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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

#421

Post by smileysteve »

la_barba wrote: post #395
smileysteve wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 5G (at least the high speed kind) has really really bad penetration, To be fair, both Fiber and Coax have far worse "penetration"; Changing the definition of a 5g fiber connector from "wireless to devices inside of a home" to "a small antenna you put on the outside of the house or by the window and a wifi router inside" drastically changes the definition, keeps infrastructure cheap, and the cost at the home is stil…

Sounds like you're talking about WiMax. I was briefly on WiMax in Bellevue, WA, but the service sucked, not sure if it was the tech itself or their infrastructure...

WiMax was the (pre)4G implementation using the old Nextel spectrum (a major reason why Sprint was an investor).

I had the EVO 4G on WiMax, had amazing speed, especially near the highways before anybody else did. Also made for a great hand warmer.

The point is that 5g may provide the product that most people want when they want fiber; have less additional infrastructure cost, and the wireless penetration doesn't matter if we consider a base station -- or a physical install (as required by fiber or coax)

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

#422

Post by Beermotor »

zer0faith wrote: post #260
post_break wrote: post #87

ATT brought 1gig fiber to my neighborhood (probably because I'm in NASA's backyard). I have gig symmetrical unlimited for $70 a month. Comcast of course tries to offer the same but with cable and you and I both know it wont be symmetrical, or anywhere close to the speed you pay for. It's funny how quickly Comcast will bend when there is a competitor in the area. Just down the street where there is no fiber they will…

North Alabama (Huntsville) ? Rumor had it google fiber was coming that way.

Google started offering service in Huntsville in 2018 and from what I understand it is a solid gigabit symmetrical. Huntsville just happened to have dark fiber (courtesy of the late KMC) to a good portion of the city and that helped speed the roll-out.

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

#423

Post by fulafel »

scarejunba wrote: post #409
mynameisvlad wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right, if you're looking at the entire country, but if you can draw a Lithuania shape that's got Lithuania-like properties, you should expect Lithuania performance within that shape. Here's one: https://thetruesize.com/#?borders=1~!MTI4MDE3Nzc.MTIwNDM0NDM... Naturally, the big thing is that labour costs dominate costs of everything, so we won't have gig fibre available for Lithuania costs. But the fact that we don't…

Do labour costs really dominate ai ISPs?

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

#424

Post by torwayburger »

dantillberg wrote: post #182
torwayburger wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there is some geographical last mile type issue to bring internet to these buildings that are surrounded by fiber, it could be helpful to pitch the church/hospital with a wireless link from one of the fiber pops. I have brought service to medical and hospital buildings in this way before and it's always worked out well.

In the case described above, the topography is "completely flat", and the internet provider in question already provides electrical service to the premises.

That should mean they have public utility status, access to public poles etc. It would simplify such a solution. I've deployed such links in a flat scenario as well.

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

#425

Post by reaperducer »

cptskippy wrote: post #420
linsomniac wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3-4 years ago the town in this article got tired of the tearing up of its main street, and refinished that street, after telling the likely suspects that they'd better put down extra capacity now if they were going to need it, because future digs would require the diggers to completely redo the road rather than just trench and fill.

I'm kind of surprised they weren't installing conduits and vaults. Isn't that common practice to facilitate easier repair of faults?

Fiber companies aren't interested in spending the extra money for conduits and vaults. They just want to get quick cash to feed to their investors.

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

#426

Post by 98codes »

nostromo wrote: post #323
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…

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...

Losing market share downtown maybe -- all I can get in Fremont is 100MBps from Centurylink, just a few blocks from Adobe, Google, Tableau -- it's nuts.

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

#427

Post by NLips »

gadders wrote: post #93
smt88 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>>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. It used to be in the UK you needed a Church of England Bishop (and a cathedral) but now you have to apply to the Lord Chancellor.

To add flavour in the guise of figures:

The largest city in the UK is (Greater) London, population ~9M. This is an outlier. The next largest is Birmingham, population ~1M. The smallest city (by population) is St Davids, population ~1800. This is also an outlier.

Most cities are 100k to 1M. However, there are a decent number of towns >100k.

The largest town is Reading, population 230k.

There possibly isn't a smallest town worth defining - there's no objective divide between villages and towns.

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

#428

Post by maitredusoi »

For 60$ you have a Freebox delta in France (sorry only in French https://www.free.fr/freebox/freebox-delta/ ) . It includes 10 Gbps (via fiber cable) + a sound system ( from Devialet, an equivalent to Bose system) + Alexa on the remote controller + 500 Go HDD for video recording or music playback + 200 (international) TV channels + Netflix SD , all inclusive ?!

For the little story, french people said 60 $ for all of this Freebox delta was sooooo expensive. After reading the Colorado Town news, I stay amused.

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

#429

Post by wmeredith »

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…

> They are doing everything they can to protect their existing infrastructure and do as little as possible to upgrade services.

Well, that's how rent-seeking works.

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

#430

Post by parliament32 »

Teknoman117 wrote: post #319
parliament32 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>labor costs It depends. If you're constantly doing new customer setup/teardown, yeah that'll cost man-hours. But once your network is up and running it really doesn't take much work to keep it running. My ISP is a very small local outfit. They have a "few thousand" customers... and the whole thing is run by literally two dudes, doing everything from netops to hw installs to billing and support. Yeah I'll have a few…

Are you willing to share what the ISP is called? Sounds like it may be a fun read.

They don't have any written material, this is just from talking to the guys. Turns out starting an ISP isn't hard if you can lease last mile from one of your local big boys (and here, by law, they have to make last mile available for lease at a reasonable price).

Basically rent a quarter cab in a colo, get a router (or two), a switch (or two), and a server (or two). Negotiate with last mile provider and a pair of upstreams. Get your DC to x-connect you to your upstreams and last mile provider. Do some marketing (elevator ads in residential apt buildings are apparently basically gold). Buy a pallet of cable modems, spend a few weeks configuring your crap... $50k later, you have an ISP, and you can offer service at 50% of the big boys' rates while still raking in a substantial profit.

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