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EPB launches America’s first community-wide 25 gig internet service

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Re: EPB launches America’s first community-wide 25 gig internet service

#41
post #25
post #9

Wow this reads like an announcement from a different timeline (like the one that was promised when fiber was promoted in the early 2000s). 25Gb/s symmetric? In the middle of Tennessee? Meanwhile I have traffic-shaped Comcast and no fiber in sight in Silicon Valley.

its weird, I live in a tiny little town with about 400 households and I now have access to 1G symmetrical fiber for about $80/month - but we (the town) had to pay for the fiber build out with increases taxes and user fees...well worth it in my case. I would have been OK with only Comcast as previously it was just 3Mb Verizon DSL for almost my entire WFH career (20+ years).

A cynical person might say that large telecoms company aren’t interested in monopolizing your market and so you are free. I’m astounded by how bad/expensive my internet is in massive cities that should be easy to connect. I live in an apartment in LA and have very few options. I lived in a loft in downtown before (5 years ago) and the building only allowed DSL. I have a business connection in Portland and pay around 100/month for 15Mb.

Re: EPB launches America’s first community-wide 25 gig internet service

#42
post #12

I don't really see the point - impressed that they offered it, but how many people truly need it? I have 1G symmetric FTTH internet, the bottleneck is still the services I want to access at the other end - really makes no difference how much faster the pipe is, if the service you are using can't keep up. Will some people benefit?? sure - a handful of power users doing massive uploads and downloads for commercial purp…

/remindme in 10 years In all seriousness, YES! File sizes are not getting smaller. If the bottleneck of data transference were my hardware, then we would live in a data utopia. Imagine the size of files for the last 20 years and you could probably do a relatively close comparison for the next 20. I would say they have future-proofed their system for a long while. I would also say that with the addition of IoT, there…

> Imagine the size of files for the last 20 years and you could probably do a relatively close comparison for the next 20.

Is it? A some point usefulness plateaus.

I mean taking the streaming example, we can easily stream several 4K HDR streams within a 1G pipe, and 4K is basically retina-class unless you plan to project in a cinema, so anything above is virtually useless (just like the move to 24bit/192kHz is for listening).

The only way I can see this use case growing in size in any semi-useful way is by reducing compression ratio to eliminate artifacts.

Similarly picture size increase but I don't see people start sharing gigapixel pictures.

Maybe this could be an enabler of truly privacy respecting home self-hosting. Own your data, own your services. Maybe distributed storage like ipfs could benefit from that as well.

But size, I can only see us using more of it because we basically now have the ability to be inefficient, not because it's useful.

But hey, 20 years is basically impossible to project into with any reliability.

Re: EPB launches America’s first community-wide 25 gig internet service

#43
post #12

I don't really see the point - impressed that they offered it, but how many people truly need it? I have 1G symmetric FTTH internet, the bottleneck is still the services I want to access at the other end - really makes no difference how much faster the pipe is, if the service you are using can't keep up. Will some people benefit?? sure - a handful of power users doing massive uploads and downloads for commercial purp…

The way I see it is that by raising the bar like this, you're making more realistic speeds for average users a) more stable/common and b) less expensive.

Re: EPB launches America’s first community-wide 25 gig internet service

#44

When we bought a house, the best one ended up being literally a couple miles outside of EPB's service area and I had to switch to Comcast. I see their billboard every time I drive home, just to rub salt in the wound.

You have different parameters than I, because "the best one" has 25Gbps to the home, and not Comcast for an internet provider. :-) I know what you're saying, though. I suppose it's possible to have higher priorities than bandwidth. Personally, I'd still have to give serious thought to how much I want $FEATURE if it means having to do business with Comcast (or Comcast aside, give up 25Gbps). Backyard for the kids? The…

And here I am looking at properties that even Starlink would have trouble providing service to...

Re: EPB launches America’s first community-wide 25 gig internet service

#45

When we bought a house, the best one ended up being literally a couple miles outside of EPB's service area and I had to switch to Comcast. I see their billboard every time I drive home, just to rub salt in the wound.

I love how so many companies offer work-from-home now as you can literally work from anywhere in the world as long as it's only in a major city with a high bandwidth connection.

Re: EPB launches America’s first community-wide 25 gig internet service

#46
post #9

Wow this reads like an announcement from a different timeline (like the one that was promised when fiber was promoted in the early 2000s). 25Gb/s symmetric? In the middle of Tennessee? Meanwhile I have traffic-shaped Comcast and no fiber in sight in Silicon Valley.

This has been going on for a while, comments like this and the recent Tennessean article/debacle are a bit eye opening to the naivety of technology and accomplishments outside of major hubs.

Re: EPB launches America’s first community-wide 25 gig internet service

#47
post #9

Wow this reads like an announcement from a different timeline (like the one that was promised when fiber was promoted in the early 2000s). 25Gb/s symmetric? In the middle of Tennessee? Meanwhile I have traffic-shaped Comcast and no fiber in sight in Silicon Valley.

> Meanwhile I have traffic-shaped Comcast and no fiber in sight in Silicon Valley.

Isn't the SF bay area more of a geography issue than an incumbent monopoly issue? I'm sure its a mixture of both, but also a geography issue.

Re: EPB launches America’s first community-wide 25 gig internet service

#48

Cool, but try to get 25Gbps on your mac. It's tough. We have our own 10 gig symmetrical fiber backbone connection and wanted 25Gbps on a mac in our film production facility. Thunderbolt maxes out at 40Gbps so you're already close to the max data transfer rate for a peripheral. We had to use ATTO's hardware which is bulky, a pain to configure on a macbook (you need to bond two interfaces) and honestly most of the time…

Yeah frankly I just hardline for 1Gbps and anything over like…I don’t know, 1TB? I just ship a drive. Anything beyond 1 or 2 requires too much effort to make work for me. It helps that I’m an in-house video producer at a tech company and not working at a post house/on major sets anymore haha

How big do you think the carrier pigeon needs to be for an HDD? Carrier Albatross? Can they even be trained?

Re: EPB launches America’s first community-wide 25 gig internet service

#49
post #9

Wow this reads like an announcement from a different timeline (like the one that was promised when fiber was promoted in the early 2000s). 25Gb/s symmetric? In the middle of Tennessee? Meanwhile I have traffic-shaped Comcast and no fiber in sight in Silicon Valley.

My parents in (poor) rural Michigan will soon have county wide fiber internet provided by the local electrical co-op. I'm sure the support will be semi-local and so will the technicians. So you'll actually get people that at least pretend to give a shit about your problems all for a better price than whats available in the city from Comcast.

And yes, they and ATT lobbied extensively to block communities from building out their own ISPs because they didn't want to compete. Michigan has a law in place where a municipality can't build out a service if at least 3 companies are willing to bid on running 'high speed' internet service in a town.

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