A company that is installing super fast broadband service in Baldwin City today, says it likely will begin offering the service in Lawrence in early 2016.

Baldwin City-based RG Fiber is close to signing a lease agreement with the city of Lawrence that will give the company access to a ring of city-owned fiber optic cable that is needed to launch a gigabit broadband service in Lawrence.

City commissioners are scheduled to approve the lease agreement as part of their consent agenda on Tuesday evening. Mike Bosch, chief executive of RG Fiber, said that’s one of the last pieces of paperwork needed for his company to start a major broadband project in Lawrence. Bosch has begun accepting preregistrations for gigabit service at rgfiber.com/signup.

If this lease agreement with the city is one of the final pieces needed for the Lawrence project, you may be wondering why work won’t begin until at least 2016. The simple answer is because Bosch is busy making Baldwin City king of the Douglas County digital world. RG Fiber currently is installing fiber in Baldwin City. We have an article in today’s Journal-World about how Baker University will have the super-fast broadband service everywhere from classrooms to dorm rooms. Baker University students are surely destined to rule the world for awhile because they’ll have enough broadband to simultaneously watch YouTube, update on Facebook, post on Twitter and do something called Hulu. (What? I don’t have to shake my hips like that when I say Hulu? You’re sure it doesn’t have something to do with a hula hoop?)

Baker is expected to have the service within the first two weeks of August, and then customers in other parts of the town will be hooked up. After the Baldwin City project is well along, Bosch will start hooking up homes and businesses in Eudora in late 2015. Then, Lawrence will get its chance. That’s right, Lawrence is the largest city in the county, but we’re third on this list. RG Fiber tried to get a lease agreement with the previous Lawrence city commission that would have allowed the Lawrence project to get started quicker, but that deal moved slower than my Miss Pac-man game connected to dial-up.

The new group of city commissioners elected in April restarted those lease talks with RG Fiber. Bosch said he’s now confident the Lawrence project will happen.

“People are genuinely excited about getting this in Lawrence,” Bosch said. “They can see that Baldwin City is a real thing. They know it wasn’t just talk.”

Bosch said the number of signups he receives in Lawrence will play a role in where the company decides to offer the service in the city. He said the most likely locations to be involved in the first phase of the project are neighborhoods near major city streets that already have city-owned fiber in the rights-of-way. Those streets include: Sixth, Clinton Parkway, 23rd Street, Wakarusa and parts of Iowa between Sixth and 23rd streets.

The project will include more than just gigabit Internet service, which is the same speed of service the much ballyhooed Google Fiber project is delivering in parts of Kansas City. In addition to the gigabit service, RG also will offer video cable television packages and phone service, Bosch said. The company is marketing those services in Baldwin City currently. Bosch said he’s still working on a pricing plan for Lawrence, but expects gigabit service to run around $85 to $90 per month. If you want to bundle Internet, television and phone, that service likely would start at about $170 per month.

It will be interesting to watch how this project develops in the coming months. There certainly has been some skepticism among some about whether a startup company like RG can actually deliver a working broadband system. By the time the project gets to Lawrence, there should be some indication of how service levels are in Baldwin City and Eudora.

The last group of city commissioners also got bogged down with the question of whether a company like RG Fiber could make this sort of broadband service available throughout the community. That will be a key issue to follow in the years to come. Will the service make its way into lower income portions of the city? Lawrence-based Wicked Broadband had proposed a different type of system to bring gigabit service to Lawrence. It wanted to create a regulatory system called an “open access” network. An open access network would allow multiple providers to use the same sets of fiber optic cables to get service to people’s homes and businesses. But RG and other companies said creating such a regulation would serve as a major disincentive for other broadband providers to invest in Lawrence. A city-hired consultant largely agreed, so the current crop of city commissioners have moved past that idea and allowed the RG project to move forward.

But if a few years go by and the gigabit service is largely contained to just a few prosperous areas of Lawrence, there may be a discussion about whether the city should offer a city-owned broadband service. That would cost tens of millions of dollars to build. But who knows? Maybe by that time there will be something cooler and hipper than gigabit service that occupies our debates.

