By: Ryan J. Stanton
AnnArbor.com Staff
Posted: Feb 23, 2010 at 4:02 PM [Feb 23, 2010]
Mayor John Hieftje says city officials are working with the University of Michigan on a proposal to make Ann Arbor one of the first communities in the nation to test Google's newly announced "Fiber for Communities" initiative.
Ann Arbor and U-M officials are partnering with other key stakeholders on a proposal to be submitted to Google by March 26. City officials hope to convince Google to bring its plans for a new ultra-high speed broadband network to Ann Arbor.
Tom Crawford, the city's CFO, gives a report to the City Council Monday night. He was joined by IT director Dan Rainey.
Ryan J. Stanton | AnnArbor.com
Google recently put out a request for information to communities all across the country. It plans to use the information it receives to determine where to build its new fiber network.
"Google is planning to launch an experiment that we hope will make Internet access better and faster for everyone," reads the announcement from Google. "We plan to test ultra-high speed broadband networks in one or more trial locations across the country. Our networks will deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today, over 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections. We'll offer service at a competitive price to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people."
Google officials say more details will be distributed in the coming weeks.
Hieftje said he was impressed with the fact that city officials and staff at the university came together immediately to work on a proposal to submit to Google.
Tom Crawford, the city's chief financial officer, gave an update to the Ann Arbor City Council on those efforts Monday night.
"This is a pretty significant event for Google," Crawford said. "It allows them to have a chip in the game of the public policy issue around broadband and how it's installed in the United States and the deployment of it. It's a very exciting opportunity for any community who gets it. Many people consider this to be an economic development incentive for whichever community gets it. In fact there are a number of communities that are installing this in their communities on their own."
Council Member Christopher Taylor, D-3rd Ward, offered the following comments in an e-mail to AnnArbor.com:
"We are confident that our response will demonstrate that Ann Arbor would be a terrific location for Google to conduct this exciting experiment. All parties understand what a tremendous benefit FTTH (fiber-to-the-home) could provide to Ann Arbor and Michigan and are committed to doing everything we can to make it a reality. We will also conduct broad-based outreach to build and demonstrate community support and excitement for the project. Public support is an important criterion for Google as it determines which communities will proceed to the next round."
University of Michigan President Emeritus James Duderstadt is expected to be part of the team heading up the response. Duderstadt was president during the buildout of the NSFNET network, a high-speed national network funded by the National Science Foundation. It launched in 1988 and led directly to the commercialization of the Internet in the early 1990s.
Network engineer Jared Mauch has analyzed the cost of a fiber to the home buildout, using best available commercial technology. His analysis suggests a total buildout cost of about $100 million to put municipal fiber down all 1,647 miles of public roads in Washtenaw County, plus another $1,000 per property to put the fiber online. Mauch has been managing Internet networks since 1993, starting with the local Arbornet network and now with responsibilities for global networks.
Ryan J. Stanton covers government for AnnArbor.com. Reach him at ryanstanton@annarbor.com or 734-623-2529.
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Tom Joad
Posted Feb 23
A pipe dream, an economic boondoggle. With today's advanced wifi and WifiMax available that can blanket a community, a 100 million dollar project at 1000 per property seems prohibitively expensive unless Obama is going to pay the entire bill. Fast networked connections mean little if the server isn't pumping out data at the theoretical limit, which they don't do. There is no need for a city having super high-speed fiber internet, not at that cost. Palo Alto, CA invested tens of millions in high speed fiber optic cables a decade ago and those cable sit UNDERGROUND, UNUSED, and not even connected. Investigate before open the city coffers.
Tom Riddle
Posted Feb 23
Tom,
I just want to let you know that Google is doing this out of their own coffers as a way to increase bandwidth speeds across the nation, not taking money from the localities till they charge the end user for it. Their aren't enough major companies providing high speed internet and since they don't need to upgrade their existing networks to compete, the U.S. average bandwidth is far behind the average of other countries like South Korea, Japan, and Sweden. More competition at a lower cost is a good thing. Google is sitting on a nice amount of cash and deciding what to do with it. They make money by selling ads, so if they can get more people on the internet, they make more money. Please go to http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/think-big-with-gig-our-experimental.html for more information about this project.
