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Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

dailycamera.com

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Re: Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

#2
Neighboring Longmont has had municipal internet for years with success. Everyone I know is pretty happy with it. Glad to see Boulder is joining the party.

Although I don’t live in Boulder (anymore), my office is there. I’ll be glad to stop paying Comcast for terrible quality service.

Re: Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

#3
Longmont (which is ~12 miles north of Boulder) got municiple broadband a while back. https://www.longmontcolorado.gov/departments/departments-e-m...

This also follows Fort Collins from 7 months ago: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/11/voters-reject-ca...

Note that Longmont took a couple attempts I believe to get it passed (it failed in 2009 and 2011, then passed in 2013)

Re: Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

#5
Once in a while a story about another city getting fiber, while it's fantastic (without knowing much about the cost), progress is slow and even in the heart of the Bay Area, we are pathetically lagging. https://fiber.google.com/newcities/ is looking sparse and honestly worrisome. It's amazing how much the US is behind implementing another solution they invented.

Re: Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

#6
I moved from Amsterdam to Boulder, CO. The tech ecosystem is amazing here. It's crazy how many tech companies are in a tiny city with ~100k people. You just walk down the street and it's Nest, Google, Github, JumpCloud, SolidFire, Logrhythm, VictorOps and hundreds of smaller startups. Great ecosystem. People are friendly and welcoming. It's amazing, except the internet. It's expensive, unreliable, and slowwwww.

Re: Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

#7
Boulder has a population of about 110,000 people [1]. Given "the estimated cost of the entire network is around $140 million" [2], the per-capita cost of this network comes to $1,300.

I pay $80 a month for my 300 / 20 service. In 16 months, I would be able to pay for my share of this network.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulder,_Colorado

[2] http://www.dailycamera.com/news/boulder/ci_31941127/public-s...

Re: Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

#8

Once in a while a story about another city getting fiber, while it's fantastic (without knowing much about the cost), progress is slow and even in the heart of the Bay Area, we are pathetically lagging. https://fiber.google.com/newcities/ is looking sparse and honestly worrisome. It's amazing how much the US is behind implementing another solution they invented.

> It's amazing how much the US is behind implementing another solution they invented

America is vast. My opinion is local FTTH networks will eventually be interconnected wirelessly, either point-to-point or by bouncing off LEO satellites. Sometimes, letting infrastructure roll out organically is the sounder solution.

Re: Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

#10

What type of software engineering jobs are available in that area?

Pretty much anything you can imagine from front-end web to embedded circuits. Thing to keep in mind with Boulder is that it suffers from the same building restriction effects as SF, combined with explosive population growth, so you're going to pay out the nose for every square foot of living space. As long as you build that fact into your salary negotations Boulder is going to be awesome with a quality of life eons better than the coasts IMO.

I live in Colorado Springs for family reasons but would happily live in Boulder if things were a bit different.

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