Seattle to deploy Gigabit fiber network

http://seattle.gov/mayor/SeaFi/gigabit.htm

by aaronbrethorst • 14 years ago

201 155 14 years ago

seattle.gov

marshray6• 14 years ago

Hooray! Now I have one less thing to lose by leaving Kansas City!

RE: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4917132 (from today)

clauretano4• 14 years ago

Just make sure you move to Actual Seattle and not the sprawling suburbs. As someone who has used PhoneFactor for a few years, thanks, congrats, and welcome to Seattle soon!

marshray6• 14 years ago

Thanks, good to hear it.

Alas, we'll probably land in the burbs for all the usual uninteresting reasons. But it won't hurt to have the right people seeing Gb internet across the lake.

phinnaeus• 14 years ago

I'm moving to Seattle in January and was already planning to sign up with CondoInternet. Seeing as my to-be neighborhood is one of those they say this will be offered in, I'm now wondering when this will be rolled out. Awesome news though.

Edit: "Gigabit Squared will be aggressively building, with eyes towards beginning services in the Fall of 2013."

hamburglar• 14 years ago

Scheduled to be in by the end of 2014, so don't cancel your internet service just yet. :)

I'm very curious how the "wifi neighborhoods" will be implemented. The neighborhood somehow gets a gigabit wireless connection (which the city's press release erroneously refers to as "wireless fiber"), and clients connect via 802.11n, but what exactly is my 802.11n client connecting to and where is it?

edit: hmmm, from their technical FAQ: "Services will be available to 100,000 residents within 24 months (by year-end 2014)."

bunkat• 14 years ago

CondoInternet is awesome :) 100 mbps for $60 a month. Have only had one down time in the past year due to their equipment icing over last winter. We couldn't be happier with the service.

zacs2• 14 years ago

Just a friendly mention that if your would-be neighborhood is Belltown or SLU, you may want to investigate some other options (unless of course you already have, in which case please ignore me!). Belltown has become worse and worse for crime (unless Phoenix Jones happens by to save you from being mugged). SLU, while nice and pristine and new, is now very overpriced due to Amazon's recent relocation there. Both neighborhoods absolutely have their positives as well, but I wouldn't move to them just for CondoInternet. :)

clauretano4• 14 years ago

[citation needed] re: Belltown crime.

SLU is a former industrial neighborhood now filled with Amazon offices and cookie-cutter apartments. Basically the positive there is that you're close to work, the neighborhood itself is severely lacking in culture.

illuminate7• 14 years ago

"Belltown has become worse and worse for crime"

It really hasn't. I'd be more worried about living in the U-District than Belltown or even the International District.

codex2• 14 years ago

The problem with Belltown isn't so much with crime as its antiseptic feel. Endless highrises with nothing interesting for retail underneath. No supermarket. The coffee shops have no character. On a Sunday morning the streets are barren of people, and even the lone park is cold and uninviting. It's just a classless hunk of neighborhood where bridge and tunnelers drink, and boring people live. I would far prefer to live in Capitol Hill or even Ballard.

jcomis2• 14 years ago

If you have the option for condointernet, go for that. By far the best option in Seattle.

hayksaakian• 14 years ago

Hurrah! I was getting worried about something Google fiber esque taking painfully long to make it here.

amckenna• 14 years ago

it is just getting better and better to live here in Seattle. Legalization of weed, same-sex marriage, and now high-speed internet

dmishe2• 14 years ago

Private health insurance sucks ass in WA, but other than that it does look good :)

octaveguin• 14 years ago

That and the transportation. Otherwise, Seattle is probably the place I like to live in the states the most.

The traffic and lack of good public transport options is a serious negative :(

btilly4• 14 years ago

Personally I don't want to live in Seattle because of the earthquake risk that nobody is prepared for.

