Gigabit Speeds At Home In the US 249
An anonymous reader writes "The Electric Power Board of Chattanooga is preparing to offer 1 Gigabit speeds at home by the end of the year. 'The city-owned utility announced today it will boost its broadband service to 1 Gigabit throughout its service territory by the end of 2010. Such a connection will be 200 times faster than the average broadband speed in America and the fastest of any US city.' The NY Times reports that the service will cost $350 per month. 'Mr. DePriest of EPB does not expect brisk demand for the one-gigabit service anytime soon. So why offer it? "The simple answer is because we can," he said.'"
The price is actually pretty nice (Score:4, Interesting)
$3,5 per mbps is pretty close to the wholesale prices - and it would be pretty hard to get that for just 1 gbps. Where's the catch ?:)
200 times faster? (Score:5, Interesting)
Get 199 friends and split the bill to get 5Mbps for 1.75$US per month!
Re:Yet the price isn't bad (Score:5, Interesting)
Splitting it would be a huge win. You'd get surge access to a Gbit of bandwidth, and if everyone was "surging" at the same time, you'd get 18MB/s as you said. Considering I pay $30/month for less than 1MB/s..... Yes, I'd jump on this if I could split it.
--PM
Re:More info (Score:5, Interesting)
They're symmetric, though, which might not matter for many people, but I find nice. The 30 Mbps lowest tier is 30 Mbps each way, whereas Comcast's 30 Mbps service is 30 down, 7 up.
Re:More info (Score:3, Interesting)
Uhhh, no. Xfinity 50 Mb/s speeds cost $100. A total pipe of 1 Gb/s will therefore cost $2,000 per month, which equals $24,000 per year. A Cisco router capable of handling 20-way multipath will add $14,000 to this. So for a year's service at equal capacity via Comcast, you'll need to pay $38,000. This is NOT cheaper than what this metropolitan network is charging.
1GB for $350 has fanstastic potential... (Score:5, Interesting)
>> 'Mr. DePriest of EPB does not expect brisk demand for the one-gigabit service anytime soon. So why offer it?
Because there is a huge opportunity for resale or inclusion in basic services of multi-tenant (residential or business).
Give 10 businesses 100MB/s for $50 / month and you're making money or for offer it free and it's a cheap inducement lease space
Give 100 tenants 10MB/s for $10 / month and you're making more money or for offer free and it's a cheap inducement to renters
Re:Awesome.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Then the Midwest might bring down the average speed. But there's absolutely no reason why San Francisco, LA, Chicago, NYC, shouldn't have the same high speeds as entire countries like Japan, Korea, etc.
However, the argument you're using isn't even a good one for the Midwest. Sparsely populated places are easy to reach with long fibers, and so cheap to bring high bandwidth to. It doesn't take a huge operation or investment to bring fiber to nearly everyone in Montana or Wyoming.
The real answer is that US the telecom network cartel has never been aggressive in bringing Internet to homes. Quite the opposite: every time there's a push to increase the reach or speed of the network, the telcos have been there to push back, claiming the new traffic load will kill the existing network, or some other malarkey. What they're afraid of is that more bandwidth creates more opportunities to compete with them, and gives them less time to milk ancient services for a dragged out period of pure profitability before investing in a new generation. And that's exactly what they've got, and what we're stuck with. Except when an org not in their cartel provides some actual competition, like this municipal network operator.
Falling Prices (Score:3, Interesting)
I can see this subscribed to by small businesses with data heavy uploads (film production companies, ad agencies etc). Spread across an office of 20 employees, $350 is peanuts when each worker is getting 50mps, assuming it's symmetrical.
However I think the price for the gigabit service will drop to something hotly competitive like $99 within 36 months as the electric utility begins poaching customers from the established players when it hits home that selling access to information is more profitable than burning coal.
It wouldn't surprise me if shareholders and even regulators eventually order a spinoff of this tail-wagging-the-dog broadband division, and it winds up with a cable co, where it all gets dialed back to the current offerings.
- js.
Re:1GB for $350 has fanstastic potential... (Score:1, Interesting)
EPB FIber would never allow it. They view all us local ISP's as their direct competition, even though they got $115M in stimulus dollars, a boatload of cash from the parent company..EPB Power... which is the local power monoply, and is owned by the city of Chattanooga.
The stimulus grant was to EPB to build out their smart grid network, however the only application that's made it onto their network so far is EPB Fiber, and to date, they've refused to open the network to anyone else.
Re:"At home" (Score:3, Interesting)
(stops laughing)
Realistic situation:
College students living in a house with ~5 people, $30/month five ways for 1-mbit service comes to $6 per month per person, which two of the people don't pay until you padlock their rooms with a sign saying "see me".
Unless the house is near an open wi-fi, then nobody even brings up the issue of getting internet for the house.
Only if it can maintain those speeds (Score:3, Interesting)
It is easy to offer gigabit speeds. You provide a line that signals at a gigabit, probably just Ethernet. The hard part is having the infrastructure above that which can maintain it. This is particularly the case if you have multiple lines.
