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I work for a FTTH service Provider in California, (No not Winfirst nor Competisys, the other one) and this is our current pricing. Our network is currently connected to Broadwing's Backbone.

200k - $25/month
2mbit - $45/month
6mbit - $85/month
12mbit - $125/month
100mbit - $350/month

There are monthly bandwidth limits but they are reasonable.

One thing though, we are only deploying to new home communities (Currently in San Jose, Milpitas, Santa Clara, Oakland, Sacramento, Huntington Beach, and Lake Elsinore) and are currently only providing Internet Access. We seem to feel that the reason why many of these other FTTH companies are failing is that they are spending too much money focusing on overbuilds and additional competing services. With our focus on access our take rate is high, and our network uncluttered. Now this isn't to say that we don't plan to provide video on demand, but right now, we're just trying to make sure we have our fiber in the ground.

For those of you in Texas, here are a couple other companies diong FTTH, CTT and Clearworks which is now backed by Eagle Broadband. Clearworks is using World Wide Packets Equipment.

Wow, no wonder they're going belly up. That's the crappiest website I've ever seen. It doesn't even come up with a "Your browser sux0rs, get I.E. 6.5", just a blank screen unless you have flash enabled. And the entire site was done with horribly ugly gray borders around an ugly flash navigation system. One thing the dot com bombs did was spend extraordinary amounts of cash on good web developers (after all, if you have no product, it's all you've got), and this WinFirst obviously did not.

What about dynamic flash content?

why do people keep saying this? FLASH DOES ALLOW YOU TO HAVE DYNAMIC CONTENT!

you can put sql queries right into your flash code. you wanna connect to an oracle db, do your queries or update data and then output things so they look pretty? no problem. you want to use flash with php and mysql to make your sites dynamic? no problem

if you have a quick connection to the web (the site is a bit bloaty... we are talking about flash) go here and click on "tv times". play around with that. then check out how the same thing looks in html.

both are dynamic...

Actually, they can. Check out winfirst out of sacramento, they are offering syncronous 10mb/s fiber for like $50/mo

--Fuzz

* a direct optical connection on the side of your home, which is

* Ethernet standards based, and

* Operates at 10MBps bidirectionally, with

* No shared bandwidth, so

* Buy our stuff, if

* You live in Sacramento, by checking out:

* www.winfirst.com and maybe, just maybe

* Your life will stop sucking.

Here in Sacramento, Western Integrated Networks is doing just that.

Fiber (well really it's that hybrid coax/fiber system that cable companies already use...just fatter pipes the whole way down and more focus on two-way syncronous connections) to the home with a single connection that does telephone, Internet and digital TV.

According to a couple techs I've talked to, the telephone service is basic VoIP. Since a T1 is 1.5Mbit and that's I think 32 lines then I don't expect this will take up much bandwidth. Supposedly the interface to the "modem" is going to be 10BaseT (it remains to be seen if I will be able to hook my own hardware into the line at its true 100Mb+ speed or I have to use their hardware) so that isn't a lot of traffic. Now each TV channel is apparently a full 5-6MBps MPEG-2 video stream. This I imagine is going to chew up the majority of their system bandwidth, especially if they plan to offer the same channels as AT&T digital cable or DirectTV.

It's kinda amazing to think about how much data that single coax from your cable provider carries. In order to provide the equivalent hundreds channels of video, WIN is having to rollout some pretty high powered stuff.

- JoeShmoe

Cable companies are usually required to obtain a franchise agreement, which grants them the authority to use local city-owned rights-of-way in exchange for a number of things, including, requirements such as providing "open access" to competing ISPs. The agreements are basically lease agreements, leasing the city property in return for consideration.

By law, a municipality cannot grant an exclusive franchise (monopoly), and in fact, most cities are busily trying to lure competitors to their local cable companies into town. They hate having a single cable company as much as the citizens do. But the cost of building a new system is large, and only recently have companies begun to step forward to try and "overbuild" old systems, like AT&T's. The arrival of these overbuilders has less to do with anything congress did (i.e. telecom Act of 1996) than it does the perceived opportunity to run the old coax companies out of business, by building modern state of the art ringed fiber networks, which can offer voice, video, and data at rates and speed vastly exceeding anything that can be done on a crapulent old Coax system. Take a look at Western Integrated Networks proposed system as an example of what these new arrivals want to build. Notice, the fully symmetric 100baseTX ethernet network provided into homes, via a fiber actually brought into the house? That ought to get any self-respecting geek's heart pumping fast.

In regards to "Open Access", the more important thing happening, is th activities resulting from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in Mt. Hood v. AT&T, where the court ruled that @Home was a telecommunications service, not a cab;le service. This ruling will require (if left to stand) that cable comapnies be regulated identically to telephone companies, and thus will be forced to offer competitive access to their networks.