Gigabit Seattle

Last updated

Gigabit Seattle was a fiber-to-the-home / fiber-to-the-business network planned to be deployed in Seattle, Washington. The network comes out of a partnership between the City of Seattle, the University of Washington and digital economic development company Gigabit Squared to deploy a next generation network in the City. [1] The project is the second city project announced by Gigabit Squared as part of its Gigabit Neighborhood Gateway Program, after Gigabit Chicago. [1] [2]

Contents

Background

Since 2004, leadership in the City of Seattle pursued affordable, Internet access for residents and businesses with the hope of using a city-sponsored network. [3] The City abandoned one effort in July 2012, and pursued a new strategy – leasing excess capacity on the city-owned fiber to private providers. [4] On October 2, 2012, the City of Seattle issued a Request for Interest Archived 2012-12-29 at the Wayback Machine to use excess capacity in the City's fiber optic network. [5]

On December 13, 2012, at an event at the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, Mayor Michael McGinn and Gigabit Squared President Mark Ansboury announced the Gigabit Seattle project. [6]

Currently this project is considered to be dead. [7]

Components of the project

The project is made up of three parts: fiber-to-the-home and fiber-to-the-business, a dedicated gigabit to multi-family housing and offices and next-generation wireless cloud services in 12 neighborhoods throughout the city. Gigabit Seattle plans to build out a fiber-to-the-home/fiber-to-the-business network to more than 50,000 households and businesses in 14 demonstration neighborhoods, connected together with excess capacity that Gigabit Seattle will lease from the City’s own fiber network. To provide coverage beyond the 14 demonstration neighborhoods, Gigabit Seattle intends to build a dedicated gigabit broadband wireless umbrella to cover Seattle providing point-to-point radio access up to one gigabit per second, achieved by placing fiber transmitters on top of 38 buildings across Seattle. These transmitters can beam fiber internet to multi-family housing and offices across Seattle, even those outside the twelve demonstration neighborhoods, as long as they are in a line of sight. Internet service would be delivered to individual units within a building through existing wiring. This wireless coverage can provide network and Internet services to customers that do not have immediate access to fiber in the city. Gigabit Seattle will provide next generation mobile, wireless cloud services in its 14 neighborhoods. [8]

Deployment and services

Gigabit Squared had planned to begin engineering the network in the first quarter of 2013. Pricing and service offerings were not announced, but it has been indicated they would have been competitive with current broadband service offerings in terms of price, though speeds would have likely been faster. [9]

The Gigabit Seattle network was going to be rolled out initially to 14 demonstration neighborhoods:

Partnership

Gigabit Seattle will own and operate the fiber network and broadband wireless services. The City and The University of Washington will not be asked to invest in the project, and will not have any ownership share. The City's Department of Information Technology, will coordinate the activities of City departments, coordinate the efforts of other public agencies for the purpose of and facilitate lease agreements for City-owned excess fiber. [11]

The University of Washington will provide community leadership and collaborate with Gigabit Seattle on public uses of the next generation network, piloting health care and education applications. [11]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wireless Internet service provider</span> Internet service provider with a network based on wireless networking

A wireless Internet service provider (WISP) is an Internet service provider with a network based on wireless networking. Technology may include commonplace Wi-Fi wireless mesh networking, or proprietary equipment designed to operate over open 900 MHz, 2.4 GHz, 4.9, 5, 24, and 60 GHz bands or licensed frequencies in the UHF band, LMDS, and other bands from 6 GHz to 80 GHz.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GCI (company)</span> Telecommunications corporation operating in Alaska

GCI Communication Corp (GCI) is a telecommunications corporation operating in Alaska. Through its own facilities and agreements with other providers, GCI provides cable television service, Internet access, wireline (networking), and cellular telephone service. It is a subsidiary of Colorado-based company Liberty Broadband, a company affiliated with Liberty Media that also owns a 26% interest in Charter Communications, having been originally acquired by Liberty in 2015.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">C Spire</span>

C Spire, formerly known as Cellular South, Inc., is a privately owned telecommunications company headquartered in Ridgeland, Mississippi. The company consists of three business divisions – C Spire Wireless, C Spire Home Fiber, and C Spire Business.

iProvo is the name of the fiber to the home service in Provo, Utah. Provo's backbone connects homes and businesses throughout the city, as well as municipal buildings, schools, power stations, and traffic signals. Construction began in July 2004 and was completed within two years. With the exception of new subdivisions not included in the original build out contract, the fiber optic backbone is available in all areas of the city. The network's fiber optic equipment is manufactured by World Wide Packets.

