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Gigabit Speeds At Home In the US
An anonymous reader writes "The Electric Power Board of Chattanooga is preparing to offer 1 Gigabit speeds at home by the end of the year. 'The city-owned utility announced today it will boost its broadband service to 1 Gigabit throughout its service territory by the end of 2010. Such a connection will be 200 times faster than the average broadband speed in America and the fastest of any US city.' The NY Times reports that the service will cost $350 per month. 'Mr. DePriest of EPB does not expect brisk demand for the one-gigabit service anytime soon. So why offer it? "The simple answer is because we can," he said.'"
$3,5 per mbps is pretty close to the wholesale prices - and it would be pretty hard to get that for just 1 gbps. Where's the catch ?:)
Additional verbage. http://www.chattanoogagig.com/
Who is their right mind would pay $350/month for Internet service at home? Sounds more like a company solution than home owner solution.
I'd be more worried that it was limited to 50GB/mo or something.
... the Chattanooga Choo-Choo!
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Get 199 friends and split the bill to get 5Mbps for 1.75$US per month!
I'd certainly pay $35 for 100 meg though.
If you could split it 7 ways, that would be a 18 MB line each at $50, which is a good deal compared to the semi-monopoly prices you usually get. Of course, this could vary depending on how close to a gigabit the line will actually get you (although it shouldn't be worse than the big ISPs, and may be significantly better).
My webcomic
I have the base 30 Mbps for $58/mo at the moment, but if I remember correctly, when I tried connecting their (brand new) gateway to my Gigabit hardware it operated at 100 Mbps. It would seem strange to configure an interface to drop down to something less than the max by default, although I know that is possible to do. My guess is that they would have to swap out some hardware.
They are pretty good about delivering at 30 Mbps!
At least until the telco and cable monopoliesservices can buyget to enough legislators to block them.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
That's great, but I mean, according to this (which I admit I don't know how accurate it is) it seems to indicate that the US is still pretty low in terms of overall connection speed.
Why does north america suck so much when it comes to technical infrastructure? It's kind of irritating, especially when this is apparantely the hub of the economic first world.
Some (few) things are best provided in a monopolistic environment. Utilities (like power) and infrastructure (like this) are typically in that category. However, that's best in a public monopoly, not a for-profit, private monopoly.
This here is Huckleberry Hound, tracking down what's coming up in broadband. And here's Pixie and Dixie to tell us what's in the box.
What's in the box boys?
A gigabit modem adapter.
Well how about that? I wonder if it works.
Bye bye Jynxie
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUJttwvla7s
Here comes the porn train. "Woo Woooooooooo!"
it's been available for a while for about $60/month. http://pirateisp.net/pris/
>> 'Mr. DePriest of EPB does not expect brisk demand for the one-gigabit service anytime soon. So why offer it?
Because there is a huge opportunity for resale or inclusion in basic services of multi-tenant (residential or business).
Give 10 businesses 100MB/s for $50 / month and you're making money or for offer it free and it's a cheap inducement lease space
Give 100 tenants 10MB/s for $10 / month and you're making more money or for offer free and it's a cheap inducement to renters
In my area, T-1 internet access is costing around $500 per month. That's the special rate we get for having multiple internet Ts as well as several MPLS T-1s. What a bargain!?
For us, $350 per month gigabit access would be pure heaven. I'd gladly kill you for that service!
If you include taxes and whatnot, I pay only slightly less than that now for a dedicated T1 with a four-hour downtime SLA. I'd trade the SLA for those kinds of speeds.
i pay $125/mo for 1U of colo space with a 10MB connection, but i get that boths ways and it works under extreme load (many millions of hits per day/1000s of concurrent active connections in the past) and has extremely low latency (it is in one of googles old data centers in the bay area)... the same level of service, to my home would be worth $350 to me if i needed it, but 10MBs has served all of my needs. a hop to my house and back to the data center would be something i'd rather eliminate, but not paying for colo space would be nice.
this is already a reality in sweden for $140/month by "telia".
sorry but the link is in swedish, try babelfish :)
http://www.telia.se/privat/produkter_tjanster/bredband/bredbandvianatverksuttaget/fiberlan/
This just shows what can happen when private companies are allowed to compete without regulation to provide services much more cheaply and efficiently than the gov... oops, hang on, I'll try again.
