Comcast, Beware: New City-Run Broadband Offers 1Gbps For $60 a Month (arstechnica.com) 110
A municipal broadband service in Fort Collins, Colorado went live for new customers today, less than two years after the city's voters approved the network despite a cable industry-led campaign against it. Ars Technica reports: Fort Collins Connexion, the new fiber-to-the-home municipal option, costs $59.95 a month for 1Gbps download and 1Gbps upload speeds, with no data caps, contracts, or installation fees. There's a $15 monthly add-on fee to cover Wi-Fi, but customers can avoid that fee by purchasing their own router. Fort Collins Connexion also offers home phone service, and it plans to add TV service later on. Connexion is only available in a small portion of the city right now.
"The initial number of homes we're targeting this week is 20-30. We will notify new homes weekly, slowly ramping up in volume," Connexion spokesperson Erin Shanley told Ars. While Connexion's fiber lines currently pass just a small percentage of the city's homes and businesses, Shanley said the city's plan is to build out to the city limits within two or three years. "Ideally we will capture more than 50% of the market share, similar to Longmont," another Colorado city that built its own network, Shanley said. Beta testers at seven homes are already using the Fort Collins service, and the plan is to start notifying potential customers about service availability today. The city reportedly issued $143 million in bonds to finance the city-wide network. Fort Collins has a population of 165,000. The two residential internet packages that Connexion is offering are the $59.95 gigabit plan and 10Gbps plan for $299.95 a month. Shanley told Ars that "there are no taxes and fees on internet service," aside from the optional $15 charge to use city-provided Wi-Fi hardware instead of a customer-purchase router.
The broadband service also offers a gigabit Internet and phone service bundle for $74.90 a month. "Phone service on its own starts at $19.95 a month," adds Ars. "When TV service is available, there will be an Internet and TV bundle for $119.90 a month, and a bundle of all three services starts at $144.85."
"The initial number of homes we're targeting this week is 20-30. We will notify new homes weekly, slowly ramping up in volume," Connexion spokesperson Erin Shanley told Ars. While Connexion's fiber lines currently pass just a small percentage of the city's homes and businesses, Shanley said the city's plan is to build out to the city limits within two or three years. "Ideally we will capture more than 50% of the market share, similar to Longmont," another Colorado city that built its own network, Shanley said. Beta testers at seven homes are already using the Fort Collins service, and the plan is to start notifying potential customers about service availability today. The city reportedly issued $143 million in bonds to finance the city-wide network. Fort Collins has a population of 165,000. The two residential internet packages that Connexion is offering are the $59.95 gigabit plan and 10Gbps plan for $299.95 a month. Shanley told Ars that "there are no taxes and fees on internet service," aside from the optional $15 charge to use city-provided Wi-Fi hardware instead of a customer-purchase router.
The broadband service also offers a gigabit Internet and phone service bundle for $74.90 a month. "Phone service on its own starts at $19.95 a month," adds Ars. "When TV service is available, there will be an Internet and TV bundle for $119.90 a month, and a bundle of all three services starts at $144.85."
Colorado does it again (Score:1)
Longmont, about 45 minutes south of Fort Collins, also has gigabit internet for $60 / month. It's fantastic. Two years and I've never had to call support for anything.
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I got it as a promo for $50 a month when I lived in Longmont. We moved though and are in Nederland with 20/7 for $60 a month. It’s a good trade off though all things considered :)
[John]
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In Colorado Springs Centurylink offers 1Gbps up/down fiber for $65 a month. The ONT rental fee is like $10 a month. I think you can buy your own but it's expensive enough that it would take more than a year before it paid for itself unlike a regular DSL modem which could pay for itself in a few months.
Re: Colorado does it again (Score:2)
No, that's not for the ONT, it's for the wireless router they give you. Just use your own and tag vlan202. Problem solved.
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Let me know when it goes down to 9.99 bucks a month, like in my country :)
https://translate.google.com/t... [google.com]
Re: Colorado does it again (Score:2)
...to win future brand loyalty
In English, we call it "marketshare" (this obviously isn't about loyalty).
Re: Colorado does it again (Score:2)
If Comcast cared about brand loyalty they wouldn't always publicly make excuses for why they keep winning the golden turd award. Comcast doesn't give a shit about that, all they care about is regulatory capture.
