Ashland, Oregon has long been a trailblazer in terms of meeting community demand for faster, more affordable broadband access.

The city-owned network has also had a bumpy road—at times being branded as an example of municipal broadband failure. But the network continues to grow as it faces down an urgently-needed pivot toward a fiber-based future. 

Despite the current economic healthiness of the network and the clear benefits it’s brought to the community over the last 20 years, local officials are talking about divesting instead of making the financial commitment to continue the investment the city has already made.

The community-owned Ashland Fiber Network (AFN) was first developed in the late 1990s by locals angry at the high prices and historically terrible customer service by the local cable company. Like so many community broadband alternatives, it was a network built from grassroots frustration at consolidated market failure. 

Benefits of the community networks were on stark display during the telecommuting and home education boom of the Covid-19 crisis, when the city announced it would be providing free 30 Mbps broadband to all city residents without access to the Internet. 

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AFN is an open access network, meaning that numerous companies are allowed shared access to the core city network, delivering a variety of broadband, phone, and TV services. As a result, the network’s no-contract broadband pricing tends to be simpler and less expensive than options found in cities dominated by one or two private sector telecom monopolies.

Join us live on Thursday, November 11th at 5pm ET for Episode 25 of the Connect This! Show, where co-hosts Christopher and Travis Carter (USI Fiber) will be joined by Glen Atkins (a twenty-year veteran of the cable television industry) and Ron Hranac (former Technical Marketing Engineer at Cisco) to talk about the future of hybrid fiber-coaxial (HFC) network infrastructure. 

Cable began as a one-way video distribution system before transforming into the avenue by which the majority of Americans access the Internet today. It has enjoyed a long life as the result of new specification standards, encoding schemes, and the result of pushing fiber farther and farther into the network. The panel will talk about DOCSIS and the move from the 3.1 standard to 4.0, which will enable symmetrical gigabit speeds to users and more households served at the highest speed tiers. They'll also dig into the pantheon of other hardware and system upgrades used by cable operators, from low latency DOCSIS to virtualized cable modem termination system (vCMTS). 

With so much fiber being built in 2021 and beyond, how much life is left in the cable plant? 

Subscribe to the show using this feed, or visit ConnectThisShow.com

Email us [email protected] with feedback, ideas for the show, or your pictures of weird wireless infrastructure to stump Travis.

Watch here or below on YouTube Live, via Facebook Live here, or follow Christopher on Twitter to watch there.

Join us live on Thursday, November 11th at 5pm ET for Episode 25 of the Connect This! Show, where co-hosts Christopher and Travis Carter (USI Fiber) will be joined by Glen Atkins (a twenty-year veteran of the cable television industry) and Ron Hranac (former Technical Marketing Engineer at Cisco) to talk about the future of hybrid fiber-coaxial (HFC) network infrastructure. 

Cable began as a one-way video distribution system before transforming into the avenue by which the majority of Americans access the Internet today. It has enjoyed a long life as the result of new specification standards, encoding schemes, and the result of pushing fiber farther and farther into the network. The panel will talk about DOCSIS and the move from the 3.1 standard to 4.0, which will enable symmetrical gigabit speeds to users and more households served at the highest speed tiers. They'll also dig into the pantheon of other hardware and system upgrades used by cable operators, from low latency DOCSIS to virtualized cable modem termination system (vCMTS). 

With so much fiber being built in 2021 and beyond, how much life is left in the cable plant? 

Subscribe to the show using this feed, or visit ConnectThisShow.com

Email us [email protected] with feedback, ideas for the show, or your pictures of weird wireless infrastructure to stump Travis.

Watch here or below on YouTube Live, via Facebook Live here, or follow Christopher on Twitter to watch there.

Join us live on Thursday, November 11th at 5pm ET for Episode 25 of the Connect This! Show, where co-hosts Christopher and Travis Carter (USI Fiber) will be joined by Glen Atkins (a twenty-year veteran of the cable television industry) and Ron Hranac (former Technical Marketing Engineer at Cisco) to talk about the future of hybrid fiber-coaxial (HFC) network infrastructure. 

