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Plans

I have waited till the new year to contact the Council because the
newly elected Councilors take office on January first. Yesterday I
talked to Randall Ryti, the Vice Chair of the County Council. He says that the Council will have an infrastructure priority in 2021. I told him that ultimately I want the County to own any communication infrastructure that constitutes a natural monopoly. I believe that optical fiber that runs to every neighborhood in the County will be the key piece of such infrastructure. I also said that my short term goal and the request in our open letter is more modest. We simply ask that the County Council make Better Los Alamos Broadband a priority NOW (BLABNOW). I also talked with Councilor Ryti about how to effectively communicate with Councilors. I hope they all appreciate that I did not set up the WordPress petition software to send new email to the Council each time someone signed the open letter. Here is my current plan:

  • Friday January 1: Send email to those who signed the open letter with a link to this blog posting. I will suggest that email from individuals to the council will be particularly effective before the Council meeting on January 12, and that I’d like additional signatures before the 3rd when I will incorporate the signatures into the letter.
  • Sunday January 3: Send our open letter to the new Council.
  • Tuesday January 5: Make a public comment at the beginning of the virtual Council meeting.
  • Tuesday January 12: Attend the virtual Council meeting. At that crucial meeting, they will talk about priorities for 2021.

4 replies on “Plans”

When I tried using my dreamhost account (where I host andy@fraserphysics.com) to send email to the 111 folks who’ve opted in, I discovered that dreamhost has a limit on sending email of 100 emails per hour. On my second try with only 80 addresses, I found that my out going email is blocked with messages like “Our system has detected an unusual amount of unsolicited email originating from your address.” So, I may not get the email out today.

Yesterday I tried setting up an “Announce List” called something like andy@blabnow.blog. The robot at dreamhost sent invitations that got lost in most people’s spam boxes. This evening, I sent email to all 111 BLABBERS from my gmail account. That seemed to work. Unless someone has a better suggestion, I’ll use gmail in the future.

FYI: supposedly some part of LA county already has a fiber backbone sitting uselessly underground. If rumors are to be believed, one terminus is half-way up the hill from the roundabout towards Barranca Mesa.
I for one would prefer that my ever-ballooning taxes go towards internet infrastructure rather than gratuitous boondoggles like the planned kiddie pool (especially this one, as we effectively already have a public kiddie pool).

I want the County to have a resource that we could use to check your rumor. I believe that there is fiber to every school in Los Alamos County. It may be that there is fiber going up from Diamond to Barranca School.

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