Fiber to the <i>x</i> Broadband network architecture term

Fiber to the x or fiber in the loop is a generic term for any broadband network architecture using optical fiber to provide all or part of the local loop used for last mile telecommunications. As fiber optic cables are able to carry much more data than copper cables, especially over long distances, copper telephone networks built in the 20th century are being replaced by fiber.

In a hierarchical telecommunications network, the backhaul portion of the network comprises the intermediate links between the core network, or backbone network, and the small subnetworks at the edge of the network.

Internet access is widely available in New Zealand, with 94% of New Zealanders having access to the internet as of January 2021. It first became accessible to university students in the country in 1989. As of June 2018, there are 1,867,000 broadband connections, of which 1,524,000 are residential and 361,000 are business or government.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Internet in the United States</span> Overview of the Internet in the United States of America

The Internet in the United States grew out of the ARPANET, a network sponsored by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense during the 1960s. The Internet in the United States in turn provided the foundation for the worldwide Internet of today.

Fiber to the premises in the United States are primarily covered by Google Fiber, Verizon, and Lightower.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gigabit wireless</span> Telecommunications classification

Gigabit wireless is the name given to wireless communication systems whose data transfer speeds reach or exceed one gigabit per second. Such speeds are achieved with complex modulations of the signal, such as quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) or signals spanning many frequencies. When a signal spans many frequencies, physicists refer that a wide bandwidth signal. In the communication industry, many wireless internet service providers and cell phone companies deploy wireless radio frequency antennas to backhaul core networks, connect businesses, and even individual residential homes.

Towerstream Corporation is a Fixed Wireless Fiber Alternative company delivering high-speed Internet access to businesses. The company offers broadband services in 12 urban markets including New York City, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, the San Francisco Bay area, Miami, Seattle, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Las Vegas-Reno, and the greater Providence area, where the company is headquartered. In 2014, Towerstream launched its On-Net fixed-wireless service offering On-Net building tenants access to dedicated, symmetrical high-speed Internet connectivity, with a premier SLA, at market-setting prices. Founded in 1999 by Philip Urso and Jeffrey Thompson (eFortress), Towerstream held its first public offering in January 2007 and traded on the NASDAQ Capital Markets under symbol TWER. In November 2016 the stock had declined in price, was delisted from NASDAQ, and moved to the over-the-counter market.

Lumen Technologies, Inc. is an American telecommunications company headquartered in Monroe, Louisiana, that offers communications, network services, security, cloud solutions, voice, and managed services. The company was a member of the Fortune 500 and the S&P 500 index from 1999 until 2023. Its communications services include local and long-distance voice, broadband, Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS), private line, Ethernet, hosting, data integration, video, network, public access, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), information technology, and other ancillary services. Lumen also serves global enterprise customers across North America, Latin America, EMEA, and Asia Pacific.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">National broadband plan</span> National plans to deploy broadband Internet access

Broadband is a term normally considered to be synonymous with a high-speed connection to the internet. Suitability for certain applications, or technically a certain quality of service, is often assumed. For instance, low round trip delay would normally be assumed to be well under 150ms and suitable for Voice over IP, online gaming, financial trading especially arbitrage, virtual private networks and other latency-sensitive applications. This would rule out satellite Internet as inherently high-latency. In some applications, utility-grade reliability or security are often also assumed or defined as requirements. There is no single definition of broadband and official plans may refer to any or none of these criteria.

ACD is a Competitive Local Exchange Carrier and Internet Service Provider, headquartered in Lansing, Michigan. ACD provides Fiber Optic Service, Metro Ethernet, Telephone, Hosted Phone Service, DSL, Datacenter and Web hosting services to all types of customers.

