I pay I know it is very unfair to compare it with such a small country but $60 still sounds too much.
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
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
5G (at least the high speed kind) has really really bad penetration, T-mobiles 1.9Ghz has trouble working indoors 5G's 30, 40, and 70Ghz frequencies are much worse. You will need direct line of sight to a tower optimistically a mile away. Otherwise you'll fall back to '5G' on traditional 4G spectrum and you won't get any faster speeds.
So put the base node somewhere high like a water tower, hill, or really tall pole and then put your home modem on the telephone pole or your chimney to establish line of site. They can even use beam forming to bounce their signals against other objects to get to their destination. Homes and base stations don't move so they actually seem like a good use case for 5g over phones which are consistently inside and moving…
You don't need "5G" to do this; low-cost line-of-sight wireless networking technologies have existed for well over a decade now. There is a reason line-of-sight WISPs have not replaced, or in most cases even effectively competed against, wireline providers.
That reason is: it's far more difficult to provide reliable service this way than it seems at first.
Re: Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast
#193[deleted]
Re: Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast
#194I remember watching in Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj how greedy monopolistic ISP corporations like Comcast are trying hard to outlaw town based internet offerings. Must watch - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xw87-zP2VNA
Also recommend this episode. They go into details on several different CO cites/towns that are implementing it as well as the lobbying aspect from Comcast, etc.
Re: Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast
#195Longmont, 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.
On Spain, I'm paying 25€ for 600/600, unlimited calls, a mobile phone line with 3gb of data and 10 hours of calls.
$50 for just 1gbps, seems like they can even make profit from that.
Re: Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast
#196The business plan is interesting: https://www.fcgov.com/broadband/files/broadband-business-pla...
Key points: they're expecting this effort cost $130-$150m, not pay for itself until 2033 or so, and only get around 28% market share. If Comcast/CenturyLink drops their prices slightly, uptake might be substantially worse.
Re: Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast
#197Longmont, 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…
I live in Longmont as well and can confirm that internet here is awesome. I've never once had to think about it and always get at least 800 Mbps. Longmont as a city is great as well. People view it as a cheaper place to live than Boulder, but I'd much rather live here.
I grew up there, and just moved back. Is much nicer than 30 years ago, and legitimately nicer than boulder.
Fiber is great, and people forget how much of US infrastructure was communal in early electric buildouts as well.
Some of the objections seems to be reflexive anti-government sentiment. I haven't seen corporate services do well enough to convince me of the realistic improvements. And with most services negotiated on the national level (Netflix, apple, hbo, whatever) as direct buys, the last mile as a subsidy for cable negotiation seems wasteful.
Re: Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
Two hundred and thirty dollars? Per month? Bloody hell. I'm on the highest consumer rate that BT offers and that costs £45/mo.
If you go “off contract” with Frontier it goes up quickly. My bill reverted to $200 / month and I didn’t have premium tv channels and only 1 cablecard and 150Mbps. Made some changes to get to Internet only at 500Mbps for $50/month. That includes the modem I don’t need and can’t not pay for.
I am on a friggin contract. It includes the three useless movie channels at no extra charge, and the landline is now over fibre but they still give me forged CNID. Why can't they give me ANI (why?) . If I delete the movie channels I pay the same. There is a means tested tier for basic offerings that's much more affordable but it's only available to those who can prove Medicaid eligibility.
Re: Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast
#199Longmont, 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.
In general I agree, but in practice certain nominal prices can be monotonically decreasing due to improved technology lowering prices faster than inflation raises them.
For instance, in terms of $/GB, data storage costs have been strictly decreasing in nominal terms even with the existence of inflation.
That said, I am not sure how much innovation is going into the costs of maintaining a fiber network, so it’s possible that it won’t decrease as fast as 2-3% a year on average. I would be really interested if someone had those numbers!
Re: Colorado Town Offers 1 Gbps for $60 After Years of Battling Comcast
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The expensive part of fiber to the home is laying the fiber. It's extremely unlikely that we are going to discover a transport medium better than light pulses over fiber anytime soon.
What about wireless? Well any wireless technology you can imagine needs wireline backhaul at some point. So the bigger your fiber network, the better your wireless technology will work!