Technojunkie
Posted Feb 23
YES! Sweet, sweet bandwidth. Watch the brain drain invert in spectacular fashion if this happens. Sign me up for the Don't Be Evil Empire!
snapshot
Posted Feb 23
OK Ryan, I'm confused. Are property owners being volunteered to pay an additional 1,000 to have access to this new internet service? I was all for it until I read that piece of the puzzle.
Edward Vielmetti
AnnArbor.com Staff
Posted Feb 23
I'll note that the $100m estimate would be for all of Washtenaw County; the equivalent cost for City of Ann Arbor only would be less.
Ryan J. Stanton
AnnArbor.com Staff
Posted Feb 23
I believe, and somebody can correct me if I'm wrong, that Google is volunteering to take on the capital costs involved for the demonstration project and would then provide service using the new network at, as it states in its announcement, a "competitive price."
bananas
Posted Feb 23
And Google's evolution into another Big Media behemoth continues...How much control over content, information, and communication does one company need? Or - how much control over these things *should* one *huge publicly traded* company have? Sure it's awfully friendly and PC and it even employs local folks, but it sure looks to me like it's becoming the new generation of big, consolidated media...
Jared Mauch
Posted Feb 23
Speaking for myself ...
I would not establish a business in a place without a Road, Electricty or Water these days. The same is really true about Internet access. Giving that context...
The cost of building the fiber is around $100 million.
The cost of putting traffic on it varies depending on the technology used. To light it at gigabit (1000Mb/s) is $29k per 48 users. This was *NOT* volume pricing. This puts the cost around $605 per subscriber. This is something you can plug into a business model to determine if you charge $50/month how long will it take to recoup the equipment costs. This is also why companies want you to agree to a 1 year contract. This allows them to recoup the cost of the equipment during the life of you as a customer. The remainder $400 is to cover the last feet of building to your house, the splicing of the fiber (the fancy fusion splicers cost ~70k).
This is something that can be done for reasonable costs per home. I'm excited about the prospects of the COUNTY going after google. The city is uninteresting to me, the residents are well covered. The majority of the people in the city can already get DSL or a cable modem.
If you can build out the county for $100 million, what did the "wireless washtenaw" money go to? The wireless stuff does not work well through trees (good thing we don't have many of those in the county), so we would have been better off spending the money on building 15+ year infrastructure.
Regarding the city of Palo Alto, they were a bit before their time. The cost of fiber and equipment to terminate and "light" it has come down in recent years. It's quite cost effective now.
V
Posted Feb 23
Google's ties to the NSA is concerning. Yahoo was caught a few months ago selling personal information to the feds and intelligence agencies without the owner's consent. Both have also censored anti-government or anti-establishment information from their websites. Not to mention AT&T getting caught wiretapping all emails and phone calls for the government.
I am all for fast, inexpensive Internet. But not an Orwellian control grid where information is censored or limited. The Internet is the only open source of real news and information that is not censored (at least not the vast majority of it). Some people won't allow the free flow of information for too much long. People are realizing that there is a man behind the curtain. Most people do not know it but they are living in a matrix. Where their sense of reality is not true.
Alan M Robertson
Posted Feb 23
I sure hope that Ann Arbor doesn't lose sight of the basics. Fix the Stadium bridge before worrying about competing with Comcast!
Ryan Munson
Posted Feb 23
I'm not exactly a fan of Comcast, but do people realize they are going to increase speeds over time in the near future? Coax still has a way to go, but fiber is obviously faster.
Snow
Posted Feb 23
Why is this needed? So people can pirate movies are reasonable download speed?