Cable began as a one-way video distribution system before transforming into the avenue by which the majority of Americans access the Internet today. It has enjoyed a long life as the result of new specification standards, encoding schemes, and the result of pushing fiber farther and farther into the network. The panel will talk about DOCSIS and the move from the 3.1 standard to 4.0, which will enable symmetrical gigabit speeds to users and more households served at the highest speed tiers. They'll also dig into the pantheon of other hardware and system upgrades used by cable operators, from low latency DOCSIS to virtualized cable modem termination system (vCMTS). 

With so much fiber being built in 2021 and beyond, how much life is left in the cable plant? 

Subscribe to the show using this feed, or visit ConnectThisShow.com

Email us [email protected] with feedback, ideas for the show, or your pictures of weird wireless infrastructure to stump Travis.

Watch here or below on YouTube Live, via Facebook Live here, or follow Christopher on Twitter to watch there.

Join us live on Thursday, November 11th at 5pm ET for Episode 25 of the Connect This! Show, where co-hosts Christopher and Travis Carter (USI Fiber) will be joined by Glen Atkins (a twenty-year veteran of the cable television industry) and Ron Hranac (former Technical Marketing Engineer at Cisco) to talk about the future of hybrid fiber-coaxial (HFC) network infrastructure. 

Cable began as a one-way video distribution system before transforming into the avenue by which the majority of Americans access the Internet today. It has enjoyed a long life as the result of new specification standards, encoding schemes, and the result of pushing fiber farther and farther into the network. The panel will talk about DOCSIS and the move from the 3.1 standard to 4.0, which will enable symmetrical gigabit speeds to users and more households served at the highest speed tiers. They'll also dig into the pantheon of other hardware and system upgrades used by cable operators, from low latency DOCSIS to virtualized cable modem termination system (vCMTS). 

With so much fiber being built in 2021 and beyond, how much life is left in the cable plant? 

Subscribe to the show using this feed, or visit ConnectThisShow.com

Email us [email protected] with feedback, ideas for the show, or your pictures of weird wireless infrastructure to stump Travis.

Watch here or below on YouTube Live, via Facebook Live here, or follow Christopher on Twitter to watch there.

Join us live on Thursday, November 11th at 5pm ET for Episode 25 of the Connect This! Show, where co-hosts Christopher and Travis Carter (USI Fiber) will be joined by Glen Atkins (a twenty-year veteran of the cable television industry) and Ron Hranac (former Technical Marketing Engineer at Cisco) to talk about the future of hybrid fiber-coaxial (HFC) network infrastructure. 

Cable began as a one-way video distribution system before transforming into the avenue by which the majority of Americans access the Internet today. It has enjoyed a long life as the result of new specification standards, encoding schemes, and the result of pushing fiber farther and farther into the network. The panel will talk about DOCSIS and the move from the 3.1 standard to 4.0, which will enable symmetrical gigabit speeds to users and more households served at the highest speed tiers. They'll also dig into the pantheon of other hardware and system upgrades used by cable operators, from low latency DOCSIS to virtualized cable modem termination system (vCMTS). 

With so much fiber being built in 2021 and beyond, how much life is left in the cable plant? 

Subscribe to the show using this feed, or visit ConnectThisShow.com

Email us [email protected] with feedback, ideas for the show, or your pictures of weird wireless infrastructure to stump Travis.

Watch here or below on YouTube Live, via Facebook Live here, or follow Christopher on Twitter to watch there.

A version of this story was originally published by the National League of Cities. Read the original here, with the full version below.

There’s an overwhelming tendency among regular Americans to conflate the basic infrastructure which surrounds us with permanence. Whether it’s the garbage truck predictably rumbling down the street at the same time every week, the water flowing from the tap, or our Internet connection, we assume that the physical ties which bind us together will always be there. And that’s because it mostly has, especially for community owned and operated infrastructure. When utility services are owned and operated by communities, they are by definition maintained by people who live locally for people who live locally. It’s hard to be taken by surprise and left without essential services.

But the odds tilt in the other direction when such services are delivered by outside firms. We’re seeing the consequences of this for electricity users in the wake of the Texas grid disaster last winter (as well as coming rumblings of heat-caused outages this June), but it’s a problem that’s been around longer than that for basic service providers of all types, where bankruptcies can leave whole communities high and dry.