See http://discovermagazine.com/2012/extreme-earth/01-big-one-ea... if you don't know what I'm talking about.

illuminate7• 14 years ago

"Private health insurance sucks ass in WA"

I wasn't aware of any place that was particularly ~good~ for private health insurance.

rdl11• 14 years ago

WA doesn't seem worse than anywhere else -- $118 for a 33yo male for HSA compatible. All the quotes I've seen for individual health insurance in WA are good, and they have a lot of the "good" features of ObamaCare already.

sage_joch• 14 years ago

Not to mention the tech industry, super heroes, and nature trails. I am bullish on Seattle.

joonix2• 14 years ago

Need to get myself to Seattle.

hoka• 14 years ago

Fix that whole rain thing and I'll be there tomorrow.

elteto• 14 years ago

Better start packing up then! See this: http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2012/12/does-it-really-rain-al...

l0c0b0x• 14 years ago

Come on!.. it only took me 17 years to get used to the rain (Came from South America).

ahelwer2• 14 years ago

Yep. I have an internship there this summer, and I'll be moving from Calgary, which gets the most hours of sunlight of any city in Canada. Hope the change won't be too jarring/depressing... it was overcast every day when I was there for interviews.

MartinCron6• 14 years ago

Why fix what isn't broken? Some people enjoy the rain.

WalterBright• 14 years ago

It doesn't actually rain here. We just tell people that to keep out Californians.

rdl11• 14 years ago

The bad thing about WA state is the tax structure -- no corp or personal income tax (good), but the B&O tax is a gross receipts tax, really complex (it varies by county and by type of business), and has pyramiding (as do all gross receipts taxes) -- it's equivalent to a 12-15% corp income tax for many businesses. If you don't use 2-3 levels of contractors, or have a lot of work done as subassemblies, it should be ok -- for a software/internet startup who buys hosting from a single provider only, it is probably more like a 3-4% income tax.

It's still better overall than most states, but I'd prefer a different corporate income tax structure. Even a 5-10% corporate income tax, with no minimum, would be fine. The worst part about California corporate taxes is the $800 minimum; if you got rid of that, it would be pretty reasonable I think.

loeg3• 14 years ago

Can you expand on why the lack of personal income tax is a good thing? Instead, WA has roughly 10% sales tax which some would say disproportionately taxes the poor.

DenisM3• 14 years ago

Little known fact - income derived from sales to people outside WA is no subject to B&O tax. An Internet startup will likely have only 2% of their users in WA, and so only that much is subject to B&O tax.

This is not a tax advice, consult a competent accountant.

stevenwei• 14 years ago

I don't quite understand how it could be that high...for software sales (which I assume falls under the retail classification) the B&O tax rate is .471%. On $1M gross that's $4710. In order for that to be equivalent to a 10% income tax, you would have to be only netting $50k on that $1M, which would be incredibly low margin. Did I miss something?

pault• 14 years ago

That and the rain.

rdl11• 14 years ago

WA also has relatively permissive firearms laws, especially compared to California and NYC. For me, that's a good thing; I guess for some people it's a bad thing.

They're not quite as good as NV or some other states (SBR, automatic, etc. require a business engaged in that as a business, or a trust, vs. personal ownership), but essentially fine. I'd probably have an FFL07 side business if I were up there all the time anyway.

MartinCron6• 14 years ago

Putting high speed Internet (and weed, really) on the same level as marriage equality feels a little...cheap.

But, I agree with your sentiment. I love living in Seattle.

drewrv• 14 years ago

The drug wars effect on minority communities is often overlooked. The legalization of weed is a civil rights victory.

philwelch2• 14 years ago

Legalizing marijuana keeps people out of prison sentences which ruin their lives and strikes the first blow against the war on drugs, which is the greatest civil rights disaster of recent decades.

Marriage equality makes a little bit of legal paperwork more convenient and provides symbolic equality. An injustice, but a smaller one.

