The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Comcast Corp. will spend $10 million in Philadelphia, PA, to wire more than 200 recreation centers, health clinics, police stations, and other city buildings with high-speed fiber-optic lines, but also earn $32 million in fees over about 15 years to manage the local network.
Philadelphia now uses Verizon's "leased circuit" technology with speeds of about 1.5 million megabits per second to most buildings. The city renews a Verizon data-services contract annually and will not renew the contract when the Comcast network comes online, he said. The new Comcast network will offer speeds beginning at 100 megabits per second and advance to gigabit speed, or 1,000 megabits per second, for City Hall, the Municipal Services Building, and police district headquarters.
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Historical note: Until about 1990, Philadelphia's city government still utilized a plain Centrex system with rotary dial telephone sets, still with the MUncipal 6 number plate*. Even with Centrex, the City Hall switchboard still required 24 positions of a 608 cord board. Today, much of that traffic is served by a 311 system.
Until about 1980, the city government had an ancient PAX (Private Automatic Exchange), with old Automatic Electric AE40 telephone sets, that supplemented the Bell network.
*Some city government web pages still use the MU 6 style. Example:***** Moderator's Note *****
My circuit breaker just tripped.
1.5 million megabits per second = one trillion five hundred billion bits per second, right?Bill Horne Moderator