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: <a href="http://www.govtech.com/dc/articles/Boulder-Colo-To-Light-Up-Fiber-Optic-Network.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.govtech.com/dc/articles/Boulder-Colo-To-Light-Up-...</a>. 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 never went anywhere. I hope that it will see use soon, I was very envious of my friends that would commute in from nearby Longmont that could use their awesome municipal ISP.
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.<p>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 those households. That brings the cost to $4,666 per household, or $9,300 per subscribing household.<p>This is high, but not out of the ballpark. Verizon spent about $3,500 on average for each paying subscriber for FiOS. Chattanooga's system was about $5,500 per household.
Longmont (which is ~12 miles north of Boulder) got municiple broadband a while back. <a href="https://www.longmontcolorado.gov/departments/departments-e-m/longmont-power-communications/broadband-service" rel="nofollow">https://www.longmontcolorado.gov/departments/departments-e-m...</a><p>This also follows Fort Collins from 7 months ago: <a href="https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/11/voters-reject-cable-lobby-misinformation-campaign-against-muni-broadband/" rel="nofollow">https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/11/voters-reject-ca...</a><p>Note that Longmont took a couple attempts I believe to get it passed (it failed in 2009 and 2011, then passed in 2013)
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.
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.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulder,_Colorado" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulder,_Colorado</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.dailycamera.com/news/boulder/ci_31941127/public-support-high-boulder-moves-fund-citywide-fiber?source=mostpopular" rel="nofollow">http://www.dailycamera.com/news/boulder/ci_31941127/public-s...</a>
The bigger picture is Boulder is attracting startups.<p>Having fiber broadband is a plus to that attraction. So a better broadband means a better economy: more activity, more jobs, more people, more taxes... The cost of that infrastructure makes total sense.
I works really like one of these projects to trial a 'practical' last mile, like something like cat6 for the last 100m.<p>In KC, I live in a 4 story apt, and frequently stopped to talk to the installers when Google fiber was pulling everything into the building. It really is Fiber to a jack in your unit, but the last 5ft is <i>still</i> copper Ethernet. I figure they could have saved themselves a bundle of $ if they ran copper inside the building. The consumer wouldn't notice and it's a lot more practical.
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. <a href="https://fiber.google.com/newcities/" rel="nofollow">https://fiber.google.com/newcities/</a> is looking sparse and honestly worrisome. It's amazing how much the US is behind implementing another solution they invented.
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!!!
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.<p>Although I don’t live in Boulder (anymore), my office is there. I’ll be glad to stop paying Comcast for terrible quality service.
I have municipal telecom where I live in Vermont and it waaaaay faster and cheaper than the competition. It makes Comcast look like a joke. Hopefully, Boulder will have a similar outcome.
I've had Verizon FiOS fiber and it was just as bad as when I had terrible Comcast. Now I have Comcast in a different neighborhood and it's great.<p>Personally, availability/stability is WAY more important than bandwidth. I don't know what I'd do with over 200mbps. But in some of the places I lived, during peak hours, the internet would just stop working. That was very frustrating.
The article mentions that ~5% of residences don't have internet, but I would wager the majority of those do have smartphones and can easily access the internet via cell data, coffee shops, public outdoor wifi, etc. Is it really that much of a travesty if it's hard to stream movies on your couch?
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.