100mbps Fiber Service To Your Door

BitHive writes "With all the talk on /. about the last mile, it looks like people in Mason County, WA may get what I've wanted for years--a 100mbps fiber connection straight to their home. The ISP, DONOBi claims the personal account is 'unlimited,' but since they don't allow servers, and have a business account which is capped at 5Gb/month ($3/Gb addtl), I think we can guess at what their idea of 'unlimited' is. Their service offerings can be found here. Is anyone on this service or knows something they can report?"

Comments

The only reason Mason Cty. can do this

[iowagary]

I work in western washington and I just had a cisco rep in here talking about something vaguely related but he told us the only reason they can afford this in Mason County is because they own 3 hydro dams and have no idea what to do with all the money they are making, so they decided to pull fiber to every house. They really don't expect to ever recover the investment. Almost makes you want to move though...

Re:The only reason Mason Cty. can do this

[Diskord]

This is dead wrong. Mason County does not have any Hydro generation at all. The Cisco rep may have been thinking of Grant County in Washington, which has 3 Hydroelectric dams. They are also doing a fiber to the home project as well.

Minor Info

[Sedennial]

This has actually been in place for some time and there are a couple of other ISP's in Mason offering fibre connectivity via the open access network, but full scale rollout has been slowed down for a number of reasons. Some political and some financial. Currently they are reviewing a wireless solution for lastmile due to unexpectedly high costs for lastmile fiber solution. Last commisioners meeting I went to had some interesting discussion taking place regarding alternative solutions for last-mile.

Real per customer business costs far exceed various estimates due to the fact that to sign up customer X at the end of the street you have to essentially lay out fiber for EVERY home between your splice point and customer X. And unless every one of those customers signs up, you may have just expended $15k or more (since they Mason is doing an underground install not poletop) for one customer.

Easy

[jaavaaguru]

That would be excellent for me. My Internet habits entirely consist of...

* Checking Slashdot and a few other discussion boards
* Checking my e-mail
* Chatting on Jabber, AIM and MSN
* Updating my website
* Occasionally downloading Redhat's software updates
* Sometimes playing streaming music (but not very often)

That could easily be les than 5Gb/month.

Donobi is just the ISP

[Diskord]

Juyst to clarify, Donobi is just one of many ISP's on our fiber network. The Fiber itself is being laid by Mason County PUD3.

The PUD website is http://www.masonpud3.org

There you can find a complete list of retailers, and more information on the Fiber project.

Re:Servers

[mdielmann]

Note that forking over for a business account here will cost you...exactly the same as the personal account.

Translation: 'For $40/mo, you can have all the surfing, etc. you can handle, OR you can have all the servers and crap you want with a 5 GB/mo cap. If you choose option 2, we'll be happy to sell you more throughput at $3/GB.'

So, I think they agree with you. IF you pay for your bandwidth, THEN you can use all you want. Otherwise, you're stuck with surfing really* fast.

* Depending on site/route conditions, etc.

Re:We don't ever learn, do we?

[Diskord]

Our Fiber connection comes from NoaNet (www.noanet.com) and uses the existing BPA (Bonneville Power Administration) infrastructure. The pricing we recieve is based on 95th percentile billing, so you aren't charged on what your actual use is, but on what your average use is.

Most end customers use very little bandwidth, but then burst when they are downloading a large file, demo, etc...

Currently we have no plans to clamp or cap as you refer to it bandwidth. We do charge more as your usage increases, but at under $2 a GB, it is fairly reasonable.

Re:Yeah, great...

[matastas]

Read. The damned. Web site.

If you don't want the business account, you don't have to worry about that. You sacrifice the ability to use server. This is what we in the Real World call 'give and take.' And it comes with the territory of paying a lower price for a service.

Product differentiation

[unicorn]

They have an obvious, absolute rule to no servers. They do want to drive customers to the "business" accounts. BUT If you actually look at their page, the business accounts are the same price as the residential ones. The difference being that business accounts have a bandwidth cap.

So you can choose what service best suits your needs. Unlimited bandwidth, geared at downstream only. Or be able to run servers as well, but be limited in the amount of "free" bandwidth you get.

Re:Their DSL prices are higher?

[programR]

Our DSL prices are higher than our Fiber prices because the phone company makes those charges higher....

We provide the best prices we can on all of the different media available. DSL is more expensive to us, but Fiber is only available in certain areas... There are petitions for customers to sign to try and help get Fiber into more areas, but it really comes down to what the Public Utility District for that county is willing to foot the bill for.

We are providing IP service over the PUD network of Fiber optics. Customers also have the ability to have On-Demand video provided over the pipe & other services like telephony. Those are currently outside the realm of what DONOBi offers, but we are working with the different PUDs in the areas we can to provide all of those services to our customers.