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Comment by dc786 | Hacker News Reader

My last post was June 12, 2012, but I did a blog for over 4 years about exactly what I thought. The county has already done REDInet (Regional Economic Development Iniative) which thought it would sell little chunks of bandwidth for big prices after it was done, and somehow that last chunk of fiber through the San Ildefonso pueblo's overhead power poles never happened, and fiber between the townsite and White Rock never happened. Comcast had the only fiber between the hill and White Rock, and consumed it with TV and the relatively slow DOCSIS technology. If the county builds anything, it will be very expensive and unpopular with the voters.

Try talking with Allan and Mariela Saenz at Los Alamos Network, losalamosnetwork.com.

My blog is still there at fiberlanm.blogspot.com.

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I just looked at your blog. You quit shortly after I started.

My home Internet connection is through Los Alamos Network.

I believe that the Carson Electric Co-Op in Taos uses REDInet to provide an Internet option to their customers.

I heard for years that the San Ildefonso prevented us from connecting to REDInet. Then Alan told me that he and Comcast and everyone else buys capacity on the link that Lumen operates for LANL.

We need a someone employed by Los Alamos County who knows what's going on.

Maybe there is a way to wake up REDInet to reality. But New Mexico tends toward bureaucracy that sucks up money and really doesn't accomplish much, so I don't hold out much hope, either regionally or locally.

I moved to Camp Verde, Arizona. Things were even worse here, but the small cable company sold out to Suddenlink out of Round Rock, Texas, and that sold out to Altice, from France, and I think Suddenlink here is similar to Comcast in Los Alamos. There's nobody like Allan, and cable's fatal flaw is that upload speeds are capped at 10 Mbits/sec. I paid over $300 a month for a couple of years for less, and now pay about $130 for 50 down, 8 up. Sigh.

Trouble is, if you offer gigabit, or even 200 megabit, symmetric, for a few hundred customers, you need 40 gig or 100 gig upstream, and that's a big-city thing. Citylink in Albuquerque does have that, and I suspect LANL does, too, though I'm not in touch with them the past 8 or 9 years.

Also, for WFH (work from home) for LANL, within the county or from Taos through Belen, there's still the fact DOE (Department of Energy) really, really wants all LANL traffic to go through ESnet (Energy Sciences) so latency that could be microseconds inside town becomes at least 70 milliseconds. That makes a huge difference in how useful it is.

Other nearby resources are Jane Hill and Cybermesa in Santa Fe, Richard Loewenberg and his first mile mailing list, also in Santa Fe and John Brown at Citylink in Albuquerque. The subscription web page for 1stmile is:

http://mailman.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/1st-mile-nm

You are correct about ESnet. Before I quit LANL last year, I ran traceroute from my LANL desktop to my house. I found that the packets went through Sunnyvale. If LANL is serious about WFH, they will address that.

Terry Wallace was amenable to a direct connection in town, but the determination of whether fiber losses were excessive was left to that now-Lumen contractor, and somehow, yes those losses just didn't come up to snuff. It might have been a problem for 10 gig, but we were only trying to set up 1 gig, and the county was planning to tear down the "annex" near the Smith's gas station and destroy the route for the fiber anyway. Which the county did.

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