Comcast Brings Fiber To City That It Sued 7 Years Ago To Stop Fiber Rollout 182
An anonymous reader writes with the latest update in Comcast's "if you can't beat them, join them" fiber plan. In April 2008, Comcast sued the Chattanooga Electric Power Board (EPB) to prevent it from building a fiber network to serve residents who were getting slow speeds from the incumbent cable provider. Comcast claimed that EPB illegally subsidized the buildout with ratepayer funds, but it quickly lost in court, and EPB built its fiber network and began offering Internet, TV, and phone service. After EPB launched in 2009, incumbents Comcast and AT&T finally started upgrading their services, EPB officials told Ars when we interviewed them in 2013. But not until this year has Comcast had an Internet offering that can match or beat EPB's $70 gigabit service. Comcast announced its 2Gbps fiber-to-the-home service on April 2, launching first in Atlanta, then in cities in Florida and California, and now in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
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Re:when? (Score:5, Insightful)
Infinity. It would have taken infinity.
Re: when? (Score:5, Funny)
You mean... xfinity...
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You mean... xfinity...
So that's what they call getting 50% of the advertised bandwidth.
Not sure why they had to patent it. Not too many ISPs are clamoring to meet or beat that metric.
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You mean... xfinity...
So that's what they call getting 50% of the advertised bandwidth.
Not sure why they had to patent it. Not too many ISPs are clamoring to meet or beat that metric.
You get 50%?! I'm on a supposedly 105 Mb connection and speed tests routinely report 10 - 12 Mb. I would be thrilled with 50% of advertised bandwidth.
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You mean... xfinity...
So that's what they call getting 50% of the advertised bandwidth.
Not sure why they had to patent it. Not too many ISPs are clamoring to meet or beat that metric.
You get 50%?! I'm on a supposedly 105 Mb connection and speed tests routinely report 10 - 12 Mb. I would be thrilled with 50% of advertised bandwidth.
My apologies. I'm not a (forced) Comcast customer. It was an obviously inaccurate assumption to grant you the luxury of receiving even half of what you're paying for.
And you likely don't have a choice in providers now. Just imagine how fun it will be when the rest of the world looks this shitty when it comes to choices.
It's coming.
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Download two linux cd images in a second?
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I currently have the luxury of mooching off a business class symmetrical connection (30/30) which has completely spoiled me. It's dedicated speed and has more upload than any consumer grade connection I can obtain. When I have to go back to a residential line I will miss that upload more than anything else. I can't match it where I currently live (TWC, 50/5 is the best here) or where I plan on living (Cox, tops out at 150/20 and is totally out of my price range, the most affordable tier is 50/5).
I hear you... I used to have TWC at 50/5... but thankfully I've had FIOS for several years now...
150 down, 150 up... really a wonderful thing... That 700MB download? About 39 seconds...
And I really do get those speeds... There is enough bandwidth to the neighborhood to support it.
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Pretty cool, but still not a fundamental change in the way you use the internet.
Actually, for me personally, it was...
With TWC and 50/5, I made a point to download anything I might think I wanted, because in the evenings, I never actually could get 50 down because it was shared with about 150 houses (actually I'm sure it was faster than that, but a 500 down connection shared with 150 homes is crappy at 7pm).
Now that I get a solid 18 megabytes per second, 24 hours a day, it has changed that behavior. Steam is a good example, I used to have the whole collection downloaded. Then it grew and I needed more space to keep it, and it was running slower keeping everything up to date.
Even a 10GB game would only take about 10 min to download. Now granted, I'd prefer faster, but what it means is that if I really want to play something, 10 min is enough time to go make coffee, use the bathroom, etc.
The "cloud" has become much more useful as such. With "more or less" unlimited space in my OneDrive, it has become practical to upload a copy of everything there. I would never have tried that before with just 5 up. I also run two online backup services, BackBlaze and Crashplan, to make sure I haev copies of everything. In addition, about 2 TB of critical files (mostly work related) are stored on Amazon Glacier. Again something I wouldn't try with 5 up, but with 150 up, becomes no big deal.
And yes, in addition to 4 copies in the cloud, I also have multiple external hard drives that I rotate on backups. I lost data once, nearly 20 years ago... NEVER AGAIN! :) (and yes, I test restores from time to time)
---
Just my personal experience, others will be different of course.
