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Gig City Sandy: Home of the $60 Gig

Located at the foot of Mount Hood in Oregon, Sandy's municipally-owned full fiber network offers gigabit Internet service for under $60 to every resident in the city. Sandy is one of the few municipal FTTH networks that has been built without having a municipal electric department.

The Institute for Local Self-Reliance released this short video this week about the city’s approach—it should be a model for others who want faster Internet, but remain paralyzed by the big telecom monopoly stranglehold.

City managers, frustrated that they couldn't even get a DSL line in to City Hall started off by building their own wireless and DSL network, beginning in 2001. Today, 60% of the community has already subscribed to the Fiber-to-the-Home network, or is on a waiting list. View the video below, or on YouTube here.

Be sure to check out our report on Sandy, SandyNet Goes Gig: A Model for Anytown, USA.

SandyNet Now Offering Gigabit FTTH in Oregon

Back in September, SandyNet announced that its FTTH gigabit network was officially up and running. The utility will continue to expand and eventually bring the network to all 4,000 households. Light Reading recently spoke with Joe Knapp, Sandy's IT Director and general manager of the broadband utility about the new offering. With a population of 10,000, Sandy is in Oregon between Portland and Mount Hood.

The network is completely underground. Sandy is one of many communities that have developed smart conduit policies, reducing the cost and preparing the environment for deployment over a period of years.

You can listen to our discussion with Knapp on Sandy's conduit policy in Episode 17 of the Community Broadband Bits podcast. We also spoke with City Manager Scott Lazenby about Sandy's conduit policies during Episode 48.

Like many other communities we study, Sandy invested in connectivity out of necessity. Knapp told Light Reading:

"We started out because we couldn't get a DSL line at city hall," says Joe Knapp, IT director for the City of Sandy and general manager of SandyNet. The utility first built a 900MHz wireless network, then WiFi, then a wireless mesh network to connect residents to broadband, he says. "That became so popular that we took about 40% of the market with wireless, but that was a hard thing to sustain."

The journey to FTTH was not an easy one:

"We started to realize that a lot of communities are doing this," Knapp says. "It took three years of beating my head against the wall to finally get it to happen."

Gigabit speeds are something to boast about, but Knapp says SandyNet will not go to extremes to push them:

"As a muni network, we view this as trying to benefit the community. I tell them to try the 100-Meg service first -- we're actually not pushing the gig that hard."

Community Broadband Bits 17 - Joe Knapp of Sandy, Oregon

Sandy has run a wireless network for over eight years and has just announced a partnership with i3 to bring FTTH to everyone using i3's technology to run trunk fiber lines through existing waste water and storm water pipes. We previously wrote about Sandy here. Joe Knapp, the IT Director for the city of Sandy and the General Manager of SandyNet, is our guest on this week's Community Broadband Bits podcast - episode 17. He discusses how Sandy began offering broadband access to itself, residents, and businesses and how they expanded to fiber originally. And toward the end, he gives us the low-down on how the partnership with i3 is structured. We want your feedback and suggestions for the show - please e-mail us or leave a comment below. Also, feel free to suggest other guests, topics, or questions you want us to address. This show is 30 minutes long and can be played below on this page or subscribe via iTunes or via the tool of your choice using this feed. Search for us in iTunes and leave a positive comment! Listen to previous episodes here. You can download the Mp3 file directly from here. Read the transcript of this episode here. Find more episodes in our podcast index. Thanks to Fit and the Conniptions for the music, licensed using Creative Commons.

Oregon Town To Build Open Access Fiber Network Complement to Wireless Network

Sandy, a growing community of about 10,000 outside Portland in Oregon, is now building a FTTH network to expand on their successes offering city-run wireless broadband in 2003. They've done the whole wireless thing for 8 years but understand the future is high capacity, high reliability connections. They are starting with a pilot program that seized on energy created by Google's gigabit initiative -- they held a "Why Wait for Google?" contest that asked neighborhoods to show their potential interest in a fiber-optic network. When the Cascadia Village and Bornstedt Village won the contest, they were asked how they wanted to be involved:
What happens now? This is a pilot program, so we’re taking it step-by-step. We want the residents and property owners in Cascadia/Bornstedt Villages to be partners with us in making decisions on how this service will work. And we want it to be democratic: whatever we do, it will only be with the support of the majority of the residents and property owners who get involved. The first thing we need to know is: how would you like to be involved? We have a lot of options, depending on your level of interest, and how busy your life is. On one end of the spectrum is simply asking us to keep you informed through e-mail or letters, and at the other end is your active participation (over a course of several meetings) in the detailed planning for the implementation of this pilot project.