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Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

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Re: Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

#151

Post by oh_sigh »

davidw wrote: post #131
yahyaheee wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

can't build up, can't build out. Its a tricky problem, but we don't want to use our open spaces for development. The surrounding areas are reasonable

You can grow up, in, out, or grow the prices. Boulder has chosen the latter, meaning that more and more people drive into the town to work. Big win for the environment, there...

We were promised light rail, and even raised taxes to build it out, and then the government decided to give us a toll lane on a highway(managed by an australian company) and a bus route as a compromise. Front rangers talk a lot about environmental stewardship but from their actions I don't believe they really care about it.

Re: Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

#152

Post by bri3d »

leesalminen wrote: post #79
planteen wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I thought the person I worked with that commuted from Fort Collins to Boulder was nuts, but the Springs?!? Hopefully it was a really fulfilling job.

I thought my coworker from Castle Rock was out there (and he did end up moving to Erie). But when you look at bay area commutes it seems reasonable. The mind boggles.

Re: Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

#153

Post by LeifCarrotson »

st26 wrote: post #69
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The point I was trying to make is that utilities and infrastructure don't add up in ways that make budget decisions simple or that seem sensible when viewed from a simple calculation of total cost divided by number of households. If we did that same calculation for other utilities, we would not have many utilities at all!

Honestly, I'm not really sure how it's all paid for at the end of the day.

Re: Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

#154

Post by orthecreedence »

adultSwim wrote: post #101

Municipal control of infrastructure +1

Agreed, and not just for fast internet. This is the path to true, competition-enforced net neutrality. It would be so much better to have municipal infrastructure than to have digital rights ping-ponging in the federal government forever.

Re: Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

#155

Post by oftenwrong »

rayiner wrote: post #15

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…

What is the expected lifetime of this kind of fiber infrastructure? Shouldn't the city also accumulate funds for eventual replacement?

Re: Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

#156

Post by rayiner »

oftenwrong wrote: post #155
rayiner wrote: post #15

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…

What is the expected lifetime of this kind of fiber infrastructure? Shouldn't the city also accumulate funds for eventual replacement?

It depends. The actual fiber is probably good for decades. But a lot of the active infrastructure requires upgrades in a 10 year or so cycle. FiOS started out in 2005 with BPON. Then they upgraded to GPON. Now they’re working on NGPON-2. This requires upgrading ONTs, (very expensive) OLTs, switches, not to mention adding capacity out from the COs to handle the additional traffic.

Re: Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

#157

Post by jlarocco »

leesalminen wrote: post #75
tenaciousDaniel wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Those trailer parks in North Boulder are very well hidden. Many don’t even realize they’re there. Some of the nicest trailers I’ve ever seen, FWIW.

I don't think that's true. Those parks aren't big and they're still expensive because the property itself is expensive.

Most of the poverty number is due to all the college students - there are 33k of them in a town of 108k.

Re: Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

#158

Post by edaemon »

AlphaSite wrote: post #127
makerofspoons wrote: post #18

I went to school at the University of Colorado Boulder. Something this article doesn't mention is that the city already has over 100 miles of fiber laid that isn't currently being lit up: http://www.govtech.com/dc/articles/Boulder-Colo-To-Light-Up-... . There were several groups of students looking to build companies to utilize this existing infrastructure, as well as business interests outside the city, but it just…

100 miles of fiver isn’t really that much is it? Maybe in absolute terms but when you have runs to each house that’s probably less than a couple hundred homes

It would depend on where it's laid. If it's 100 miles of residential streets that's not that useful, but if it's 100 miles of major thoroughfares that means it's much easier to build it out across the city.

Re: Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

#159

Post by numbsafari »

rayiner wrote: post #120
numbsafari wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$100/mo for FTTH vs. $69/mo for 250MB/s Comcast? I'll take the FTTH and leave Comcast and Century Link behind, thank you very much. Would be even better if the City charged you for the fiber link and then let you select your backend provider. E.g., the way consumer choice works in the electric space. Let the city run/own the cable, and let the back-end carriers compete to provide the backbone and value-added services…

Maybe you're willing to pay more. Most people probably aren't. (FiOS uptake rates are under 40% even though its always been much faster than competing cable services.) And the brutal economics of fiber really punish you for that. If your uptake rate goes from 50% to 33%, your per-subscriber costs have to go up to compensate (which puts even more downward pressure on your uptake rate).

The average Comcast customer paid something like $150/mo in 2017.

Replace that with a $100/mo. FTTH plan, plus Netflix and you're still saving money. And many people have Netflix + Comcast already.

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