Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

dailycamera.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 214 posts

Re: Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

#81

Post by psalminen »

makerofspoons wrote: post #18

I went to school at the University of Colorado Boulder. Something this article doesn't mention is that the city already has over 100 miles of fiber laid that isn't currently being lit up: http://www.govtech.com/dc/articles/Boulder-Colo-To-Light-Up-... . There were several groups of students looking to build companies to utilize this existing infrastructure, as well as business interests outside the city, but it just…

This is exactly what I was thinking about while reading the article. Funny they didn't mention it.

Re: Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

#82

Post by tptacek »

ttul wrote: post #34
rayiner wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The math is bleaker than that (see my other post, calculating $7,000 per subscribing household). Also, out of the $80 you pay, most of it gets eaten up by operational costs. Charter's EBITDA is about 35% of revenues. So even if the city pays no taxes., it'll take 250 months to pay back your share of the network.

This is precisely the kind of long term investment that cities should make.

That's twenty years. There is a decent chance that mainstream high speed Internet will be wireless in 20 years.

Re: Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

#83

Post by nomocrypto »

tenaciousDaniel wrote: post #70
rayiner wrote: post #15

Some back of the napkin math. $140 million for 40,000 households in Boulder = $3,500 per household. If 50% of people subscribe (typical for municipal broadband), that's $7,000 per subscribing household, or higher than Charter's market cap per subscriber. A quarter of the population of the city is below the poverty line. If the intent is to offer them subsidized broadband, let's assume we get no capital recovery from…

I'm impressed by your math skills, but I used to live in Boulder and I'm shocked to learn that 25% live below the poverty line. Is that really true? I suppose it could be the fact that many are college students, but still. That seems high.

A rising tide doesn’t necessarily lift all ships.

Re: Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

#84

Post by StillBored »

jartelt wrote: post #55
rayiner wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's about 10 million per year in debt payments for the full $140 million investment. If you assume that 50% of households subscribe, and the city subsidizes rates so no capital is recovered from folks below the poverty line, that's about $686/year per subscribing household. Which is crazy high--the non-subsidized ARPU will have to be $140 to break even. (Which is also not out of line--Verizon will barely break eve…

Comcast charges $160 a month for 1000 Mbps internet and $110 a month for 400 Mbps. The $100 per month you quote isn't terrible when compared to those numbers.

I wish people would also list the upload speeds, which for doing backups, sending grandma 4k video links of the kids, etc is miserable on the 20-40Mbit, that the cable companies are providing to go with most of their "gigabit" packages.

The idea that you need to use facebook's/etcs spyware just to share a couple photos with your friends goes against the entire premise of the internet's PtP architecture.

More generally, does a media companies ownership of the infrastructure create a conflict of interest when it comes to providing a symetric communications path so you can stream your kids video's instead of having to involve a 3rd party to "cache" them for you?

Re: Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

#85

Post by jessaustin »

leesalminen wrote: post #78
st26 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kinda makes it sound like they've got too much road. Property taxes are only a thousand or three per single family household, I believe.

It sure doesn’t seem that way :). Traffic in Boulder has gotten significantly more annoying over the last several years.

Perhaps too much road infrastructure has induced traffic?

https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/

Re: Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

#86

Post by vanderZwan »

rayiner wrote: post #15

Some back of the napkin math. $140 million for 40,000 households in Boulder = $3,500 per household. If 50% of people subscribe (typical for municipal broadband), that's $7,000 per subscribing household, or higher than Charter's market cap per subscriber. A quarter of the population of the city is below the poverty line. If the intent is to offer them subsidized broadband, let's assume we get no capital recovery from…

Well, it also will likely be a huge boost to the economy, so it will pay itself back in other ways too.

Re: Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

#87

Post by bigtex »

tptacek wrote: post #82
ttul wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is precisely the kind of long term investment that cities should make.

That's twenty years. There is a decent chance that mainstream high speed Internet will be wireless in 20 years.

Agreed. Invest heavily in WISP technology if possible. Running fiber through bedrock sounds ridiculous.

Re: Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

#88

Post by jessaustin »

tptacek wrote: post #82
ttul wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is precisely the kind of long term investment that cities should make.

That's twenty years. There is a decent chance that mainstream high speed Internet will be wireless in 20 years.

That would be awesome, and would have been awesome 10 years ago, but FCC have been successfully fighting against this for a long time so we can't make assumptions. Regardless, fiber will always have more bandwidth than radio, and we'll always need more bandwidth.

Re: Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

#89

Post by blanderman »

rayiner wrote: post #24
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #7

Boulder has a population of about 110,000 people [1]. Given "the estimated cost of the entire network is around $140 million" [2], the per-capita cost of this network comes to $1,300. I pay $80 a month for my 300 / 20 service. In 16 months, I would be able to pay for my share of this network. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulder,_Colorado [2] http://www.dailycamera.com/news/boulder/ci_31941127/public-s...

The math is bleaker than that (see my other post, calculating $7,000 per subscribing household). Also, out of the $80 you pay, most of it gets eaten up by operational costs. Charter's EBITDA is about 35% of revenues. So even if the city pays no taxes., it'll take 250 months to pay back your share of the network.

How does that 250 months number change if you bake in a 2%/year price increase to account for inflation?

Re: Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

#90

Post by tzs »

rb808 wrote: post #23
thelastidiot wrote: post #5

Once in a while a story about another city getting fiber, while it's fantastic (without knowing much about the cost), progress is slow and even in the heart of the Bay Area, we are pathetically lagging. https://fiber.google.com/newcities/ is looking sparse and honestly worrisome. It's amazing how much the US is behind implementing another solution they invented.

That's bad, but also interesting that you can have the world's main tech region without much fiber to home. Maybe fiber isn't really that important.

10-15 years ago, fiber to the home (FTTH) was hugely important because it was massively faster than cable (maybe two orders of magnitude) or DSL (three orders of magnitude).

Nowadays cable is almost as fast. The same physical cable to my neighborhood that offered plans of up to 10 Mb/s 10 years ago is now giving me 500 Mb/s on my current plan, and it looks like 1000 Mb/s is available if I switch to a bundle that includes Comcast's home security service.

Faster home internet has diminishing returns. With a 150 Mb/s service, you can have two parents and three kids each streaming a different 4k movie at the same time. You can download 67 GB of data in an hour.

For most families the only time they will notice a difference between 150 Mb/s and gigabit is when someone needs to download a large file, such as when someone buys a major new game. An hour download at 150 Mb/s becomes under 10 minutes in gigabit. For most that only happens occasionally.

The last couple of times that Comcast has raised my internet speed without changing my plan or cost, I've seriously considered dropping down to a less expensive plan that has my old speed. The only thing that stops me is that I have an internet/TV/phone bundle, and the bundles with my old speeds have smaller TV packages too, which are missing some of my most watched channels.

Post reply on HN