No future here.
Fiber to the home service is coming to a string of small Mono County communities generally along U.S. highway 395 (and along the Digital 395 fiber backbone), but one – Lee Vining – will be left out.
The California Public Utilities Commission approved a $6.6 million grant to Race Telecommunications from the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) to build out FTTH systems in South Chalfant, Benton, Benton Hot Springs, Swall Meadows and Mono City. But commissioners excluded Lee Vining because AT&T and Verizon offer mobile broadband service there.
The mobile service that’s available won’t support the kind of services and applications that wireline systems can – that point was confirmed by CPUC staff. High definition, interactive video streaming is an example, and it’s not just about being able to watch Netflix.
“That type of video is increasingly critical for taking classes and is absolutely critical for medical types of applications”, said commissioner Catherine Sandoval. “Truly, it’s where the future is going”.
Unfortunately, it’s not where the majority of CPUC commissioners are heading. Despite the fact that the project would pass north through Lee Vining anyway in order to reach Mono City, three commissioners – Liane Randolph, Carla Peterman and president Michael Picker – voted to exclude the town from the project. The general rationale was that the $1 million saved could be better spent elsewhere.
It was the second time in as many meetings that the CPUC has pulled particular towns out of CASF-subsidised projects because they deemed slow and expensive wireless service to be good enough, while approving money to upgrade neighboring communities to FTTH. Race will be offering the lucky towns uncapped, symmetrical 25 Mbps service for $25 per month and a gigbit for $100. People in Lee Vining, on the other hand, will have much slower service – 6 Mbps down – from AT&T and Verizon, and will be paying by the byte: to get the 50 gigabytes of data that the median U.S. consumes, Verizon’s mobile customers have to pay $350 per month, and wait a lot longer for it to be delivered.
Resolution approving $6.6 million for the Gigafy Mono project
Alternate resolution – rejected by a 3 to 2 vote – that would have included Lee Vining
CPUC staff presentation comparing the two alternatives