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by posguy
2135 days ago
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Centurylink has pulled quite a bit of fiber in Seattle over the last 3 years, but their expansion plans are erratic (eg: putting a 12 port GPON aerial terminal in the middle of blocks of 4 story MDUs that aren't allowed to use it) and the serviceability database often has said GPON ports misallocated due to incorrect identification of the number of units in a particular property. I think Centurylink is hard up for cash at the moment, as they just dropped gigabit fiber with a free modem & install down to $49 a month for life in most areas. Frontier did similar offers for the 2 years prior to selling the Pacific Northwest division to Ziply Fiber. Ultimately the City of Seattle struck a bad franchise agreement with Centurylink that didn't mandate universal fiber coverage like more sparsely populated suburbs did (eg: Lynnwood, Kenmore, etc). The effectiveness of these agreements was middling though, only the litigious cities were able to ensure the franchise agreement was enforced. Poorer townships like Kenmore have universal fiber service available to every property by 2005 written in as a hard requirement of their franchise agreements with the telco, but without enforcement action the fiber will not be built. |
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The WaveG MDU network is in a lot of places in the city which are not Wave cable incumbent territory. It started as its own independent network in areas that are traditionally Comcast/Centurylink territory around the core of downtown, capitol hill, south lake union etc and was later acquired by Wave. The Wave cable TV network was historically its own distinct thing in a different set of franchise territories within the city boundaries.
The origins of what we would call Wave in the City of Seattle are with Broadstripe. The same guys who acquired Broadstripe out of bankruptcy and glued it together with a bunch of other acquired small to medium cable MSOs on the west coast, are the ones who formed Northwest Fiber (now Ziply) to acquire the PNW assets of Frontier.
https://www.multichannel.com/news/broadstripe-writes-its-las...
Ultimately for a full understanding of what Clink and Ziply are doing and where their last mile and midddle mile networks are the strongest, one needs to have a historical understanding of the Pacific Northwest Bell network (-->USWest-->Qwest-->Clink) and the areas that were historically GTE territory (GTE-->Frontier-->Ziply).
On the topic of the city government of Seattle and its franchise agreement with CenturyLink. I don't think a city government ever has much negotiating leverage with an ILEC such as this. The clink network in Seattle is the result of 100 years of incumbent copper phone line dialtone service, clink setting its own poles in many places, and is a core part of municipal infrastructure. The city can't reasonably force the company to vacate the right of way or cease services without causing a severe impact on the residents of the city. There's no plausible scenario in which a new franchise agreement won't put be into place...