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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

#411

Post by kls »

lonelappde wrote: post #346
kls wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we had this in the Florida Keys with AT&T who is the service provider of our area. I live 2 miles out on a peninsula of an island named Summerland, anyway I bought my house and AT&T assured me that I could get DSL but fiber would not be an option. I knew it was copper all the way to my home so I figured it would be the case. Anyways, I buy said house AT&T comes out and tried to get DSL working, and the lines have…

How is paying ATT 70k to string fiber different from your city paying 70k to string fiber? That the city can make people who don't live on your peninsula pay for the lines to your house?

The difference is that ATT owns the fiber after I pay for it and I have no rights or ownership of said fiber. If it has been a municipal endeavor or a non-profit endeavor I would have gladly paid the 70k and wrote off the amount as charitable contributions or state taxed write-offs. Granted I could have written it off as a one time business expense but AT&T still owned what I would have paid for.

I get that it is not cost effective, I have no problem with that, and am not under the impression that I am owed service, rather I just find the exclusivity agreements to be restricting competition and locking anyone out of the market that would have been willing to provide me with service at a more affordable rate. Comcast may have quoted me 20k to run the lines, I will never know, as it was not an option.

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

#412

Post by mmanfrin »

Today, in one of the four cities that birthed the very first connections made to the proto-internet (Berkeley), I am finally getting a second broadband option other than Comcast.

I'm an hour in to a 4 hour window waiting for my Sonic install. I am so happy to finally be have a choice.

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

#413

Post by [deleted] »

cptskippy wrote: post #360
crumpets wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two things: - data costs for bandwidth costs hasn't gone down at the same rate - A big chunk of an ISP is labor costs, which do not go down over time

> data costs for bandwidth costs hasn't gone down at the same rate For clarification, at the business level data has always been charged by capacity and not volume. And the costs have fallen at double digit rates since they've been measured. http://drpeering.net/white-papers/Internet-Transit-Pricing-H... ISPs plan their networks for peek capacity, the only reason they charge by volume is because they can.

[deleted]

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

#414

Post by linsomniac »

reaperducer wrote: post #369
linsomniac wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stories I heard about the expansion that was anticipating growth that never came was all about long-haul fiber: Fiber between cities and across the country. Some of that, one could speculate, was because these long haul fibers were being sold to businesses, who were paying ~$100/mbps, but the residential endpoints were still very slow (1.5Mbps DSL was blazing fast in 1998, if you could even get it), because the t…

It was more than just long-haul. Some cities suffered from the growing pains of the fiber feeding frenzy. City streets would be torn up five or six times within a couple of months as competing fiber startups tried to cash in on the anticipated gold rush. Those towns with good planning departments put together "street cut coordination" plans to minimize repeated disturbances. But most didn't get their acts together be…

3-4 years ago the town in this article got tired of the tearing up of its main street, and refinished that street, after telling the likely suspects that they'd better put down extra capacity now if they were going to need it, because future digs would require the diggers to completely redo the road rather than just trench and fill.

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

#415

Post by Obi_Juan_Kenobi »

mmanfrin wrote: post #412

Today, in one of the four cities that birthed the very first connections made to the proto-internet (Berkeley), I am finally getting a second broadband option other than Comcast. I'm an hour in to a 4 hour window waiting for my Sonic install. I am so happy to finally be have a choice.

Sonic fiber is great. It's been over a year, and zero service interruptions or degradations since the day it was installed.

Any network issues I now automatically assume are due to my home network or the server I'm trying to access.

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

#416

Post by Alupis »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #297
nnq wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

with 3gb of data - maybe I'm a weird consumer, but I don't get it what's with this insanely low data caps... while in France I had a 100gb / month 4G data plan for ~20EUR, and couple times I even exceeded those 100 gb! how/what are most people using internet for that they tolerate such small caps?!

What are you doing with your phone? Run bittorrent unthrottled 24/7 just because? I use about 300mb a month, rest is covered by Wi-Fi at home or work.

If you stream Pandora, Spotify, or a few podcasts in your daily commute, you'll eat up 3GB pretty easily.

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

#417

Post by linsomniac »

lonelappde wrote: post #341
linsomniac wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They used to quote their speeds in ATM frame rates, not in IP speed, and ATM has a lot of overhead. 15%? I wonder if their 40mbps is still quoting frame rates rather than actual IP throughput. Not sure, because 40mbps isn't enough for my home use, so I haven't even talked to them.

What is your home use scenario?

Where 40mbps isn't sufficient you mean? A family of 4 with a hell of a lot of video streaming being the primary one, but also not wanting my own Youtube videos to take 3-4 hours to upload 20 minutes. :-)

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

#418

Post by kls »

Bartweiss wrote: post #314
kls wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we had this in the Florida Keys with AT&T who is the service provider of our area. I live 2 miles out on a peninsula of an island named Summerland, anyway I bought my house and AT&T assured me that I could get DSL but fiber would not be an option. I knew it was copper all the way to my home so I figured it would be the case. Anyways, I buy said house AT&T comes out and tried to get DSL working, and the lines have…

> My point is, I don't see how allowing these "exclusive" coverage monopolies does anything but harm the consumer. I imagine a community based provider like the one in the article would be met with a host of legal challenges here. I'm not sure I understand what you mean here. I think the confusion is over exactly what exclusivity AT&T holds? (I don't intend this as a lecture since you may well know all of this, I jus…

my understanding is they have exclusivity to the polls, only AT&T can string the polls on my island only Comcast can string the polls on the next island over. I could be mistaken but that was the way it was represented to me by AT&T and Comcast when I talked to both of them, AT&T was willing to string the poll, Comcast said they could not because they where AT&T polls. They may have been wrong or mistaken, but that was the info I was given. I ended up going with a line of site, microwave internet connection (that ended my investigation into getting the polls strung), which was decent (I believe due to everything being on pillars above the tree-lines down here). That is, until after the storm which changed everything.

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

#419

Post by linsomniac »

jorblumesea wrote: post #357
linsomniac wrote: post #269

CenturyLink, in particular, but also Comcast, has brought this upon themselves... 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…

Can't speak for Comcast, but for Centurylink, they've been rolling out fiber like crazy. In Seattle I have a fiber connection for $70 / month. This was maybe 3-4 years ago and never had an issue with it. It doesn't appear to be in bad faith. Now, who knows if they'll continue to roll it out.

Nice! Only 20 years late! :-) (referring to the $2B rate hike they were given to deploy fiber by Y2K)

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

#420

Post by cptskippy »

linsomniac wrote: post #414
reaperducer wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was more than just long-haul. Some cities suffered from the growing pains of the fiber feeding frenzy. City streets would be torn up five or six times within a couple of months as competing fiber startups tried to cash in on the anticipated gold rush. Those towns with good planning departments put together "street cut coordination" plans to minimize repeated disturbances. But most didn't get their acts together be…

3-4 years ago the town in this article got tired of the tearing up of its main street, and refinished that street, after telling the likely suspects that they'd better put down extra capacity now if they were going to need it, because future digs would require the diggers to completely redo the road rather than just trench and fill.

I'm kind of surprised they weren't installing conduits and vaults. Isn't that common practice to facilitate easier repair of faults?
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