The city of Jasper, Indiana, said it has entered a deal with Smithville Communications and its Smithville Telecom subsidiary to rewire the city with fiber.
Smithville Telecom will be based on equipment from Calix, and connectivity will be fiber to the premises (FTTP). Access is going to be 1 Gbps symmetrical.
The rollout plan is patterned on Google’s for its Google Fiber service. Residents will be encouraged to sign up online in advance of fiber being installed. Neighborhoods with the highest concentration of potential customers – “fiberhoods” – will be among those upgraded first. “Some fiberhoods will be built because they are close to main line fiber,” the city said.
The plan is to begin deploying fiber in the fourth quarter of this year. Unlike Google Fiber, the plan is to cover the entire city; Jasper expects that will take three years.
The services offered will include TV, telephony, Internet, home security, and surveillance.
The city government and Smithville Telecom are still negotiating what service pricing will be. The city claims 15,500 residents.
Jasper Mayor Terry Seitz said, “The decision by the City of Jasper to leverage fiber service to our municipal departments into a complete extension of fiber throughout the community will bring state-of-the-art communications capabilities. As technology becomes more immersed into our society I believe what we are beginning today will enable us to accomplish things beyond our wildest imagination in the future.”
The announcement came a day after President Barack Obama praised municipal broadband efforts and advocated the reversal of local laws banning municipal access. His comments inspired an immediate backlash from some commercial service providers.
The Jasper and Smithville fiber build is expected to take three years to completely install. Engineering planning alone for residential and small business sections will take up to nine months. Smithville currently expects that about 33% of the gigabit fiber build will be completed by the end of 2016, 33% by the end of 2017 and full completion by the end of 2018.
Time Warner Cable offers service in Jasper.
