On the agenda for the County Council meeting on November 19, 2024 items 9 A and B are contracts AGR24-46a and AGR24-46b to build and operate respectively the Los Alamos County Community Broadband Network (CBN).
I will write a letter to the County Council encouraging them to approve the contracts. Here are some key points:
- The contracts provide what the County Council specified at the meeting on 1/24/2023.
- Modern telecommunication infrastructure is now an essential utility like roads, water, sewer, gas and electric power were in the 20th century.
- The total cost to build the CBN, $35M for 10k passings and 6k drops, is $3.5k per passing or $5.8k per drop. A quick Google search suggests that providing the essential 20th century infrastructure to a new development costs between $50k and $150k per house. Choosing $67k as the reference, the fractional cost to upgrade our infrastructure to the 21st century is only (3.5/67) or 5%.
- Now that most residents have dropped plain old telephone service in favor of an unregulated monopoly (Comcast), we have lost the protections and constraints that the federal government provided/imposed on telecommunication services and we need government at some level to ensure standards of service. The County wide telecommunication outage in December 2022 demonstrated that need.
I hope that in discussing the proposed contracts the Council will get answers to the following questions:
- When do you estimate operations for the first customers will begin?
- When will service be available throughout the County?
- What will I (a resident) need to connect to a “drop”? Who will do that work? Who will provide equipment inside the house? Who will own and or service that equipment?
- Will any of this provide protection against an outage like 2022-12-11?
- Is this in any way contingent on the proposed San Ildefonso link?