RobAley• 14 years ago

High-speed internet (and better internet access in general) is a win-win for communication & education, leading to a more open society and encouraging and facilitating change like marriage equality.

rozap• 14 years ago

The war on drugs is perhaps the biggest civil rights fiasco currently. Unnecessary and unjust incarcerations are absolutely inexcusable, and they fall almost exclusively on the minorities. i502 is not a bill about getting high, there is so much more to it.

lostoptimist• 14 years ago

Awesome news. Comcast's monopoly on broadband in certain neighborhoods has produced nothing but sub-par internet access. This should greatly improve things.

illuminate7• 14 years ago

Yeah, Broadstripe and Centurylink are even worse.

kemiller• 14 years ago

What is a "fiber transmitter"?

jamesmcn• 14 years ago

Any of a number of different wireless transmitters plugged into fiber.

There are laser transceivers for use in open air, but they don't work particularly well in rain or fog. So not great for Seattle.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-space_optical_communicatio...

jauer• 14 years ago

Most likely a catchphrase to disguise the fact that they are using millimeter or microwave radio links to provide a 1Gbps connection to specific buildings that they can't (yet) reach with fiber.

HelloMcFly• 14 years ago

I've got a job interview tomorrow for a position in Seattle. I'm now even more motivated.

sidjoshi• 14 years ago

I live in SLU! Today is a happy day.

reddiric• 14 years ago

As thrilled as I am that we're doing this, overdue and hopefully done right in the public interest, being about three blocks outside one of the initial service areas stings just a smidge.

irollboozers2• 14 years ago

I am seriously debating why I recently moved from Seattle to SF/Bay... I can't go a week without seeing or hearing something that just rubs it in.

rdl11• 14 years ago

It's not like you had to renounce your citizenship or anything :) I'm sure you could move back. I know I am seriously considering NV or WA 10+ mo/yr as soon as it makes sense for my business (I've also lived in Seattle).

jimray• 14 years ago

I lived in Seattle for 7.5 years, moved to San Francisco September 2011.

My only regret is not doing so sooner.

Seattle is a wonderful town (and it really is a big town more than a city) full of wonderful, if slightly insular, people. It's beautiful, there's great food, you can hike and kayak if that's your thing.

If you're a developer that doesn't work for Microsoft or Amazon, though, the geek community is definitely lacking. There are plenty of professional nerds but much fewer people working on exciting side projects.

I found it much harder to meet people, nerds or civilians. It's the sort of place where people settle in, where people have grown up, where people aren't necessarily looking for new friends. All of which is fine, I just found it a bit off-putting.

Seattle doesn't really do urban density (granted, SF has plenty of room to grow, literally, here). Some of that is intentional, mostly it's just aggravating. It doesn't seem to want to be a city. Portland, which is smaller, manages to do many of the "city" things (like public transportation and urban planning) much better.

And, man. Don't forget the weather. Those months without the sun age you.

I loved my time and life in Seattle. SF feels more like home, even if I have to wait another year for Sonic.net to roll out fiber.

irollboozers2• 14 years ago

This neatly summarizes how I feel. Or how I think I feel. Or how I want to feel?

There's no getting over the fact that Seattle isn't Silicon Valley. But, it's become so clear that Seattle isn't as static as it used to be. So even though it's insular now (and always has been), I just have a gut feeling that Seattle will open up and blossom more. Can you imagine a Seattle with SV's good parts, and none of the bad parts? Or is that just inherently impossible because it is Seattle?

In between the legal weed, fast internet, social entrepreneurship community, and it now being the 'it' place to live and play, it's almost a tossup for me. If there were money in Seattle and the funding climate there not being so stingy, maybe I would've stayed.

kpennell5• 14 years ago

You're not alone. I left Seattle for SF because the insular unfriendly people literally made me feel depressed so much of the time. I just visited for Thanksgiving and I was amazed how much unhappier Seattlites seem compared to SF people. It felt so good to come back to the bay. I'm from Bellingham and Seattle is the pretty much the only place in Washington that is that unfriendly. Everett, Bham, Olympia, you name it, they're friendlier.

