Utah Locals Are Getting Cheap 10 Gbps Fiber Thanks To Local Governments (techdirt.com) 74
Karl Bode writes via Techdirt: Tired of being underserved and overbilled by shitty regional broadband monopolies, back in 2002 a coalition of local Utah governments formed UTOPIA -- (the Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency). The inter-local agency collaborative venture then set about building an "open access" fiber network that allows any ISP to then come and compete on the shared network. Two decades later and the coalition just announced that 18 different ISPs now compete for Utah resident attention over a network that now covers 21 different Utah cities. In many instances, ISPs on the network are offering symmetrical (uncapped) gigabit fiber for as little as $45 a month (plus $30 network connection fee, so $75). Some ISPs are even offering symmetrical 10 Gbps fiber for around $150 a month: "Sumo Fiber, a veteran member of the UTOPIA Open Access Marketplace, is now offering 10 Gbps symmetrical for $119, plus a $30 UTOPIA Fiber infrastructure fee, bringing the total cost to $149 per month."
It's a collaborative hybrid that blurs the line between private companies and government, and it works. And the prices being offered here are significantly less than locals often pay in highly developed tech-centric urban hubs like New York, San Francisco, or Seattle. Yet giant local ISPs like Comcast and Qwest spent decades trying to either sue this network into oblivion, or using their proxy policy orgs (like the "Utah Taxpayer Association") to falsely claim this effort would end in chaos and inevitable taxpayer tears. Yet miraculously UTOPIA is profitable, and for the last 15 years, every UTOPIA project has been paid for completely through subscriber revenues. [...] For years, real world experience and several different studies and reports (including our Copia study on this concept) have made it clear that open access networks and policies result in faster, better, more affordable broadband access. UTOPIA is proving it at scale, but numerous other municipalities have been following suit with the help of COVID relief and infrastructure bill funding.
It's a collaborative hybrid that blurs the line between private companies and government, and it works. And the prices being offered here are significantly less than locals often pay in highly developed tech-centric urban hubs like New York, San Francisco, or Seattle. Yet giant local ISPs like Comcast and Qwest spent decades trying to either sue this network into oblivion, or using their proxy policy orgs (like the "Utah Taxpayer Association") to falsely claim this effort would end in chaos and inevitable taxpayer tears. Yet miraculously UTOPIA is profitable, and for the last 15 years, every UTOPIA project has been paid for completely through subscriber revenues. [...] For years, real world experience and several different studies and reports (including our Copia study on this concept) have made it clear that open access networks and policies result in faster, better, more affordable broadband access. UTOPIA is proving it at scale, but numerous other municipalities have been following suit with the help of COVID relief and infrastructure bill funding.
Had it for five years while I needed it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Comcast pissed and moaned because their 12mbps upload speeds weren't cutting it. I paid for 250mbit UTOPIA service and it was actually in the 280s. I had no need for gigabit at the time. Friends who had gigabit service ran into the problem of their connection being faster than the server on the other end.
I've had that "problem" (Score:2)
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Utopia is a really great model, I wish something like that was in my city. Meanwhile, a family member in California has a house that is like 4 houses away from fiber service (as the crow flies, but literally close enough that a direct ethernet cable would likely be in spec) and has had underground utilities for 20 years (so no excuses about telephone poles or backhoe prices) and fiber isn't offered. Because we're the cable & phone company, so screw you, you'll take what we offer and like it, OR ELSE. No
Re: Had it for five years while I needed it. (Score:2)
Yeah, cause trenching fiber incrementally around a neighborhood is a zero-cost activity.
I bet you the house 4 doors down is part of a different development that had fiber run during the initial build-out.
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Yeah, cause trenching fiber incrementally around a neighborhood is a zero-cost activity.
Please read closer. Utilities are already underground - that means there are already tubes running to each house, no trenching required.
So I'm sure any intern would be capable of tying fiber to the tube's rope and pulling it through the tube. Say 10 minutes per house? Oh the humanity.
I bet you the house 4 doors down is part of a different development that had fiber run during the initial build-out.
You lose the bet. Whole neighborhood was built in like the 1960's. Ah but it's the next block, great excuse for not continuing to roll out fiber to a middle class neighborhood with basically zero construction costs when you can
Re: Had it for five years while I needed it. (Score:2)
That is not how underground utilities work. If you wanted to make a pipe âin waitingâ(TM) for fiber and other things you didnâ(TM)t think of before, it would need to be well engineered and very expensive and is not worth the cost as it is unlikely you would make enough room or have the right specs for the future magic thing you wanted. You cannot just swap out the phone wire or add other things to existing armored cable that is underground, they are built to different specifications than fibe
Why so expensive? (Score:3)
Re: Why so expensive? (Score:2)
Do you think that your ISP service really costs just $20/month, or does the government divert tax revenue to subsidize it?