Beware Indeed (Score:4, Interesting)
For perspective, I pay $100 / month for 250 / 15 from Xfinity as I type this. Internet only, no TV or Phone bundle with it.
My own cable modem and router. Terabyte cap, but I've never even come close to it.
If municipal broadband was offered here at the price mentioned in the article, Xfinity would lose EVERYONE because
the only competition is either Cellular Data, Satellite, or *DSL running on the shittiest copper plant in existence.
*When I had DSL, I was lucky to get 56k out of it. It was beyond pathetic.
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Kind of makes you wonder why they haven't been scrambling to upgrade service nearly everywhere. Yes, replacing all that old copper would be expensive, but municipal services have been leading the charge for 1 Gbps connectivity in the US for awhile now.
The big telcos and cable companies still have the pull to roll out service faster than any municipality. They're dragging their feet.
Re:Beware Indeed (Score:4, Interesting)
1. People who think that government is always bad. There are some of these idiots who post regularly on /..
2. Lobbying and money put into opposing municipal ISPs.
Note that the latter has been successful, with some states passing laws that put high barriers against cities building their own ISP service.
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What about private-publics making bond issues and then paying back the bonds with the profits from the ISP expansion? Not everyone is using tax money to build these municipal systems.
Also who is actually starting an ISP today that isn't just a reseller for one of the cable/telco monopolies?
Re:Beware Indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not that governments are always bad. But it's pretty shitty when you start/invest in a business and then the government comes along and competes against you using TAXPAYER funds.
I would agree with you if we were talking about a bakery, or a manufacturing company.
But Internet is arguably a public utility. It's taking the place of Ma Bell. And, reliable as it was, POTS wasn't cheap,
Look at it this way: if the residents of a town think they can collectively provide Internet service to themselves for less money than Comcast is charging, why shouldn't they be allowed to try? This isn't a case of "Government" forcing something on a community, this is the community saying, "we can do it cheaper" and taking on the risk themselves.
In this case OK though (Score:3)
when you start/invest in a business and then the government comes along and competes against you using TAXPAYER funds
I agree that is bad.
However, large ISP's like Comcast are essentially government. You cannot offer private competition against them, they will use government to stop you.
Therefore I see municipal broadband as more a case of government competing against government... that sounds like a good idea, internal competition.
Really the worst? (Score:2)
I may have you beat, here in Silicon Valley.
In the subdivision where my townhouse lies, the mid-20th-century copper plant is underground along the back of the lots facing the elementary school playground. They replaced the pedestals recently. But the underground cables were (and still are) sufficiently damaged that there are far too few good pair left.
When the rainstorm took out both my phone lines a few years back, they replaced the lines to
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Yea this is how most repairs go these days. Anything that requires any real long term work or investment is just patched to the barest minimum to get working "for now". Most repairs to underground cabling is not replacing the cabling that's damaged, no they will adjust the levels of an amplifier or just attach to you to different port that's getting a better connection or run a patch/split from another location. You'd be surprised at how many times someone who's had something fix now has a neighbor who
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Not a Comcast cheerleader here at all. But I hate AT&T with all the hatred I can muster. Good luck dealing with AT&T, they have always treated me badly.
Re: Beware Indeed (Score:2)
Re: Beware Indeed (Score:2)
That's not bad. I had 100/5 for $100. I got a TV bundle that needed a $150 install. We never turned on the 20 year old receivers that we rent for $20/month.
So we could apparently get rid of one of the receivers. But if we remove both the very basic TV bundle stops and the net only price is.... $100!
Anyway, ATT Fiber finally came after 7 years. It's 1gb/1gb for $40 and that is a 2 year contract. Of course Comcast priced itself down to $60 all of a sudden... for new customers.
To give more history, it took Com
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Say I wanted to backup some data from a friend or from work, I could hit 1TB in 11hours lol theoretically.
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100/100 from FiOS #39.95 a month contract free. They offer a gigabit tier for $70 or so. Diminishing returns for me at that point.
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I live nearby Ft Collins and Longmont, and its funny - now that those cities have relatively cheap gigabit internet service, Xfinity has been quietly offering its own gigabit internet for $70/mo. I recently upgraded to that after paying the exact same amount for their 250/15 service.
