Portland Fiber

This video addresses what is at stake in our communications future here in Portland and around the world.

This morning, I sat through most of a presentation/discussion of the draft Portland Broadband Strategic Plan with a number of invited telco industry representatives at City Hall’s Council Chambers. The representatives were from CenturyLink (formerly Qwest), Comcast, EasyStreet, Integra, TW Telecom, LS Networks, and Don Westlight as a representative from NWAX, a local peering exchange. [...]

As of a few days ago, the City has posted a draft Broadband Strategic Plan. I encourage everyone to read the document and then to comment on it and to point out where it comes up short. Portland needs to invest in scarcity-squashing infrastructure. The City has built its own fiber infrastructure for governmental use. [...]

There was a recent piece on a PBS program called “Need to Know”, very much worth a watch. Watch the full episode. See more Need To Know. It shows the kind of competition spurred by Open Access rules on infrastructure. Sadly, the FCC is such a basket case, we are unlikely to ever get these [...]

After about a year of deliberation, Google has announced their choice of Kansas City, Kansas as the test-bed for their 1Gbps fiber-to-the-home network. Congratulations to Kansas City and Google for moving forward with their project. We share their excitement about what the future holds there. Meanwhile, the City of Portland has been considering what it can do [...]

Forget 1Gbit, USA Today reports that a Swedish woman has an experimental 40Gbps fiber-optic Internet connection. While the article makes it clear that she only uses a fraction of the speed available to her, it’s important because it demonstrates the power of a fiber optic infrastructure. The 40Gbps speeds were accomplished with a new modulation [...]

The United States Court of Appeals ruled today that the FCC does not have authority to require Net Neutrality on privately owned networks like Comcast’s cable Internet or Verizon’s FiOS. A variety of approaches suggest themselves to preserve the essential freedom of the Internet. One is to change the law to provide the FCC the [...]

Someone on twitter recently mentioned Molalla Communications Cooperative as a nearby existing fiber-to-the-premises network. It is, and there are others. It has better bandwidth and pricing than we get from incumbents here in Portland, their X-Fon product has 40 Mbps down, 10 Mbps up for under $50/month. However, looking at their fine print, we find [...]

Qwest, our local phone company–the company that owns all of the phone lines in the city, ran this full page ad in the Oregonian. Qwest is eager to advertise their “Fiber-optic* fast connection speeds up to 20 Mbps.” What Qwest is less eager to advertise is the little asterisk on “fiber-optic” which leads to the [...]