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Pretty cool, but still not a fundamental change in the way you use the internet.
Actually, for me personally, it was...
What you just described doesn't fit the mold of the vast majority of internet users. If I had to pull a number out of my ass, the number of home users that have multiple TB of data that needs to be backed up in multiple cloud locations as well as cold storage and home backups, would put you in the top .01%. You just described a business scenario that should be kept to a business class connection, not a $50 or $100/month home connection.
I think the OP's post is reasonable. The other 99.99% of internet u
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What you just described doesn't fit the mold of the vast majority of internet users. If I had to pull a number out of my ass, the number of home users that have multiple TB of data that needs to be backed up in multiple cloud locations as well as cold storage and home backups, would put you in the top .01%. You just described a business scenario that should be kept to a business class connection, not a $50 or $100/month home connection.
I think the OP's post is reasonable. The other 99.99% of internet users out there would benefit far more from a stable 10x10 connection than they do from multi-Gb download speeds.
I'm not bashing you, it sounds like you've got a great setup that works for you. Just pointing out that your use case doesn't apply to very many people.
Actually... you're right, I would have to agree with you...
It is easy to allow one's own person use case to color their views of things... My Mother has 3 megabit ADSL and any time I go to her house, it is painful to me, but to her, it is "normal". She has never had anything faster.
How about we aim for 25/25 then for everyone? 10/10 is too slow for a long term plan, IMHO. :)
Or better yet, how about we plan for and build out gigabit to everyone! :) AT&T just laid fiber in my neighborhood and is goin
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I'd rather see society make a concerted effort to get everybody a 10/10 connection than roll out gigabit speeds to a handful of lucky cities. We've got whole swathes of the country that are lucky to see T1 speeds on the download side and a pittance on upload. Of course, 25/25 would be better, 50/50 awesome, and 100/100 future proof.
While I agree with you to a point, I wouldn't say 10/10. That is no longer fast enough for a lot of what people could be doing. Video is no longer a minor part of the web.
25/25 would be enough to give multiple streams of 1080p video, which would allow the cable companies to go away. :)
I used to have DirecTV, got rid of them a year ago or so, now everything for us is streaming. I'd be happy to pay some reasonable number per month to buy channels over the web à la carte.
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While you are right that 10/10 is not enough for some use cases, it is sufficient for the great majority of people and a good baseline. Netflix at the highest bit-rate is only about 6 megabit. 10Mb would allow a comfortable amount of headroom. Simultaneous streams would work, just with a minor reduction in video quality. But as they say "The better is the enemy of the good". I'd rather see a movement to good serviceable bandwidth being universally available than an insistence on 25Mb if it takes three t
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TWC neglects our area nearly as badly as Verizon; we didn't have DOCSIS 3 until 18 months ago and if you were unlucky enough to live on a congested node you'd see peak hour speeds dip below 1Mbps. This is a city of 50k with metro area of 250k, we're not talking about cow country. Head out into the sticks and you've got nothing but satellite or (maybe) LTE, neither of which makes for an acceptable wireline replacement.
Bleh, I feel for you... totally...
The state of Internet in the US is embarrassing... where there is a monopoly, the prices are stupid and the speeds are slow.
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Which is basically everywhere!
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I guess it depends on your opinion of slow.
10 megabit strikes me as the minimum acceptable in 2015.
My Mom has 3 megabit ADSL, the fastest offered to her home. She is just outside of the service area of TWC, it is her only option.
That is slow. :)
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I have 3 smart TVs, PS4, Xbox, 4 Smart phones, 2 PCs, 2 Tablets, a wife and 2 sons that still live at home that use them all constantly. I may not need a huge connection for any one thing but I've noticed I have more and more connected devices. When my sons were little we had one PC with dial up I imagine after the kids are grown and move out the number of devices will drop but I have no intention of going back to dial up.
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I have EPB. Trust me, you would like my 1 Gb symmetrical better than your 30 Mb symmetrical. EPB's reliability blows away every other residential ISP I've experienced (mostly cable companys.) Since the only thing they block is port 25 outbound my home server makes my media collection available anywhere I go, streaming or otherwise. Moving large files between home and work is so fast it feels like being on site. I'll admit that I don't max out the connection 95% of the time but it's great to have when you ne
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"You're going for the sarcasm, but that's really the only point I see for these mega speed tiers"
I'll rape a 2Gbps link with just Camfrog alone.
