The biggest problem is the price of getting internet traffic between Los Alamos and Albuquerque. That price is too high. The monopoly vendor for it is Qwest. We really need to solve that problem first.
First, several large Los Alamos customers need to co-operate and order one big connection and share it. The biggest of those customers is LANL, and all the rest are by comparison insignificant. So we should all encourage LANL to do the right thing in this case. We smaller customers should unite much sooner than the behemoth federal government can even decide what to do, in the meantime.
Second, we should find a way to add an alternative to Qwest. Perhaps a commercial bandwidth provider could extend their own fiber to Los Alamos, maybe some already have extended to Santa Fe. Or we should pool our resources and buy our own fiber installation to at least Santa Fe, perhaps all the way to Albuquerque. Personally, I am seriously considering a wireless link between Albuquerque and Los Alamos. It looks to me like we could have 300 Megabits on 5-year 7% loan payments for what Qwest charges for 9 Megabits (6 bonded T-1 circuits).
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3 comments:
Thanks for setting up this blog. I enjoyed reading through it.
What is known about Lambarail and Internet2 connectivity in in the state, and Los Alamos in particular?
How many people are really interested in 50 Mbit or better service?
What will they pay?
Richard Browning
I found this PDF from UNM back on November 29, 2007. I just did a search using google for "NM gigapop" then a search within that for lambda. The above was the top item. Second is something from checs.net and other items may be interesting, such as fifth, "Internet to the Hogan." Checs means New Mexico Council for Higher Education Computing/Communication Service.
I think my earlier reading on the topic revealed that UNM has a National LambdaRail connection that is one gigabit, not the ten gigabits the modern parts of the nation see. That's at the Western Bank building at 505 Marquette NW in Albuquerque.
I don't think even Los Alamos National Laboratory has a ten gigabits connection, though it appears maybe they do have something somewhat faster than the OC-48 they had a few years ago, which would be about two gigabits. Nothing but LANL in Los Alamos has even a tenth of that, except maybe Los Alamos County itself has a hundredth or a fiftieth.
In the Qwest DSL or Comcast options, individual customers will see under 10 megabits, but if those companies would publish graphs of their Los Alamos traffic, we'd probably see that they often exceed 50 megabits aggregate each. Maybe just White Rock gets to that level.
There seem to be lots of individuals who would pay around $20 per month for internet, maybe AOL dial-up established that expectation. Some will pay more if it's faster. Some who realize the value of it for saving gas in a car, or who earn money faster or just have a better life somehow because they have faster internet, are willing to pay a lot more, but few would spring for thousands of dollars per month even though they do pay that to rent commercial space, or nearly half a thousand per month just to lease a car.
What I wonder is what will people pay to own their internet infrastructure on down the block, at least to their neighbors' houses, as an initial investment, especially if really high bandwidth is pretty cheap as time goes on. Paying rent to a corporation that takes out a loan, or a government entity that issues a bond, just isn't my idea of fun, or even sanity.
A couple of corrections or clarifications:
I think the wireless link I am considering has a maximum bandwidth of 165 Mbits/sec, not 300.
The 505 Marquette NW building seems to be Compass Bank. I got the idea that it is Western Bank from a search using whitepages.com, but streetview on maps.google.com shows that the sign on the building is Compass Bank. I think the streetview picture is newer, but I don't know how to be sure. I haven't gone and looked in person.
I have some concern that a reader of these comments may not understand what I mean when I compare people owning their own internet infrastructure with paying rent to a corporation or a government entity. The first thought the reader may have is that of course no one can own a conduit and some fiber that goes beyond their property line, there are rules against that.
I agree there are rules, and the reason for the rules is to keep people from intruding on each other. But by the same reasoning, we should not want some company, or city, county, state or federal department intruding on us unfairly, either. Besides, even if the local government organizes and polices installation and maintenance of that conduit and fiber, that doesn't mean they have to finance it by either taxes or by selling bonds. And, if a single phone or cable company has a monopoly (or two have a duopoly) on utility infrastructure, we should not be forced to accept that we can only rent, that we cannot buy.
I fail to see that any aspect of that prevents individual property owners, or for that matter any citizen (tenant, homeless, whatever) financing internet infrastructure. And I think local government should encourage and assist in making such installations safe, effective and non-intrusive. The state utility regulators should force the utility companies to set reasonable rates and to offer sale of the assets involved in connections, not just monthly rental.
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