Morristown, Tennessee is a sleepy little town outside Knoxville where I grew up. Spurred by rising cable TV prices, the hamlet has embarked on an ambitious program to provide fiber to the home:
The new network should be available to all Morristown customers by the summer of 2007. Then the utility will use financing based on revenues it’s receiving from city customers to extend services to the county, Swann said.
He said the network will deliver service superior to the cable companies’ current offerings because it will consist entirely of fiber, or tiny glass cables, connected directly to the customer’s home or business — cables that can deliver video and data, such as the Internet, at lightning speed both coming and going.
Most cable companies, including Charter, supply service through a hybrid fiber coax system. While fiber comprises the bulk of the network, cable and Internet is delivered to customers via copper wires. These connections provide slower upload than download speeds and can be upgraded only to a point, Swann said.
With the fiber-to-the-home network, as technology improves, the utility will be able to deliver data services more and more quickly, potentially improving on today’s broadband speeds by more than 100 percent, he said.
I don’t generally approve of government doing things that the private sector is capable of doing, but I also don’t approve of getting screwed by the cable company, so I’ll be watching this with great interest.
H/T Isenberg