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It also depends on how many internet users you need to support. For a single person, having a 30/30 or even a 50/5 should be more than adequate for the modern web, where you're not going to notice much of any slowdowns. I have 4 very heavy internet users in my household, including myself, and we were consistently choking on Cox's 50/5. To give you an idea, there are 2 people who like their Netflix, 1 person downloading and uploading class assignments (sometimes very large projects), and 1 person who need
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Download two linux cd images in a second?
My laptop doesn't have a 2gbps ethernet port unfortunately, so I'll be stuck with one.
ITYM two in 10 seconds, since it's mega bits not mega bytes.
You ignore real household use (Score:2)
Well thank you Mr Gates for being so sure normal people couldn't use high speeds to advantage - what if two kids are watching YouTube in 1080p, another person is using Netflix, and then someone fires up a PS4? I just got one the other day and wanted to play two game demos - over *2GB* each thank you very much. I had to play the next day because *I* don't have 2GB fiber...
Plus we all know that 2GB is shared so it's almost always going to be a percentage of the rating speed. Might as well be a percentage
That just shows my point (Score:3)
Thanks for totally ignoring the last point that actual speeds are a fraction of the rated speeds... the 2Gb connection may well be just a 100Mbps connection most of the time.
But your own post as it stands refutes your counter-argument. Waiting even four minutes for a demo is fairly long, which shows that higher speeds are in fact needed by average users today - even if they are not being used continuously. Having a high burst speed IS very useful to even the average person today.
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" Waiting even four minutes for a demo is fairly long, which shows that higher speeds are in fact needed by average users today"
No, that just shows that programmers need to learn to tighten up their bloated code. I've seen demoscene stuff pushing PS3-level graphics before the PS3 was even available.
Oh, and the demo was written in 96 KILOBYTES.
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http://www.pouet.net/ [pouet.net]
http://modarchive.org/ [modarchive.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D... [wikipedia.org]
With a bit of cleverness, very impressive graphics and music can be conveyed using a tiny amount of storage space. Haste makes waste.
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http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?... [pouet.net]
Here's one done in 4 kilobytes. Hope you've got at LEAST a GTX680 to get it running, because it's some serious fucking code and needs serious hardware to operate.
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Thanks for totally ignoring the last point that actual speeds are a fraction of the rated speeds
Depends on provider / where you live. I pay for 50 Mbps from TWC and while it varies some (it's cable, of course it'll vary some), I usually a little OVER 50 Mbps, even during peak hours. That's with multiple gamers / Netflix addicts in the house. The only time speed becomes an issue is if someone is being inconsiderate and running several torrents at a time while everyone else is trying to stream movies / download games off Steam.
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Or, you know, it could be that the bottle neck is that cable is a shared pipe with your neighbors, and if they upgrade that pipe the split is scaled and the 1000M will get you 100M, or thereabouts..
I have 4 heavy users in my house, we typically are streaming several videos at the same time, and downloading other shit as well.
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Well first off, the local power board has better service than Comcast, therefore Comcast probably felt obligated to up the bar lest they look like even bigger fools. Yes, it's dick waving to restore their bruised ego.
Also to get that market share back they had to either improve performance, improve service, or lower cost. And Comcast sure as hell would never improve service or lower cost...
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The first question that comes to my mind is, "What the fuck is the point of 2 Gbps service for residential customers?"
Your question is limited to existing technologies and platforms that are built around the assumption of 12/3Mbps connections at best.
Imagine a respectable percentage (or large enough market) where the network was reliably 2Gbps or more.
If the latency were low enough, there'd be less reason not to share multiple GB files on remote drives for editing locally, like agencies using Photoshop files between 700MB and 1GB large.
Hi quality VR conferencing might materialize if the machines connected to each other cou
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The solution to get those dial up users hooked to broadband is to run fiber, which is cheaper than running new last-mile copper (which would go to fiber after one hop anyway)
Then, fiber is at Gbps speed because the signal doesn't degrade (over the distance for one cable to the consumer anyway), else we'd be
So dial up users may or may not need 1Gbps, but they need that tech which gives them 1Gbps anyway.
What remains is only a political/economics problem ; if anything, fiber makes most sense in rural areas (m
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The first question that comes to my mind is, "What is the point of 2 Gbps service for residential customers?"
