The San Francisco Chronicle recently featured Sonic.net, which is now deploying a “fiber to the home” project in Sebastopol “replacing the aging copper wires that reach most homes with fiber cables offering speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second.” The best we can do in parts of Glendale is broadband via cable or “fiber to the parkway box” with copper wire connecting to subscribers’ homes. Sonic.net is stimulating broadband competition by rolling out a faster, lower cost, high-capacity system that won’t include the data caps other providers are now imposing. This is what customers in Glendale (and the rest of the country) shopping for an ISP should be able to get.
Chronicle reporter James Temple asks: “If a small regional Internet service provider thinks it can profitably deliver such services, what’s stopping its huge, high-margin rivals?” A possible answer is found at the end of his piece. Cities in Northern California are placing themselves on the Sonic.net waiting list.
He goes on to mention that Sonic.net was selected by Google to operate its experimental fiber-to-the-home network at Stanford. (Google is building its own city-wide fiber-optic service in Kansas City, Kansas – Glendale was one of the cities that competed for that test network.)
Comparing service plans and rates with AT&T’s and Comcast’s is complicated, but Sonic.net is
“providing a competitive choice in the marketplace that, hopefully, tugs the giants in a direction that benefits all consumers.
So why aren’t AT&T and Comcast delivering similar services at comparable prices? In all likelihood, only because the little competition that exists hasn’t compelled them to do so.
Fiber-optic broadband technology is a necessary component of the smart grid, it would be a more efficient and secure transmission method for smart meter data, it provides extremely high-capacity and high-speed upload and download speeds, and it is more secure while emitting almost no radio frequency energy into the surrounding environment. This is the technology Glendale should be seeking for its city services, businesses and residents.