...government bureaucracies try to implement services that could be done more cheaply and efficiently than the private secto...wait a second...
...
Shit.
I can see this subscribed to by small businesses with data heavy uploads (film production companies, ad agencies etc). Spread across an office of 20 employees, $350 is peanuts when each worker is getting 50mps, assuming it's symmetrical.
However I think the price for the gigabit service will drop to something hotly competitive like $99 within 36 months as the electric utility begins poaching customers from the established players when it hits home that selling access to information is more profitable than burning coal.
It wouldn't surprise me if shareholders and even regulators eventually order a spinoff of this tail-wagging-the-dog broadband division, and it winds up with a cable co, where it all gets dialed back to the current offerings.
- js.
You covered everything except the global warming impact and PETA's position on the issue...
Now, I know this isn't the same deal, but it sure makes the concept proposed in the article a much more attractive idea for subdivisions and local neighborhoods. I know that my apartment management company would probably go for this as soon as it became available. It makes our building more attractive to renters, and with around 30 units, it means they can either tack on the extra $10-15/mo to rent or simply include it as a perk for living there. Granted, I would still prefer to have my own personal connection, but this could provide (at least for me) a reliable backup in case something happens to my connection.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
Slows down to 1200 baud from 4PM to 11PM when all the dads get home and start downloading porn.
Nothing new here. First they sue to block competition, and if the law doesn't support them they buy one that does.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Tell them the part about the "precious bodily fluids".
But it will be the most incredible 40 seconds of Internet access you'll ever see!
Especially at a consumer level. You can only watch/download so much porn in one month before you hit other bottlenecks....
"To prevent this day from getting any worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD THING" 1GJU8xLuDKDxEs4KLf8fAGyptoDsqvEsBT
Well,
Simply recruit 10 neighbors and hook them to a 10 port router and wallah! At 35 bucks plus taxes, it's cheaper than many solutions and the speed is almost guaranteed to be superb 100% of the time. How about that?
It is easy to offer gigabit speeds. You provide a line that signals at a gigabit, probably just Ethernet. The hard part is having the infrastructure above that which can maintain it. This is particularly the case if you have multiple lines.
My bet is that at that price, they have insufficient upstream. So you sell your gig line out and you discover that really you are lucky to get 100mbit at the best of times. Thus your customers are getting less than they paid for and so on.
This is amazing.
Now we're where South Korea was ... a decade ago.
Except theirs costs 1/20th what we're hearing for the US.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
how much bandwidth per node / headend backend?
Aaaaand, what's the pipe they have to the rest of the world? I don't care if I've got 1Gb to my provider. The rest of the internet isn't going to make that experience any better than 1Mb... In many cases I find that 1Mb isn't any better than 56Kb.. There are just too many factors to make this a non-issue. Fix the upstream and maybe I'll get excited about the link to my house.
yvan eht nioj
Add in Fi Phone Basic and the price goes down to $317.03/month. Add Fi TV Expanded instead and the price is only $344.23 which is cheaper than the Fi TV Basic somehow.
They sell vowels. Srsly.
Edith Keeler Must Die
350.00 per month is more than most consumers are willing to plunk down. I don't see myself spending that kind of money. It is more practical for a business that needs that kind of bandwidth.
If I could get that anywhere in Alberta (Canada) I'd sleep with it's foul-smelling, unibrow-ed best friend on the off chance it'd hang-out with me more.
Heck, considering Telus/Shaw's *up to 1mbit* = 300kbit marketing crap I'd even stay and cuddle, then buy it dinner the next night.
-Matt
--- Need web hosting?
Geeks get too obsessed with the big pipe numbers and don't stop to think the costs of backing all that up whit the infrastructure upstream you need to maintain that speed. That is something I've observed is common in many of the countries with the really fast Internet. I remember a guy from Japan posting on Slashdot how great his 100mbit Internet was, he could download a CD in about 10 minutes. I had to point out that is not 100mbit, that is 10mbit. Nice and fast, but same as I was getting on my connection (12mbit at the time).