In other news and notes from around town:

UPDATE: I heard back from Debra Schmidt, local systems manager for WOW in Lawrence. She confirmed this weekend’s outage indeed was one of the larger ones the Lawrence cable/Internet system has experienced in recent years. She estimated about 4,500 accounts were without service at one point or another on Saturday.

As we previously reported, a vehicle accident on Kasold Drive caused the problems. A car hit a utility box that is a major splice point for WOW’s system in Lawrence.

“It probably was the worst damage we’ve ever had to the system,” Schmidt said.

The accident happened a little after 4:30 a.m. on Saturday. WOW responded to the scene shortly thereafter and had a crew of 10 workers on site until about 8 p.m. Saturday.

“I know it seemed long, but I can promise you we were working very hard to make the outage as short as possible,” Schmidt said.

Schmidt said most customers had service restored before 8 p.m. Saturday, and she said there are no lingering issues left from the accident.

But WOW is experiencing technical difficulties on another front. Schmidt said last week the company installed new equipment related to its On Demand cable television service. She said that installation has created problems for some customers who are ordering On Demand programs or trying to watch On Demand programs.

A timeline for getting that issued resolved hasn’t been determined yet. She said several engineers are working on that issue currently. Schmidt didn’t have an estimate for the number of customers impacted by that technical difficulty, but she said the problem was not system wide.

ORIGINAL POST:

• While we’re talking about Internet and cable, it was an eventful weekend for the city’s largest broadband provider, WOW. There have been multiple reports on social media of Internet outages and cable problems that occurred this weekend in Lawrence.

WOW’s Facebook page has a special note to Lawrence customers that says a vehicle accident occurred on Kasold north of Sixth Street about 4:30 a.m. Saturday. (The statement said near Kasold and Fourth Street, which caused my GPS to hiccup, so I’m assuming somewhere north of Sixth Street.) “This accident damaged a significant part of our fiber plant,” according to the statement. “Our crews are on site working diligently to restore service as soon as possible.”

Posts on social media, however, indicate there were some problems with video service prior to that accident. I sent an email to the local manager for WOW over the weekend, and she said she was working on an update of the situation. I reached out to here again this morning and will let you know when I hear more.

• We still have sunflower lapel pins and “Wizard of Oz” tattoos, but there is now one less way to show our Kansas pride. Lawrence’s Wheat State Pizza has closed its doors. As I noted on my Twitter feed late Friday (@clawhorn_ljw) the store’s last day of business was on Sunday.

Wheat State was a Kansas creation that used the state’s most famous crop — wheat — to create a unique pizza crust. The store opened about 11 years ago in The Malls Shopping Center at 23rd and Louisiana streets. Brad and Jennifer Remington took over the business in 2010. Brad told me the intense competition in the Lawrence restaurant market caused the couple to look for other opportunities.

“There is obviously a lot of competition,” Brad Remington said. “It is not that anybody pushed us out. But we just aren’t really getting ahead in life doing this.”

Remington said the restaurant business is going through a cycle in Lawrence where more new restaurants are opening than the market can immediately support.

“I know a lot of restaurant people in town who are struggling right now,” Remington said.
Remington said the ownership of The Malls had been good to work with, but finding successful restaurant locations in Lawrence is becoming more difficult as the restaurant scene becomes more concentrated.

“Eventually, you have to make that decision to move on,” he said. “Unless you are on Mass. or south Iowa Street, it is really difficult to get seen.”

Remington thanked his customers and said he had “made a lot of friends through this place.” Remington said he suspects there are more changes coming in the Lawrence restaurant scene as some other existing firms re-evaluate their position over the next year.

“I almost think the city has to put some sort of limit on how many new restaurants can open up, but I don’t know how the city could really do that,” Remington said. “But there are a lot of good, small, hometown businesses that are having a hard time competing right now.”

As for the future of Wheat State, founder Ryan Murphy continues to own the rights to the Wheat State name and recipes. Murphy told me in an email that he hopes to reopen a Wheat State Pizza in Lawrence at some point in the future. But it sounded like there were no definite plans. Murphy said he may start a crowd-funding campaign in the next few weeks to try to raise some money to open a new store. He said he likely would focus his efforts on finding a downtown location. I’ll let you know if I hear of any progress on that front.