71–80 of 214 posts
I work in downtown Boulder in a tech startup. The tech and startup scene is amazing for a city the size of Boulder. After Longmont and Fort Collins, finally Boulder will be getting the municipal broadband as well. Nice!!!
I sure hope they don't need to open up roads(lane closures) to pull the fiber. Traffic is already agonizing, closures would make the commuting nightmare even worse for cars, buses & bikes alike.
Hopefully they're laying conduit with new road construction. I read somewhere that there are proposals to mandate that (can't remember if it was state or federal level). Edit: seems like it's both: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/natio... https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/10/fed-u... https://www.csg.org/pubs/capitolideas/enews/cs41_1.aspx https://www.azleg.gov/legtext/50leg/2r…
Some back of the napkin math. $140 million for 40,000 households in Boulder = $3,500 per household. If 50% of people subscribe (typical for municipal broadband), that's $7,000 per subscribing household, or higher than Charter's market cap per subscriber. A quarter of the population of the city is below the poverty line. If the intent is to offer them subsidized broadband, let's assume we get no capital recovery from…
Students there are all living off parent money so their disposable income is much higher than hard data would suggest.
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I understand vast. I am not expecting Montana to get full coverage by the end of the decade. But San Jose, California? Hello?
> But San Jose, California? Hello? It routinely blows me away that my Manhattan internet is faster and cheaper than that at my parents' in Cupertino. I suspect common local political dysfunction underwrites the differences in housing supply, public transportation and internet quality.
But yeah, I was surprised to learn that my options in Mountain View were shitty, expensive cable or shitty, slightly less expensive DSL.
Some back of the napkin math. $140 million for 40,000 households in Boulder = $3,500 per household. If 50% of people subscribe (typical for municipal broadband), that's $7,000 per subscribing household, or higher than Charter's market cap per subscriber. A quarter of the population of the city is below the poverty line. If the intent is to offer them subsidized broadband, let's assume we get no capital recovery from…
I'm impressed by your math skills, but I used to live in Boulder and I'm shocked to learn that 25% live below the poverty line. Is that really true? I suppose it could be the fact that many are college students, but still. That seems high.
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As Rayiner commented elsewhere in the thread [1] Boulder has a population of 40,000 households , which is the appropriate metric to use when people within a household regularly share a connection. It gets more expensive when you consider non-subscribing households, subsidized households, and operating costs. Payback periods quickly climb to 10-20 years or more, depending on how you do your math. However, I think it s…
Kinda makes it sound like they've got too much road. Property taxes are only a thousand or three per single family household, I believe.
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That, or maybe $140M is a gross over estimate, or is referring to more than what’s discussed in the article? I’m tending toward that; it can’t possibly cost anywhere near $10k per subscriber to build out fiber normally, even in small cities, can it? Seems like if it was normally that expensive, there wouldn’t be fiber anywhere. What’s so different in Boulder? I’d speculate that CenturyLink paid less than $1k to run f…
Fort Collins is in the midst of this right now, they proposed borrowing "up to 150 million" to roll their municipal fiber out. The cost break down is here, page 5. https://www.fcgov.com/broadband/pdf/Broadband_Executive_Summ...
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As Rayiner commented elsewhere in the thread [1] Boulder has a population of 40,000 households , which is the appropriate metric to use when people within a household regularly share a connection. It gets more expensive when you consider non-subscribing households, subsidized households, and operating costs. Payback periods quickly climb to 10-20 years or more, depending on how you do your math. However, I think it s…
Kinda makes it sound like they've got too much road. Property taxes are only a thousand or three per single family household, I believe.
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Calling it a tiny city is a bit of a stretch considering the sprawl along the entire front range (South Denver to Fort Collins). You're suddenly at 3+ million.
Yep. Having worked in Boulder for 4 years, my observation is that the number of people who actually live in town are the minority. In-college interns or new college grads tend to live in town. There is a smattering of more senior engineers in Boulder as well. But it seems most people commute in from Longmont, Erie, Louisville, Superior, Lafayette, Broomfield, Denver, or Ft. Collins. I worked with a guy who commuted f…
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That could explain it. My fiber comes in from an above-ground wire strung on poles. They’re proposing to bury the lines, at high cost?
poles are uncommon in residential areas here, everything is buried. and digging is expensive.