Re: Why so expensive? (Score:1)
There is a difference when Europeans pay 40% income taxes and 15-25% sales taxes to fund these things. You CAN do the same in the States, but it will suck. European Internet is full of complaints that their cheap gigabit doesnâ(TM)t actually provide more than a few Mbps during times of congestion or this region is still on DSL technology, because the government handles the backbones, there is no incentive to upgrade, because everyone has gotten their gigabit. Similar to how health care, public transpor
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In the end, it comes out to close to a wash.
Re: Had it for five years while I needed it. (Score:2)
Friends who had gigabit service ran into the problem of their connection being faster than the server on the other end.
Please, expand on the idea that having a connection that is faster than the server on the other end is a "problem"? I don't remember this being a problem in the days of dial-up service [youtube.com], why should it be a problem now?
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What's funnier is that with UTOPIA, if I buy the fiber portal, I don't have to pay the $30 interconnect fee. I literally pay $35/mo for amazing internet.
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But that's about to change. Comcast has begun national rollout of DOCSIS 4.0 service, which will allow not only speeds above 1 gigabits per second, but do it symmetrically for download and upload speeds.
Karl Bode is a certified asshole (Score:3)
But this is a good thing anyways. I've always advocated this model for non-rural networks (lot of if, and, and buts involved there, unless we do something like require power companies to always deploy fiber with grid connections since they're already trenching.)
The network fee seems a little high in this case though.
Government doesn't have to pretend (Score:5, Interesting)
Karl Bode doesn't realize this is the model for communications infrastructure in most of the world. He is actually surprised that a government utility can hold corporate interests, accountable. To put it another way, when the government can tell everyone how a service performs, which it can because it owns the backbone, the government doesn't have to pretend those corporations are honest.
3 expensive options (Score:4, Interesting)
Where I live (Texas) there are three ISP's that will hook up to my house from the curb if I subscribe. But mysteriously, the price is roughly the same for all three. It is about $50/month for 300Mbps. Gigabit is $80. I sure would think there could be some price competition, funny that there ain't.
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They have the same problems reaching your domicile, will install the same equipment and must pay the same wages and dividends: It's not surprising there's much similarity. That also creates an incentive to not compete, to slowly increase their prices/service and wait for the competition to do the same.
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>> the same problems reaching your domicile
As I said, they can reach my domicile from the curb. They pay a contractor about $35 to hook up a customer (I asked one of them), and I am using my own cable modem and router 'equipment'. The close similarity in pricing is very fishy, seems like collusion.
Re: 3 expensive options (Score:2)
It's identical service from the 3 providers, the only thing they can differentiate on is customer service.
I wonder if there really are three parallel fiber runs in front of your house, I *strongly* suspect the three companies are all on the same fiber and each rents capacity from one of the other companies that actually owns/installed the fiber.
In other words, once you get past your curb, I think they are all running on the same equipment for the same cost and providing the same service.
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>> I wonder if there really are three parallel fiber runs
Yes there are. AT&T dug new cable runs for the entire neighborhood last year, and there are now 3 termination boxes at the curb. It was a large investment, and yet they are slightly more expensive than the other options for no apparent reason.
Re: 3 expensive options (Score:1)
If you increase prices without a matching increase in costs, then people will move to your competitors. There is literally no incentive to raise prices without offering better/more services than your competitors.
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The lack of price competition isn't caused by collusion.
It's caused by the way we have to pay the municipality- by homes built out by the municipality, rather than revenue share or static price per home serviced by us.
It basically sets the low-end price that anyone can realistically offer, and the only way we can drive our prices down is by competing in take-rate (the one with the most customers can afford lower prices)
It's a fucked up sy
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>> customers on municipally owned networks
The options in my neighborhood are definitely not owned by the municipality. They are Spectrum, Astound, and AT&T. Each has its own cable in conduits that are parallel to each other in the ground, I have seen them.
But I am curious about the situation you describe. "homes built out by the municipality", is this to say that the cable runs were dug by the city? Or that they own even more of the infrastructure? What part of the system do you provide?
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The options in my neighborhood are definitely not owned by the municipality. They are Spectrum, Astound, and AT&T. Each has its own cable in conduits that are parallel to each other in the ground, I have seen them.