Google Fiber Inc. is a fiber broadband Internet and IPTV service operated by Alphabet, servicing a small and slowly increasing number of locations in the United States. In mid-2016, Google Fiber had 68,715 television subscribers and was estimated to have about 453,000 broadband customers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">EPB</span> Electricity and telecommunications company in Chattanooga, Tennessee

EPB of Chattanooga, formerly known as the Electric Power Board of Chattanooga, is an American electric power distribution and telecommunications company owned by the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee. EPB serves nearly 180,000 homes and businesses in a 600-square mile area in the greater Chattanooga area and Hamilton County. In 2010, EPB was the first company in the United States to offer 1 Gbit/s high-speed internet over a fiber optic network, over 200 times faster than the national average. As a result, Chattanooga has been called "Gig City" and held up as a national model for deploying the world's fastest internet and the most advanced Smart Grid electric distribution system in the United States. On October 15, 2015, Chattanooga implemented the world's first community-wide 10-gig Internet service.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Minneapolis wireless internet network</span> Overview of wireless internet in Minneapolis

The city of Minneapolis, Minnesota, is covered by a citywide broadband wireless internet network, sometimes called Wireless Minneapolis. The network was first proposed in 2003, at which point only a few other cities nationwide had such systems in place. Local firm US Internet beat out EarthLink to build and operate the network, with a guaranteed ten-year, multimillion-dollar contract from the city itself as the network's anchor tenant. Construction began on the project in 2006, but encountered several delays. Most of the city was covered by the network by 2010, and USI Wireless, the subsidiary of US Internet responsible for the system, set up numerous free internet access points at public locations around Minneapolis.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ting Inc.</span> Wireless service company

Ting Inc. is an American internet service provider founded by Tucows in 2012. It originally consisted of Ting Mobile, a mobile virtual network operator, and Ting Internet, an internet service provider that offered gigabit fiber Internet. In August 2020, Ting Mobile was sold to Dish Wireless. Today, Tucows continues to provide the enablement software for Ting Mobile and continues to operate Ting Internet independently.

Gigabit Squared, LLC was a digital economic development corporation that specialized in the planning, implementation and rollout of communications infrastructure. Unlike incumbent telecommunications providers in the United States, who typically own and operate networks in addition to providing wholesale and retail Internet access services, Gigabit Squared designed and built networks, but does not always finance, operate and maintain those networks.

Gigabit Chicago is a gigabit-speed networking project in Chicago. It is a partnership of the State of Illinois, the City of Chicago and Gigabit Squared.

References

  1. 1 2 "Gigabit Seattle". www.seattle.gov. Archived from the original on 4 February 2013. Retrieved 6 February 2013.
  2. ↑ "Neighborhood Gateway Program". Gigabit Squared web site. Retrieved 7 July 2013.
  3. ↑ Dudley, Brier (12 December 2012). "Seattle, Gigabit Squared, UW to announce broadband plan". The Seattle Times. Retrieved 6 February 2013.
  4. ↑ Dudley, Brier (23 July 2012). "Seattle divvies up network, ending big broadband plan". The Seattle Times. Retrieved 6 February 2013.
  5. ↑ "Increasing access to existing fiber optic cable network". mayormcginn.seattle.gov. Retrieved 6 February 2013.
  6. ↑ Hickey, Kathleen (18 December 2012). "Seattle lays plans for its own ultra-high speed Internet service". GCN. Retrieved 6 February 2013.
  7. ↑ Fingas, Jon. "Seattle kills Gigabit Squared's fiber internet rollout before it even starts". Endgadget. Retrieved 8 April 2014.
  8. 1 2 "Gigabit Seattle - General FAQ". Seattle.gov. Archived from the original on 4 February 2013. Retrieved 6 February 2013.
  9. ↑ Farivar, Cyrus (14 December 2012). "Seattle announces its own gigabit Internet service". Ars Technica. Retrieved 6 February 2013.
  10. 1 2 "Gigabit Seattle Adding Two New Neighborhoods – Is Yours Next?". Gigabitseattle.com. Archived from the original on 13 March 2013. Retrieved 6 April 2013.
  11. 1 2 "Gigabit Seattle - Technical FAQs". Gigabitseattle.com. Archived from the original on 15 February 2013. Retrieved 6 February 2013.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.