211–220 of 519 posts
Competition is working, though I'll jump ship to Connexion (muni ISP) as soon as I can.
Longmont, 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.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I grew up there, and just moved back. Is much nicer than 30 years ago, and legitimately nicer than boulder. Fiber is great, and people forget how much of US infrastructure was communal in early electric buildouts as well. Some of the objections seems to be reflexive anti-government sentiment. I haven't seen corporate services do well enough to convince me of the realistic improvements. And with most services negotiat…
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…
For me the benefit isn't sustained peak use, it's about saving time when there is something big to download. I want to play a game I haven't played in a while but it needs a 4 GB patch? With 1gbps I don't mind sitting there waiting a bit, 100mbps and I'm likely to just quit and find something else to play.
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Well, Romania is known for cheap internet prices, but for reference, here the largest _private_ operator is offering 1Gbps for $9.33/mo, taxes included (19% VAT). I kinda' doubt that $50/mo is really unsustainable, especially once the infrastructure is already built.
What's the actual bandwidth like? Where's the closest big exchange?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I grew up there, and just moved back. Is much nicer than 30 years ago, and legitimately nicer than boulder. Fiber is great, and people forget how much of US infrastructure was communal in early electric buildouts as well. Some of the objections seems to be reflexive anti-government sentiment. I haven't seen corporate services do well enough to convince me of the realistic improvements. And with most services negotiat…
The first year it seems great. The real issue is 10 years down the road when people are using 5G and giving up their internet connections, who is left paying for the infrastructure and the union jobs?
Longmont, 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.
Your $50/mo for 1 Gbps can therefore remain stable, and the ISP might someday offer 10 Gbps for $70/mo as an upgrade offer. Clearly, by those prices, as long as the per-customer costs are less than $47.78, that $50 more than covers the cost of the 1 Gbps bandwidth. Everyone who doesn't upgrade ends up subsidizing further build-out.
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So put the base node somewhere high like a water tower, hill, or really tall pole and then put your home modem on the telephone pole or your chimney to establish line of site. They can even use beam forming to bounce their signals against other objects to get to their destination. Homes and base stations don't move so they actually seem like a good use case for 5g over phones which are consistently inside and moving…
You don't need "5G" to do this; low-cost line-of-sight wireless networking technologies have existed for well over a decade now. There is a reason line-of-sight WISPs have not replaced, or in most cases even effectively competed against, wireline providers. That reason is: it's far more difficult to provide reliable service this way than it seems at first.
The verizon 5g home looks pretty good [0] if your current options are only dsl or cable which they are for a bunch of americans. It's even got a 4g backup connection.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/verizon/comments/9lqp6n/i_got_5g_ho...