The Gigabit Squared project to bring fiber Internet to Seattle is reportedly dead, with the company having failed to pay more than $50,000 to the city.
Newly sworn in Mayor Ed Murray "has declared the city’s deal with startup broadband company Gigabit Squared dead," according to a Puget Sound Business Journal article yesterday. "Murray confirmed that the deal with Gigabit Squared had fallen through."
Murray received a donation from Comcast, which could lose customers to a fiber network, but told Ars before the mayoral election that he would not change the city's gigabit plan. In fact, the problems with the Gigabit Squared plan started before Murray was sworn in on January 1.
"About all that’s left of [former] Mayor Mike McGinn’s promise to bring high-speed Internet to Seattle neighborhoods in partnership with Gigabit Squared is the small company’s unpaid bill for $52,250," the Seattle Times wrote today. "Erin Devoto, Seattle’s chief technology officer, said that as of mid-November, the company’s phones were turned off and the city was unable to reach its officers. She turned over the bill for city staff’s preliminary engineering work on a broadband network to the City Attorney’s Office for collection."
Gigabit Squared did make a payment of $2,500 to the city in November, but it owed much more than that. "In an initial engineering agreement, the company had agreed to compensate the city for preliminary work by city engineers and staff on the project, while the city and the company worked out a larger master agreement, which was ultimately never completed," GeekWire reported last week. The company told city officials in November that it hadn't been able to raise enough funding.
According to the Business Journal, Gigabit Squared declined to answer questions about the Seattle project, saying only that "Gigabit Squared appreciates Mayor McGinn’s passion for, and support of, the FTTH (fiber-to-the-home) project in Seattle. We look forward to a dialogue regarding project possibilities with Mayor-elect [sic] Murray and his staff.”
Gigabit Squared, which also plans to build a fiber network in Chicago, struck a deal with Mike McGinn in 2012 "to lease the city’s unused dark fiber-optic cable and connect 14 Seattle neighborhoods to high-speed internet," the Seattle Times noted. Gigabit Squared had planned to begin a rollout to two neighborhoods in Q1 2014.
Just because Gigabit Squared is probably done in Seattle doesn't mean the city won't find someone else to operate a network. The Business Journal reported that Murray said he's looking for other companies with a "more realistic financing mechanism" to lease the city's dark fiber.
There is already some gigabit Internet available in Seattle through a company called CondoInternet, but it's limited to certain condos and apartment buildings.
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