Ah- your problem may actually be collusion- those are shit companies lol
But I am curious about the situation you describe. "homes built out by the municipality", is this to say that the cable runs were dug by the city? Or that they own even more of the infrastructure? What part of the system do you provide?
Well, dug by contract from the city- and owned by the city- yes.
We provide the layer-3 data going over the built out transport network. I.e., you select us as your ISP, we interact with municipality (or whoever they're contract to run their network), and they setup the L2 transports from your home to our L3 equipment.
City operates the fiber, and the GPON OLTs and basic L2 transport to the nearest PoP.
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Thanks for that explanation.
10g matters not (Score:2, Interesting)
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There are definitely some sites that serve faster than 1Gbps, especially Steam, Epic Games, Nvidia drivers (just downloaded a 500MB driver update yesterday--took less than 2s--that's at least 5Gbps), other download servers like some package repos, or of course any sort of torrent network.
And of course GCS and AWS S3 can max out 10Gbps.
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you're right that most sites you could download from, max you will get is well under that but it's still nice to have extra head room. I have 8gb fiber and max download speed getting games is something like 180-250MB/s. Steam is on the lower end of that because the main bottleneck is speed of decompression (speed of CPU) not network speed.
That said they also have a 3gbps plan and I doubt I would notice much of a difference from that (250MB/s = 2gbps). You can get closer to maxing out a connection with multi
Re: 10g matters not (Score:2)
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Which means that a household of 10 can all connect to different sites and get full speed.
What is with this assuming only one person in a house can be connected?
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And it should not degrade just because wife and children return home and want to watch some streams, each one with a different taste.
You just got all the cannibals on Slashdot excited...
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So wrong it's laughable.
As someone who sells 1, 2.5, 5, and 10gbps service, as well as operates datacenters that businesses use to provide said data, I assure you the internet is connected at >=10gbps these days, and our customers complain loudly when they can't get the speed they're paying for from 37 different test points across the internet.
As for "consumer", we have customers with 1, 2.5, and 10gbps NICs (hell Mac Mini's come with 10gbps these days, and 2.5gbps is essen
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Completely correct. The issue isn't the download speed, but how fast the web server the send data to the Internet, especially in high-traffic situations. (I remember the old phrase for overloading a website, "Slashdotting," back in the days when web server server was way lower than now.)
Re: 10g matters not (Score:1)
You cannot burst beyond 500M because your provider doesnâ(TM)t actually have the technology to provide more than 1G at low cost over the distances required in urban environments on a shared network. DOCSIS4, which is the next-gen standard for both consumer fiber and copper can do just over gigabit by consuming all channels until you reach the local POP. Current DOCSIS3 at those speeds is really a bundle of multiple data channels, which if you know anything about bonding, you know you need multiple stre
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Re: ArchieFlunker (Score:3)
Care to back that claim up with anything other than opinion pieces that make hand-wavy claims without supporting documentation? Kinda like the famous "women make 72 cents for every dollar a man makes for the exact same work" - which is false, and, by the way, illegal. Women, on the whole, earn 72 cents compared to men, on the whole (all women compared to all men), but when you dig into the numbers women earn almost identically as men do, as numerous studies have shown.
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What you can read from that isn't much, because the nature of the expenditures is too difficult to really make any statements with.
A single military base can drastically alter the ratio for a state with a small GDP (which the majority of red states are)
Large GDP states ("red" or "blue" tend to send more money than they receive)
So the more accurate wa
ISP Portion seems Expensive (Score:2)
The network access portion seems reasonable... but the ISP component would seem excessive. I would expect something like $25/1Gb + $10 profit on service and access. Upstream access should be about $10-15 max, and the other services and infrastructure I would expect to be covered by ~$10-15.
What am I missing?
I pay $80 vs their $75 for same 1 gbit (Score:3)
AT&T fiber has been rock solid since the install, for several years. Speedtest says I'm getting about 950mbs which is fine as the target server is half a state away.
Their service doesn't seem all that amazingly different. $5/month difference isn't that big a deal and AT&T is super major backbone provider.
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Depends where you are...
Some areas have competition and reasonable prices, other areas have no competition so you're stuck with one provider and it's expensive (with usually poor service to boot).
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I pay $49.99 for symmetrical 10Gb service from Sonic (with no data cap) in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Most of the rest of the US does not have that option.
UTOPIA is newsworthy because it's enabling that option for places that are decidedly NOT the SF bay area.
