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

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

#171
post #39

I recently bought a house in Utah. Utopia is the best internet provider experience I've had so far (I've had Xfinity and Verizon previously). Speeds are typically 10-25 Mbps _faster_ than the advertised rate I'm paying for. Being able to have multiple (~5 or more) provider options to choose between is a welcome change from past monopolies I've been trapped in. Granted this all could change down the road (I hope not),…

Utopia provides an active ethernet connection to each subscriber with the specified bandwidth. This is superior to most fiber deployments, which are passive optical networks (GPON) where groups of 16-32 homes share a connection (usually 2.4 Gb down and 1.2 Gb up). I live in Utah and actively worked to get fiber in my small city. Utopia requires cities to guarantee a take rate (40% if I recall correctly) and taxpayers…

Verizon home, where available, isn't too bad... it's definitely a good backup connection for WFH scenarios.

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

#172

I live in the bay area and just got sonic fiber to my house. 49 bucks a month for 10gbe. I have only seen it get up to 8gb in TESTING... I might be able to get to 9. That is a stupid amount of bandwidth. I give it 6 months before I get a call and they fire me as a client. Cause im going to try to use the hell out of it.

What hardware do you use to not immediately down step the bandwidth coming off the modem?

When I subscribed a few years ago there was no reasonable home network hardware that exceeded 1gbps so I finally gave up and “settled” for the lower speed…

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

#173
post #76

Ugh, it's a little annoying that I cannot get faster than 2 gigabit internet in NYC, and it cost me like $120/month. 2 gigabit is more than fast enough for pretty much anything I do, especially since most of the stuff in my house is on WiFi anyway, but I did get my house completely wired for 10 gigabits about a year ago to try and future-proof everything. It's frustrating that NYC is a super expensive place to live,…

Worst internet I ever had was at a Cupertino apartment…in 2013. Walked a mile to the office where we had blazing fiber. Manager said a lot of the valley outside of company offices was way behind cause of the cost of installation. Hope it’s improved.

I doubt much has changed. The Bay is lagging in terms of infrastructure — it’s hilariously sad.

My only options currently are Comcast or DSL. I’m anxiously waiting for Sonic to become available.

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

#174
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sonic is reselling AT&T fiber in most situations, but they provide their own support which is nice if you need it. If the problem is with the fiber, you are still relying on AT&T.

Not "most situations" for years and not at all for a bit now. AT&T fiber reselling in an area was always a stop gap until we could build out our own offering at that locatuon and offer a better and cheaper product of our own which is more profitable for us to people that were already our customers, which is a win for them and for us.

It might not be "most situations", but its certainly mine. I've been filling out the sonic form yearly for at least 5 years now. I'll say i do appreciate that it stopped offering me verizon. It always felt like a bit of a con for the frontpage to advertise gigabit, ask for my address, then give me a "success" page that only offered verizon. Unfortunately i suspect that with verizon not being offered it means sonic has decided this area isn't worthwhile and has stopped accepting customers (not going to fully out myself, but we have a bart stop and are not end-of-line).

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

#175

I'm in NYC and I have a local ISP called Honest Internet that gives me gigabit for $50/mo. Comcast/Xfinity, Verizon, Spectrum all wanted $90/mo for this. I also have a direct email address to get support rather than some useless "chatbot" and endless phone queue. Support local ISPs.

Cox is more than that in Phoenix... I've got 2gb down (100mb up) currently. I do wish they didn't charge 2x or more to host a server at home though (business account).

> I do wish they didn't charge 2x or more to host a server at home though (business account).

How is this enforced? Is it an IP address (instead of NAT) you're paying for?

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

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not "most situations" for years and not at all for a bit now. AT&T fiber reselling in an area was always a stop gap until we could build out our own offering at that locatuon and offer a better and cheaper product of our own which is more profitable for us to people that were already our customers, which is a win for them and for us.

Any plans to resell AT&T fiber in locations where you don't have service? (Asking not-so-transparently if you will come down to San Jose where I live…)

That was the plan until AT&T pulled the rug out from the resellers, so it's not an option anymore, as much as we'd like to.

