fiber-14_Ben_Felten_cc.jpg

Fiber optics carry information as pulses of light, with capacity and speeds much greater than copper phone lines. Fiber-linked homes have access to super-fast Internet connections.

(Ben Felten/Creative Commons)

Portland yearns to be first rate.

We love our restaurants, boast of top-notch beer and wine. We crave a Major League Soccer title.

What’s gigabit Internet good for?

Gigabit Internet provides online access at 1 gigabit per second – 1,000 megabits. That’s about 50 times faster than Comcast’s standard download speed (20mbps). Google made it a coveted threshold with its Google Fiber initiative in Kansas City, Austin and Provo.

Few people need gigabit speeds now, but as households’ bandwidth demands grow new applications emerge. Some possibilities:

Streaming video

that launches instantly as soon as you turn them on, as quick as flipping between TV channels.

Online backup

: Large corporations back up their computers continuously to the “cloud.” Similar backups are possible for home users.

Video chat

: Big-screen, high-resolution video conferences with multiple people that make you feel like you’re all in the same room.

Hobbyists

: Even casual photographers and videographers create large HD videos and high-resolution photos. Editing and publishing can be a chore at current Internet speeds.

Full house

: Watch video, download songs, hold video chats – no matter how many people are in your family.

4K

: Ultra-high-definition video streamed online to super-big screens.

Gaming

: Online competition with remote players, without any lags.

Don’t need a gig?

Here’s a sampling of some other speeds and prices:

Comcast

: 20 megabits per second (mbps) downloads to $65 a month, or $54 a month with cable TV or phone service; 50 mbps for $75/month ($64 with phone or cable); 105 mbps for $75/month ($64 with phone or cable.)

CenturyLink

(speeds not available in all locations): $30/month for 40 mbps, $60/month for 100 mbps.

Fibersphere

(

): $40/month for 50 mbps (uploads and downloads); $60/month for 100 mbps.

Frontier Communications

(Washington County and east Multnomah County): 15 mbps downloads for $30/month; 25 mbps for $40/month; 35 mbps for $50/month (discounts available with other services.)

And someday, maybe, we’ll have super-fast Internet.

For close to a decade the city has harbored ambitions for a fiber-optic network that tied residents to the Web at breathtaking speeds. Few people, strictly speaking, need “gigabit Internet,” a gold standard that offers connections fifty times faster than the current standard.

But that hasn’t stopped Portland from lusting after it in city-sponsored initiatives and grass-roots crusades in anticipation of a new class of technologies that would produce wondrous online video and other services over lightning-fast fiber optics.

Well, guess what: Gigabit Internet is here. But you’ve gotta pick your spots.

Rather than a massive project to string fiber up and down Portland’s streets, fiber is coming in drips and drabs, building by building – to parts of the Pearl District, in a handful of new apartments on the eastside and in a smattering of suburban developments.

It’s a modest step, not the grand gesture online advocates had envisioned. But in time it may get the job done, for some people at least, bringing faster Internet speeds to the Portland area.

"The neighborhoods that show us they want us the most, those are the ones we'll look at first," said Sam Sanders, community technical liaison for a tiny Beaverton telecom company called Fibersphere, which is looking to build targeted fiber projects in parts of the city – perhaps beginning in the next several months.

Fiber optics carry Internet communication in pulses of light with more speed and capacity than the copper phone lines that connect most of the city. Much of suburban Portland already has fiber running to their homes, installed by Verizon for its FiOS service and sold to Frontier in 2009.

Portland has been a laggard, though, frustrating the city’s ambitions for faster connections.

Portland looked seriously at building its own fiber-optic network to homes throughout the city in 2006, but the city council balked at the $500 million price tag and the project never got past the $139,000 study the city commissioned to evaluate feasibility.

The city then flaunted itself shamelessly three years ago when Google held an open competition for its first fiber project. Portland and its netizens tried various stunts to get Google's attention, attempting the world's longest "Telephone Game," crafting a beer (Gigabit IPA) and creating a fawning website (portlandheartsgoogle.com –still online today.)

Google picked Kansas City instead, and has since expanded to take over networks in Provo and in Austin. Portland’s efforts stalled, with no appetite for spending public funds and no private company ready to take the leap.

Qwest Communications, nursing a long hangover from a spending binge during the dot-com era, never had the money to build a Portland network. But Qwest’s new owner, CenturyLink, has quietly taken a different approach.

“We’ve been sort of under the radar,” said Martin Flynn, the company’s Oregon spokesman.

CenturyLink isn’t building a big, Verizon-style fiber network in Portland. But like Fibersphere, it’s lighting up new apartment buildings and working with developers to ensure residents have access to tomorrow’s technologies today. And the door is open to a broader rollout someday, Flynn said.

“This is the future,” he said. “This is where we invest our dollars, for the most part.”

The cost of adding fiber to a new development is little different from the cost of installing conventional wiring, and the long-term payoff could be huge as new technologies come online. New buildings can offer gigabit capabilities to lure tenants, and don’t have to worry about rewiring the apartments when it ceases to become a premium feature and becomes standard.

“It is a way to future-proof and hedge a bet against what the future demands are going to be,” said Aaron Jones of the Vancouver firm Urban IDM, which is working with CenturyLink to build fiber-linked apartments in Vancouver and Portland – including the new U Street Lofts at S.E. 27th and Hawthorne.

It’s also a way to build in some choice, Jones said. Apartments typically come wired for cable TV, but some renters don’t want cable – or want a service provider other than Comcast.

“It’s nice to have options for tenants,” he said. “It’s nice to be able to move into a building and choose who your Internet provider is.”

Gigabit Internet isn’t cheap. CenturyLink charges $100 a month in locations where it’s available (though it offers a $20 a month discount for the first year.) Fibersphere is pricing it at $70 to $80 a month.

For some people, Fibersphere’s Sanders said, a superfast Internet connection might supplant the need for a landline phone and cable TV. If so, $80 a month measures up pretty well against the $150 to $250 a month that many viewers pay Comcast for a

“triple play” of cable TV, Internet service and home phone service.

“More and more people are realizing there are options,” he said. “I think customers are going to dictate whether the triple play option works or whether they’re willing to consider something else.”

Google notwithstanding, gigabit Internet is still a rarity. And outside of a few voracious web surfers, the demand for such speeds is muted.

Gigabit Internet has a chicken-and-egg problem: There’s no need for super-fast Internet since the applications and services don’t exist to support it. But no one will build services if no customer base exists for the products.

“If live sports can be streamed on the Internet I think it’ll be just like dominoes,” said Mary Beth Henry, manager of Portland’s Office of Community Technology and the city’s most outspoken advocate for faster Internet speeds.

The city has had preliminary talks with Fibersphere, aiming to clear away permitting hurdles to stringing fiber from existing utility poles or burying it in the ground. And Henry said Portland won’t set minimum buildout requirements for Fibersphere or anyone else who wants to bring fiber to the city.

She said the city won’t set any buildout requirements for companies looking to expand Portland’s fiber footprint, either. That means Fibersphere, or someone else, could target specific neighborhoods and build out slowly.

It won't meet everyone's needs, but it might provide a foundation for the future.

“We’ll do anything to keep the possibility of competition alive,” Henry said, “because it’d be great for our citizens.”

Note: This article has been corrected to indicate that Google has a fiber network in Provo, not Omaha.

-- Mike Rogoway; twitter: @rogoway; phone: 503-294-7699