My bet is that at that price, they have insufficient upstream. So you sell your gig line out and you discover that really you are lucky to get 100mbit at the best of times. Thus your customers are getting less than they paid for and so on.
how much bandwidth per node / headend backend? (Score:3, Interesting)
how much bandwidth per node / headend backend?
Re:More info (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The price is actually pretty nice (Score:3, Interesting)
It is $0,35 per Mbps. Not even Cogent sells it that low.
The catch? There does not need to be one. If only one user in three will misuse the line, but the other two use it reasonably, they will still come out with a profit.
In fact, it is too expensive. Where I live we have 500 Mbps internet on a shared connection. We pay what equals 5 USD/month. At any given time I can transfer with 200-300 Mbps because people do not use the net as much as you would think.
Ya that is the real trick (Score:3, Interesting)
Geeks get too obsessed with the big pipe numbers and don't stop to think the costs of backing all that up whit the infrastructure upstream you need to maintain that speed. That is something I've observed is common in many of the countries with the really fast Internet. I remember a guy from Japan posting on Slashdot how great his 100mbit Internet was, he could download a CD in about 10 minutes. I had to point out that is not 100mbit, that is 10mbit. Nice and fast, but same as I was getting on my connection (12mbit at the time).
Especially if you have a high density area like an apartment building, but even if not, it isn't hard to offer Ethernet to the units and that will be 100mb or 1000mb of course. However it is a lot harder to have all the stuff higher up to keep maintaining those speeds.
Also you discover that some function like big WANs. They've got reasonable internal bandwidth, but not a lot outside. Latvia seems to be like this. They rank highly on Speedtest ratings, but it is all people testing to their own ISP's speed test servers. When I test those speed test servers from a large bandwidth site in the US, they get only a few megabits. So you'll see good transfers to others on your ISP, but not so good when downloading from a website in another data center.
An impressive connection not only has good bandwidth to your house, it can back it up at higher levels. I've been happy with Cox Home Business for that reason. It is reasonably pricey ($150/month for 50/5mb and 4 static IPs) but it has good infrastructure. I get my speeds, and to many different sites. It isn't like I get it to their internal test server but nothing else, I can download from Steam and Impulse and so on at those speeds.
Any time you see something with tons of bandwidth for a small amount of money, ask yourself what the catch might be. Remember that lots of bandwidth requires a lot of expensive equipment to make happen, and a lot of connections to other large networks. That isn't free.
Re:More info (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:More info (Score:1, Interesting)
"Everyone bitches about Comcast's service, but then isn't willing to pay for quality service."
Because Comcast's service reeks. It's slow, well, starts fast, ends slow. It drops packets. It's buffered or something, probably cached, and it shows. Their service doesn't know shit, headend operators are dicks (pole to residence checked, pole to headend checked, still not working? why are you saying check the pole? repeat 3x, finally, they check the pole...and fix the problem (this took over 1 month)).
Besides crushing bittorrent, they also slag hulu and streaming sites...maybe not directly, but by their rate limiting if you've been streaming video.
Besides, it's rare in the US to have options for broadband. Give me an option for quality service then. Where I was, there were million dollar homes. The ONLY options were sat broadband (sucks) and Comcast. Verizon has pair gain on the telephone lines, despite fiber to the curb. You offer to hook up the fiber, Verizon won't link up the location (or can't).
4G is in my county (Clear), but they didn't manage to get over the couple of hills south of us, so no 4G here.
But hey, I've got a natural gas line there. Where I am now, I've got to have fuel oil trucked in. And the best competition to Comcast is 7.1 mbit DSL, 6mbit Clear...and Comcast has been tiering for awhile now so only those 2 maybe beat the lowest default tier.
Freaking sucks, but at least I can get a backup line now that isn't dialup.
Re:The price is actually pretty nice (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:More info (Score:2, Interesting)
What makes DSL "crap"? It's usually cheaper than cable and if the ISP knows their stuff you'll always get what you pay for.
The same can be said for Cable as far as getting what you pay for. In both cases your connection merges into a fatter shared line.. the only difference is where, physically, that this happens.
.. the data carrying capacity of cable is also certainly much greater, even if the current hardware doesnt take advantage. The downside is of course that upgrades are much more expensive for the provider because the network is far less centralized, with a couple more routine levels too.
Telephone copper has its upsides in that often the sharing point is at the switches themselves, so its at a centralized location where upgrades and reconfigurations are cheaper overall. It also has its downsides, for example if the dedicated portion of your wire is unusually noisy, well then you are only 1 customer.. and the problem could be anywhere between you and the switch that is miles away.. you have the leverage of a toothpick and are unlikely to get it resolved any time soon.
For cable coax.. the upside is that if you are having problems, either the entire neighborhood is having the same problems (lots of leverage to get it resolved) or the problem is between the telephone pole and your modem (much simpler/cheaper to find and resolve)