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For perspective, I pay $100 / month for 250 / 15 from Xfinity as I type this. Internet only, no TV or Phone bundle with it.
For another comparison point but in the other direction, I pay 35€/month [www.free.fr] (~$39) for 1Gb/s down, 600Mb/s up (tested to 870Mb/s / 450Mb/s), no cap, fixed IPv4 address, IPv6, WiFi roaming, 100+ TV channels some of which in 4K, recording and replay services, unlimited landline phone calls to 100+ countries, and 2 hours of cell phone calls to 100+ countries and from countries within Europe but essentially no data to go with that. Adding an unlimited 4G+ plan would be an extra 20€/month.
I could also p
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For another comparison point but in the other direction, I pay 35€/month [www.free.fr] (~$39) for 1Gb/s down, 600Mb/s up...
To clarify a potential ambiguity, these are all-included prices: do not add VAT, do not add local, regional or national taxes, do not add extra for the "modem" rental (it's included), do not add extra for the TV decoder (except for the higher end 10Gb/s offer where it's a one time 480€ purchase).
Anyone know what the angle is? (Score:4, Insightful)
Have they just not gotten around to one of those laws in Colorado? I can't imagine they'll let this stand. Once people see it working they'll want it for themselves. Kind of like how Medicare for All is polling around 70% nationally.
Re:Anyone know what the angle is? (Score:5, Informative)
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Heathcare used to be affordable in the past... and certainly is affordable in other countries. The excuses made for high costs never hold water. The problem we have now is too much complex regulation, we need simple and effective regulation. Not just more bureaucracy (medicare) which will tend to drive up costs since they'll be able to just buy out whoever is in charge... kind of like how
Re:Anyone know what the angle is? (Score:5, Interesting)
Please explain why government-run healthcare is cheaper and delivers better outcomes in countries where healthcare is run by the government.
We're talking about gov't insurance (Score:4, Interesting)
Government run healthcare means the gov't runs everything. To be honest that works too. But in the US we're much better off with single payer because we already have a large, well run single payer system in place, Medicare, and it just needs a bit of beefing up to cover what it doesn't cover now.
As for why gov't run healthcare is more profitable:
a. Healthcare is fundamentally about insurance. Not everybody gets sick or injured, but we don't know _who_ will until they're in their 60s (when everyone starts breaking down) and even then we don't know _how_ they'll get sick. Insurance does best with the largest pool of insurees, and the largest pool is the entire nation.
b. As a healthcare consumer I am ill equipped to make informed decisions. I can easily figure out the best snake cake to buy (it's moonpies & RC cola) and I can figure out the best car to buy with some work and I can even with a _lot_ of work figure out the best home to buy. I can't shop around for a heart transplant. It's too complicated, there are too many factors involved, and I'm only ever going to get 1. The same goes for my pharmaceuticals. If I had the training to know which drug to buy I'd be a doctor
c. Finally and most importantly, we're seeing Venture Capitalists buying up life sustaining drugs and hospitals left and right. Let me ask you this (don't answer, just think about it): How much would you pay so your wife, husband or child could walk? How much would it be worth that they don't spend the rest of their life in a wheelchair?
Right now there's a VC who's busy figuring that out and buying up access to things like hip and knee replacements. They're using their vast wealth to become the gatekeepers to medicine that radically changes quality and duration of life. They're turning Medicine into the iBook; a luxury item few can afford but that is so desirable that it's still insanely profitable. With the difference being I can live without an iBook, I can't live without the heart medication that keeps me alive.
A few things I forgot to add (Score:2)
d. Administrative costs are much, much lower in a non-profit health insurance system, which is where a lot of the savings come from (I touched on this with the Venture Capitalists but didn't state it plainly).
e. Preventative care is incredibly valuable. In America people don't go to the doctor until the damage is done and it's much, much more expensive to treat.
On a side note point (e.) is where "free" money comes from in a social democracy. Basically inaction costs money too. If it costs me $1000 t
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Please explain why government-run healthcare is cheaper and delivers better outcomes in countries where healthcare is run by the government.
Put simply, those countries health care systems are focused primarily on the needs of sick people, not shareholders.