Especially if you have a high density area like an apartment building, but even if not, it isn't hard to offer Ethernet to the units and that will be 100mb or 1000mb of course. However it is a lot harder to have all the stuff higher up to keep maintaining those speeds.
Also you discover that some function like big WANs. They've got reasonable internal bandwidth, but not a lot outside. Latvia seems to be like this. They rank highly on Speedtest ratings, but it is all people testing to their own ISP's speed test servers. When I test those speed test servers from a large bandwidth site in the US, they get only a few megabits. So you'll see good transfers to others on your ISP, but not so good when downloading from a website in another data center.
An impressive connection not only has good bandwidth to your house, it can back it up at higher levels. I've been happy with Cox Home Business for that reason. It is reasonably pricey ($150/month for 50/5mb and 4 static IPs) but it has good infrastructure. I get my speeds, and to many different sites. It isn't like I get it to their internal test server but nothing else, I can download from Steam and Impulse and so on at those speeds.
Any time you see something with tons of bandwidth for a small amount of money, ask yourself what the catch might be. Remember that lots of bandwidth requires a lot of expensive equipment to make happen, and a lot of connections to other large networks. That isn't free.
All I can say is Veracity Networks in Provo, UT can already provide 1Gbps to residents who want it. Actually, if they really wanted, they could go 10Gbps over their fiber connection if they wanted to pay for it. The reality is people don't want to pay the $350 for the 1Gbps when you can already get 40+Mbps for much much cheaper.
The only issue I see with a power company providing data, is that power is always primary and gets first attention. Data is secondary. Unlike a true telco, there simply will be a time when you'll have to wait on power if/when there is an outage, etc. Yes, yes, with no power you can't use data, but it could be you DO have a means to receive power, and still no data available. A true telco's job is data only....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
I recall living in Japan and working for an electric utility company. We had an ISP, CableCo and FTTH sub-sidaries.
Japanese utilities are much more diverse. Of course, they have near monopolies which make them cash cows.
Anyhow, I paid $80ish for 100MBps FTTH service.
I miss those days. And no, there were no caps.
Because, you know... CAPS ARE ANNOYING!
you = a faggot nigger jew spamming piece of shit
Yay for unrestricted, vigorous competition between telecom companies in the good ol' U.S. of A.! We're number one, we're number one!
Wait... what does "city-owned utility" mean?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
reached in 33 minutes! Cool!
Disagree. A private, for-profit, monopoly would be much better. If the $350/mo spread across the 20 people that subscribe doesn't cover the costs of offering it, guess who pays the rest? You do, via taxes. I don't know about you, but I'm opposed to subsidizing my neighbors 1Gb net connection when I'm stuck on 10Mb. If the demand isn't there to make it economically viable then it shouldn't exist. It's painful to say that about such a sweet deal, but it's true.
I'm opposed to all monopolies, but I also realilze that they're a fact of life. Given that, I'd take a well-regulated (yes, that part is vitally important) private monopoly any day over another government program that will only get bigger and more bloated.
Yesterday's "Australian" newspaper (13th September) had an scathing article criticising the proposed Australian fibre network on the grounds that nobody in the USA is going to offer gigabit speeds to the home.
The article was basicly arguing for the status-quo for people some distance from an exchange - 56kps dial-up should be enough for anyone apparently.
Ok, where i live in Sweden 1000/100 Mbit/s comes at a price of 495kr, ~$69 :D
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a train filled with hard drives.
"...the fastest of any US city." That's just plain wrong.
Grant County Washington has 1gbps to most houses. http://gcpud.org/customerService/fiberNetwork/index.html Information is a little hard to find on their site, but let me give you some details.
I have 1gbps fiber optic to my house; from the drop box it goes to 8 100mb CAT5e ports, with 2 more dedicated for telephone service. My GARAGE even has this, as it's running on a separate electrical meter than the house. So not only does my garage have better connectivity than their city, but it costs roughly $30/month. My particular ISP has port 80 capped at about 800kb/s, and port 21 capped at 1,500kb/s. Torrents often come in over 1mb/s. My particular cost is closer to $50/mo because I have a static IP address, and more ports provisioned than the default of 2. The hookup to the house is free, the PUD does that; see, we metaphorically raped California some years back on electricity when they had massive brownouts, so the PUD had extra money to spend. The in-house wiring of the CAT5 and the internet/TV/telephone service is all what the customer pays for.