I still cringe a bit at how unhappy I was there.

xhrpost2• 14 years ago

In all seriousness, what's the likelihood of bootstrapping something like this? Intuitively I'd say near zero, high upfront costs, low profit margins, slow ROI. For some reason though, my gut isn't convinced.

InclinedPlane2• 14 years ago

ROI is fine compared to most industries. Don't get jaded by the super-fast ROI examples from the software industry, it's not usual for a company to grow into a billion dollar goliath in less than a decade. For most industries, even telecom, a >10% average annual return is fantastic and will attract plenty of investment and seed capital.

joonix2• 14 years ago

You're much better off figuring out a wireless solution. Building out and maintaining a network of underground cables in an established city just sounds like a nightmare.

xhrpost2• 14 years ago

I know what you mean, and there has been wireless successful wireless startups so there is a case for it. The big issue though is bandwidth. With ubiquitous wifi hardware (thus cheap), you might be able to push 100Mbps (rough guess, I'm not sure how multi-antenna systems work for the 300 limit, I would assume 1 antenna to a person's house though). Which would be great but you're not going to get it unless you're standing next to the base station. You have to go through thousands of feet of air and then share what's left with everyone else using that AP. How many people would share an AP? Assuming 4 to a tower, easily 100? During peak times of day, I doubt you could get WiFi to deliver speeds that rival current offerings and it may be difficult to even match them (my local WiFi provider just recently broke 15Mbps for their top business tier at a much higher price than local cable).

You also need to physically install and maintain antenna's on everyone's roof (how would this work at apartments?) and hope there's no buildings in line of sight to the tower. Both of which would be highly vulnerable to weather (you put lightning suppressors on those people's antennas and ran a grounding wire to the earth right?).

TL;DR: I don't think wifi is any less of a nightmare (purely hypothesis though, I don't have experience with either in public infrastructure) but we see it more simply because initial cost of deployment is less.

snitko• 14 years ago

Question: why would a private person (as opposed to a business) need a Gigabit internet access?

MartinCron6• 14 years ago

The same reason we need more than 640K of RAM, maybe?

Alaskan0053• 14 years ago

In 5-10 years maybe. Now virtually all sites are slower than a ~ 10-50 mbs connection so having all that extra bandwidth doesn't help you at all. That's the reality.

bradleyland• 14 years ago

Why would you need a terabyte hard drive? Why would you need 8 GB of RAM? Why would you need a Core i7 processor capable of over 80,000 MIPS?

Step back and think about what you do with a computer or mobile device today. Most of what we do involves the Internet. We don't "need" Gigabit internet access any more than we "need" the things above, but when they're present, we're free to find innovative new ways to use them.

marshray6• 14 years ago

It's still a fair question though.

How many streams of retina-quality video do you need to watch (or feed) simultaneously?

gduffy• 14 years ago

I think in 10 years this question will be regarded the same as "who needs a personal computer?" is today. Similar questions were asked about always-on broadband (vs dialup), gigabytes/terabytes of memory/disk, etc. We've been pretty good at finding ways to use whatever tech is thrown at us.

My pet example use case for 1Gbps is my product, Dropcam (shameless plug: http://www.dropcam.com), where we could use that extra bandwidth to provide amazingly higher quality video, support for more cameras per location, and generally do much more cutting edge stuff.

Symmetric 1Gbps means you don't just access the "cloud" anymore ... you become a part of it. Kinda like the original pioneers of the Internet imagined in the first place.

illuminate7• 14 years ago

Because it can be offered, and we've been ripped off by ISPs for quite some time now.

driverdan• 14 years ago

Need is a strong word so I'll assume you mean want.

