Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
The Internet

Comcast Brings Fiber To City That It Sued 7 Years Ago To Stop Fiber Rollout 182

Posted by samzenpus from the imitation-is-the-sincerest-form-of-flattery dept.
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.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Comcast Brings Fiber To City That It Sued 7 Years Ago To Stop Fiber Rollout More

Comcast Brings Fiber To City That It Sued 7 Years Ago To Stop Fiber Rollout

Comments Filter:

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday April 30, 2015 @08:10PM (#49590505)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:when? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by preaction ( 1526109 ) on Thursday April 30, 2015 @08:35PM (#49590593)

      Infinity. It would have taken infinity.

      • Re: when? (Score:5, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 30, 2015 @08:55PM (#49590677)

        You mean... xfinity...

        • 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 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.

            • 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.

    • Re:when? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Shakrai ( 717556 ) on Thursday April 30, 2015 @09:02PM (#49590697) Journal

      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.

      By the way, where's my fucking IPv6? That would offer more future proofing than upgrading my connection from 100Mbps to 2Gbps. Tell me, what's on the horizon tomorrow that I can't do with my 100Mbps connection?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Qzukk ( 229616 )

        Tell me, what's on the horizon tomorrow that I can't do with my 100Mbps connection

        Download two linux cd images in a second?

        • Re:when? (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Shakrai ( 717556 ) on Thursday April 30, 2015 @09:28PM (#49590755) Journal

          You're going for the sarcasm, but that's really the only point I see for these mega speed tiers. I do a lot of Android hacking and regularly download ROMs in the 300 to 700 megabyte range. When I had my 10Mbps connection that meant killing 10 or 11 minutes of time while I waited for it to download. Now I can do it in 2 or 3 minutes, which is certainly nice, but it's hardly a fundamental change in the way I use the internet.

          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).

          Frankly I'd rather have 10/10 or 20/20 with good contention ratios (i.e., I should be able to count on getting full speed most of the time, barring exigent and/or unforeseen circumstances) than one of these overpriced mega speed tiers that offers shitty upload with massively oversubscribed download.

          • 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.

            • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

              by Shakrai ( 717556 )

              150 down, 150 up... really a wonderful thing... That 700MB download? About 39 seconds...

              Pretty cool, but still not a fundamental change in the way you use the internet. 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.

              As an aside, I'm jealous that you can max out your 150/150 FIOS connection but my old 15Mbps

              • Re:when? (Score:5, Interesting)

                by FlyHelicopters ( 1540845 ) on Thursday April 30, 2015 @11:52PM (#49591205)

                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.

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by Pascoea ( 968200 )

                  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

                  • 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

              • 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.

                • 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

              • 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.

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by Ogive17 ( 691899 )

                  The state of Internet in the US is embarrassing... where there is a monopoly, the prices are stupid and the speeds are slow.

                  Which is basically everywhere!

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by jon3k ( 691256 )
                  I guess it depends on your opinion of slow. I think really it's just expensive. At my company we buy a lot of broadband backup for satellite offices (many, many dozens) and work with every cable provider in the southeast, and we can get 100-150mb/s in pretty much any area that isn't the total "sticks". Unfortunately it costs $250-$300/mo (this is for commercial service, residential is typically about one third that price). So yeah, pretty fast in my opinion, just pretty pricey. This includes Comcast, M

                  • 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. :)

          • 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.

          • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward

            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

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Khyber ( 864651 )

            "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.

          • 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

        • 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.

      • 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

      • 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...

      • 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

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Shakrai ( 717556 )

          Stop holding back the future by asking for comparisons from today.

          There are tens of millions of people that get to make the following choice:
          1. Dial up.
          2. High latency capped satellite.

          If they're "lucky" they one or two more choices:
          3. Slow and asymmetric ADSL
          4. Fast but capped LTE.

          I have no desire to hold back the future but if you ask me to rate my frustrations with the residential internet marketplace in the United States a lack of gigabit+ speeds doesn't make the list.

