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Blog: Century Broadband Plan, How Fast Is It?
May 20, 2009
Monday night, a Virginia consultant presented his plan to the Century Town Council for the Century Community Access Network — a community wireless broadband network.
A lengthy video presentation detailed the plan — install a wireless network with multiple antennas, place routers at $34 per month each into homes and build a community high speed internet network. And the total cost to Century? Nothing, according to Rodney Thomas, of the Richmond, Virginia, consulting firm Resources Building Tomorrow, LLC., with federal funds footing the $146,492 setup fee. The proposal actually would be better than free — the town would make $10 per subscriber per month, everything would be installed and maintained by couple of companies. Thomas sweetened the deal with information that Century would own the network in five years, and his company would event apply for more money to renovate the Carver Community Center to provide a physical location for the project.
Sure sounded like a sweet deal, and it created many questions — the most basic of which was “how fast will Internet connection speed be?” From our Monday morning article (click here to read the whole story):
When asked by NorthEscambia.com Publisher William Reynolds how fast the broadband service would be, Thomas replied that it would be “broadband speed”. When pressed for a further answer to define how fast “broadband speed” would be, Thomas said he did not know technical answers. Looking through some papers, he said that it would use “802.11n” routers, a not yet defined standard that provides speeds up to 108 Mbit per second. But Thomas did not provide an actual speed estimate for the internet connection.
Smoke and mirrors came to mind.
It’s the most basic question about any Internet service…how fast is it? “Broadband” was simply not an acceptable answer. It’s like buying a car; you don’t want to write a check for a car without knowing what kind of car it is and what features it has.
“Broadband” is general defined as any Internet connection faster than a 56K dialup modem. Let’s look at an example of downloading a 1.5 GB movie from Itunes. On a dialup connection, it would take you two days and 10 hours to download your movie. Ouch.
On the slowest DSL connection offered by AT&T in Century, 768K, it would take four hours and 43 minutes to download that movie. Better take a nap and wait to put the popcorn in the microwave. That DSL connection would cost you, by the way, just $20 per month. On the fastest DSL connection offered by AT&T in Century, 6 Mbps, that movie would download in 33 minutes, just enough time to call some friends to come over. The monthly cost? $42.95 per month.
Incidentally, if the NorthEscambia.com web server could connect to Itunes using just one Internet connection that serves the site, it could grab that entire 1.5GB movie in one second. “Smokin” is the technical term, I believe.
The point? There’s a big difference in speeds that could be classified as “broadband”.
Thomas told us in the council meeting that his service uses 802.11n routers that can operate at up to 108Mbps. The Internet speed is only as fast as the connection provided to the router. Such a router could be hooked up to a dialup connection, but there would be no blazing speed. And, just for the record, while he told us the system would use “n” routers, the written proposal he provided the council details the usage of “g” routers which are slower. It’s not an important difference, simply because the total Internet connectivity of the system would likely not match the router speed. Technical, I know.
His router answer was simply meaningless. We wanted to know, and pressed for the answer, how fast the possible internet connect would be. But there was no answer, just a comment about our questioning from Thomas’ friend and Century businessman Jack Moran. Again from our Monday article:
“I am put off by the hostility of the tone of some of the questions. I am not the computer geek that William is, but I know something about it. This is an opportunity for Century to…bring itself into the 21st century.” — Jack Moran
Computer geek? Maybe not. But knowledgeable? Humbly, yes. Our question was very legitimate; if you are going to pay for a service, you want to know what you are going to get for your money.
The written proposal that Thomas presented to the council is not real specific about the upstream speed, the total speed of the internet connection that every user will share under the plan. It does reference charging the town $900 per month for a “5.0 Megabit Ethernet Circuit”. That 5 Mbps circuit would be slower than a single DSL connection available in Century, and it would be shared hundreds of times.
Thomas told us after the meeting that the 5 Mbps speed in the proposal was incorrect. There was no mention of the mistake in his presentation to the council.
When we spoke to Thomas Tuesday morning, he told us that we would be emailed more technical information about the proposal or that his technical people would post comments on our story. By late Tuesday night, we had nothing.
