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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

#351

Post by diminoten »

linsomniac wrote: post #269

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…

Cox is now offering universal 1 gbps services, so I'm not sure the "do as little as possible to upgrade services" is accurate any longer.

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

#352

Post by shmerl »

tryptophan wrote: post #338
shmerl wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some details here: https://www.opensecrets.org/news/issues/net_neutrality/

Net neutrality is a completely difference issue. It has nothing to do with why its hard to make an ISP competitor.

Related though. Anti-competitive ISPs also don't like net neutrality, since it's essentially aimed at curbing anti-competitive network behavior. Quite unsurprisingly, the same bad actors are usually opposed to direct ISP competition.

I.e. if they oppose net neutrality, high chances are they oppose municipal networks as well. To put it differently, once they have monopolist mentality and anti-competitive behavior, it spills out to everything.

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

#353

Post by godelmachine »

djzidon wrote: post #151
godelmachine wrote: post #30

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

video not available

Google - “Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj why your internet sucks”

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

#354

Post by [deleted] »

_b wrote: post #340
nostromo wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't true for Century Link. Lots of people in Seattle, and a growing number of other cities, have Century Link gigabit fiber to their residence. I pay less than $70 a month for this. Comcast is losing marketshare fast in Seattle because of this. https://www.centurylink.com/fiber/img/Gigabit-Launch-Map-res...

Century Link expanded its fiber network in Seattle when it seemed likely Google Fiber would come, but in the last 4 years while it has been clear it wouldn't, it seems like CenturyLink has stopped expanding their network.

[deleted]

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

#355

Post by Osiris »

nicholasjarnold wrote: post #349
linsomniac wrote: post #269

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…

CenturyLink has been acting in what appears to be good faith within Denver city limits in the past few (~4) years or so. They've been offering gigabit fiber service in select parts of the city for around $60-70/month for at least that amount of time. While I agree with the general sentiment about large providers needing to do more for less and faster, it seems that CL is being a good corporate citizen in Denver at le…

Denver has it but it's not expecting to are outside the metro area. I had an installer tell me that fiber would never come to my neighborhood despite it only being a 10 year old development in a fast growing city (Castle Rock, south of Denver).

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

#356

Post by dmoy »

_b wrote: post #340
nostromo wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't true for Century Link. Lots of people in Seattle, and a growing number of other cities, have Century Link gigabit fiber to their residence. I pay less than $70 a month for this. Comcast is losing marketshare fast in Seattle because of this. https://www.centurylink.com/fiber/img/Gigabit-Launch-Map-res...

Century Link expanded its fiber network in Seattle when it seemed likely Google Fiber would come, but in the last 4 years while it has been clear it wouldn't, it seems like CenturyLink has stopped expanding their network.

My block is surrounded by blocks that all have gigabit fiber, but my block never got hooked up. Every year I ask, every year they have no comment.

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

#357

Post by jorblumesea »

linsomniac wrote: post #269

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…

Can't speak for Comcast, but for Centurylink, they've been rolling out fiber like crazy. In Seattle I have a fiber connection for $70 / month. This was maybe 3-4 years ago and never had an issue with it. It doesn't appear to be in bad faith. Now, who knows if they'll continue to roll it out.

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

#358

Post by aloknnikhil »

ehsankia wrote: post #333
nostromo wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't true for Century Link. Lots of people in Seattle, and a growing number of other cities, have Century Link gigabit fiber to their residence. I pay less than $70 a month for this. Comcast is losing marketshare fast in Seattle because of this. https://www.centurylink.com/fiber/img/Gigabit-Launch-Map-res...

But are there competing gigabit internet in Seattle? Obviously they will stay competitive, that's beside the point. It's like how Comcast happened to bring cheap gigabit internet to every city Google Fiber entered... The fact that it takes a local competitor to get these big companies to bring cheap gigabit is exactly the problem. Your anecdotal evidence about a city full of competition doesn't really prove anything.

There are far more options in Seattle than ever before (and possibly than any other city in the US). WaveG, CenturyLink, CascadeLink, WebPass (Google Fiber), Comcast

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

#359

Post by gonehome »

In the Bay Area (Palo Alto) you can get 1 Gbps Comcast service and it works well, but getting it is hard because everything else about Comcast is bad.

- It's hard to order the service because the price online is a stupidly high price no one should pay if it's listed at all.

- When you call two thirds of the sales reps don't know what gigabit is and will tell you it's not in your area (even though it is) rather than finding out. I've had them tell me it requires a $300 installation fee (it doesn't) or that they'll email me when it's available (it was already available and they wouldn't have). You have to call until you get someone who can do their job.

- The upload is capped to 35mbps

- I was able to get 1gbps for $89/month, but it required a two year contract. It's also not listed on the bill as this, but as 'performance plus' with a gigabit add on which makes things confusing.

- There's a 1 terabyte/month data cap and it's $10 per 50GB after that capped at a max cost of $200. You get two 'courtesy months' of this, but then you get charged. You can pay $50 to have 'unlimited'. After months of using 700GB or so per month suddenly my usage spiked to 2TB so now I have to pay this - it's very hard to determine why (nothing on my end appears to have changed and my ubiquity software shows no massive increase in usage).

- Comcast also has a gigabit pro plan which is real fiber to the house (no modem/coax cable) - it's 2gbps up and down, but requires a $1000 installation since they're actually bringing fiber to your house and special hardware to make use of it (also good luck finding a rep that will let you actually buy it - none of them know about it, twitter is best option to find a good support person).

While the service once set up is good (except for upload) everything else about interacting with them is terrible. After the two years runs out they'll drop my speed to 25mbps and double the price and I'll have to call and negotiate the plans with a rep all over again. Any interaction with the public website or billing is also pretty bad.

All I want is to pay a reasonable price for faster service. I'd even pay more (potentially a lot) if I didn't have to deal with all of this.

Even in a competitive market Comcast has problems.

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

#360

Post by cptskippy »

crumpets wrote: post #285
gamegoblin wrote: post #199

Earlier 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…

Two things: - 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

> data costs for bandwidth costs hasn't gone down at the same rate

For clarification, at the business level data has always been charged by capacity and not volume. And the costs have fallen at double digit rates since they've been measured.

http://drpeering.net/white-papers/Internet-Transit-Pricing-H...

ISPs plan their networks for peek capacity, the only reason they charge by volume is because they can.

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