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Chattanooga's Municipal Network Doubles Down On Fiber Speeds

tetrahedrassface writes "The first city in the U.S. to offer a screaming fast fiber network has now announced customers will get a free 60% boost in speed. If you had the 30 MB/sec service you now will get 50. Mid-range customers get a doubling for free, while the high end consumers of fiber get an average 250% boost. The fiber network recently passed 40,000 members and judging from a test of my business, we are currently over 300 MB/sec." What's the fastest service actually available where you live, and what does it cost?

165 comments

  1. What do you do with this speed? by ugen · · Score: 4, Interesting

    On an end-user end - what exactly do you do with these speeds? I have fairly ho-hum Comcast running at about 15mbit/s. Frankly, I am not sure what to use that speed for. Web page opening speed is now governed by remote server processing capacity, files download instantly, movies stream (and in any case my movie consumption capacity is limited by low information to noise ratio :) ). What else? Am I missing something people really do with this?

    1. Re:What do you do with this speed? by BLKMGK · · Score: 2

      In my case I'm working on setting up an Open VPN connection between myself and another so that my media library is accessible remotely. I'm already able to stream to my phone. Lots of potential!

      --
      Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
    2. Re:What do you do with this speed? by Joehonkie · · Score: 2

      Yes. Yes you are. I do a lot of downloading and uploading of decently sized files, as well as streaming HD video and playing online games, and I'd like to be able to do the latter without it being affected by the former, and I'd like the former to happen as fast as possible to make it more convenient.

    3. Re:What do you do with this speed? by ugen · · Score: 1

      So what you are saying is that there are additional lifestyle choices I would need to make (like watching more video content and playing online games) to make full use of higher speeds? That can't be healthy, but oh well, I see your point.

    4. Re:What do you do with this speed? by MightyYar · · Score: 3, Insightful

      For me, it would be remote backup and video streaming. Video streaming lets me get rid of cable (or would, if it weren't for live sports). Before you say, "but 15 Mbps is fast enough for HD video", consider that there are 4 people living in this house - and a remote backup could kick off at any time as well. Remote backup is awesome at high speed if your upstream can handle it. For my roughly 2TB of data from 3 computers, it takes (best case) 3 months to upload on a Comcast 2Mbps uplink. The 50 Mbps minimum speed that they quote in TFA applies upstream as well, so that's only 4 days!

      --
      W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
    5. Re:What do you do with this speed? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      a.) Backing up remote servers (in addition to the backups running within the data center)
      b.) Trying to stay ahead of the bandwidth consumption of my kids!

      The latter is the difficult part. If it was just me it would be enough to have about 10-15 Mbit/sec. Add in some kids and you're suddenly in a world of pain!

    6. Re:What do you do with this speed? by buglista · · Score: 1

      I've got 20mb/s down - ISOs for example do NOT download "instantly" as you put it. On Virgin cable (what I'm on), you can get 120mb/s - which I don't need, but the upstream bandwidth that goes with that would be welcome - takes ages for me to upload a VM to someone else.

    7. Re:What do you do with this speed? by modmans2ndcoming · · Score: 3, Informative

      you know that 15 Mbit down on a cable connection is not the rate at which you upload right? upload speeds are typically 1 Mbit, 2 if you pay extra.

    8. Re:What do you do with this speed? by vlm · · Score: 1

      In my case I'm working on setting up an Open VPN connection between myself and another so that my media library is accessible remotely. I'm already able to stream to my phone. Lots of potential!

      You can do that with Plex outta the box with the integrated myplex service. Takes about 5 minutes to set up, assuming you've already got Plex as a media server or you're willing to run in parallel with mythtv (which is what I do). The fact that I can stream my videos over a slow CELL PHONE connection indicates I have absolutely no idea what to do with 50 megs.

      I know what a business could do with that. What I'm mystified about is given likely "no servers" terms of service, what can a end user do with it?

      --
      "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
    9. Re:What do you do with this speed? by Tastecicles · · Score: 1

      I had the WORST time with Virgin... 3 are faster - and more stable - and are not picky about the amount of bandwidth you use, unlike a certain cable provider.

      2010 I kicked Virgin to the kerb for the last time as I was getting 50% uptime at a VERY generous estimate (having to restart the fucking router every half an hour did NOTHING for my disposition nor my work rate) and never any more than 2MBit down. On a 30MBit contract.

      --
      Operation Guillotine is in effect.
    10. Re:What do you do with this speed? by petermgreen · · Score: 1

      One of the big problems with DSL and to a lesser extent cable connections is they often have lousy upstream. Fine if all you do is consume content but painful when you produce something big and want to upload it.