Which is, incidentally, the assumption that all shared networks (like, e.g., the Internet) make anyway. That's the whole point; they wouldn't be shared networks otherwise!
Are you adequate?
It's actually even better than 100Mbps per person sharing it, as long as each of the 10 persons uses it in a reasonably intermittent fashion. Everybody can get more than their share some of the time as long as nobody gets their whole share all the time.
Are you adequate?
My company is working on a long-term construction site in Chattanooga and we get absolute dick for Internet speeds. We'd gladly pay twice this price for 1/10th the speed! What gives?
Mexican ISP TELMEX charges $3,000 dlls for 10Mbps
Thats why Carlos SLIM, is the richest men on the world
I can't believe how people on Slashdot are so networking illiterate. Who cares that they offer 1 gbps service unless they have the bandwidth to support it upstream. I am a network engineer for a Fortune 100 company with a huge network, and we have 10 gbps ports with 2 gbps CIRs at a few of our POPs, and only a few ISPs can really support such speeds. You won't find many providers who can offer 10 gbps, nevermind 40 gbps for transit and no tier 1 is going to peer with them.
So you're left with a few 10 gbps connections at best, shared among how many customers who could have 1 gbps service?
Of course all this assumes that an average customer could actually take advantage of 1 gbps. It's funny to see people bitch about 10 mbps service, when most people don't have any applications that can take advantage of what they already have. I do high def video conferencing at 4.5 mbps and that's the best I can do. I rarely max out my 25/25 service, and I'm a huge bandwidth hog.
They offer it so they can be first to market, of course. Yeah, there isn't much demand for it now, but in five years or so there will start to be demand, and they will be ready.
How many Slashdotters here have had to deal with the service issues that come with trying out a brand-new higher speed tier from their cableco/telecom? I tried my cable company's 50 mbps service more than six months after they began offering it, and I still had a connection was was generally down between 5am and sometime after I went to bed, because they were still "tweaking" their new DOCSIS 3 network every night. By offering this service now the Electric Power Board of Chattanooga can get the kinks worked out with the few customers that do show interest in it, so when the popularity picks up they will have service with a reliability track record while their competitors are still struggling to get their ducks in a row or making vague promises of higher speeds tiers "coming soon".
This is planning for future growth, not bellyaching about having to upgrade infrastructure when they can't meet demand like the duopoly tends to do.
You can get a dedicated T3, OC3, or OC48 to you house, if you are willing to pay for it. But you aren't willing to pay that much.
Big kudos to the folks in Chattanooga for even trying this. A lot of us Northerners would expect Chattanooga to just be reaching 56k dial-up right now (or maybe just all be gettin' computers), but this is certainly a big step in the right direction, and one we should all take notice of. Bravo, Tennessee.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
I had this speed in my home in Sweden for a couple of years now. Fibre all the way to my apartment 1000/100Mbit for ~$139/month (antivirus, and rental movies included) Nice to see that the US of A is catching up with the world ;)
If the demand isn't there to make it economically viable then it shouldn't exist.
Sure, but the demand IS there, it IS economically viable (see other countries) and existing private monopolies are fighting tooth and nail to protect their obsolete, overpriced offers.
The private sector isn't interested in upgrading the infrastructure, even if it would be profitable in the long term; it has demonstrated that time and again (remember those 200 billion embezzled taxes?).
Who are you going to ask if not the government?
I have the 30Mb service from EPB. Their network will auto-throttle UP when additional bandwidth is available.
This means I get a MINIMUM of 30Mbps (assuming whomever I am downloading from can provide that speed up). When there is room on the network (always) it will go faster and faster :)
I've had my 30Mb service reach upwards of 50Mb, fan-freaking-tastic.
I'd really love to test the Gb service, but it would be difficult to find anything able to feed that speed -- that and even my SSD would be struggling to keep up!