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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.'"
$3,5 per mbps is pretty close to the wholesale prices - and it would be pretty hard to get that for just 1 gbps. Where's the catch ?:)
Additional verbage. http://www.chattanoogagig.com/
Maybe some who is really, really into BitTorrent?
I read the internet for the articles.
... the Chattanooga Choo-Choo!
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Get 199 friends and split the bill to get 5Mbps for 1.75$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
Where I live 400Mbit is about $1000/month (that has to be adjusted for the fact that the price and salary levels here are generally a fair bit above the US, but still). The 1000 Mbit option is "call us for price". I think you'd better be sitting down if making that call for a quote.
The only consolation is that we don't oversubscribe over here. You get what you pay for. But boy, do you ever pay.
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.
I'd easily pay that for my home office. I'm already paying $150/month for Comcast's 50Mb/s service.
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
>> '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
College students living in a house with ~5 people. $350/month five ways comes to $70 per month per person, which, depending on your situation, isn't incredibly bad. Put in a couple extra hours of work per month and you're done.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
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.
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.
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.
Get the 400 mbit and then sell wi-fi connections to your neighbors.
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,
They would probably block or throttle all bittorrent activity though...
"To prevent this day from getting any worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD THING" 1GJU8xLuDKDxEs4KLf8fAGyptoDsqvEsBT
(stops laughing)
Realistic situation:
College students living in a house with ~5 people, $30/month five ways for 1-mbit service comes to $6 per month per person, which two of the people don't pay until you padlock their rooms with a sign saying "see me".
Unless the house is near an open wi-fi, then nobody even brings up the issue of getting internet for the house.
Tell them the part about the "precious bodily fluids".
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
They sell vowels. Srsly.
Edith Keeler Must Die
Get the 400 mbit and then sell wi-fi connections to your neighbors.
If you have a contract that allows re-sale -
and if you want to want the legal, technical, and financial responsibilities of running a mini-ISP out of your home.
The subpoena comes to you as the owner of record of the parent account.
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.
Yup - I'd jump on it. Of course I could write it off as a business expense.
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.
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
Because, you know... CAPS ARE ANNOYING!
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!
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.
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
Your T1 probably includes an SLA, which you won't be getting from that 100Gbps line.
ur mum's face is a piece of shit
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 ;)
"Developed countries" still lagging behind. Riga has already 50% optical fiber network coverage. Current VIP subscription that includes 500Mbps internet, home IP TV, phone line and optional video surveillance system costs just 91 USD (translation form Latvian) Haven't checked that, I'm still satisfied with 100Mbps + IP TV for about 36 USD