Re:Anyone know what the angle is? (Score:5, Insightful)
There is plenty of evidence that it does.
I'll ask you to look at the UK. Healthcare was simply too expensive for much of the population before the NHS was formed. Isn't affordability the key issue?
Does it? Or do government medical programs actually reduce the cost of private healthcare through cost saving.
The key difference is that private heathcare is focused on increasing revenue, while public healthcare options can focus on reducing cost by making people healthy again.
I have personal and family experience of both UK and US healthcare. US healthcare is typically pure crap. Treatment is far worse than in the UK. But, hey, healthcare in the USA costs far more, so it must be better, right?
I note that you say nothing about outcomes.
You are under a delusion similar to Stockholm syndrome -- US healthcare has abused you so much, yet, you still support it.
Exactly. US healthcare is so bad that it is hard to imagine that it could get worse.
However, a public/private hybrid would probably manage to be worse, which is why a single-payer/Medicare for all system is really the only viable option.
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I'll ask you to look at the UK. Healthcare was simply too expensive for much of the population before the NHS was formed. Isn't affordability the key issue?
There is no *key issue* You need to look at overall quality of healthcare as well, which includes:
- Access to procedures
- Wait times
- Availability of doctors
Among other intangibles. I'll be the first to admit the US healthcare system is broken, but I see significant issues in government run systems as well, with patients also exhibiting similar "Stockholm syndrome" behaviors. The waiting rooms in hospitals in Detroit usually have quite a few people from Windsor, across the river in Canada, mainly because th
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Canada does it at the Provincial level with the Federal government setting minimums and routing money around. Our Constitution makes it a Provincial thing so the feds do like your feds do with highways.
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You are under a delusion similar to Stockholm syndrome -- US healthcare has abused you so much, yet, you still support it.
So what you are saying is you have no sympathy for those suffering. Bernie sanders is trying to take my health insurance away and make it illegal!1!!1! I have Stockholm syndrome and want to keep my insurance. I can't help but to sympathize with my abusers. Every paycheck deduction, every copay, the uncertainty if it's in plan or even covered, trying to price check heart attack treatments on the way to the hospital in an uber instead of an ambulance and having no clue what it costs and no way to even fi
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First of all, your diagnosis of me is completely wrong. I don't support US healthcare, I just don't support making it worse via "Medicare for all". That's taking the cause of the problems we have now and making them worse by pouring gasoline on the fire. It's giving the same people who have screwed it up for decades even more power over it.
Second, your example of the UK fails to demonstrate a country can switch from private to public and save money. Adjusted for inflation and taking into account national in
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What you're missing is that private healthcare only makes money if they provide a service their customers want. In other words, if they make people healthy.
Wow! Major delusion here. Healthy people don't go to hospitals to get treatment (the exception being cosmetic surgery and the likes). So most private healthcare only makes money if people are ill. That means they can pick the most expensive cure and a lot of the time you won't even have the opportunity to shop around. Or they can pick a cheap cure that will only work in the short term, ensuring repeat business and you'll be none the wiser.
Here's what a government-run single-payer grocery store [youtu.be] looks like.
So you're saying this is what healthcare looks like in Canada [wikipedia.org] and the
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First, I've spent 3 months this year so far "abroad". I'm well aware of what other countries systems look like. Wait times for public single-payer systems are twice or more what they are in the United States. In Canada, 60% of patients wait at least 4 weeks just to see a specialist, compared to 25% in the U.S., and the U.S. system sucks compared to how it could be.
Second, the lack of competition in health care (which is one of the key items missing) is primarily because of government regulations restricting
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First, I've spent 3 months this year so far "abroad". I'm well aware of what other countries systems look like.
France, UK and USA, spent at least a year in each so same here.
In Canada, 60% of patients wait at least 4 weeks just to see a specialist, compared to 25% in the U.S., and the U.S. system sucks compared to how it could be.
Of course the wait lines are going to be shorter when most people cannot afford to see a specialist because their insurance does not cover it and they cannot afford an insurance that will.
It's also interesting to note that the overall healthcare quality in Canada and the United Kingdom which you so much derided is consistently [who.int] being [commonwealthfund.org] rated [april-international.com] higher [worldpopul...review.com] than the one in the USA.