The same consequences hold true when those firms are Internet Service Providers (ISPs), beholden to interests outside of the cities and towns they serve. Tens of thousands of American households learned this very lesson last fall when AT&T announced it was leaving the DSL business and no longer making new connections to its aging infrastructure, even though those wires will continue to sit in the ground for decades to come. Buy a new house in this area, and if AT&T DSL was the only provider in town, and you’ve got few or no options.

A version of this story was originally published by the National League of Cities. Read the original here, with the full version below.

There’s an overwhelming tendency among regular Americans to conflate the basic infrastructure which surrounds us with permanence. Whether it’s the garbage truck predictably rumbling down the street at the same time every week, the water flowing from the tap, or our Internet connection, we assume that the physical ties which bind us together will always be there. And that’s because it mostly has, especially for community owned and operated infrastructure. When utility services are owned and operated by communities, they are by definition maintained by people who live locally for people who live locally. It’s hard to be taken by surprise and left without essential services.

But the odds tilt in the other direction when such services are delivered by outside firms. We’re seeing the consequences of this for electricity users in the wake of the Texas grid disaster last winter (as well as coming rumblings of heat-caused outages this June), but it’s a problem that’s been around longer than that for basic service providers of all types, where bankruptcies can leave whole communities high and dry.

The same consequences hold true when those firms are Internet Service Providers (ISPs), beholden to interests outside of the cities and towns they serve. Tens of thousands of American households learned this very lesson last fall when AT&T announced it was leaving the DSL business and no longer making new connections to its aging infrastructure, even though those wires will continue to sit in the ground for decades to come. Buy a new house in this area, and if AT&T DSL was the only provider in town, and you’ve got few or no options.

A version of this story was originally published by the National League of Cities. Read the original here, with the full version below.

There’s an overwhelming tendency among regular Americans to conflate the basic infrastructure which surrounds us with permanence. Whether it’s the garbage truck predictably rumbling down the street at the same time every week, the water flowing from the tap, or our Internet connection, we assume that the physical ties which bind us together will always be there. And that’s because it mostly has, especially for community owned and operated infrastructure. When utility services are owned and operated by communities, they are by definition maintained by people who live locally for people who live locally. It’s hard to be taken by surprise and left without essential services.

But the odds tilt in the other direction when such services are delivered by outside firms. We’re seeing the consequences of this for electricity users in the wake of the Texas grid disaster last winter (as well as coming rumblings of heat-caused outages this June), but it’s a problem that’s been around longer than that for basic service providers of all types, where bankruptcies can leave whole communities high and dry.

The same consequences hold true when those firms are Internet Service Providers (ISPs), beholden to interests outside of the cities and towns they serve. Tens of thousands of American households learned this very lesson last fall when AT&T announced it was leaving the DSL business and no longer making new connections to its aging infrastructure, even though those wires will continue to sit in the ground for decades to come. Buy a new house in this area, and if AT&T DSL was the only provider in town, and you’ve got few or no options.

A version of this story was originally published by the National League of Cities. Read the original here, with the full version below.

There’s an overwhelming tendency among regular Americans to conflate the basic infrastructure which surrounds us with permanence. Whether it’s the garbage truck predictably rumbling down the street at the same time every week, the water flowing from the tap, or our Internet connection, we assume that the physical ties which bind us together will always be there. And that’s because it mostly has, especially for community owned and operated infrastructure. When utility services are owned and operated by communities, they are by definition maintained by people who live locally for people who live locally. It’s hard to be taken by surprise and left without essential services.

But the odds tilt in the other direction when such services are delivered by outside firms. We’re seeing the consequences of this for electricity users in the wake of the Texas grid disaster last winter (as well as coming rumblings of heat-caused outages this June), but it’s a problem that’s been around longer than that for basic service providers of all types, where bankruptcies can leave whole communities high and dry.

The same consequences hold true when those firms are Internet Service Providers (ISPs), beholden to interests outside of the cities and towns they serve. Tens of thousands of American households learned this very lesson last fall when AT&T announced it was leaving the DSL business and no longer making new connections to its aging infrastructure, even though those wires will continue to sit in the ground for decades to come. Buy a new house in this area, and if AT&T DSL was the only provider in town, and you’ve got few or no options.