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There is one advantage, though, especially in a small town:

I can do absolutely nothing about Lisco's current bandwidth cap, other than blog loudly. They know I'm not going to switch to Mediacom, and definitely not Iowa Telecom. No one else can really compete with their fiber network, partly because they have a government grant to do it.

However, if it was actually local to the town, and the town chose to be assholes about our Internet, all I really have to do is make enough of a fuss to get the rest of the town pissed off. That's not hard in a small town. March them all down to the town hall and demand to know why our tax dollars aren't being spent efficiently enough...

Maybe I'm being optimistic. Maybe things don't work that way in the real world. Or maybe the better solution would be to start laying some of our own fiber.

Fiber is 100mbits where?

Read my sig. $65/mo, no installation fee. It's actually cheaper than the DSL, but I just moved across town, outside the fiber zone, so it'll be a few months of 1 mbit before I'm back to 100 mbit.

Lans' are 100megabits? Wha? You can buy an 8 port gig switch for 40 bucks

I have this. It actually runs about 400 mbits. And yes, I have tested -- a gigabit crossover can run much faster.

The no piracy claim tells me that this is vaporware, really.

Not really. If it works the way they say it does, piracy is pretty much impossible. Unlike audio and video, they're not transferring everything needed to play the game -- they're only sending the generated audio and video, which is only useful to a "pirate" if you intend that everyone should play that level precisely the same way you do. Even if they end up sending scene data, that still doesn't include any of the logic.

In other words, it works because gaming is interactive.

The reasons it doesn't work are a combination of current technological limitations and the speed of light. It's possible it could work someday, but it's really not something I think we'd ever want. Consider:

I'm just saying being able to play all the games off a local network with only one host would be nice for consoles which aren't really friendly to that idea right now.

Well, the price might make that easier, if everyone only pays $50/year. But then, who pays for the server that you'll have to install locally?

Mostly because they're more locked down than any other DRM that exists. It's "you want to play more than 4 people/more than one game at once, you need more consoles".

That isn't really fair. PC games tend not to have local multiplayer, meaning if you want to play more than one person, same game or different games, you need more PCs. And a gaming PC is typically much more expensive than a console.

The only advantage you might be thinking of is, if there's no DRM, you can have a LAN party in which one person shares a game with everyone there -- that is, piracy. But that's even less of a problem, when you think about it. Two consoles and two copies of the game are still much cheaper than eight gaming PCs and one copy of the game.

I like PC gaming, and I want it to continue. I'd love to see it expand -- I love when a game works on Linux. But consoles do have an advantage, there.

Fairfield.

Fairfield.

http://liscofiber.com/

http://liscofiber.com/

http://liscofiber.com/

The terms actually kind of suck, but aren't enforced. Nothing evil, just some interesting language on what is considered "excessive bandwidth" -- apparently, more than five hours of video per week is excessive. Funny, they never seem to complain when I download an entire TV series in a week...

http://liscofiber.com/

And that is per second, yes. There is no cap. There is vague mention of not being a bandwidth hog in the terms, and some unfortunate language (apparently watching five hours of video is not considered "normal use", so clearly these terms were written by people who've never seen YouTube).

However, I never got a single complaint for all the torrents I ran.

Unfortunately, I just moved across town, and the fiber hasn't come here yet, so I'm back to 1 mbit DSL until spring.

Well, I'm going to brag.

http://liscofiber.com/

$65/mo, 100 mbit, seems to be down and up. It's just shameful -- I can scp files between home and work faster than I used to be able to scp them around a LAN.

Nice im not that far from you 200 miles one can dream.

Well, I'm going to brag.

http://liscofiber.com/

$65/mo, 100 mbit, seems to be down and up. It's just shameful -- I can scp files between home and work faster than I used to be able to scp them around a LAN.

If you've already got cable, it seems to me that getting TV with your fiber could still be an attractive offer. The $65 is the cheapest plan, but that's phone+internet, no TV.

Seriously, if I could get $65 fiber, I might, but where do I need to live ?

Fairfield, Iowa.

If a town of 10k people, in the middle of nowhere, can get that -- or crappy DSL, or sort of decent cable, and there's another, business-oriented ISP around selling fiber, too -- why is Comcast winning everywhere else?

Well, it's not Verizon, but Lisco gave me a map for my hometown. But I'm not sure how to do this for the general case.

It's not Verizon, and it's certainly more than 25. I have downloaded torrents at some 3 or 4 megabytes per second, without interfering (that I know of) with anyone else's web browsing (certainly not my own).

Ah, found it: they also have gigabit services.

Living in NY this sounds like a great upgrade to my current FIOS service but somehow I wish I was living back in my old hometown of Fairfield, Iowa. The local ISP, LISCO, is rolling out FTTP that features 100/100 Mbps as standard service in a package that also includes phone service with 1500 minutes of long distance for $60/month! Is this possibly the best deal in the country? Makes me feel like I'm getting taken for a ride by Verizon. http://www.liscofiber.com/pricesresidential.htm