Second, the lack of competition in health care (which is one of the key items missing) is primarily because of government regulations restricting the supply.
I don't think supply restrictions and lack of competition are a necessary co
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Sorry, must've been confusing you with higher in the thread. Supply restrictions and lack of competition in the United States are a direct result of current government policy/laws/regulations.
But you can't claim a public health care system is best by using an article whose criteria of best is: "What countries have the best healthcare in the world? One of the best ways to determine the nations with the best healthcare is by taking a look at the 2019 Best Countries report from U.S. News & World Report. In
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As I said, Stockholm Syndrome. You are trapped in the way things are.
I can't find anything in your link that shows pre-NHS spending on healthcare, so your argument on this point is not valid. Besides which, as I pointed out, most people could not afford comprehensive healthcare, so naturally spending was lower. It's an apples to oranges comparison.
Adjust this for actu
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My argument isn't invalid because you lack simple reading comprehension or the ability to click a link. Start with the first paragraph of the report cited:
Re: Anyone know what the angle is? (Score:2)
You do have reading comprehension issues. You claimed that the linked study showed an increase in spending from pre NHS to post the introduction of the NHS. It doesn't.
In fact it shows a reduction in spending on the years immediately after the introduction of the NHS.
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Are you confused and reading % of GDP in the chart instead of the actual spending line?
Here's the source with specific numbers [ohe.org] in table 2.2. It shows:
447 million pounds total spent in the UK in 1949 (Start of the NHS)
482 in 1950
883 in 1960, and so on.
Per capita, that's 9, 10, 17 respectively, you don't think those are increases?
The UK wasn't my example, I asked for an example of where implementing a national public healthcare system saved money and that's the example I was told to investigate. I was just re
Re: Anyone know what the angle is? (Score:2)
The start of the NHS was 1948, not 1949. That chat does not show any pre NHS data.
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How is that relevant to you showing that "the costs went down afterwards"? After the conversion to the NHS, did the costs go down, or not?
No, they didn't. Please provide your source and annual numbers on total health care expenditures to back up your contention if you disagree.
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I should also point out that although healthcare spending has increased over the life of the NHS, this is a meaningless statistic by itself. You need to show that there has not been a similar or greater increase in the USA.
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The original contention by you was that after converting to healthcare run by the government in the UK, the costs went down. Here's the exchange from your post, emphasis added:
Now you ad
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My comment was not a direct answer to your question. In any case you haven't shown any valid data, because you haven't shown any cost data for before the start of the NHS in 1948
Even using the graph in the original link, total spending as a percentage of GDP reduced in the years 1940-1958.
I'm not going to dig into another document, only to find that you have misrepresented it.
More importantly, the graph does not support your contention that "the UK spends more than twice as much on health care now than pre
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So you're saying you quoted me in your post and directly replied to the quote with "I'll ask you to look at the UK", but didn't actually mean to answer the question you were quoting? Now you don't seem to be even conversing honestly.
Costs, as in how much was spent on health care. It's a simple concept, which has nothing to do with what GDP was in the UK for those years, nor what spending on library books was, nor how much tea sold for. You take how much total was spent in the UK on health care at one point,
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BTW, just so you can see I'm not just BS'ing you, since you seem to really really want pre-1948, pre-NHS numbers to post-NHS start numbers in terms of percent of GDP (should be really be cost per capita instead, but hey, you can have all the benefit of the doubt you want for your position), here you go [ukpublicspending.co.uk]:
So admit you are totally wrong about the
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As I pointed out earlier and you keep ignoring, pre-NHS, many people simply didn't have access to healthcare, so attempting to compare costs is not valid.
You want to be pedantic about my post being a directly reply to your question, but also don't want to have to define the key
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Have you got a citation to show that this is due to "regulations" and not collusion between insurance companies and MRI providers?
Re: Anyone know what the angle is? (Score:2)
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Since you failed to provide a single citation, we can readily infer that you are talking bullshit.
