Ponca City, Oklahoma officials used fiber to build the fastest free wifi mesh in the nation. According to this GovTech article from March 26, 2014, Google and Apple have visited Ponca City to check out how this city of 25,000 residents has made muni-wifi successful while so many other projects have gone dark.
Ponca City officials say that the success all started with fiber, and with starting small while working your way up.
“Other cities want to get where we are,” Baird said, “but they say, ‘Well, that’s just too expensive.’ The biggest problem other cities have is that they want to do it this year. Not ‘I want to do it over 10 years.’ It’s too big an investment and so it gets killed. The first thing is get some fiber out there; start small and work your way up.” Ponca City began 15 years ago, steadily adding fiber for city communications and disaster recovery. Today it has 350 miles of fiber that have opened vast opportunities to the city and its residents.
The fiber build started in 1999, but now provides services to over 17,000 residents over 25 square miles. Some of the comments indicate there are issues with speed, so there are two sides to this story. Performance improvements should be simplified due to the foundation being built on top of a fiber network.
Cities and villages in the greater Dayton region have some existing fiber networks to support traffic signals and other systems. With some strategic vision from regional government and dedicated support from the community, this same success story could be written about Dayton, Montgomery County, Greene County, and the entire Miami Valley region.
Let’s start building fiber to the home in a few neighborhoods and small communities and connect them to these regional fiber assets.
Leigh Sandy is the founder of Extra Mile Fiber and has been building and operating networks connected to the Internet since 1995.