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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

#161

Post by rb808 »

move-on-by wrote: post #127
rb808 wrote: 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.

I brought up the 5G as an example of something that could change in the future. The problem is no one knows what is going to happen in 10-20 years. Its easy to spend public resources and have a great cheap service, maintaining this for decades is a different problem and it'll be interesting to see how it pans out.

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

#162

Post by rtkwe »

thekyle wrote: post #113
bjelkeman-again wrote: post #88

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?

They probably have differing levels of speed/capacity rented/bought from the city and can improve their connection out to the larger internet.

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

#163

Post by mentat »

Donald wrote: 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.

Same thing happened when AT&T fiber came into my neighborhood. $70 for unlimited gig put some pressure on them.

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

#164

Post by rasz »

josh2600 wrote: post #49
pmjordan wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU is a big(ish) and diverse place. We pay about twice that for 40Mbps VDSL and about 2.5x that for 50Mbps LTE. To be fair, we could get something slightly (~20%) cheaper as we've got a "business" deal to get static IP addresses on each connection. The fastest consumer package we could get at this location (cable) is 500Mbit/s down, 40Mbit/s up for €80/month. (Their business level contracts top out at 300/40 Mbps…

The EU is also smaller and dramatically denser than the US. Nationwide service in the US is categorically different than servicing a nation in Europe. The rollout costs are dramatically higher.

This tired argument falls apart once you start looking into internet options in NY, Manhattan, 1st Avenue. Kinda sorta the densest spot in US, and all you can get is Verizon DSL or Spectrum Business Cable.

"New York Votes to Kick Spectrum Cable Out of the State" https://fortune.com/2018/07/29/spectrum-communications-kicke...

"New York City sues Verizon for not completing citywide fiber network" https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/14/nyc-sues-verizon/

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

#165

Post by tehlike »

HeadsUpHigh wrote: post #145
sbarre wrote: post #9

I pay 75$ CDN for 1Gbps with no cap in Toronto, and I used to think we had it bad in Canada.. "Fighting" with a local cable company (monopoly I assume?) to offer a 1Gpbs service in 2019 is depressing.

I'm sorry but how exactly is that bad? I have 6 mbps down 0.5 up and this is the best speed I've ever had. I've never heard of anything going beyond 1gbps in my country. What opitons exist above that for consumer level and why would you want it? Like, what's there to do with more than 1gbps right now?

You will not run into an issue where you consume all the bandwidth, but you will also not wait long time to download a blueray movie. At that speed it is more about time.

75$ is usually the going rate where i live for about 300mbps. Fiber runs into low hundreds with comcast, with 1TB data cap. Competition (att) gives it for 70 without datacap, so that is what i did.

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

#166

Post by throw0101a »

orblivion wrote: post #61

After a long period of my life not having the fastest in speeds at home, I ended up going all in and telling Comcast "give me the fastest Internet you have". So I'm paying for 400Mbps. ...what do I need all this speed for? What could someone possibly do with 1 Gbps? It's not as though web pages will load faster, they have their own throttling. I don't think I need 400Mbps to stream 4k video. Torrents don't seem to ta…

I'm at work, which is about four hundred people, and looking at our LibreNMS graphs, we barely hit 200 Mb/s.

I'm not against having higher speeds as an option because we don't know what the next Killer App will be and what it may need, but there is a point of diminishing returns for most people.

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

#167

Post by rasz »

longcommonname wrote: post #144
polpo wrote: post #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…

Theres still locations here that can't get fiber. The local hospital is owned by a church and they own apartments adjacent to the hospital. These apartments are surrounded by others that get fiber but the map still shows they aren't planned.

Sounds like the landlord problem.

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

#168

Post by tehlike »

robohoe wrote: post #133
swebs wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what its worth, average salary in Lithuania is around 10,000 euros per year.

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?

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

#169

Post by dantillberg »

longcommonname wrote: post #144
polpo wrote: post #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…

Theres still locations here that can't get fiber. The local hospital is owned by a church and they own apartments adjacent to the hospital. These apartments are surrounded by others that get fiber but the map still shows they aren't planned.

If you can't get municipal fiber where you live in Longmont (I'm a resident; hi!), you should most likely be complaining to your landlord, not the city. If you're not sure, call up Longmont Power & Communications and ask them what's up.

There are a few apartment complexes around Longmont that have resisted integration with the city's fiber network. My understanding is that the city has negotiated with each of them over the installation of fiber on their premises and that some of those negotiations didn't succeed, e.g. the apartment complex owners wanted to own and control the fiber that the city would pay to install.

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

#170

Post by beatgammit »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #156
polpo wrote: post #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…

“And I know my $50/mo rate will never rise.” Let’s hope they tie it to inflation or similar. Otherwise the system will die slowly due to underfunding.

It could just be locked in for existing customers, but rise for new customers. Over time, people move or die, so it shouldn't be much of an issue.
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