I’ve been working on a project at my office to connect buildings and have been talking to the city about their fiber network.

Burbank is leading the way with fiber offerings, it is a great way to attract media companies with multiple locations within the city limits and beyond.

Basically you pay $200/mo per strand of fiber for the first mile! This is a great deal.  Most locations can have up to 24 strands of fiber. Imagine what you can transfer with 24 strands of fiber!

Anyway, the process is fairly straight forward, and I’ll be providing more details as we progress.

Another development is that the City of Burbank will be offering internet services on the fiber network, so basically you can get an ethernet handoff and access to the internet along with the fiber. The service is said to be very competitively priced.

In other news, Charter Communications which is also striving to provide competitive internet data services is close to completing upgrades to DOCSIS which will enable Charter to offer speeds of 60mb down and 10up, which is comparable to Verizon Fios. DOCSIS 3.0.

Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification (DOCSIS) is an international standard developed by CableLabs and contributing companies that include: ARRIS, BigBand Networks, Broadcom, Cisco, Conexant, Correlant, Harmonic, Intel, Motorola, Netgear, Terayon, and Texas Instruments. DOCSIS defines the communications and operation support interface requirements for a data over cable system. It permits the addition of high-speed data transfer to an existing Cable TV (CATV) system.