111–120 of 214 posts
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It's Boulder, houses are getting close to California levels. The cheapest starter homes are around $700k.
there are at least 3 trailer parks in boulder, maybe more. i wonder how prices in them have changed over the years? :)
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What did Japan do with their vast broadband lead (which has now eroded entirely)? How did that dramatically benefit their economy? It didn't revolutionize their tech output, it didn't jump start their moribund economy. Finland has been among the ten fastest nations in regards to broadband speeds for a long time. That didn't do much for their economy as it languished in a near ten year recession. It didn't spur an epi…
Of course it doesn't matter economically - when only a tiny fraction of a potential userbase has anything approaching gige to the home there is going to be zero application development based on those requirements. You may be entirely correct that "150mbps is good enough for anyone" - but based on watching capabilities grow with data speeds the past 35 years I'd bet heavily in the opposite direction. If 50% of Interne…
and yet nobody ever has the faintest idea what would be done with it, despite the fact that every office building has been internally wired for gigabit ethernet (or faster!) for >10 years. what is anyone doing at work with it? what is anyone doing across large corporate campuses like google's or facebook's with all their internal bandwidth?
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.
I moved from Amsterdam to Boulder, CO. The tech ecosystem is amazing here. It's crazy how many tech companies are in a tiny city with ~100k people. You just walk down the street and it's Nest, Google, Github, JumpCloud, SolidFire, Logrhythm, VictorOps and hundreds of smaller startups. Great ecosystem. People are friendly and welcoming. It's amazing, except the internet. It's expensive, unreliable, and slowwwww.
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Perhaps too much road infrastructure has induced traffic? https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/
I only visit Boulder, so I'm not positive, but it seems to me that they have tons of people coming in from the suburbs. Most of the people inside of Boulder, in my experience, tend to ride bikes and/or take public transit, but you need a car to get to some trails and you need a car to get into Boulder as a resident of the surrounding areas (or at least most people do).
I do not know of any trails you would absolutely need a car to get to. One of the more popular places to start a hike, Chautauqua, actually started a very expensive paid parking program to get people to stop driving there (parking is limited, complaints from residents over noise), and instead take the free shuttle from city center.
Anyways, my home internet is absolute garbage (I'm just west of HW36, so outside of the city by a block). My speed is 5.05 Mbps down, 0.47 up and there's no alternatives to Century Link in my area. I might as well use a cellular network.
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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.
Those trailer parks in North Boulder are very well hidden. Many don’t even realize they’re there. Some of the nicest trailers I’ve ever seen, FWIW.
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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.
Unless Comcast is doing a fiber installation to your home, it's not comparable. They are probably just raising the caps they have on their existing conditions, but the neighborhood is still sharing the same amount of bandwidth. It's also not symmetrical up and down.
Shameless.
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've also read about studies that show that access to the internet improves health outcomes for poor people, so Boulder may also benefit from fewer emergency room visits and fewer sick days from those low-income households.
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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…
$100/mo for FTTH vs. $69/mo for 250MB/s Comcast? I'll take the FTTH and leave Comcast and Century Link behind, thank you very much. Would be even better if the City charged you for the fiber link and then let you select your backend provider. E.g., the way consumer choice works in the electric space. Let the city run/own the cable, and let the back-end carriers compete to provide the backbone and value-added services…