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Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast

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Re: Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast

#61

Post by orblivion »

After a long period of my life not having the fastest in speeds at home, I ended up going all in and telling Comcast "give me the fastest Internet you have". So I'm paying for 400Mbps.

...what do I need all this speed for? What could someone possibly do with 1 Gbps? It's not as though web pages will load faster, they have their own throttling. I don't think I need 400Mbps to stream 4k video. Torrents don't seem to take advantage of the full bandwidth.

I could see the benefit if I were doing 10x as much stuff _at the same time_. So is this for large families or businesses? I'm considering going down to about 100 and saving a few bucks.

Re: Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast

#62

Post by someguydave »

microcolonel wrote: post #58

As somebody who really dislikes the idea of being forced to subsidize a municipal network, I like that they have some success. The cost of competing with Comcast should not be so great that people find this necessary.

https://pagetwo.completecolorado.com/2017/10/23/fort-collins...

Indeed, this is taxpayer-subsidized “competition”

Re: Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast

#63

Post by not_a_cop75 »

Donald wrote: post #10

As a FoCo resident, Comcast sent me an email saying that they're "upgrading our network" and "increasing your Internet download speed". Not really clear what that means until I see an updated rate sheet. I'm sure this is entirely a coincidence and has nothing to do with the fact that they suddenly have some competition now.

You have to know the slang:

"upgrading our network" - In this case network refers to financial network, but should really be "net worth".

"increasing your Internet download speed" - download speed for them is actually slang for the amount of money they can charge you for standard access.

Re: Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast

#65

Post by ThaJay »

josh2600 wrote: post #49
pmjordan wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU is a big(ish) and diverse place. We pay about twice that for 40Mbps VDSL and about 2.5x that for 50Mbps LTE. To be fair, we could get something slightly (~20%) cheaper as we've got a "business" deal to get static IP addresses on each connection. The fastest consumer package we could get at this location (cable) is 500Mbit/s down, 40Mbit/s up for €80/month. (Their business level contracts top out at 300/40 Mbps…

The EU is also smaller and dramatically denser than the US. Nationwide service in the US is categorically different than servicing a nation in Europe. The rollout costs are dramatically higher.

Compare a US state to a EU nation and the differences are not insurmountable.

Re: Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast

#66

Post by homonculus1 »

tyingq wrote: post #59
homonculus1 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't describe a Ponzi scheme though.

I think it's a very high level comparison to the idea that the funds/rewards in a Ponzi scheme are underprovisioned. Edit: Yes, it's not a great analogy.

But on an even higher level, a Ponzi scheme is outright fraud where most victims get nothing. Underprovisioned internet bandwidth gives every customer part of what they were promised, which is plenty for most of them anyway. Using sensational words imprecisely distorts meaning.

Re: Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast

#67

Post by kalleboo »

josh2600 wrote: post #49
pmjordan wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU is a big(ish) and diverse place. We pay about twice that for 40Mbps VDSL and about 2.5x that for 50Mbps LTE. To be fair, we could get something slightly (~20%) cheaper as we've got a "business" deal to get static IP addresses on each connection. The fastest consumer package we could get at this location (cable) is 500Mbit/s down, 40Mbit/s up for €80/month. (Their business level contracts top out at 300/40 Mbps…

The EU is also smaller and dramatically denser than the US. Nationwide service in the US is categorically different than servicing a nation in Europe. The rollout costs are dramatically higher.

Why do services have to be nationwide? Sweden didn't get wired by nationwide services, there are tons of local fiber ISPs that only service one city.

Case in point: The article. The US needs more of that. Do that in every town and you're sorted.

Re: Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast

#68

Post by cameronbrown »

orblivion wrote: post #61

After a long period of my life not having the fastest in speeds at home, I ended up going all in and telling Comcast "give me the fastest Internet you have". So I'm paying for 400Mbps. ...what do I need all this speed for? What could someone possibly do with 1 Gbps? It's not as though web pages will load faster, they have their own throttling. I don't think I need 400Mbps to stream 4k video. Torrents don't seem to ta…

Throughput - not all about speed. Downloading a game on Steam should not cripple my ability to watch TV, as an example. Plus most machines are off auto updating nowadays, I shouldn't have to suffer because my laptop/phone/TV/toaster decided to patch itself when I don't have any control over that.

Re: Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast

#69

Post by JelteF »

orblivion wrote: post #61

After a long period of my life not having the fastest in speeds at home, I ended up going all in and telling Comcast "give me the fastest Internet you have". So I'm paying for 400Mbps. ...what do I need all this speed for? What could someone possibly do with 1 Gbps? It's not as though web pages will load faster, they have their own throttling. I don't think I need 400Mbps to stream 4k video. Torrents don't seem to ta…

Downloading Steam games is one thing that actually takes advantage of my 750Mbps.

Re: Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast

#70

Post by kls »

josh2600 wrote: post #44
jkilpatr wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "upgrading our network" They actually where not doing this before because it's probably a bad idea. Modern cable networks look like this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_fiber-coaxial#/media/Fi... Fiber goes to copper which then splits out to a large number of homes. The copper line near your home can do multiple gigabit but that needs to be shared with everyone else on the tree. So selling higher speeds is ea…

Basically every telecom network is built as fiber to the node not fiber to the premises. The nasty truth of all communication and transportation systems is that arteries are cheap and capillaries are expensive. If I am building roads, it is WAY cheaper to just build highways than it is to build the small roads to everyone’s homes. When doing construction for telecom, the payback calculations are based upon “passings”…

So we had this in the Florida Keys with AT&T who is the service provider of our area. I live 2 miles out on a peninsula of an island named Summerland, anyway I bought my house and AT&T assured me that I could get DSL but fiber would not be an option. I knew it was copper all the way to my home so I figured it would be the case.

Anyways, I buy said house AT&T comes out and tried to get DSL working, and the lines have been so patched and spliced that they cannot even get 1mbps, so they basically tell me I am screwed that it would not be cost effective to run new copper down a 2 mile stretch and that my only option would be to pay (or band my neighbors together to pay -- All 2 of them) for them to string fiber the whole way. I think it would be something like 70k.

2 Months later Hurricane Irma hits and rips down every poll down our street, and AT&T is forced to restring the whole street due to the fact that they are legally required to provide phone service to every customer in their "exclusive" area or they loose said exclusivity. Fortunately for me they opted to string it with fiber, and provided fiber to the home.

My point is, I don't see how allowing these "exclusive" coverage monopolies does anything but harm the consumer. I imagine a community based provider like the one in the article would be met with a host of legal challenges here.

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