ChrisW
Posted Feb 24
About 15 years ago a spokesman for Governor Engler spoke in Ann Arbor about the need to diversify the state away from the auto industry. I suggested that they run fiber optic cable to all homes and businesses for the upcoming internet boom, giving Michigan a leg up on competition from other states and countries. NAFTA had just been passed and it was clear that manufacturing jobs were going away.
Needless to say, we got no fiber optics and no diversification and we are now suffering for it. High speed internet is no different than railroads, The Soo Locks, highways, and electricity. As much as I hate big government, this is one area where big government would have been a great idea. Wireless internet (WiMax, WiFi, cellular) is far too limited in bandwidth for serious business and even home use. A typical iPhone SDK is 4GB, with updates coming every week or two. ("Unlimited" wireless is usually capped at 5GB/month).
Michigan residents pay $150/month to Comcast for cable tv, internet, and phone service. That money could easily pay for a fiber optic network given the economies of scale involved in wiring the entire state.
Technojunkie
Posted Feb 24
Good grief. There are far more people scanning Internet traffic than just our government. Russian mafia, ChiCom dissident hunters and industrial espionage agents, bored sysadmins, bored students, untold millions of infected Windows PCs... honestly, that's what encryption is for. It has always been assumed that unencrypted Internet traffic has all the privacy of a postcard. Our government is likely the least competent and least interested in you of all the available threats. If you have a problem with what our government does, vote accordingly.
Building this network doesn't stop work on any other city infrastructure projects. Google is funding it. All they want is some cooperation, not that Ann Arbor is known for being difficult for private developers to work with or anything. If this project works out the way I think that it will its secondary effects will generate quite a bit of tax revenue. If not, Google is the only one taking the risk.
What will people do with gigabit class Internet? THAT'S WHAT GOOGLE WANTS TO FIND OUT! Ann Arbor, with the University of Michigan and a surprising number of nerds who haven't fled the state yet (vote Snyder!), would make an ideal test bed for such a network. Personally I'm hoping that someone creates the Metaverse. Maybe it'll only be good for mundane things like HD-class IPTV over IPv6 multicast. I want to find out. If the control freaks in this town screw this up then I'm going to look at real estate wherever the network does get built. Enjoy what the PHBs running AT&T sell you and whatever Comcast provides that's just good enough to compete with them. If either of those two incumbents were remotely competent then Google wouldn't need to attempt this.
A2K
Posted Feb 24
Oh Google, please, please build the new network in A2.
*fingers crossed*
I did a happy dance when I got to jettison Comcast for ATT (which is far less craptastic/evil) but a bit of competition never hurts innovation or price for the consumer :O)
Gill
Posted Feb 24
Geez people, why is everyone so scared of Google. Ya'll already have Comcast monitoring everything you do...
Janelle Baranowski
Posted Feb 24
If the city and county do not have to contribute any money for the infrastructure, which seems to be the case, I see no problem with this. Oh, and no free parking for the workers either.
V
Posted Feb 24
@Gill,
If "do no evil" Google wanted to, it could be like Comcast on steroids. It controls far more direct content (Google Video, Youtube, Google search, etc., etc., etc.) than Comcast. Google also has massive server farms that record every website its users visit and possibly every emails sent using Gmail. Google could be far more evil than Comcast if it wanted. Again, if Google can provide faster Internet at a reasonable price and it helps the local economy, I am all for it. However, we need to be vigilant and not assume Google will "do no evil" because it already has (censoring content and blocking blogs that have noting to do with hate or copywrite issues). I am glad Google is in AA but I wish they would abide by their own moto, "do no evil." Unfortunately, anything of value to the federal government, they will want some control
Basic Bob
Posted Feb 28
How is Comcast any more evil than AT&T? Seems to me the govt broke up AT&T and since then they are putting the empire back together a piece at a time. Only this time the head office is in Texas instead of New Jersey. In fact the new AT&T offers many services unimaginable a few years ago. Neither is as evil as Micro$oft or Disney.