Thomas is a grant writer and consultant and, by his own admission, not a technical person. We’ll give him the benefit of the doubt on our technical question that seemed to create so many problems. Not everyone that drives car knows the horsepower of the engine under the hood. They just know it gets them there.
But in examining the proposal presented to the Century Town Council for the Century Community Access Network, we found other problems. We will address some of those in a post on Thursday morning.
Comments
8 Responses to “Blog: Century Broadband Plan, How Fast Is It?”
I have had Brighthouse for about two and a half years now. Overall, I’ve been pretty much satisfied with the service. I upload quite a few photos and before Brighthouse, I would sometimes have to let the computer upload photos for 3 nights, That’s starting the upload about 8 PM and letting it run until time to go to work the next morning, almost 30 hours of uploading. With the cable system, I can upload the same amount of photos in about 20 minutes. As for downloading, I recently downloaded a new program, about 350-375 MB the download was complete in a matter of seconds. Cable speed depends on usage in the local area, and Brighthouse has said that if the need arises, they would increase the bandwidth. So far the speed has been fairly consistent. As for the hidden fees, I’ve seen the price go up some, but then, what hasn’t gone up in price lately. As for customer service, my last experience with customer service was back in January I couldn’t get on line at times, or the connection was dropped. At first they wanted to tell me my modem was bad, I told them that I had worked in electronics and with computers and didn’t think the modem was the problem, that it was downstream somewhere. I set up an appointment to meet them here at the house to exchange the modem, about an hour before the appointment, then called and said they had found the problem about a quarter of a mile below the house and wouldn’t need to exchange my modem, I haven’t had any problems since. As for Century getting in the broadband business, I say as with anything, do a good investigation, weigh the pros and cons and make a informed decision.
The Town Council had nothing to do with this, other than to listen – politely – as the gentlemen made a lengthy presentation. The Council did not invite the speaker and made no recommendation or motion in response to the presentation.
http://www.bbwexchange.com/neighborhood/index.asp
Broadband Wireless Exchange Magazine
It is a 10 page article about the how and why of:
“Building a Neighborhood ISP
with Broadband Wireless Technology”
It goes on to tell that any one of “us” could do this same thing, you can also apply for the same grant.
Page “9″ is real interesting, on how lucrative the investment that you make would be.
But most of us do not live in a “Dark Zone”, because we do have access to dsl and cable.
What I do not understand is, this guy is going to get a federal grant for the Town of Century and he will be collecting the majority of the fees? He will get 2/3s of the fees paid by the customers… Is the equipment and installation really costing nearly $150k? Or does he take a fee off the top of that too? I have to wonder if that is what the federal program that he is applying through had in mind…Should he realy be getting a small business grant or loan? Why does he get to start a business (in the name of TOC) with no investment of his own? What is the name of his business and does he have any partners or investors? (besides the federal government)….And he is from Virginia?
Matt – as someone who lived in Orlando and had to deal with Brighthouse for years, I can say that if anything that is reason to adopt this plan right away. My impression is that community wireless broadband may not be as fast, but it is much less of a headache and MUCH cheaper for residents. I’m sure you know all the issues Floridians have had with Brighthouse for years…now imagine no more hidden fees, customer service that is actually responsive, etc
My impression is if a town can escape from the Brighthouse monopoly, they should do it. I’ll be interested to read more of this post in the coming days and hear your opinion on this William
-Mark
Yes, Matt, Century has Bright House. I’ll take a look at some of that in a blog tomorrow.
Doesn’t Century already have Brighthouse networks broadband internet in that area?
Here we go again! Smoke and mirrors is right, William. I’m waiting with bated breath to see what our council members do with this one. Why is it that every person who comes into Century with a business proposal, has no idea what they are even proposing??? To answer my own question, it’s because they’ve seen what ridiculous measures have been passed by our council members, and we are now known as the town that will fall for any snake oil sales pitch that is out there. This is especially true after that $4000 attorney fiasco! Give me a break, Council Members!