btno post: Fiber poor diet

Thanks so much, Jim Rickman, for the mention on your btno blog.

I guess it's just human nature. Fiberlanm drew only a single comment other than my own. That is overwhelmed by the number of comments the Fiber poor diet post on btno drew. My answer to the single comment is that I'm not sure whether 2.9 cents per minute for long distance on voice telephone has any relationship at all to fiber, or internet, except that long distance is a competitive market, while, in contrast, internet between Los Alamos and other locations is a Qwest monopoly.

I subscribe to the nanog mailing list and a message on that last Friday complained that it's outrageous that 20 Megabits of bandwidth in China costs $3400 per month. Well, in Los Alamos, the best price I can find is about $4000. (Well, 45 Megabits is only about $400 more than that, but then there's another big jump to, say, 46 Megabits.) This is not for a home DSL or cable connection, this is for an ISP (Internet Service Provider) connection that is dedicated, symmetric and has an SLA (Service Level Agreement) that guarantees refunds for downtime if it exceeds mere minutes per month. In some ways, China is more primitive than the farthest outpost of rural America, but at least it has cheaper internet prices than Los Alamos.

In northern Virginia, internet is about $12 per Megabit per month, or $240 per month for 20 Megabits, and even in Albuquerque it can be $35 ($700 for 20,) but, no, Los Alamos, you're not Virginia.

If we meekly allow Qwest and Comcast to continue business as usual, the ratio will continue to be starkly adverse. If we get our County government to build an internet project, we might see more reasonable monthly prices and much greater capability, but it will cost needless millions in taxes.

I appreciate what faster, higher capacity internet can do. Those of us who share that view should invest in our own piece of it. We should do it with fiber. We should also inform those who think internet is some passing fad or a luxury how utterly wonderful internet is, so they will join us. The County government should do two things:

1. get out of the way of citizen owned and installed local fiber;
2. finance private (see below) installation of fiber to neighboring cities, including between the townsite and White Rock.

By neighboring cities, I mean Santa Fe, Espanola, Cochiti and probably Cuba. Pueblos such as San Ildefonso and non-native villages such as El Rancho should be included on the way, and should be encouraged to participate in the financing, too.

By private installation of fiber between cities, I mean we would set up a co-operative which would charge for fiber use according to the cost of it on an amortization schedule, and including an option that a fiber user can buy dark fiber outright and just pay for maintenance of that dark fiber as maintenance events happen. The maintenance fee could be an estimate with a refund after a year when the estimate exceeded expenses, something of that nature.

I think we only have two problems to solve:

a. get the price for packet transit between Los Alamos and the rest of the world down to a reasonable level;
b. stop renting from the Qwests of the world, we should own our infrastructure, not rent it.