I remember watching in Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj how greedy monopolistic ISP corporations like Comcast are trying hard to outlaw town based internet offerings. Must watch - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xw87-zP2VNA
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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
#152In Baltimore City, your only choice for broadband is Comcast. They charge $75/month for 25Mbps down. I believe that's about double what they charge for the same speed in places where they have competition.
I sure hope you mean Mbps otherwise I'm moving there!
Yes, you're right, corrected!
Re: Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast
#153Earlier 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.
This is a holdover from the early days of the phone systems, i.e, 1920s.
It is extremely expensive to string cables, and so a whole bunch of companies would install stuff to the most lucrative markets (big cities), go bankrupt, and then there would be all of these cables would be left hanging causing a hazard. So it was decided that only one company would string cables... but that company would have its prices regulated.
Fast forward a few decades, and those incumbent telco/cableco companies still had monopolies (or huge advantages because they had infrastructure built back in the day), but the price regulations were rescinded.
IMHO the solution is either:
* bring back price controls (with infrastructure upgrades and a modest profit margin taken into account)
* force the incumbents to allow ISO Layer 2 access to other companies so there is competition at Layer 3 (IP)
The latter is:
Re: Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
anything less than 6-7,000 people is a village.
The 8th largest city in my state has a population of 16,000.
The western US is funny- I could name maybe 5-6 'cities' in Montana, but the largest barely has a large enough population to fill a football stadium.
Re: Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is this a Ponzi scheme?
As GP (and FCC) indicates, you pay for a service but only get what was promised if the collective load permits. If everyone hits their lines at the same time, there's not enough capacity to maintain advertised service.
Similar problems occur with the electric grid or water etc, but the thing is as long as there is excess capacity 24/7 you can’t tell the difference. Unlike money you can’t bank unused bandwidth.
The reality of 1Gbps networks is people have trouble saturating the line for very long. Even 5 different 4K streams is not hitting anywhere close to that.
Being able to download a 20GB file quickly is the benefit, even if you don’t download many of those per month.
Re: Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast
#156Longmont, just south of Fort Collins, was the first city in Colorado to build out a municipal ISP, and it’s inspired surrounding cities to do the same. It’s where I live and it was a not-insignificant reason why I chose to move here. So far it has been a resounding success for the city. The buildout completed on time and adoption rates are higher than initially expected (the city planned for 37% but the last number I…
“And I know my $50/mo rate will never rise.”
Let’s hope they tie it to inflation or similar. Otherwise the system will die slowly due to underfunding.
Re: Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast
#157Earlier 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…
Without the exclusivity agreement, it sounds like you wouldn’t have been reconnected. A community provider probably wouldn’t allocate 70k in capital to bring 3 (potential) customers online. So you’re benefitting by the subsidy of users in denser areas being forced into exclusivity.
It’s not really 70k. It’s probably 15-20k.
Re: Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 8th largest city in my state has a population of 16,000.
The western US is funny- I could name maybe 5-6 'cities' in Montana, but the largest barely has a large enough population to fill a football stadium.
When last I was in Lincoln, Nebraska, they told me that on football Saturdays, the stadium was the second-most populous location in the state, after Omaha. "Last" was over thirty years ago, so this may have changed.
Re: Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If all the ISPs are using the same infrastructure how do they compete on internet speed?
I see several ways they could compete. For example, when I lived in Barcelona I had 300Mbps fiber to premise for about €55/m. It was excellent, but every month or so they'd do routine maintenance and I'd be without internet for a few hours. Not too bad, but this was enough to make it impossible for me to serve anything from my home computer. In a system like in Sweden, one of the providers could allocate and manage maintenance time in a way that it would be extremely rare for me to go without internet. Another way would be for different providers compete in how they handle burst speeds. I'd also be happy to have 1Gbps for 24h every month, and then 300Mbps for the rest of the time.
In short: Create a fair field for competition and ideas will come naturally.
Re: Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast
#160Longmont, just south of Fort Collins, was the first city in Colorado to build out a municipal ISP, and it’s inspired surrounding cities to do the same. It’s where I live and it was a not-insignificant reason why I chose to move here. So far it has been a resounding success for the city. The buildout completed on time and adoption rates are higher than initially expected (the city planned for 37% but the last number I…
I live in Longmont as well and can confirm that internet here is awesome. I've never once had to think about it and always get at least 800 Mbps.
Longmont as a city is great as well. People view it as a cheaper place to live than Boulder, but I'd much rather live here.