On Sat, Feb 02, 2019 at 07:57:07AM -0800, mitch Stanley wrote: > If Roseburg can do it , Portland should have accomplished this too! The > only thing affecting this lack of Fiber in PDX is entrenched interests -
Literally entrenched - digging up a century of urban infrastructure and adding optical fiber to that rat's nest of pipes and cables and sewers and tanks and long-forgotten buried toxics isn't impossible, but it will be very very complicated. Meanwhile, Portland City government has accumulated its own byzantine network of rules and sub-organizations and established interests. Meshing all of those complexities will be ... complex. And while it is fashionable to hate the companies that provide services now, they accomplish more than 98% of us sidewalk superintendents do. For the 2% of us who (like Russell) actually make some forward progress, the question is whether they can grow those efforts to citywide scale. Very few of us have the discipline and commitment for that. Far more of us spend our time attacking those very few who devoted their lives and succeeded with such efforts. If Portland is fibered 30 years from now, faux-populists will attack the creators of that network 50 years from now. Roseburg and Sandy can do fiber because they are small and relatively young. A small committed team can get the whole job done quickly. Beaverton has fiber, installed by visionary Verizon NW, but now owned by corrupt and inept Frontier. I have fiber and a disabled optical network terminal in my Beaverton house. I will turn that back on when Frontier goes bankrupt and its successors show more customer savvy than my "new" provider Comcast currently offers. Verizon and Comcast reformed themselves; perhaps Frontier and Centurylink will as well. The new highrise portions of Portland are fibered already, supplied by independent non-public-utility companies. In the natural course of things, old neighborhoods will be torn down and rebuilt with highrise fiber as well. As a fifties child, I distain highrise living, but that is vastly "greener" than single-family dwellings. Stubborn housegrubbing old hippies like me must die off, too. I'm not saying that fibering an ENTIRE city as complex as Portland is impossible, but it will require a hell of a lot more effort and capability than just demanding "gimme". It has been a little more than half a century since Charles Kao and his team in the UK made the first practical fiber optics. Half a century from now, other technologies will connect young folks living "beyond highrise". My guess is orbit-linked bio-smartsuits, no fixed dwelling or permanent physical possessions. The "fiber generation" will be the antiquated old farts in artifact-cluttered high rises. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected] _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
