Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast • Hacker News Board

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

#101

Post by jkilpatr » Wed, Sep 18, 2019, 12:59 PM UTC

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.

5G (at least the high speed kind) has really really bad penetration, T-mobiles 1.9Ghz has trouble working indoors 5G's 30, 40, and 70Ghz frequencies are much worse.

You will need direct line of sight to a tower optimistically a mile away. Otherwise you'll fall back to '5G' on traditional 4G spectrum and you won't get any faster speeds.

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

#102

Post by Zenbit_UX » Wed, Sep 18, 2019, 1:03 PM UTC

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.

$60 CDN/month for 1Gbps symmetric in Montreal, had to fight bell tooth and nail, but very happy with it.

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

#103

Post by guan » Wed, Sep 18, 2019, 1:03 PM UTC

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…

There is a neighborhood community ISP in Copenhagen called Bryggenet. They used to make it very clear how much overprovisioning was going on, and have two different options each subscriber could pick with different levels of overprovisioning. I understand from some people who were involved that it caused some initial confusion and complaints, especially when comparing to advertised speeds of commercial offerings, but people understood eventually.

They now seem to have moved away from that model, based on a quick look at their website.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryggenet

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

#104

Post by howard941 » Wed, Sep 18, 2019, 1:04 PM UTC

hanklazard wrote: post #83

After many years of using Comcast because it was my only option, I recently had my breakup call with them. We have Verizon Fios as an option and at their lowest tier speeds, we get 100 mbps symmetric (and every time I've checked the speed over the past week, it has been as advertised). Our overpriced Comcast plan was giving us "up to 60 mbps" but we were getting, wait for it, 1 mbps in the last few weeks of our plan.…

Verizon offloaded their Floriduh operation to Frontier but fortunately the fios is already built and I too see the 100mbs symmetric. Unfortunately like Comcast (spit), Frontier believes in abusing its loyal customers so I'm going to revert to Comcast (spit) and play the bounce between the two every year because $230/mo is way too much to pay for cable & internet & unused landline.

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

#105

Post by microcolonel » Wed, Sep 18, 2019, 1:08 PM UTC

sbarre wrote: post #97

microcolonel wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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

Not so! The pressure helps people who aren't even technically covered by competitors. That's the beauty of it. :- )

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

#106

Post by zer0faith » Wed, Sep 18, 2019, 1:08 PM UTC

ya know... it's past time that they declare internet access a utility (like water, power, electricity) and tell garbage companies like Comcast to shove it.

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

#107

Post by swebs » Wed, Sep 18, 2019, 1:08 PM UTC

vincnetas wrote: post #71

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.

One more data point. Vilnius, Lithuania 1GBs for 19.90€ (22.00$) /month https://www.telia.lt/privatiems/kur-veikia-internetas-ir-tv/...

For what its worth, average salary in Lithuania is around 10,000 euros per year.

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

#108

Post by josh2600 » Wed, Sep 18, 2019, 1:09 PM UTC

kalleboo wrote: post #67

josh2600 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google the universal service fee which is collected on every usage of title 2 telecom services and has been for nearly 100 years.

People in the US pay for universal service.

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

#109

Post by josh2600 » Wed, Sep 18, 2019, 1:12 PM UTC

foobarian wrote: post #95

kls wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wir…

It’s precisely due to the fact att destroyed competitive telecom equipment and infrastructure at every turn for the last 150 years that we have exclusivity agreements. Att has threatened to break domestic telecommunications over and over again if they couldn’t have monopolies (although now Comcast exercising those same monopolies is hurting att).

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

#110

Post by mdkdog » Wed, Sep 18, 2019, 1:13 PM UTC

bencollier49 wrote: post #25

martin_a wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Es ist einfach eine Frage der Höflichkeit, dass wir in der "Quasi-Weltsprache" Englisch kommunizieren. Ich denke das trägt im Internet allgemein zum Verständnis bei und sollte dementsprechend auch hier zum guten Ton gehören. Ob man es in irgendwelche Regeln schreiben muss weiß ich nicht, ich dachte ich kann ja trotzdem mal danach fragen. Better this way?

Why not? Spanish and German are widely spoken; if people want to use them to communicate, then let the market decide by virtue of the number of upvotes and responses they get.

according to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num... , German does not even make the top 10 ...is 12 just after "Urdu". I would not call German a "widely spoken" language.