I pay $60 aud for 8-9mbps. I'm in Sydney, 3km from the city and I cannot connect to our 100mpbs if you're super lucky NBN which has been "running" for 8+years - $90aud from a cheaper ISP. Malcom Turnbull messed up our internet infra, became Prime Minister, didn't do anything to fix it and walked out on the job last year.
I can't connect to the NBN because it hasn't rolled out in my area, I've lived in or near the city cbd the whole time the NBN has been going on and I have never lived on a street that was connected.
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
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
“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.
On Spain, I'm paying 25€ for 600/600, unlimited calls, a mobile phone line with 3gb of data and 10 hours of calls. $50 for just 1gbps, seems like they can even make profit from that.
That's not how it works. Bandwidth is a shared resource and most people aren't using 1gpbs every second of the day. Profit for telecom providers isn't on a variable basis and therefore unit economics make much less sense.
Re: Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
“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.
It could just be locked in for existing customers, but rise for new customers. Over time, people move or die, so it shouldn't be much of an issue.
thats correct. its now $70 for new customers.
Re: Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast
#244Earlier 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”…
To distill this down to a memorable heuristic, the cost of building out a municipal network of any kind is proportional to the mean linear distance of the street frontage.
This has interesting implications for civic planning. It is very much cheaper to put dwellings right on the frontage line, with zero-setbacks to adjacent properties, and then have huge backyards, than it is to center each building on its lot. That relatively small distance between the street/conduit/pole/pipe and one building is multiplied thousands of times across a municipality. An extra meter of frontage on a property at the root-end of a street is counted multiple times when calculating distances to properties closer to the leaf-end of the street.
Things that seem relatively minor for individual properties, like residential street widths, setbacks, minimum lot sizes, and maximum building heights, these have a huge impact on the cost of building municipal service networks. Those zoning rules established for aesthetic reasons literally create millions of dollars of economic impact. You just can't have cheap fiber to the premises if your premises can't be closer than 20' to the property line.
Re: Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast
#245After 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…
Faster speeds help with downloads. Yeah you won't notice the difference when downloading a selfie, but when you buy Gears 5 on Steam and want to start playing, you will notice the difference between waiting ~1h45m @ 100Mbps / ~11m @ 1Gbps to get that 80GB game.
That's true but don't forget that downloading stuff isn't sequentially related to what you can do in real life.
Your body won't be blocked for 1 hour and 45 minutes. You could choose to download a huge file before you goto sleep / work / etc. and by the time you're back it's go time.
Re: Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast
#246Is anybody getting 10Gbps already?
Re: Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast
#247Earlier 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?
Unlikely, but if the ISP gets to terminate the fiber at the head end --- one ISP may be willing to run 10G and others only 1G.
More likely, the last mile provider does termination, so line speed isn't negotiable by provider. Instead you're competing based on peering and transit connections, oversubscription ratios, availability of static ips, other policies, customer service, etc.
Re: Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. What do you mean by self-rule? Singapore is autonomous, but that's definitely not the norm for cities. Almost all of them belong to larger states. No US city has self-rule even at the level below the federal government. Washington, DC comes closest, but it is technically ru…
Well, the concept of an independent city - that is, one that isn't contained within any county - does exist in the U.S.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_city_(United_State... Of course, Washington DC could be considered one example, although the above Wikipedia link begs to differ because DC isn't a state. However, there are a few dozen more, most of which are in Virginia.
Such a city is still under two higher levels of government; it's hard to call that "self-rule".
Also, this kind of administrative definition of "city" causes weird conflicts. It's easy for a city, such as Los Angeles, to be much larger than the county it's nominally located in, such as Los Angeles county. Conceptually, it's also easy for a city to be its own county, which is a different status than "not contained in any county" -- but in practice where this is supposedly the case, the city will not actually match the county boundaries, instead being noticeably bigger or smaller.
I conclude that, in order to make the claim that cities usually have self-rule, the people who would like to make this claim adjust their definition of self-rule so that it covers the things they're already sure are cities, rather than having a definition of self-rule in mind and observing that, by apparent coincidence, most "cities" turn out to have it.
Re: Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
In general I agree, but in practice certain nominal prices can be monotonically decreasing due to improved technology lowering prices faster than inflation raises them. For instance, in terms of $/GB, data storage costs have been strictly decreasing in nominal terms even with the existence of inflation. That said, I am not sure how much innovation is going into the costs of maintaining a fiber network, so it’s possib…
Of course, people are going to expect more as technology improves.
Exactly this. I work at a research and education network (a regional ISP), and we are asked to perform upgrades and new deployments constantly. If it is just residential use, the upgrade path will be more predictable. However, business and municipal users can scale quite unpredictably and the 10GE links allocated in 2019 might need to be 100GE in 2025.
Re: Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast
#250Nitpicking 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…
For contrast: My rural hometown of around 15,000 (not tiny but still 10 times smaller than Ft. Collins) built its own fiber network in the mid-90s. It still runs today and has expanded to include many of our smaller neighboring communities of 400-10k people. Now that the city has grown to about 20k we have larger ISPs moving in. They lease the city's infrastructure so we have a municipal fiber network with multiple competing private options. You get fancier hardware and more channels with the private companies but I find the local ISP more reliable and I have one bill for internet, power, gas, water, and waste.
Way better setup than when I was in I was in ATL and forced to use Comcast. Plus there aren't any data caps.