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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

#91

Post by seanalltogether »

bjelkeman-again wrote: post #88
IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition to the cynical everyone-is-corrupt answers you've been getting, I'll add: ISPs, like mail delivery or electricity, are classical examples of "natural monopolies" where the fixed price of installing infrastructure is high, while the marginal cost of each additional customer is low. Such environments are tricky to manage: You want some market forces, because otherwise there's one lazy government-owned provi…

I really like how it is done in Sweden where the city provides the fibre but doesn’t run any service over it. We can choose from 5-10 ISPs. Much like the road.

It's definitely the best way to do it. We have similar setups here in the UK. Let the government deal with all the right-of-way, property rights complications regarding the infrastructure, let private companies provide the customer service on top of it.

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

#92

Post by dzhiurgis »

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…

My understanding is that you get a lot more bandwidth to abroad, which becomes quite important when you don't live near US or Europe.

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

#93

Post by gadders »

smt88 wrote: post #74
dfsegoat wrote: post #54

Nitpicking title: 'Town' vs. 'City', bugs me as a former CO resident. Ft. Collins is huge (~170k people compared to most CO towns which are 400-10k ppl). The title sort of leads you to believe it was a folksy, rural community effort. In reality Intel, AMD, Broadcom and a major State University are located there and that probably helped the effort substantially. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Collins,_Colorado#Maj…

I looked into this, and Ft. Collins is a "Home Rule Municipality" under state law, meaning it can name itself either a town or city. It seems to have chosen to be a city, so you're right. Around the world, it seems that there's one consistent criterion for something being a city: it must have self-rule and a certain amount of government structure. Some places (notably not the US) have population requirements, but tho…

>>Around the world, it seems that there's one consistent criterion for something being a city: it must have self-rule and a certain amount of government structure.

It used to be in the UK you needed a Church of England Bishop (and a cathedral) but now you have to apply to the Lord Chancellor.

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

#94

Post by iagovar »

mrep wrote: post #84
josh2600 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”…

Doesn't 5G solve that problem? Lay fiber to a bunch of 5G nodes and then you can service hundreds of customers who only need to install a wireless modem to get fiber speeds and latency.

It can work for light users who don't really care about speed if they get something decent, otherwise is a very bad idea, not to mention that it's basically impossible to avoid shades or guarantee any coverage at all.

The ISP I currently work for (in Spain) is playing with this idea for sparsely populated areas, where we didn't lay FTTH yet and our customers are connected through DSL. It can potentially save a lot of money on deployment but the current BTS locations are not enough, we'd have to build at least 2x for decent coverage, update their links and so on. I don't know, I think we will just lay FTTH in the end. Dealing with saturation on wireless connections is very difficult sometimes.

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

#95

Post by foobarian »

kls wrote: post #70
josh2600 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

I think the problem that was trying to solve is to avoid the Comcast poles, AT&T poles, Verizon poles, RCN poles and probably others, all strung up with their own networks of cables and wires.

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

#97

Post by sbarre »

microcolonel wrote: post #60
sbarre wrote: post #9

I pay 75$ CDN for 1Gbps with no cap in Toronto, and I used to think we had it bad in Canada.. "Fighting" with a local cable company (monopoly I assume?) to offer a 1Gpbs service in 2019 is depressing.

That's because of Beanfield. Outside of the core of Toronto that is not the case. If you go all the way to Burlington, it starts costing about $300/mo, if they are even willing to install it. I'm hoping Beanfield continues to expand their area of competition.

It's more than just Beanfield. I live in a condo building and Beanfield wasn't even an option here.

If that was the case, I'd never have been able to get this plan, right?

I agree that it's certainly due to competition, but it's not as reductive as that.

Also, I have a co-worker who lives in Milton and he has the same service as me for basically the same price (he's in a bundle though).

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

#98

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

mrep wrote: post #84
josh2600 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”…

Doesn't 5G solve that problem? Lay fiber to a bunch of 5G nodes and then you can service hundreds of customers who only need to install a wireless modem to get fiber speeds and latency.

Unless 5G is literal magic I severely doubt it won't have the same problems with congestion as every preceding wireless networking system. 4G home Internet sucks, the latency, available bandwidth and general connectivity are unreliable. Makes playing an online game miserable and watching streaming video annoying.

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

#99

Post by iptrans »

q3k wrote: post #43
imglorp wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fraud yes, because they're underprovisioned if everyone asks for 1 Gb, but the ponzi scheme continues to work okay because many households will find that median 72 Mbps is enough for several vid streams so they're good to go. The bigger problem is the industry which can do horrible, abusive things to its customers and communities. They'll try anything except delighting their customers. If any of the upcoming WISP sol…

> Fraud yes, because they're underprovisioned if everyone asks for 1 Gb All residential ISPs overprovision [1] at some point or another - be it at the acccess level (as with shared mediums like DOCSIS and GPON), distribution/aggregation (metro Ethernet switch and (V)DSL DSLAM uplinks) or at peering/upstream level (always). You cannot expect to have non-overprovisioned 1Gbps at $60/mo, when global transit is currently…

$0.6/Mbps/month is a bit on the high side for IP transit at scale.

You can buy IP transit for under 10 cents per Mbps at well connected datcenters. Additionally, any ISP with peering at an Internet exchange will have a lower blended costs as a lot of content can be accessed over settlement free peering and local CDN nodes.

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

#100

Post by jkilpatr »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #98
mrep wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't 5G solve that problem? Lay fiber to a bunch of 5G nodes and then you can service hundreds of customers who only need to install a wireless modem to get fiber speeds and latency.

Unless 5G is literal magic I severely doubt it won't have the same problems with congestion as every preceding wireless networking system. 4G home Internet sucks, the latency, available bandwidth and general connectivity are unreliable. Makes playing an online game miserable and watching streaming video annoying.

5G will work differently, if you can get a signal at all it will be pretty fast.

But considering leaves are enough to totally block a 5G signal, good luck getting it.

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