281–290 of 519 posts
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
Such business attempts should be punished by the law!
such business creates its own law!
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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…
How is the diversity there? Will a Chinese American family feel welcomed there? Asking for a friend. :)
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Of course, people are going to expect more as technology improves.
APM Marketplace [1] just had a researcher on the program the other day sharing that most Americans don’t use more than 20Mbps of bandwidth, and paying for anything above that as a typical internet user is throwing your money away. Power users, businesses, researchers, and others might expect more, but not the majority of residential users. Muni fiber investments will last quite a while. [1] https://www.marketplace.or…
And I can't even get a faster more pricy connection because my legacy contract gives me upload speeds I don't get till I add 50% to my bill
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“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.
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…
- data costs for bandwidth costs hasn't gone down at the same rate
- A big chunk of an ISP is labor costs, which do not go down over time
CenturyLink, in particular, but also Comcast, has brought this upon themselves... They are doing everything they can to protect their existing infrastructure and do as little as possible to upgrade services. I'm thinking of back in '98 when QWest was rolling out DSL, the would only connect you to a central office. They refused to put DSLAMs in the pedestals, because if they did that they had to allow CLECs to do the…
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Here in New England, the distinction between a city and a town is whether it is governed by a town meeting style government with selectmen, or by a city council style government with or without a mayor. In MA at least, you cannot choose to be a city unless you have at least 12K in population.
The board of selectmen were always interesting in my town (at least to me, I didn’t really understand it as a child). Not sure if we are over the 12K minimum, but I doubt anyone would call us a city even if we were. Municipal ISP would have been cool, but I think power would be a better option first. A neighboring town (either Mansfield or Medfield) as municipal power and compares to us during storms they do great (a…
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.
[1] https://drpeering.net/white-papers/Internet-Transit-Pricing-...
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APM Marketplace [1] just had a researcher on the program the other day sharing that most Americans don’t use more than 20Mbps of bandwidth, and paying for anything above that as a typical internet user is throwing your money away. Power users, businesses, researchers, and others might expect more, but not the majority of residential users. Muni fiber investments will last quite a while. [1] https://www.marketplace.or…
One reason for getting a faster link is that most broadband connections in the US are not symmetric. Comcast in my area doesn't even make claims of upload speed anymore, but my recollection of when they used to is that it was about 10% of the download speed. If you want more than 2 Mbps upload, that 20 Mbps plan wouldn't cut it.
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…