That said, I believe we are in San Jose, just mostly for aerial (telephone pole) locations. Below ground infra is much more expensive to serve, and historically we've focused on aerial for that reason, but I believe plans are moving forward to fill in the gaps in the areas where we already provide service with micro-trenching, so hopefully we'll be able to offer you something in the future.

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

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not "most situations" for years and not at all for a bit now. AT&T fiber reselling in an area was always a stop gap until we could build out our own offering at that locatuon and offer a better and cheaper product of our own which is more profitable for us to people that were already our customers, which is a win for them and for us.

It might not be "most situations", but its certainly mine. I've been filling out the sonic form yearly for at least 5 years now. I'll say i do appreciate that it stopped offering me verizon. It always felt like a bit of a con for the frontpage to advertise gigabit, ask for my address, then give me a "success" page that only offered verizon. Unfortunately i suspect that with verizon not being offered it means sonic ha…

Depending on where you live, if we already serve some houses in the area (very possibly if we're advertising locally), then it's likely that your specific location is more costly to serve and is being delayed until we reach that phase of the rollout for the area.

Specifically, aerial deployment through telephone poles is an order of magnitude cheaper than underground unless you get in when the neighborhood is being built (which AT&T and Comcast often do, and get pre-wired to each house). My understanding is that we are trying to fill in the areas between that aerial neighborhoods we initially built out where we provide service, it's just slower. If the availability form shows service for houses in your city that seem to have service delivered through telephone poles then it's possible we'll get to you in the semi-near future.

If you live in the bay area have service through a telephone pole and we can't service you, then I'm not sure what's going on. My understanding is we've covered most the bay area, but honestly that's not my department...

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

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is single player factorio phoning home so heavily?

It's about video streaming. The challenge with Factorio is that there is always lots of very tiny little changes on the screen from all the tiny boxes and trays of stuff moving around on belts, which means if you want acceptable video quality, you need a lot of bitrate as the usual h264/h265 compression magic of just encoding differences between frames doesn't work out any more - too much change between frames, you'r…

Strange that when one talks about a particular application using a lot of upstream bandwidth, we are meant to assume what they actually mean is that a separate application responsible for recording the UI of that first application and uploading it to a server uses a lot of upstream bandwidth.

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

#179
post #99
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh, they could have bought one the monopolies if they wanted to, like they did with Motorola when it is was in their interest to do so. It is a matter of will and persistence to run a this kind of business, Google does not have the DNA to run a serious enterprise business that needs decades of commitment to a product .

In 2012 google paid like 12B for Moto, comcast had a market cap of like 80B

Google did a $70B stock buyback last year. Every year they are doing similar numbers for the last 5 years.

In 2012 they had $50B cash on hand. Today despite the buybacks every year they still have $100-150Billion cash on hand, while Comcast is only worth $150 Billion.

They could absolutely afford it now and most likely 10 years back as well without even considering financing the deal.

---

Google is just very bad at acquisitions, they simply are too risk averse and don't have the DNA.

Compare with a peer like Microsoft in the same time frame: bought Linkedin($24B), Github ($8B) Activision($70B) invested in OpenAI ($10B), or Facebook : Instagram($1B), Occulus($3B), WhatsApp($19B).

Mandiant is the only acquisition of note since Motorola even that is pretty small at $5B.

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

#180
post #116
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.

People worry about price dumping waaay out of proportion to how often it is a problem. Usually when there is a deep-pocketed entity stomping out local competition they are using regulatory capture as their main tool (this is what Comcast seems to do) and the problem is competition has been made illegal. In situations like this, my default assumption is that it is illegal to lay competing cables until proven otherwise…

That new national network ("the NBN") is so hit-or-miss that it's not funny.

My current connection in Brisbane is 1GbE download (incredibly fast for Australia), but only 50mbps upload. That 50mbps upload is the fastest commonly available speed in the whole country. Most ISP's don't offer anything faster than 20mbps. :(

Reliability isn't great either. Had an 8 hour (!) outage overnight about a month ago, then a ~2 hour outage last week. Both caused by NBN Co, rather than my ISP.

The concept of hosting anything actually useful or important from home infrastructure is just laughable when there are commonly multi-hour outages. It's just fucking stupid. :(

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