Google Adopts Wireline Fiber Optic Plan:
Invite Them to Glendale! 3


Google plans to roll out a test ultra-high-speed wireline broadband service and is looking for friendly cities. Glendale, California should put in a bid for Google’s offering:

…Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today with 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections. We plan to offer service at a competitive price to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people.

The company’s wireline initiative is a bold move just one month before Congress receives the FCC’s National Broadband Plan for the Future. The FCC is considering policies to expand wireless infrastructure, increase spectrum allocation to wireless carriers, and further quash local resistance to cell tower placements.

Just yesterday, citizens in Santa Fe, New Mexico succeeded in tabling an initiative that would have provided city-wide wi-fi service. The New Mexican reports:

Twenty-eight people spoke against the ordinance which, they said, would allow low-power antennas to be erected with little public scrutiny of health and environmental impacts.

“I don’t think we want to turn our city into a microwave,” said Azlan White of Santa Fe.

“This feels like an enormous experiment on our health and rights.”

Following that debate, Santa Fe City Council voted to join the list of cities (which includes Glendale) calling for repeal of federal law that prohibits consideration of microwave towers’ health and environmental effects.

Grass-roots groups like Glendale Organized Against Cell Towers (GOACT), or the citizens of Santa Fe, would likely have no problem with a fiber-to-the-home service strung along existing utility poles or undergrounded. Compared with wireless technology, high-speed fiber optic transmission is faster and more secure, and emits no radiation.

During the hearing on Glendale’s draft wireless ordinance last week, Planning Commission chair William Kane remarked that as a society, we were stuck with wireless technology until progress provides something better. Something better – the fiber-optic network Google is proposing – is currently available. It’s just a lot more expensive to install.

Google probably has the resources. Perhaps it has learned a lesson from its 2007 attempt to create a city-wide wireless network in San Francisco via Proposition J. Today’s Wall Street Journal says that effort was “abandoned amid political opposition and financing concerns.”

The main points of that ‘political opposition’ (summarized in this 2007 editorial) remain very relevant now, and points 4 and 5 are particularly salient as the FCC presents its work to Congress:

1. WiFi networks are less reliable than wired networks.

2. Serious privacy issues are not considered by Prop J. As written, Prop J only addresses the sharing of network user information with third parties.

3. Wireless networks are more difficult and expensive to secure than wired networks and are therefore vulnerable to identity theft and unauthorized surveillance of users.

4. WiFi raises serious health and environmental issues. Citywide WiFi would require at least 2,200 microwave transmitters to be placed on light and utility poles, in addition to the more than 2,500 antennas for cellular phones already installed throughout the City. Meanwhile, no scientific studies have been conducted to date specifically on the health effects of WiFi exposures. Studies have been done on exposures to low-intensity microwave radiation of people living near cellular phone base station antennas in Spain, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, Egypt and Austria. All seven studies document significant adverse health effects. In the German and Israeli studies, these effects include increased rates of cancer. In September, the European Environment Agency issued a statement urging caution before proceeding with WiFi. Yet Mayor Newsom has placed Prop J on the ballot without informing the public of the potential health and environmental impacts of WiFi as required by the City’s Precautionary Principle ordinance.**

5. Prop J completely ignores a comprehensive study of the alternative of a fiber optic broadband network which the City commissioned and was published this past January (available on the Department of Telecommunications and Information Services website.)

Sunroom Desk advocated a high-speed fiber network for Glendale more than a year ago. This blog also quoted an earlier survey of broadband trends, concluding that The Future Isn’t Wireless. A hint to Glendale: send in an application!

**(Mayor Newsom has since come around, and is now sponsoring legislation that would require radiation warnings on cell phones, while the San Francisco Board of Supervisors is set to propose its own protective wireless ordinance in the near future.)


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Invite Them to Glendale!

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