1. Households with more than a couple residents who are bandwidth hungry. Ever live in a place where people are trying to use VoIP, stream 1080p videos, download Windows updates, and play online games at the same time? Having experienced this it's the best use case I can think of.

2. Productivity. The faster you can download the 2GB Xcode update the faster you can get back to work.

3. Lower latency is better for gaming. A better connection can give you an advantage over other players.

4. Because people want it.

erickhill2• 14 years ago

So proud of Seattle on a personal and professional level, across multiple recent advancements.

fionabunny• 14 years ago

Cool, which were they? Just wondering.

erickhill2• 14 years ago

1) Marriage equality 2) Decriminalization of small quantities pot 3) Amazon's recent innovations in the hardware space 4) MS's recent innovations in the hardware space 5) T-Mobile's finally getting the iPhone

Several others on a more personal, non HN related front. Mostly trivial and entertainment based.

DenisM3• 14 years ago

The initial 12 neighborhoods include: Area 1: the University of Washington’s West Campus District, Area 2: South Lake Union, Area 3: First Hill/Capitol Hill/Central Area, Area 4: the University of Washington’s Metropolitan Tract in downtown Seattle, Area 5: the University of Washington’s Family Housing at Sand Point, Area 6: Northgate, Area 7: Volunteer Park Area, Area 8: Beacon Hill and SODO Light Rail Station and Areas 9-12: Mount Baker, Columbia City, Othello, and Rainier Beach.

sharkweek• 14 years ago

As someone from Seattle, even though I don't see my neighborhood on that list (Maple Leaf) -- I am extremely excited to see more and more infrastructural focus on SODO and Areas 9-12 getting some much needed improvement. The light rail running through that area has been a step in the right direction for everyone in those neighborhoods, and I'm excited to see that development continue.

egypturnash• 14 years ago

Oh hell yes. I live in the U District. I am basically first in line for this. Signed up for more info as it happens. Goodbye, Comcast.

kyllo2• 14 years ago

No love for West Seattle? :(

mtgx• 14 years ago

Hopefully the pricing will be competitive with Google Fiber, and not several times more.

tombrossman• 14 years ago

Our (government owned) telco is building out an island-wide Gigabit network here in Jersey which is great. Problem is that it is capped at 50GB/month usage, which defeats the purpose. Actually using the connection's full capacity for about 5-6 minutes a month will result in overage charges. I'm hoping Seattle has a more realistic monthly cap, if one exists.

Sign-up page with plan details here: http://www.jtglobal.com/Jersey/Personal/JT-Fibre/Fibre-Tarif...

lsc• 14 years ago

Note, Santa Clara has municipal fiber too[1] - It is only 'last mile' (e.g. you have to hook up to a real provider in a santa clara data center) and the per-hookup install costs are... substantial, but the ongoing costs, if I could get several customers on the same physical fiber (I mean, if I signed up a few people in a row on a street) could be competitive with the 100Mpbs down/20Mbps up half a kilobuck comcast cable service, and gigabit or even 10 gigabit (if you are willing to make the setup fees even more... substantial) are realistic.

I'm currently working on a project to light a warehouse in santa clara (and I'm moving prgmr.com, and my massive overcommit of bandwidth to santa clara so I'll have somewhere to get transit) If others are interested in a 'fiber to the condo' type setup, lemme know; as a hosting provider (mostly upload) buying symmetrical links, I'd be pretty happy to have some end-user (mostly download) customers. I'm also willing to show you what I know, if you are trying to do the same thing on your own. (I mostly am interested in the fiber 'cause it's cool, and 'cause it is the next step on the path to learning what I need to know to operate a datacenter... a very long term goal of mine. I don't expect to make much money on the fiber project, as selling 'enterprise connectivity' isn't really my kind of game.)

[1]http://svpfiber.com

sytelus• 14 years ago

Does anyone worry about increased microwave radiation due to all these beamed broadband Antennas all over?

Seattle to deploy Gigabit fiber network

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