Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Utah Locals Are Getting Cheap 10 Gbps Fiber Thanks to Local Governments

techdirt.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 224 posts

Re: Utah Locals Are Getting Cheap 10 Gbps Fiber Thanks to Local Governments

#131

Post by Qwertious »

Diesel555 wrote: post #115
troupo wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We desperately need more competition. It’s the only thing that actually lowers prices. Unless it's a deep pocketed behemoth coming and stomping out local competition because they can afford to lose money on price dumping. Though I agree with the general idea of the competition.

This is all covered in microeconomics. Competition is very good for society. Things that stop competition are bad and require government action. The scenario above is describing the behaviors of a “natural monopoly” due to the barriers to enter the market. As with all monopolies, regulation or some government action is normally required to promote competition and stop bad behavior (some examples of government actions…

I hate how corporate lobbying is described as "government action", as if the government here is the actor and not the condom.

Re: Utah Locals Are Getting Cheap 10 Gbps Fiber Thanks to Local Governments

#132

Post by rayiner »

kristopolous wrote: post #120
swarnie wrote: post #105

> Two decades later and the coalition just announced that 18 different ISPs now compete for Utah resident attention over a network that now covers 21 different Utah cities. In many instances, ISPs on the network are offering symmetrical (uncapped) gigabit fiber for as little as $45 a month (plus $30 network connection fee, so $75). Some ISPs are even offering symmetrical 10 Gbps fiber for around $150 a month: Congrat…

For however conservative Utah is, they are very community oriented so in practice, they seem to implement some fairly socialist policies. They were real early in housing first and they have a pretty nice built-out public transit system, a bunch of coops, 3x the average of credit union membership ... things like that.

There’s a communitarian-libertarian axis that’s distinct from the conservative-liberal axis. While libertarianism tends to dominate both the left and right in the U.S., I suspect most American conservatives outside the coasts are more communitarian, closer to Christian democrats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_democracy. Conversely, while American liberals have putatively communal ambitions, they’re often too fragmented and individualistic to accomplish them.

Re: Utah Locals Are Getting Cheap 10 Gbps Fiber Thanks to Local Governments

#133

Post by Wytwwww »

mikeyouse wrote: post #40
nox101 wrote: post #34

I know people disagree with me about this. I certainly hate it that governments gave local monopolies to companies like Comcast That said, I'm pretty confident municipal internet is bad thing in the long run (compared to actually competitive markets, not local monopolies) Problems: (1) Unlike say, water, sewage, power - internet tech changes 10gig might seem fast today. In 15 years it will seem slow. Will the governm…

This is a pretty silly comment given the "private" options that could have been at gbps speed for a decade+ are still at DSL and Cable speeds. Blind faith in 'the market' to solve these things after it's failed to do so seems odd.

But that seems more like an US issue? In places which actually allow or even encourage free market competition providers tend to be able to keep their infrastructure up to date while still offering reasonably low prices.

Re: Utah Locals Are Getting Cheap 10 Gbps Fiber Thanks to Local Governments

#134

Post by refurb »

swarnie wrote: post #105

> Two decades later and the coalition just announced that 18 different ISPs now compete for Utah resident attention over a network that now covers 21 different Utah cities. In many instances, ISPs on the network are offering symmetrical (uncapped) gigabit fiber for as little as $45 a month (plus $30 network connection fee, so $75). Some ISPs are even offering symmetrical 10 Gbps fiber for around $150 a month: Congrat…

> Congratulations, you've invented European style internet access with prices that almost match, super proud of you Utah.

Isn’t Utah like 3M in an area the size of Western Europe?

It is an accomplishment considering

Re: Utah Locals Are Getting Cheap 10 Gbps Fiber Thanks to Local Governments

#135

Post by refurb »

renewiltord wrote: post #93

It's funny. For eons, Americans on the Internet could be relied on to say that the reason they don't have fiber is because their country is big. But their more rural areas get it first and best, revealing the lie everyone tells. But forget that, these ISPs absolutely rule https://www.brigham.net/residential-pricing/ That's so much nostalgia. I adore it!

Brigham City isn’t rural.

