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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

#431

Post by novok »

Bedon292 wrote: post #232
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?!

My phone is always on WiFi unless I am in my car driving from place to place. I use under 2GB a month, closer to 1GB most months. I can't even comprehend how you would use 100GB of data on a mobile device in a month. My primary internet consumption is sitting at a computer all day long, or a laptop on the couch. The mobile data is just for traffic, slack, email, and news. All my podcasts are downloaded on WiFi, all m…

You live an urban lifestyle where you commute and travel by train and you don't stay in your suburban palace most of the time when you're not at work. Then you look at youtube videos during that time.

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

#433

Post by peterlk »

linsomniac wrote: post #408
jyrkesh wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in a combo CenturyLink / Comcast market, and it's AMAZING what competition between even just those two firms does to my offerings. Switched from Comcast's $90/mo gigabit with a 1 TB data cap and only 90 Mb/s upload to CenturyLink's $60/mo symmetric gigabit with no data cap. I have a contract-less "lifetime price guarantee", they did free install (which included running a fiber line from the pole to my house with…

I wonder why we are stuck with these options (in the town referenced in the post): 1gbps Comcast and 40mbps CenturyLink.

Colorado has laws that give monopolies on the infrastructure to whoever owns it. But in order to get around anti-trust laws (or for some other cynical reason), so in your case, there is really only one provider, but they share their infrastructure with their competition and throttle them to nothing. So your options are "whatever comcast offers" and "whatever comcast decides CenturyLink can offer"

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

#434

Post by novok »

josh2600 wrote: post #44
jkilpatr wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "upgrading our network" They actually where not doing this before because it's probably a bad idea. Modern cable networks look like this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_fiber-coaxial#/media/Fi... Fiber goes to copper which then splits out to a large number of homes. The copper line near your home can do multiple gigabit but that needs to be shared with everyone else on the tree. So selling higher speeds is ea…

Basically every telecom network is built as fiber to the node not fiber to the premises. The nasty truth of all communication and transportation systems is that arteries are cheap and capillaries are expensive. If I am building roads, it is WAY cheaper to just build highways than it is to build the small roads to everyone’s homes. When doing construction for telecom, the payback calculations are based upon “passings”…

With the capillary road network, don't most cities make developers of new blocks pay for the roads too? I think the difference although is developers are many small independent firms, while telecoms are large national corporations, and don't give ownership up once they are done developing.

With your post, it made me realize that telecom & power cable runs should really be owned by the resident city, like roads are.

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

#435

Post by yellow_postit »

bahmboo wrote: post #363
aloknnikhil wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are far more options in Seattle than ever before (and possibly than any other city in the US). WaveG, CenturyLink, CascadeLink, WebPass (Google Fiber), Comcast

That doesn't appear accurate. If you happen to live in a building (condo/apt) that is supported by one of the other gigabit companies you list then you are good to go. But that is a very very small part of the population. Otherwise Seattle has only 2 options for physically connected internet: Centurylink and Comcast. And they are priced accordingly.

Yup and there are large swaths of Seattle where Century Link doesn’t have competitive speeds to Comcast. Cities should have even more competition for service providers than rural areas.

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

#436

Post by Scottopherson »

marviel wrote: post #271

Another datapoint is Chattanooga, TN, with their municipal 1Gbps / ~$65 plan. https://epb.com/home-store/internet They had plans to expand the service to the surrounding area, but Comcast lobbied to prevent it... https://www.techspot.com/news/68941-residents-rural-chattano...

$67.99 exactly. My bill has always been the exact price that they list on their website; no extra fees or taxes randomly popping up on the billing statement.

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

#437

Post by microcolonel »

rtkwe wrote: post #175
microcolonel wrote: post #58

As somebody who really dislikes the idea of being forced to subsidize a municipal network, I like that they have some success. The cost of competing with Comcast should not be so great that people find this necessary.

Democracy, if you don't like it vote for people against it and if it wins still that's the breaks sometimes. Some things work better with collective action than private enterprise especially things that require large build outs of infrastructure that you don't want duplicated: eg roads, you're paying to maintain a lot of roads you never drive on because their existence benefits everyone.

In that sense, I would not be against a municipal government installing a system of conduits and/or dark fiber, and charging ISPs and other fiber users for it (provided they had some reasonable obligations to conduct the whole business transparently).

I think conduits and dark fiber are both more similar to roads (and utility poles and the structural cables between them) than actual internet service; and the nice thing is that new private entities, provided they are not preempted by rigid bylaws, are then enabled to seek out a better standard of service without duplicating the whole infrastructure.

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

#438

Post by cptskippy »

reaperducer wrote: post #425
cptskippy wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Fiber companies aren't interested in spending the extra money for conduits and vaults. They just want to get quick cash to feed to their investors.

They're currently installing fiber in my area with vaults that, according to my partner the engineer, are way closer together than they need to be. I wonder if something else is going in them as well...

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

#439

Post by wuliwong »

maitredusoi wrote: post #428

For 60$ you have a Freebox delta in France (sorry only in French https://www.free.fr/freebox/freebox-delta/ ) . It includes 10 Gbps (via fiber cable) + a sound system ( from Devialet, an equivalent to Bose system) + Alexa on the remote controller + 500 Go HDD for video recording or music playback + 200 (international) TV channels + Netflix SD , all inclusive ?! For the little story, french people said 60 $ for all of…

Prices vary from country to country on lots of things. How much does gas cost in France vs the USA?

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

#440

Post by novok »

tonyb wrote: post #129
jkilpatr wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "upgrading our network" They actually where not doing this before because it's probably a bad idea. Modern cable networks look like this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_fiber-coaxial#/media/Fi... Fiber goes to copper which then splits out to a large number of homes. The copper line near your home can do multiple gigabit but that needs to be shared with everyone else on the tree. So selling higher speeds is ea…

Fiber to the home/GPON is also a shared medium. One OLT (the fiber device in the headend) port generally goes out to a splitter in the field that then goes to 128,64,or 32 customers which has about ~2.5 gbps of downstream speed that is probably also shared with the video service. That is generally more capacity than DOCSIS but it isn't a fiber straight from the customer house back to the provider network. Modern DOCS…

It's because software services are built according to the infrastructure of their typical customer. If symmetrical connections were the standard in america, how would that change the software landscape today?
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