Category: meter reading

Exploring the Huntsville Fiber Model – Community Broadband Bits Podcast 191

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Last week, we were excited at the announcement from Huntsville Utilities in Alabama. Huntsville is building a municipal dark fiber network to every premise in its territory that will be open to multiple service providers. Google has already committed to using it to bring real connectivity to the community.

In this week's episode, 191, we are talking with Tom Reiman and Stacy Cantrell to understand the model. Tom is President of The Broadband Group, the consultant that is working with Huntsville on this project. Stacy Cantrell is the Vice President of Engineering for Huntsville Utilities.

We talk about how the model originated, some of the technical details behind the network, and what benefits they expect to see. This is an excellent discussion with many implications for the thousands of communities that want to improve Internet access locally but would prefer not to offer services directly.

The transcript from this episode is available here.

We want your feedback and suggestions for the show – please e-mail us or leave a comment below.

This show is 33 minutes long and can be played below on this page or via iTunes or via the tool of your choice using this feed.

You can download this Mp3 file directly from here. Listen to other episodes here or view all episodes in our index.

Thanks to Kathleen Martin for the music, licensed using Creative Commons. The song is “Player vs. Player.”

Muni Fiber Tennessee Twofer: Columbia and Pulaski – Community Broadband Bits Podcast 189

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We cover a lot of Tennessee ground in this week's Community Broadband [no-glossary]Bits[/no-glossary] podcast – episode 189 – from a cable network to muni Fiber-to-the-Home; Columbia to Pulaski. Wes Kelley, the Executive Director of the Columbia Power and Water Systems is our guest to talk about Columbia's cable and Pulaski's fiber.

He cut his teeth working with a Michigan community's public utility that ultimately decided not to get involved in telecommunications. But he moved on to build out a citywide fiber network in Pulaski before ultimately moving to Columbia, which was the last community in the United States to build a cable system (since then it has been all fiber).

He shares some of his lessons along the way, tips for customer service, and Columbia's plans for the future with their cable system. He also has some choice words for the big content owners that make the cable television business all but impossible for any reasonably sized cable operation.

The transcript from this episode is available here.

We want your feedback and suggestions for the show – please e-mail us or leave a comment below.

This show is 30 minutes long and can be played below on this page or via iTunes or via the tool of your choice using this feed.

You can can download this Mp3 file directly from here. Listen to other episodes here or view all episodes in our index.

Thanks to Kathleen Martin for the music, licensed using Creative Commons. The song is “Player vs. Player.”