Today? There is no point. The available services have to be built for the speeds that are common; nobody is building Internet services that need several hundred megabits for reasonable performance -- because performance would suck for nearly everyone, because hardly anyone has that. The point of gigabit plus speeds is that if you have those speeds, reliably, the difference between local and remote storage almost disappears, which enables very different approaches to building systems.
In addition, define "r
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Working from home in some cases could do with as much bandwidth as you can find. I've got a contractor at a town 500km away that has to wait more than an entire day to download the data that is sent to him before he can work on it. If he was on gigabit or that twice over he could get it very quickly or possibly even use a remote desktop to a machine that already has the project data on it's disk.
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If there is not a lot of length of copper or fibre between the two endpoints why not? It's only congesting a little bit of a network.
I could just about empty the office and send just everyone in one section of my workplace home if there was enough ba
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If there is not a lot of length of copper or fibre between the two endpoints why not? It's only congesting a little bit of a network.
Perhaps I wasn't clear. I wasn't referring to building of network connections, I was referring to the building of user services that rely on them. For example, YouTube is built to dynamically adjust video quality based on available bandwidth, but the range of bandwidths considered by the designers does not include hundreds of megabits, because far too few of the users have that capacity. They have to shoot for the range that most people have.
But as that range changes, services will change their designs to
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Not having to worry about my Steam downloads interfering my family's streaming video and still leaving enough room for comfortable web browsing and a torrent or two? All the while a computer is making a cloud backup?
Excess resources is what allows for growth, you know.
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The first question that comes to my mind is, "What the fuck is the point of having more than 640k of memory for residential customers?" It's marketing department dick waving that serves no purpose. 640k should be enough for anyone.
It's not like new technology gets developed to take advantage of new features, right? It's just a big waste of resources to develop these things.
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The first question that comes to my mind is, "What the fuck is the point of 2 Gbps service for residential customers?" It's marketing department dick waving that serves no purpose. It would seem to me that society (both public and corporate) ought to be looking at the areas that are lucky to get T-1 speeds before it worries about upgrading cities that already have access to double and triple digit Mbps connections. For most people it's all gravy once you get past 10-15Mbps and I'm not aware of any consumer grade gear that can take advantage of 2Gbps.
More importantly, what are the caps on such service? You'll essentially wind up paying more for band width you really don't need and not getting any noticeable performance boost, at least for the average home user. The best result from Google's rollout is that incumbents may be forced to offer more competitive offerings, especially if Google offers $300/lifetime rates.
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"What the fuck is the point of 2 Gbps service for residential customers?"
Right now that's enough speed to treat an online drive as local one. I'm guessing you could just plug one in as a Time Machine or ZFS or btrfs and never have to think about backups again. Lots of things along shared database/filesystem lines. With that kind of reliable bandwidth you could start considering shared VR. Collaborative video/3D work. See what you can get it to do with Microsoft's HoloLens.
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The first question that comes to my mind is, "What the fuck is the point of 2 Gbps service for residential customers?"
For instance, it would be feasible to use off site storage even for often used data. You could upload your movies to some file service and stream from there. No need for your own backup concept. You could even have your office file stuff on a remote filer and wouldn't notice much of a speed bump.
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As others have noted, not having to wait hours for downloads has benefits to productivity as well as creativity.
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8k video!
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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And the arms race between porn producers and porn consumers continues..... :)
1980s: Wait three hours for the xmodem bbs download of the latest low resolution images. Annoy your housemates that need to make or receive a telephone call. Discard 99% of the photos after viewing them once.
1990s: Wait three hours for the high resolution alt.binaries.erotica.* jpg photoset to download on your POTS modem. Annoy your housemates that need to make or receive a telephone call. Discard 99% the photos five minutes after the download finishes.
2000s: Wait three hours for the torrent of SD videos to download on your cable modem. Annoy all of your DOCSIS node neighbors who just want to surf the web without lag. Discard 99% of the videos five minutes after the download finishes.
2010s: Wait three hours for the torrent of HD videos to download. Annoy all of your DOCSIS node neighbors who just want to watch Netflix without buffering. Discard 99% of videos upon download completion.
2020s: Wait three hours for the 4K videos to download......
2030s: Wait three hours for the 8K videos to download......
2300s: Wait three hours for the holodeck programs to download. Annoy the Captain when his request for tea, earl grey, hot is delayed. Discard 99% of the programs......
