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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

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Verizon offloaded their Floriduh operation to Frontier but fortunately the fios is already built and I too see the 100mbs symmetric. Unfortunately like Comcast (spit), Frontier believes in abusing its loyal customers so I'm going to revert to Comcast (spit) and play the bounce between the two every year because $230/mo is way too much to pay for cable & internet & unused landline.

Two hundred and thirty dollars? Per month? Bloody hell. I'm on the highest consumer rate that BT offers and that costs £45/mo.

Does BT include a huge TV package with set top boxes (fees), premium movie channels (HBO etc.), a modem\router (fee), internet, voip, and likely a handset fee?

That’s the only way it would get to $230. I’ve paid between $70-$115 for symmetrical gigabit and that’s the most expensive you can buy. A £45 plan might be 100mpbs down and maybe 10 up.

From BT’s website: >ULTRAFAST FIBRE PLUS £54.99

Average speed 145Mb

Speed guarantee of at least 100Mb

£54.99 is actually a worse plan that what AT&T offers. I can get 1gbps up/down for $70.

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

#122
post #89
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In India.. ~$20 for 100Mbps (data capped at 400GB) ~$85 for 1Gbps (data capped at 2.5TB)

~$12.4 here for 300 Mbps symmetric and unlimited. Literally unlimited. Last month I used 1TB+.

Isn't 1TB / month fairly average for heavy users? AFAIK many US data caps are at 1 TB. At 30 TB I'd say it is "literally unlimited".

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

#123
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”…

So we had this in the Florida Keys with AT&T who is the service provider of our area. I live 2 miles out on a peninsula of an island named Summerland, anyway I bought my house and AT&T assured me that I could get DSL but fiber would not be an option. I knew it was copper all the way to my home so I figured it would be the case. Anyways, I buy said house AT&T comes out and tried to get DSL working, and the lines have…

Without the exclusivity agreement, it sounds like you wouldn’t have been reconnected. A community provider probably wouldn’t allocate 70k in capital to bring 3 (potential) customers online.

So you’re benefitting by the subsidy of users in denser areas being forced into exclusivity.

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

#124
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 saw was around 54%). In my experience, the service has been so good as to be totally invisible. And I know my $50/mo rate will never rise. I wish Fort Collins the same experience. The fact that they both cities have municipal electric service will help this significantly.

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

#125

As somebody who really dislikes the idea of being forced to subsidize a municipal network, I like that they have some success. The cost of competing with Comcast should not be so great that people find this necessary.

https://pagetwo.completecolorado.com/2017/10/23/fort-collins... Indeed, this is taxpayer-subsidized “competition”

The problem is that everyone is paying for it, especially given the way property taxes typically work.

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

#126

Earlier 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?

I wonder if they don't and instead compete on customer service? No idea if that's how it works, but that would be a great change of pace.

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

#127
post #116

The first year it seems great. The real issue is 10 years down the road when people are using 5G and giving up their internet connections, who is left paying for the infrastructure and the union jobs?

I don't think you understand how limited 5G is. The range is basically the same has your home WiFi router. Without a fiber infrastructure to back it, 5G is nothing. If the city is no longer able to sell direct internet, then it will just sell/rent the infrastructure to whatever to 5G provider there is.

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

#128

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…

Yeah but everyone in Ft. Collins is a cow herder so this town label is still appropriate. (sorry this is a bad intra-Colorado rivalry joke, please ignore)

Sko Buffs!

But also Fort Collins has a lot of beer production, so they are ok in my book. It’s still not Boulder though...

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

#129
post #10

As a FoCo resident, Comcast sent me an email saying that they're "upgrading our network" and "increasing your Internet download speed". Not really clear what that means until I see an updated rate sheet. I'm sure this is entirely a coincidence and has nothing to do with the fact that they suddenly have some competition now.

> "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…

Fiber to the home/GPON is also a shared medium. One OLT (the fiber device in the headend) port generally goes out to a splitter in the field that then goes to 128,64,or 32 customers which has about ~2.5 gbps of downstream speed that is probably also shared with the video service. That is generally more capacity than DOCSIS but it isn't a fiber straight from the customer house back to the provider network.

Modern DOCSIS networks are much more capable than the linked diagram. The general guideline is that your top speed package shouldn't be any more than half of the node capacity (which ends up being similar to GPON that often does a 1gbps service on a shared ~2.5gbps network). The video portion of a HFC network also doesn't share the bandwidth that has been assigned to Data.

The diagram shows a node of 500-2000 homes - that is a HUGE number, I've worked on networks with nodes much larger than they should be and about 250 is the biggest node. ~100 customers per node is more common and in newer or upgraded HFC networks the goal is normally N+1 or N+0 (Node plus one active device or zero active devices - the linked diagram is N+10) those numbers get down to the 32-64 customers/node range.

I do work on DOCSIS networks for small providers but some of the tools the big guys use to monitor the RF quality is pretty amazing. They are able to read the RF Spectrum of every modem in the network and find common impairments in the cable plant and they can also assign individual modems different modulation profiles, so if your inside wiring and drop cable are capable of it your modem gets a higher modulation profile (and higher speed) than your neighbors that have crappy radio shack cable (the inside wiring has a huge impact on the signal quality). Traditionally you would have to set the service to work for the lowest common denominator but the emerging technologies are changing that. That doesn't necessary mean the big guys don't have capacity issues in other places (example: Netflix peering) but there is quite a bit of work and technology behind the last mile delivery.

You also can't ignore the business aspects - there is significant capital investment in upgrading any last mile network. I can take a group of 200 customers at 50mbps and upgrade them to 200mbps and the overall traffic pattern doesn't hardly change at all. That makes it hard for operators to justify to shareholders why spending hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to go from 500mbps to 1gbsp is a good investment.

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

#130

After many years of using Comcast because it was my only option, I recently had my breakup call with them. We have Verizon Fios as an option and at their lowest tier speeds, we get 100 mbps symmetric (and every time I've checked the speed over the past week, it has been as advertised). Our overpriced Comcast plan was giving us "up to 60 mbps" but we were getting, wait for it, 1 mbps in the last few weeks of our plan.…

Speaking of poor cable speeds, were your downstream/upstream signals poor? Did you have an upstream filter installed on your line by any chance?

I too had a similar issue but a tech visit to disconnect a noise filter fixed it.

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