Re: Utah Locals Are Getting Cheap 10 Gbps Fiber Thanks to Local Governments

#136

Post by yourapostasy »

fragmede wrote: post #58
theyeenzbeanz wrote: post #15

Comcast lobbied so hard to get our local mileage for fiber expansion voted down. When it passed, they suddenly decided they’re going to spend 6 figures worth of money to expand their own fiber backdown (they’re not even to the house). Its amazing when corporations will spend more money fighting something than actually implementing said thing.

when you can simplify things down to a number on a spreadsheet, it's a simple math equation. It doesn't make sense if you step back and look at what's actually best, but money warps everything it touches.

> money warps everything it touches.

I wonder what would happen if money transactions frame dragged transaction metadata along with the money. Today, the money is public data, but the far more interesting transactional metadata exchange is a hyper-fragmented market.

Re: Utah Locals Are Getting Cheap 10 Gbps Fiber Thanks to Local Governments

#137

Post by Nursie »

KeplerBoy wrote: post #121
defrost wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

{ Multiple people in household each having multi-party high resolution video calls | band practice | data manipulation collaborations | 4K TV on demand } can suck up the bandwidth when the priority is smooth real-time with low interactive latency. It's not always going to be peak demand, but it'll be noticable when everybody piles on at particular times of day. TBH I have relatively low bandwidth most of the time and…

You absolutely cannot saturate a 10 Gbit link with today's consumer's needs, let alone with today's consumer hardware. That's hundreds of Netflix 4k streams.

Sure, but the OP talked about being happy with a 10Mbps link.

I think a lot of modern households might find that constraining, even if a 10Gbps link was massive overkill.

There are two orders of magnitude in between of course :)

Personally I found that going back from a 1Gbps link to ~100Mbps has felt a little sluggish, particularly when downloading games. It's not a huge thing, but being able to get that new game pretty much now was great.

Re: Utah Locals Are Getting Cheap 10 Gbps Fiber Thanks to Local Governments

#138

Post by Phiwise_ »

fooey wrote: post #94
Phiwise_ wrote: post #74

This is such a misleadingly narrow headline. Utopia's a decade old and has been a mess from the business side pretty much the entire time. Even Google fiber in Provo's somehow giving better rollout service than they are. I was excited when it was announced as a teen but it's been a long road of failing to live up to expectations for all but a tiny fraction of our residents in the rich parts of our cities. And it's su…

Provo built a municipal fiber network and then sold it to Google for one dollar, so I'm not sure that's a great counter example > Provo taxpayers still will have to make $3.3 million in bond payments on the system each year for the next 12 years, even though Google will own the network.

Did I say it's a "counter-example"? Both are operational dumpster fires. I obviously brought it up in a negative tone with the words "even" and "somehow". Utopia's a business, too. Why are you defending them? Do you even live here? They even did basically this same thing to their cities years back, which you'd know if you did.

Re: Utah Locals Are Getting Cheap 10 Gbps Fiber Thanks to Local Governments

#139

Post by jorvi »

jwells89 wrote: post #36
lillecarl wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's more to a connection than speed, there might be data limits, there might be latency differences and it might just be unavailable or expensive. I'm not from the US, but if it's somewhat economically viable, go for the underdog.

In the US it’s also not uncommon for connections to be not only asymmetrical, but downright lopsided. Comcast sells “gigabit” in my area that’s 1.2Gbps down but only like 20Mbps up which is just silly. Thankfully a competitor offers true gigabit for about the same price, and so that’s what I subscribe to.

That's pretty much all DOCSIS providers worldwide. I'm not sure if it is a technical limitation or just what the customer wants, but you pretty much always see ~ 1/5 ratio 200mbits. So, 5 up / 20 down or 60 up / 600 down.

Re: Utah Locals Are Getting Cheap 10 Gbps Fiber Thanks to Local Governments

#140

Post by Guthur »

Nursie wrote: post #64
denkmoon wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The things you could do with 1.25gbps. Crazy stuff. Vastly different infrastructure/density situations but here in Australia I'm paying ~56USD per month for 0.04gbps up.

Australia has Abbott and friends to thank for fucking the whole NBN plan up royally. We would have had fiber to the premises everywhere and affordable gigabit by now, but Abbott decided Australia shouldn't spend money on what he saw as merely a "video entertainment system" and binned it in favour of the current Mixed Technology mess. Which then actually cost more to implement.

Pretty sure they intentionally screw it up. It means that the populous will generally think that the government can't provide effective utility at cost and so private equity can move in and provide equally bad utility at monopoly rent prices.
Post reply on HN