Steve Mensing, Editor
♦ I guess they “cover-up kids” in Salisbury’s “want to move on” city hall have entered an alternate reality. Maggie Blackwell suggests elsewhere that Salisbury, N.C. needs to get started by taking advantage of Fibrant’s capabilities as a gig city. It appears our Mayor Pro Tem, in our flat-lining burg thanks in large part to the Fibrant debacle, seems unaware of the fiber-optic utilities inability to sell it’s highest speed internet 100 Mbps from it’s rollout in November 2010 until two weeks ago. In almost over 3 1/2 years since Fibrant’s the soft rollout, the utility only managed to get three, yes three 100 Mbps customers. The city traded in 33 million dollars in certificates of participation. 7.6 million dollars from the sewer and water fund, many millions more in debt that has destroyed major city services and cost the jobs of many city employees. The city of Salisbury, N.C. is dead in the water. And now with a proven incapacity to sell super high-speed internet they are going to promote Salisbury as a gig city?
Maggie, seriously Salisbury is in no race with other cities that “we must run”. Salisbury can’t even win in Salisbury where Time Warner Cable and AT&T U-verse are already mopping the floor with Fibrant with their high-speed internet offerings. Fibrant is a distant 3rd place for internet.
AT&T U-Verse is going to a gig in the Charlotte region (it will eventually rollout here) and Time Warner Cable is going to 10 Gigabytes down and 10 Gigabytes up in their business class which will rollout here. Their residential customers will be able to get speeds up to 300 Mbps which is overkill.
http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2014/07/31/5078583/why-were-bringing-ultra-broadband.html
Forget about competing with the many livable cities who have or will shortly have Gig fiber optic capacity. People will take a look at Salisbury’s soaring stats in poverty (28% and likely to rise because people are moving out), awful FBI violent crime and property crime stats which will show a 5x increase in homicides next report, and Salisbury’s city public school’s poor composite scores in the state’s READY Report. Try to recruit tech entrapaneurs to come here when most of the top livable cities will be going Gig in 2014-2015. Salisbury will be left in the dust by livable gig cities like Cary, Raleigh, Charlotte, Wilmington, Huntersville, Chapel Hill, Greensboro, Winston-Salem and many others. Salisbury doesn’t have much to offer in comparison with many other cities with livability.
http://rowanfreepress.com/salisbury-nc-statistics/
On top of Salisbury’s deadbeat Downtown, Salisbury’s City Hall has attracted enormous media attention from around the state for their scandal, cover-up, and desire to move-on. There will be no moving on.