Re: Anyone know what the angle is? (Score:2)
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i'm not sure what your argument is here, considering that most OECD countries have better funded public health care systems and seem to be spending less
i'd extrapolate from that that a better funded system produces more efficient results, not that we should make the current system cheaper to justify providing better funding
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The argument I was responding to was that if we did a "Medicare for all" plan where the government ran all of health care spending, they could keep costs to levels similar to the public healthcare systems in other countries. The statement of mine you quoted was a response that if the government is already spending more than those countries while covering only 37% of people, it makes no sense to think you're going to increase that coverage to 100% and magically spend the same or less than the government is a
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Re:Anyone know what the angle is? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Yeah, I'm currently paying $70/month for Gigabit symmetrical, with about four different choices of comparable fiber service. They also have inexpensive TV and phone combo options, which I don't need. "Basic" is $50/month symmetrical for 100MBs, so I figure that's enough to cover their fixed costs.
Of course, that's because they let in competition in the local loop half-a-dozen years ago, rather than the politicians giving access away to one company.
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That Wired article is quite different from every complaint I've ever heard about cable/telco Internet duopolies.
Can we stop this? (Score:2, Informative)
A wireless access point (AP) is not a router. A router is not an AP. Just because they're often found combined into a single box doesn't make it correct to say "router" when referring to an AP, as was done here.
(Also, most consumer devices which connect to an ISP are _just barely_ routers, they typically don't support routing protocols, or even do full IP routing [multicast routing is typically
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Comcast have two choices here... (Score:3)
Either they improve their own network and get competitive, or...
You know, lawyers, bribes..
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Considering that the city has floated $150M in bonds to pay for it, and only provide service (right now) to about 20 houses, I don't think Comcast has to worry for a while....
Got to wonder whether the 20 houses are in the same part of the city, or whether they belong to people with connections....
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That said it doesn't take terribly long for stuff to get installed if they actually start working on it... that's the real question. It just becomes a repetitive process of adding a new street each week etc... so while the initial pilot might be 20-30 houses, you can conceivably be doing hundreds of houses a week if you have several crews doing neighborhood setup an a few dozen tech's to do the house end of things.
Chattanooga had this 15 years ago (Score:3)
Unfortunately, no other city in Tennessee can get it because the whore legislators there got bribed by the scared cabelcos to pass a law to make it illegal for other cities to follow suite.
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Lots ot think about (Score:1)
At one level having the government provide low cost high speed internet is great. At another it seems worth reading the contract very carefully to see what data they are allowed to access and what they can do with it. (of course the same applies to commercial vendors).
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That might bother me if I didn't just assume that NSA already has direct access to whatever they want anyway. If you don't control all the hardware and software that makes up your communications, it is pretty safe to assume the government can get to it.
Maybe Apple is safe with their end to end encryption but even those have flaws that other security companies have found and exploited. I wouldn't be surprised if NSA is sitting on some zero-day bugs that they won't even share with the FBI because they are eit
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Clearly city-run Internet works. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Of course private companies can do this, but overwhelmingly they don't.
Something similar happening in my town (Score:5, Informative)
Adios Time Warner, you had your chance.
So the real cost is (Score:3, Informative)
So the actual cost is:
OK, I want to encourage experimentation with public Internet to see if it's cost-competitive with private ISPs. But that's just blatantly unfair. The only reason to experiment with this is because you think a public service can provide Internet for cheaper (at a given level of quality/speed) than a private service. If you're forcing private ISPs to add taxes and fees to their service, then you gotta add them to the public service as well. Otherwise it becomes "successful" only because it's receiving a government subsidy, and you've legitimized all the arguments against government-funded Internet access.
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So the actual cost is:
OK, I want to encourage experimentation with public Internet to see if it's cost-competitive with private ISPs. But that's just blatantly unfair. The only reason to experiment with this is because you think a public service can provide Internet for cheaper (at a given level of quality/speed) than a private service. If you're forcing private ISPs to add taxes and fees to their service, then you gotta add them to the public service as well. Otherwise it becomes "successful" only because it's receiving a government subsidy, and you've legitimized all the arguments against government-funded Internet access.
A few additional considerations:
First, you assume that after 7 years, all the equipment will be thrown away, and all the HW, SW, business processes, etc. will be created from scratch. Since that won't be the case, only some fraction of the $143 million needs to be spent again.
