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Re: Sunday, March 5, 2006
Regarding community wi-fi - here's the story that nobody knows. Take a look at the small town of Rochelle, Illinois. It is situated at the intersection of several railroads, just outside of Chicago - but too far away to be a 'bedroom community' - that's important in this case. When railroads were the thing, Rochelle had a real set of options, being a hub city. When the railroads started hurting, so did Rochelle. Rochelle owns their own power plants - they are their own utilities - they even provide dial tone and cable tv to their residents. Unusual, yes? But in the mid 1990's, they decided to become their own ISP as well. Using the right-of-way on their own power/phone poles, they put up a fiber-optic OC3 ring around the city. Connected to a load-balanced pair of T1's from two seperate upstread providers, with options to buy more bandwidth as needed. They put in a rack of modems and sold dialup to their citizens as a traditional ISP of the time. They offered an attractive package to lure businesses to settle there - lots of low-cost land (many abandoned city-owned buildings downtown), tax breaks, and a fiber-optic cable into your phone closet with high-speed Internet access at a low cost - when fractional T1 cost in the thousands per month (circa 1995). The goal was to make Rochelle into a town where businesses would want to be located. Close to Chicago - but not paying Chicago real estate prices. Access to railroads to ship and received goods - also major highways. Infrastructure favorable to business and tax breaks. And of course, if the businesses came, the theory was, the town's population would grow. This was a town that was slowly being decimated. Unlike many such towns, the city managers didn't want to let it happen. When I last did work for them, they were also planning to do such things as video arraignments from jail to courthouse, video/sound streaming training material into their school system for classroom enhancements, SCADA monitoring of their power plants, and so on. I want to stress - this is a SMALL TOWN. Flash forward, they're doing wireless high-speed access for selected areas of their city, to meet the needs of their citizens. This is the story - these were the guys who had the vision, and still hold the fire. Not CA - we know that CA gets it. This is a tiny town about 80 miles from Chicago that didn't want to die. Somebody needs to look at this. What a story. And they were doing this ten years ago. I had a tiny part in it, but it is great to see where they've gone from those days. http://www.rmu.net/acs/default.aspx Smooches, Wiggy There are responses to this message:
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