California mountain community requests $759K for FTTH

8 November 2015 by Steve Blum
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Click for the big picture.

A fiber to the home project in the Tahoe Basin in eastern Placer County has been proposed for a construction subsidy from the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF). Submitted by Inyo Networks – one of the companies involved in the Digital 395 network in eastern California – the grant application asks for $759,000, which is 70% of the total $1.1 million project cost…

The proposed Alpine Peaks Broadband Project will serve a designated “Priority Area” community in the Upper Ward Canyon area of eastern Placer County. Representatives of the community have been unsuccessful in efforts to get the Incumbent telephone and cable companies serving the surrounding areas to extend broadband services into the community of 95 households.

The project proposes a Fiber-to-the-Premises (FTTP) Last Mile network…This technology will replace a 1973 vintage direct buried coaxial network that has deteriorated to such an extent that it has been rendered inoperable and thus has been abandoned.

Initially, the network will support symmetrical 1 Gbps broadband service, as well as voice and video, and could be upgraded to 10 Gbps in the future.

A total of 23 projects were either held over from the last round of CASF project applications or proposed in the current round, which began last December. At that point, there was something like $160 million available to be spent on building broadband infrastructure in California. One – ViaSat’s massive satellite terminal deployment – was rejected. Four projects totalling $5.8 million have been approved; the remaining 18 proposals are asking for a total of $161 million – about $7 million more than is in the kitty.

Tellus Venture Associates assisted the Tahoe broadband consortium’s development of the Alpine Peaks project. I’m not a disinterested commentator. Take it for what it’s worth.