          Incidentally, the sentence that you quoted had the word "residential" in bold. You liste

          • 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

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by jon3k ( 691256 )
            We are never going to run fiber to ever single random household in the boonies. Ever. It's never going to happen. The cost of the labor alone makes it unfeasible. What we need to do is focus on deploying fiber in high density areas TODAY so we can start deploying the services of tomorrow. Then, overtime, continue to expand the availability of fiber. We cannot hold ourselves ransom to an unattainable dream of fiber to ever home and stop building towards the future. You create this false dichotomy that

      • 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

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dbIII ( 701233 )

          Today? There is no point.

          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.

          • LOL. Did you read the rest of my post?

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by dbIII ( 701233 )
              No. It appears I should have. It doesn't change the point I'm making where with enough bandwidth available you would become much closer to the typical case NOW.

              nobody is building Internet services that need several hundred megabits for reasonable performance

              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

              • nobody is building Internet services that need several hundred megabits for reasonable performance

                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

      • The first question that comes to my mind is, "What the fuck is the point of 2 Gbps service for residential customers?"

        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.

        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 spee

      • 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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Aereus ( 1042228 )
        It's just a dick-wagging contest, since EPB "only" offers 1Gbps. Besides, the boilerplate undoubtedly says that is maximum theoretical and the guaranteed minimum is like 1% of that.

      • 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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jon3k ( 691256 )
        Too expensive (cost per home passed). Money is better spent battling it out in high density areas with high demand for internet service. It's simple economics.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jthill ( 303417 )

        "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.

      • Have you seen how massive games are these days? GTA V is a 60 GB download, The Evil Within is a 50 GB download, Titanfall is 30 GB, etc - all just the base games, no DLC included in those sizes. If you're barely paying more than you used to pay for a 30 - 50 Mbps connection, why WOULDN'T you go for 1 - Gbps and not have to spend hours or days downloading a new game?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Sique ( 173459 )

        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.

      • more than 2 separate 4K video streams?

        As others have noted, not having to wait hours for downloads has benefits to productivity as well as creativity.

  • Lucky bastards (Score:3)

    by RingDev ( 879105 ) on Thursday April 30, 2015 @08:11PM (#49590515) Homepage Journal

    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

    • 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

    • 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...

  • Correction (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Ignacio ( 1465 ) on Thursday April 30, 2015 @08:39PM (#49590611)

    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)

      by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Thursday April 30, 2015 @08:50PM (#49590641)

      $50-$120? try more like $150-$300 + $250-750 install with 3 year contract with a $200+ ETF and $20 mo modem rent fee.

    • 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."

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ZipK ( 1051658 )

      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.

    • As I understand it, the fiber roll out was done to support smart metering by the utility. Much of the infrastructure the city is supporting for fiber to the house is supported by electricity costs not the internet cost. It is hard enough to undercut the competition if it is a government provider, but this is a government provider that is providing a lot of the business expenses through a service sector you can't even compete in.

  • But not until this year has Comcast had an Internet offering that can match or beat EPB's $70 gigabit service.

    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)

      by Darinbob ( 1142669 ) on Thursday April 30, 2015 @11:43PM (#49591169)

      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.

      • This had been approved by the duly elected city council. From what I can see this looks like the voters actually like this.

        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

  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... [wikipedia.org]

    Predatory pricing (also undercutting) is a pricing strategy where a product or service is set at a very low price, intending to drive competitors out of the market, or create barriers to entry for potential new competitors. If competitors or potential competitors cannot sustain equal or lower prices without losing money, they go out of business or choose not to enter the business. The predatory merchant then has fewer competitors or is even a de facto monopoly.

    In many countries predatory pricing is considered anti-competitive and is illegal under competition laws. It is usually difficult to prove that prices dropped because of deliberate predatory pricing rather than legitimate price competition. In any case, competitors may be driven out of the market before the case is ever heard.

    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

  • An EPB Customer's Perspective (Score:5, Informative)

    by DenaliPrime ( 6153 ) on Friday May 01, 2015 @12:28AM (#49591327) Homepage Journal
    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.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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

Slashdot Top Deals

For God's sake, stop researching for a while and begin to think!

Close