1970s: Wait three hours for your arpanet dial-back modem to download ASCII porn of Jane Fonda. Annoy your workmates by monopolizing the Telex printer unit.
There was life before xmodems you young whippersnapper!
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I am not enough of a videophile to discern the difference between 720p and 1080p.
That's not a "videophile" thing, that's a "Dude, you should probably go to an optometrist and get that check out" thing.
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More than likely it's "I am not enough of a videophile to own a 1080p television." And that's exactly where I am. With a family, two cars, and only one income of any significance, I have better things to spend my money on than a TV when my existing 32-inch 720p television is still in working order.
It reminds me of the two or three years when I'd hear people complain about the fancy new HD cable channels not looking any better on their 15 year old Sony Trinitron.
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25Mb/s for a single 4K stream, which will be the defacto in a couple years. The price of 4K TV's has already dropped to the floor (just look at Vizio's new models you can pickup at Walmart). Now consider the standard family of four. Two to three simultaneous video streams, someone downloading something, add in some online gaming and you've got a normal American household every evening of the year and you're EASILY pushing 100Mb/s.
A couple of years? HDTVs have been on the market for how many years now and yet the overwhelming majority of broadcasts are well below the "old shit" 1080p level.
Wake me up in another decade when they might be close to being ready to stream 4K to the majority.
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Nobody cares if you don't use it. There is demand for it so it's useful enough. Not to mention ISPs have been teasing us with fiber since the 90's.
It's like asking "who needs more than 1 gallon per minute water service at home?" It isn't up to you.
Who is asking for it? Where is this demand coming from?
I think your analogy is a bit off -- I already have a 20 gallon per minute pipe to my house. Maybe 100 gpm would be useful from time to time, I could understand paying for that. And maybe once a year when I'm filling my pool, 1000 gpm would be nice but certainly not worth paying extra for since i'd utilize it so rarely. But 2000 gpm? Who needs that, and what are they doing with it?
I can't even use a 2 gigabit connection at home, I have no 10 gig router
Speed tiers don't exist (Score:2)
I learned that there exist a 2.5Gb/s ethernet speed on RJ45 cable, which should be a credible upgrade for future consumer hardware (10Gb is not it seems)
As to the fiber, well the equipment and the fiber do it. Perhaps that 2Gbps is just 1Gbps full duplex by the way, but it's not like installing 1Gbps fiber and network interface is more expensive than installing 10Mbps or 100Mbps fiber. In fact you would have to go out of your way to find or build equipment that only supports 100Mbps, so it would be more exp
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I'm suspicious of any argument resembling "nothing we do today needs X, so therefore nothing needs X, so therefore nobody needs X, so therefore nobody should [almost always with an implicit ~be allowed to~] offer it".
I can't even use a 2 gigabit connection at home,
Yes you can. You have a _6_ gigabit connection at home. It 's your SATA link. That's getting slow, these days.
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I'm suspicious of any argument resembling "nothing we do today needs X, so therefore nothing needs X, so therefore nobody needs X, so therefore nobody should [almost always with an implicit ~be allowed to~] offer it".
I can't even use a 2 gigabit connection at home,
Yes you can. You have a _6_ gigabit connection at home. It 's your SATA link. That's getting slow, these days.
I tried plugging my SATA cable into the cable box for faster internet and it didn't work -- plus that 1 meter cable length limitation means I have to sit on the floor in front of the TV to use it.
So I figured if SATA was good, then plugging it right into the PCI bus would be better, so I plugged the ethernet into my PCIe x16 bus so I could enjoy 120Gbit speeds. But that didn't work either.
What am I doing wrong? It's almost as if internet access and local system buses are completely different and incompatibl
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Lucky bastards (Score:3)
Meanwhile I'm lucky to get 1.2mbps off my DSL and my new place doesn't have cable or dsl access. I might be able to get 802.11n wifi, but with all likelihood I'm going to be stuck with the gawdaweful lag of a satellite. :(
-Rick
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Meanwhile I'm lucky to get 1.2mbps off my DSL and my new place doesn't have cable or dsl access. I might be able to get 802.11n wifi, but with all likelihood I'm going to be stuck with the gawdaweful lag of a satellite. :(
My wife has been shopping for a new home in the county, she recently found a nice 10 acre place with a starter house on it not too far outside of Dallas for under 300k that would let us move there and then build a proper home when we're ready.