Second, the big fallacy in comparing the USPS versus UPS/Fedex is that the USPS is hamstrung by being forced to provide service to all households, including those that are more expensive to service. If the private corporation were eq
Re: So the real cost is (Score:2)
Why are you adding the $33 to the $60? Normally, the rates that utilities charge include the costs of capital (loan/bond payback and interest) in addition to the cost of the service. IOW, the $60 rate should already include the $33 bond payback (+ interest). Is there evidence this is not the case here?
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The city issued bonds, basically borrowed $143m to build the network. That means the $143m was not taxpayer money and not a cost to the taxpayers.
However, the city will need money to pay back the debt when the bonds mature.
This is where the $60/mo/home goes, towards paying back the $143m, not as a cost in addition to it.
Using your numbers, $143m works out to be $33/mo/home. So, each month the city actually runs a $60 - $33 = $27 profit per home.
From a resident of the city's perspective, he/she is paying $
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> That means the $143m was not taxpayer money and not a cost to the taxpayers.
Come on, taxpayers have to pay that back. Yes, of course, they are charging money each month, but often that just eaten up by administrative and maintenance costs.
Anyway, I'm sure Comcast got some kind of help with capital too, or something. Some places I've lived have garbage collection paid for by the city (aka by everyone), and other places I have to hire some private company to haul away the trash. There's nothing inher
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> Come on, taxpayers have to pay that back.
Taxpayers have to pay only if the city runs a loss.
The parent poster made some assumptions and came up with some numbers. I was just explaining to the parent poster what his/her numbers mean.
I am aware that there are factors not in the calculation, the interests on the bonds for one, the others include administrative and maintenance costs, like you said, or that not every internet-connected home in the city is a subscriber to the city network, etc.
Whether or no
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The $60 can be used to pay off the $33, why is it being added?
The $143 million is a cost (money spent).
The $60 per month is income. They should be on different sides of the equation and as such should be subtracted, resulting in money left over.
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And that does not include maintenance.
Take me home, country roads (Score:1)
My little town (new) in the Blue Ridge Mountains is already rolling out a 1gbps fiber service in-town. It's gotten up to about 2 blocks from my place, and I'm told it's moving about 6 blocks per year. Of course, we have a major research university here, which I'm sure helps. The price is currently $45/month without caps. There are only about 40,000 people here, and probably half of them are students, so the focus on connectivity is appreciated, I'm sure. Other than the muni broadband, you have two basic cho
Expensive add-ons (Score:2)
"Phone service on its own starts at $19.95 a month," adds Ars. "When TV service is available, there will be an Internet and TV bundle for $119.90 a month, and a bundle of all three services starts at $144.85"
What's up with that? Here in NL (and many other European countries), ISP will often throw in 1 or 2 phone lines for free, or for a couple €. I thought about getting rid of the TV package and install FreeSat (still got a dish somewhere in the shed), but the price difference is hardly worth the effort. I pay around €60/mo for 300Mb up/down plus 2 phone lines and basic "cable". Dropping the TV package would bring the price down by €10 only. In the US you do get way more channels, but I woul
Re: Expensive add-ons (Score:2)
What does the phone service get you? Can you call all over the EU with that? This $20 covers an area almost 2.5x the EU.
But most likely the charge is there to discourage adoption and from providing it to a smaller set of people. Except for the older generations, most have cellular for their main lines.
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Re: Expensive add-ons (Score:2)
Islesboro, Maine has this totally beat . . . (Score:2)
The government of Islesboro, Maine provides municipal broadband to every home and business on the island---yep, an island accessible by ferry off the coast of Maine---with the option to have 1-gigabit state-of-the-art fiber-to-the-premise broadband Internet access. Subscribers, who choose, pay a $360 yearly subscriber fee. That's $30/month! More information at: http://townofislesboro.com/com... [townofislesboro.com]
Said one municipal employee to the other... (Score:1)
I know how we can make our money back after that ransomware attack... letâ(TM)s become an internet provider!
Is that supposed to be cheap? (Score:1)
I haven't been to the US for a while, but is $60 supposed to be cheap?
My neighbors get 10Gbps for about $55...
Great! (Score:2)
Re: Today's Internet is a pathetic joke. (Score:2)
Damn. It must really suck to be you. Well, good thing I'm not.