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.'"

Comments

The price is actually pretty nice

[ManiaX Killerian]

$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 ?:)

200 times faster?

[Yvan256]

Get 199 friends and split the bill to get 5Mbps for 1.75$US per month!

Re:Yet the price isn't bad

[PeterM from Berkeley]

Splitting it would be a huge win. You'd get surge access to a Gbit of bandwidth, and if everyone was "surging" at the same time, you'd get 18MB/s as you said. Considering I pay $30/month for less than 1MB/s..... Yes, I'd jump on this if I could split it.

--PM

Re:More info

[Trepidity]

They're symmetric, though, which might not matter for many people, but I find nice. The 30 Mbps lowest tier is 30 Mbps each way, whereas Comcast's 30 Mbps service is 30 down, 7 up.

1GB for $350 has fanstastic potential...

[Glasswire]

>> '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

Re:Awesome..

[Doc Ruby]

Then the Midwest might bring down the average speed. But there's absolutely no reason why San Francisco, LA, Chicago, NYC, shouldn't have the same high speeds as entire countries like Japan, Korea, etc.

However, the argument you're using isn't even a good one for the Midwest. Sparsely populated places are easy to reach with long fibers, and so cheap to bring high bandwidth to. It doesn't take a huge operation or investment to bring fiber to nearly everyone in Montana or Wyoming.

The real answer is that US the telecom network cartel has never been aggressive in bringing Internet to homes. Quite the opposite: every time there's a push to increase the reach or speed of the network, the telcos have been there to push back, claiming the new traffic load will kill the existing network, or some other malarkey. What they're afraid of is that more bandwidth creates more opportunities to compete with them, and gives them less time to milk ancient services for a dragged out period of pure profitability before investing in a new generation. And that's exactly what they've got, and what we're stuck with. Except when an org not in their cartel provides some actual competition, like this municipal network operator.