It is about 5 miles past decent internet. :)
My deal with her is that if I can't get at least 50/50 internet, I'm not going, otherwise she can have almost anything she wants.
I'm not going back to 50/5, that is just evil. I have 150/150 now, but frankly don't really nee
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I'm right on the edge of the distance limit according to an old router firmware I had at the time. 1.5m down w/ 384 up is rock solid, 3m down w/ 512 up had too much S:N going on and would disconnect every 3-30 minutes.
Two weeks ago the local telco (windstream) drug a new fiber line past my house, but it comes from the opposite town exchange... and it is on the other side of the road. Don't care if I get fiber hookup direct, but I'd like faster DSL service...
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+1 to this, when I moved into a new apartment, I ruled out whole suburbs just because they had crappy internet. I am currently getting DSL sync speeds of about 9/1 or so which is more than adequate for my needs (including all the crap I watch on YouTube and various YouTube clones and downloading large git trees and big files related to various game mods I work on)
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Since you and your wife already have a careers elsewhere and would be supporting them, shouldn't they have moved closer to you?
Iddn't that kinda none of your fucking business? Not everybody can move to where the internet doesn't suck, that's the end of the discussion.
Correction (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't "if you can't beat them, join them", it's "BE A FLAMING ASSHOLE BECAUSE I'M COMCAST". All they need to do is price their offering at $50 or so for a year or two to kill off the municipal service, then they will be able to jack it up to $110 and watch it all burn.
$50-$120? try more like $150-$300 + 250-750 instal (Score:4, Informative)
$50-$120? try more like $150-$300 + $250-750 install with 3 year contract with a $200+ ETF and $20 mo modem rent fee.
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This isn't "if you can't beat them, join them", it's "BE A FLAMING ASSHOLE BECAUSE I'M COMCAST".
I'm hard-put to disagree with you, but IMHO it's more like "we can beat them, and then take their place when it f**king suits us."
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All they need to do is price their offering at $50 or so for a year or two to kill off the municipal service...
You're probably right, but I'd keep paying $100/month to the local utility for the privilege of not dealing with Comcast. I would rather crumple fifty dollar bills and throw them in the gutter than have to deal with Comcast's worst-ever customer service.
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surprise! (Score:2)
Yes, if you screw rate payers and force them to subsidize service most of them don't want or need, they get that service earlier. What's the point?
Re:surprise! (Score:4, Insightful)
This had been approved by the duly elected city council. From what I can see this looks like the voters actually like this. A 25 year bond with a 4.64% increase in rates and in return the city *finally* gets reasonable internet service, I don't see who's being screwed except Comcast.
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Many voters also like increasing the minimum wage, "free" public education, and buy "luxury" foreign cars and live above their means. Many voters are just not very prudent with their money and aren't experts in economics, personal finance, or networking. The people presenting this to them may not have been honest about the actual costs and benefits either. If you tell them that Gigabit
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1Gbit may be more than they need, but they weren't even getting reasonable internet either.
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Do some basic math. According to your own article, the cost of the EPB expansion is "up to $60 million", and it would provide service for about 1000 people, many of whom obviously don't want high speed Internet. That's at least $60000 per user (probably a lot more)! And that's not going to be paid for by the beneficiaries of this largesse, because they will pay the same rates as everybody else.
The assertion that "EPB will not use taxpayer money" is bogus, because as a city-owned public utility, they are imp
standard operating procedure for monopolies (Score:4, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... [wikipedia.org]
many morons think markets don't need government regulation. that they "self-regulate"
predatory pricing must be an example of what they are talking about i suppose
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it's like dealing with a creationist or an antivaxxer
simple basic history and well-established economic facts just don't mean a damn thing to you deluded fucks. it's like the religious tenets of some low iq cult: just keep asserting a simpleminded wrong belief, contrary to all facts and history, and you can continue in your quasireligious moronic bullshit
1. predatory pricing is real
2.. predatory pricing happens constantly
3. only government regulations can catch it and punish it
these are all ironclad bedrock
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[...]
you're a moron
not baseless insult. an objective description of the quality of your thought
what you wrote is hilariously solidly wrong. you blindly and blatantly deny basic facts of a subject matter you inject your puerile ignorance into
you're deluded uneducated wackjob and if you had any shame you would stop lying and making yourself look like a feeble crackpot to anyone who actually understands the simple basics of this subject matter
just shut the fuck up about what you clearly do not understand you dumb ignorant fuck
Come on. Tell us how you REALLY feel.
