Steve Mensing, Editor
♦ The other day we reported “America’s Gig City” and Fibrant are going to make the announcement on Thursday, September 3rd down at Catawba College that Fibrant is going to 10 gigs. So what if Fibrant has only sold to 1 or 2 one gig subscribers or that Time Warner Cable is already offering 10 gigs to any major business or institutional area of Salisbury or the County. The challenge is nobody is utilizing the kind of over-the-top-speed in the Bury and not a whole lot tech companies and institutions want to set up tent here due to Salisbury’s mammoth downside: crime, poverty, a bottom rung school system, 10 unsolved murders, a lack of jobs, and a major heroin, crack, and meth epidemic in Salisbury–you’ve heard it all before. All of these basics need to be shored up before the “whippoorwills come jetting back to Capistrano”.
Going to 10 gigs doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when you factor in these two ugly realities that our incumbent city council will never tell you about Fibrant.
• Reality number 1 is extremely ugly and undeniable. City Council told us that Fibrant “turned the corner”, but the 2014 city budget audit told us otherwise. Fibrant lost a whopping $12.6 million dollars. Hey and they still owe 7.6 million to the water and sewer fund.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2E5Ew6OLdElbmlTcEd0OTZBWDg/view?usp=sharing
$12.6 million in 2014 losses and our incumbents believe our municipal broadband was a good decision. And Mark “The Empire No-Tel” Lewis thinks the city should keep it.
• Reality number 2 calls on Fibrant becoming 10 gig ready. This requires an extremely expensive infusion of specialized equipment to stabilize the system under a 10x torrent of gigs and make it secure from being overwhelmed. A “fail-over facility” is a must. In layman’s terms Fibrant’s equipment can barely handle a single gig as it is. It would no doubt collapse without secure backup throughout the 10 gig system. Where is the money coming from? The water and sewer fund is already tapped out for $7.6 million and jack-rolled our bond rating. City services are limping along as a result of our alleged “fiber-optic economic development tool”.
I’m hearing whispers about going to 10 gigs already: “Bad move–don’t they ever learn? It’s almost 5 years since the soft rollout and Fibrant tanked the Bury. What are the incumbents thinking?”
Moving to the “next generation of innovation” and going “beyond the next horizon” has a heavy price tag. And most likely it will put the city in even a deeper hole.