Competition is good (Score:3)
In pretty much any situation where the last century dinosaur ISPs have had face genuine competition from new players, consumers have ended up with a better deal.
Waiting for competition in my area (Score:2)
why do they hate capitalism? (Score:3)
How socilaist (Score:1)
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Let see who they vote for.
Oh.
You do realize UTOPIA offers a free market set of ISP's to connect to, right? And it's not even free? Certainly much more competition, choice, and free market than, say, the electrical grid of the entire USA where only one set of wires is allowed to come to the house.
Oh right, you're just a troll trying to piggyback a snide political comment on a technical discussion. Never mind.
Re-defining the definition of defining. (Score:1)
Utah locals are getting cheap..
It’s 2024. Also known as the era of re-defining the definition of definitions for feelings and fucks sake.
Define “cheap” for me.
This should be rich.
Still a rip-off price (Score:4, Insightful)
When ppl outside the US see those prices, still see them overpriced.
For example in my country (Spain) i can get 10Gbps symetrical + free installation + wifi6 router and as bonus 50 Gb of cloud storage, all for 25 euro a month.
https://www.digimobil.es/fibra... [digimobil.es]
In the US they are riping-off everyone on those obscenous prices
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It's true that we pay more, but our disposable income is also much higher than yours.
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I don't think Econ 101 price/quantity equilibrium is entirely what's going on here. Gigabit service *availability* is about the same in Spain and the US, despite America's per capita purchasing power adjusted GDP being about 60% higher than Spain's.
I think the relevant figure is this: Spain has roughly 2.8x the population density of the US. It's surely a lot more expensive to build the infrastructure to cover roughly the same percent of the population here.
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Median is better.
If you like, you can look at it in terms of disposable income (since really, income- including PPP- doesn't reflect the proportional difference in cost of across the income gradient)
Start here. [worldpopul...review.com]
I think the relevant figure is this: Spain has roughly 2.8x the population density of the US. It's surely a lot more expensive to build the infrastructure to cover roughly the same percent of the population here.
As someone who works in this industry, I assure you the infrastructural cost doesn't really factor into your internet price at all. It's nearly purely labor and datacenter costs.
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The 25 euro/mo 10Gbps is an abnormal price in Spain. It's under half of its competitors.
Incidentally, the people offering that just sold that network for $750m euros.
This smells like a Verizon FIOS scam to me.
Build out a network at a loss, and then sell it to someone for a huge profit based on your subscriber count, and let them raise the prices to make good on the investment.
Marketing vs real world (Score:2)
Meanwhile we run a few hundred circuits across the globe where the vast majority are under 500Mbps, perhaps a handful on the 1Gbps range (because again, that is what the ISP offers) and the ones in our regional data centers are 10Gbps. All while supporting from 300 to 5000 associates in our RnD, manufacturing, and distribution centers at these facilities - shy under 100k folks globally and a ton of automation, data collection, monitoring, patching, VoIP, video, collaboration, file transfer, you name it.
And
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Also- your QoS isn't as great as you think it is.
Our networks are so overbuilt at the layer where the QoS matters that it's functionally a NOP. You're paying for it because we won't let you pay for residential service, and we know you can afford it.
Almost obvious (Score:2)
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The former isn't as good as you think it is. Not that it couldn't be, but in my experience thus far, across 3 states, and roughly a dozen networks, is the fiber operated networks are corrupt and cash-grabby enterprises.
The contracts they force us in to play in those networks essentially guarantee there's no price competition on them.
The service we provide on networks
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Cheap?! (Score:1)
Today's nit... (Score:3)
"for as little as $45 a month (plus $30 network connection fee, so $75)."
And like that, Techdirt also cannot quite state the price without obfuscating the fees etc. as a footnote.
This is the point of a federal law that the industry is fighting, yet even journalists can't just say '$75 a month'.
Yeah, the price is pretty competitive. Wish this wwr happening in Arizona, but never to be. The powers will never let it be born.
My local ISP has tried... (Score:3)
...for years to install fiber in out semi-rural area and faced roadblock after roadblock
The telecom monopolies claimed to serve the area when they clearly didn't
Their attitude seemed to be, we won't serve the area but we will lie that we do in order to prevent anyone else from serving it
When I look at the FCC national broadband map, they show that our area is "served" by at least four ISPs, all wireless
I don't want wireless, I want fiber
Wireless electronics is like pipeless plumbing (porta potties). It can be made to work, with limitations, when necessary, but a pipe is always better