; )
Re:standard operating procedure for monopolies (Score:5, Insightful)
The claim Comcast had that a government should not compete with private business is ludicrous because the private business in question was inadequate or unavailable. Internet is infrastructure. If municipal governments are allowed to create and fund electric boards, water boards, gas boards, sewage services, and so forth, then the governments should be allowed to create internet services where none effectively exist.
Re: (Score:3)
But of course you posted anon, because you're either retarded or a Comcast shill.
Re: (Score:2)
no one has the money to rebuild an entire redundant fiber rollout
you would need to sink billions to just begin to compete, with no guarantee of a profit (and less with predatory pricing shutting you down)
it's called a natural monopoly
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N... [wikipedia.org]
the financial barrier to market entry is too high
nevermind no one wants their streets constantly torn up to lay competing fiber even if there were multiple googles willing to try to compete as just a sideshow because they have a large cushion of
Re: (Score:2)
1. They don't need their streets torn up. My area is finally getting natural gas, and the 4" pipe is larger than what fiber needs. They're just pushing the pipe through, they can do that with the fiber.
I just wish that I had been around when this was proposed to suggest that as long as they're at it, run fiber with the NG pipe...
An EPB Customer's Perspective (Score:5, Informative)
Even though Comcast has announced 2 Gbps, I have 0 intentions of switching. My service is rock solid. Whenever I have a rare question concerning the service, I call EPB and it's a local person who is friendly, helpful, knowledgeable and doesn't immediately blame the problem on user side equipment.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I was one of the first customers to snag 1 Gbps when EPB dropped the price to $70.
Even though Comcast has announced 2 Gbps, I have 0 intentions of switching. My service is rock solid. Whenever I have a rare question concerning the service, I call EPB and it's a local person who is friendly, helpful, knowledgeable and doesn't immediately blame the problem on user side equipment.
This is the lesson yet to be taught to the cable companies, cellular companies and telcos. They honestly believe that if you move away from them, you will be back in a few years...thus they have no fear of doing things that make you mad at them. Especially getting laws passed to prevent competition.
After 30+ years of cable companies ripping you off, they would have to severely discount their price and even then customers like you and I would not go back to them.
Perhaps if they got all the anti-FTTH legisl
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I have EPB as well. No complaints. Rock solid, blazing fast. Local support who are competent for the 2 times in five years I have had an issue.
The store I worked at a couple years ago was a Comcast reseller. We seldom went two weeks without having to have Comcast on the phone or make a trip out to poke at the wiring - which did not make us feel "Comcastic" (their slogan at the time). Comcast earned a reputation for themselves on piss-poor internet service and even worse customer service. Everyone I kn
Re: (Score:3)
I think they are related. Comcast would never have rolled out it's own system if there was no competition.
Re: So... relevance? (Score:2)
Exactly this. BT (I'm in the UK) hadn't given a shit about improving the infrastructure on our business park for the last 10 years. Then along comes a privately (funded by a bloke in The City) who is installing 100Mb/s fibre to homes, mainly to rural areas. More expensive than BT, but so what, it was 50 times fate.
We also got a leaflet about their business services - 1Gb/s (including 4hr on-site), was about half the price of our 100Mb/s leased line. Granted it doesn't have a 100% SLA.
Suddenly BT send around
Re: (Score:2)
If only they could come to the conclusion that they could build a fiber network first in a city that doesn't have any at all. But that would just make too much sense.
Yeah, but the power company building a fiber network shows that there's *demand* in that city! /snark
Re: (Score:2)
Currently, there is no mechanism in place to track demand. Other than what the broadband companies do for themselves. With regulated utilities (which broadband providers should become), service requests and response times are tracked and reported to various utilities commissions.
If there were some centralized point where requests for service could be accumulated, then Comcast and its ilk couldn't claim that there is insufficient demand in a particular area to justify construction.
Re: (Score:3)
I can confirm Speedtest's results independently by uploading/downloading content to an Amazon EC2 instance. I am, in fact, getting what both the cable company and Speedtest.net have told me I'm getting, which is good, because I refuse to do business with Ve