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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

#381

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 f…

> There's a 1 terabyte/month data cap

In other words, you're allowed to use your service for about three hours per month.

I worked for an ISP and I completely understand the idea behind overprovisioning, because you build your network for average traffic and not the maximum theoretical capacity needed to serve 100% of customers using 100% of their connection 100% of the time. But here Comcast is overprovisioning by a factor of 240:1 -- that is, you can only use your connection at 1/240th of your theoretical capability. That's insane, and demonstrably unnecessary.

I use Sonic.net which is a relatively much tinier ISP, but who offers uncapped gigabit for much less than Comcast's capped joke offering. Therefore, people who really want to use their connection heavily are much more likely to go to Sonic.net than Comcast, meaning that Sonic.net probably has a much higher average per-customer usage than Comcast does. And yet, they're still cheaper, still uncapped, and still growing. If Sonic.net can do it, Comcast is just being greedy.

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

#382

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…

>You can get gigabit now for around $100/mo, if you commit to a year. I'm just sitting on 120mbps for $90/mo, because people the next neighborhood over are getting door hangers saying the city fiber is coming soon.

I'm in FoCo and I think that gigabit is now $70 bc of the city announcement, but that is only an "intro" price (love that about comcast). It is also AFAIK not bi-directional gig. Uploads are still capped and you have a data transfer limit as well.

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

#383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That doesn't appear accurate. If you happen to live in a building (condo/apt) that is supported by one of the other gigabit companies you list then you are good to go. But that is a very very small part of the population. Otherwise Seattle has only 2 options for physically connected internet: Centurylink and Comcast. And they are priced accordingly.

Hmm. I wouldn't call that a very very small part. It's not pervasive. But it's still better than the competition in most cities.

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

#384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it's also little over the size of West Virginia.

Why does it matter? Because populous cities have to subsidize sparsely populated ones, and that is why prices are high?

Because it costs a whole lot more to lay down fiber across the US than it does to cover a fraction of it.

The sheer distances between everything makes it incredibly difficult to build infrastructure like high speed rail, fiber across the country, etc.

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

#385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The availability area for CenturyLink gigabit in Denver is tiny [1] and hasn't grown much over the last few years as far as I can tell. [1] https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1iOdQ6O5Nv9AkqN29de...

I had a gigabit fiber-to-the-home connection in an area inside of Denver city limits (more than 3 years ago by the way) that is not shown on your linked map, so your data source for this is not accurate.

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

#386
post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OT: Outside of Boulder, what's the tech job scene like out there?

The Denver tech job scene is pretty strong. A lot of startups and a growing corporate outpost presence, as well as all of the "old tech" around the Tech Center. Northern Colorado (Longmont, Ft. Collins) has traditionally been a center for hardware design and test equipment, but unfortunately most of these companies have shrunk overall and have reduced their Colorado presence. I would say that in recent years the epic…

Agreed - I wish FoCo could attract more tech companies - it is a great city with highly educated people (esp with CSU here). But for now your best bet is remote work if you want to get paid a salary equal to the COL of FoCo (which is almost the same as Denver/Boulder). Sadly due to lack of competition in tech, the few tech companies here pay well below market because they can. You can literally move to Boulder/Den and get a 30-40% pay increase...

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

#387

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…

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...

I live in the middle of Capitol Hill and would love to ditch comcast, so I went to check this out. Good news, I qualify for "high speed" internet of up to 7Mbps!

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

#388

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

> A big chunk of an ISP is labor costs

Explicitly the reason for automating things, esp. since network connections don't require a ton of labor once provisioned.

Orchestration engines help to do the former (Ansible, Salt, Puppet, whatever), and they usually tie into monitoring systems like Nagios, ScienceLogic, or SolarWinds, and can trip, and then launch, remediation efforts automatically.

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

#389
post #196

The business plan is interesting: https://www.fcgov.com/broadband/files/broadband-business-pla... Key points: they're expecting this effort cost $130-$150m, not pay for itself until 2033 or so, and only get around 28% market share. If Comcast/CenturyLink drops their prices slightly, uptake might be substantially worse.

Comcast now (surprise, surprise) offers 1Gb lines for $90. I jumped on it. But when the city's fiber rolls out to my location, I'm sprinting toward Connexion. Cancellation fees be damned.

You will also get gig bi-directional with the city - afaik comcast is only offering 20-30Mbit uploads for their gig service.

But yeah surprise! City announces city internet service and comcast slashes gig from $200-300 a year ago down to $70-90 lol

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

#390

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 f…

> There's a 1 terabyte/month data cap In other words, you're allowed to use your service for about three hours per month. I worked for an ISP and I completely understand the idea behind overprovisioning, because you build your network for average traffic and not the maximum theoretical capacity needed to serve 100% of customers using 100% of their connection 100% of the time. But here Comcast is overprovisioning by a…

Sonic.net's gigabit option is extremely limited - they only have DSL in most of the bay area. I think they also force a phone on you?

I agree in general though, it's even more annoying when you try and find details about the cap and have to keep reading copy from Comcast about why "those who use more should pay more".

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