261–270 of 519 posts
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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.
How much of your taxes is being used to subsidize that rate?
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On Spain, I'm paying 25€... My first reaction was to say that's wrong. Maybe it's just new, but last time I checked, a couple of years ago, there's no way to get a decent land line under 40€. The trick was that the "cuota de línea" is hidden from the listed price. Most of the land lines are owned by Movistar that rents them to Vodafone thieves and other ISPs that consider it an independent expense, as if it's not jus…
Jazztel, everything included You just need to negotiate with them, not just accept the first base offer. https://i.imgur.com/kHDdXZ1.png
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…
> my $50/mo rate will never rise
Came here to dispute that. Your rate may never rise but deficits will come out of taxes.
Being a public service the budget is publicly available.
For 2018, I count $11,930,874 in expenses and $12,420,323 in revenue (literally 99.9% from $50/mo service charge). That's a 3.9% margin. At that margin, I don't see how rates will never rise. The expenses will go up with inflation. If the revenue remains constant ...
That said, it wasn't readily obvious so I didn't dig deeply to see if some 2018 expenses were unusual one-time charges, or anything like that.
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You can't really compare sticker prices here. US percapita GDP is about 6 times higher. The average salary is about 8 times higher. So as a proportion of those things, cost is fairly similar.
GDP doesn't matter here. Average salary might... presuming employees that maintain the system are paid average salary, AND the cost is overwhelmingly in the "salaries" category - which I sorta' doubt.
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Of course, people are going to expect more as technology improves.
APM Marketplace [1] just had a researcher on the program the other day sharing that most Americans don’t use more than 20Mbps of bandwidth, and paying for anything above that as a typical internet user is throwing your money away. Power users, businesses, researchers, and others might expect more, but not the majority of residential users. Muni fiber investments will last quite a while. [1] https://www.marketplace.or…
Comcast in my area doesn't even make claims of upload speed anymore, but my recollection of when they used to is that it was about 10% of the download speed. If you want more than 2 Mbps upload, that 20 Mbps plan wouldn't cut it.
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For me the benefit isn't sustained peak use, it's about saving time when there is something big to download. I want to play a game I haven't played in a while but it needs a 4 GB patch? With 1gbps I don't mind sitting there waiting a bit, 100mbps and I'm likely to just quit and find something else to play.
As I mentioned, it seems that websites have their own throttles. Are game download servers different?
Game downloads tend to be pretty big, and some downloaders will break up the download over multiple connections which can make it easier to hit your maximum speeds. There's a lot of CDN in game downloads because of the size, and CDNs will often be close to you, reducing latency, which makes high speeds more achievable.
Unrelated, a high speed upstream connection makes offsite backup much more realistic.
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Faster speeds help with downloads. Yeah you won't notice the difference when downloading a selfie, but when you buy Gears 5 on Steam and want to start playing, you will notice the difference between waiting ~1h45m @ 100Mbps / ~11m @ 1Gbps to get that 80GB game.
That's true but don't forget that downloading stuff isn't sequentially related to what you can do in real life. Your body won't be blocked for 1 hour and 45 minutes. You could choose to download a huge file before you goto sleep / work / etc. and by the time you're back it's go time.
They are doing everything they can to protect their existing infrastructure and do as little as possible to upgrade services.
I'm thinking of back in '98 when QWest was rolling out DSL, the would only connect you to a central office. They refused to put DSLAMs in the pedestals, because if they did that they had to allow CLECs to do the same and CLECs could start "cherry picking" service locations for DSL. One very rural community ("Ruby Ridge?") had to sue to get the right to put in DSLAMs. DSL was dependent on how many wire feet you were from one of the two central offices in town.
Compared to my inlaws up in Saskatoon Canada: Similar size city, they deployed DSLAMs in the remote terminals and ran fiber to them and used the copper to the house for the last mile and covered the whole city.
Remember, the telcos got a $2 billion rate hike to enable them to deploy fiber to the home by the year 2000. Except for a few small trials (I used to work at QWest), they just pocketed the money, no large scale fiber buildout was done.
Until Fort Collins passed the "we are going to build out our own fiber network", Comcast was really dragging their feet on upgrades. You can get gigabit now for around $100/mo, if you commit to a year. I'm just sitting on 120mbps for $90/mo, because people the next neighborhood over are getting door hangers saying the city fiber is coming soon.