      Also while small files may download "instantly" at 15 mbit/s large files certainly don't. Grabbing a new version of an install CD/DVD still takes noticable time.

      Having said all that I don't do any of theese things often enough to justify the higher cost of a faster connection.

      --
      note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
    11. Re:What do you do with this speed? by Tastecicles · · Score: 1

      I was directly interrogating massive databases for massive amounts of information on a very frequent basis. A fast connection was, at the time, absolutely essential to maintaining my work rate.

      Unfortunately, Virgin Media did not deliver. Looking elsewhere, I found a cellular provider that did. In spades.

      --
      Operation Guillotine is in effect.
    12. Re:What do you do with this speed? by fast+turtle · · Score: 1

      B) Don't I know it. If there weren't 4 computers on the home network I'd be able to get by with a meager 512k u/d speed. What I want is lower ping times insted of the ever growing crap I've been seeing to various servers. Hell this would even improve the VOIP experience (triple play package) if they'd fix the damn Lag. Proper QoS might be of help there.

      --
      Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
    13. Re:What do you do with this speed? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      As a consultant I do reliability and performance analysis and engineering for major manufacturers' production data centers. Right now, one of my biggest gating factors on how many clients I can handle, and how well I can handle them, is network bandwidth. In a 500 server data center, I can consume a billion data points (time-series data) in one day. I would prefer to host the analytics and database locally, but I have to host it on-site right now, and extract the data for post analysis (vs real-time analysis) which is very slow, hence the constraint on my ability to grow my business. With a 300-500Mbps connection I could easily fork the data stream so I can do better real-time analytics on server behavior and performance locally on my own machines. Making adjustments to the algorithms used to predict system failure and service levels would be much easier. If I make a mistake, then I only risk taking down one of my own servers, and not the customer's.

    14. Re:What do you do with this speed? by LinkX39 · · Score: 1

      I don't get your hang-up here. That's like saying "Yeah, my car can do 65 miles an hour but I only ever drive in the city where the speed limit is typically 45 or lower. Do cars actually need to be able to go faster than that?" Just because YOU only do things that make use of the lower end of the spectrum doesn't mean it's "unhealthy" for other people to take advantage of the higher end, or even "unhealthy" for YOU to take advantage of them at times. Your reaction to their explanations confuse me......

    15. Re:What do you do with this speed? by Shinobi · · Score: 2

      As an end-user, me and my family uses our 100Mbit/s connection to watch HD streams, play games(including downloading them.... it's at the point where installing straight from the net is faster than from DVD's), I also use it in my work, downloading huge datasets from clients etc, as well as uploading.

      I am actually considering upgrading to the 1Gbit/s option.

    16. Re:What do you do with this speed? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Try living with 1.5Mbps with occasional static causing dropped packets to interfere with down/up continuity. Oh, & with a vendor (Centurylink) that doesn't seem to give a crap about improving it. Don't you just love that privatization uber alles business model? Works really well without true competition, doesn't it?

      I s'pose I could try Comcast (or whatever they are trying to call themselves today) but they really aren't competing - their pricing structure would gouge me in order that they can afford to buy NBC creating greater monopolization. I have a fundamental philosophical difference with that concept.

      The smart thing is for the data pipe to be "socialized" like water & sewer, & let small private businesses provide the attach points.

    17. Re:What do you do with this speed? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Am I missing something people really do with this?

      Apparently. You may have a movie that streams fine. Somebody with far more capacity streams more than one. Useful if you're not the only person in the house.

      Not to mention the dozens of other things that one can do.

      Does this matter to you? Maybe as much as driving a car matters to somebody who is hardcore Amish.

    18. Re:What do you do with this speed? by Kookus · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I just don't get why memory manufacturers are making such large capacity modules. Why would anyone ever need more than 64kb of memory?

      I don't get why people make short-sighted statements about why an existing limitation isn't a problem,

      People don't build sites, or applications, or services very often that have requirements that exceed things like memory, or network speed. If they do, they learn real fast that people call their product a piece of crap.

      If network speeds were fast enough, then there'd be a way for us to store all of our information in "the cloud", and not have to worry about things like backups, or virus scanning on a at home basis. We could write operating systems that were designed to be run centrally, just like the good old mainframe era and dumb terminals. Then we wouldn't have as many grandma's out there running windows 95 in the year 2010.

      Hell, you could ask the browser makers if they like the sounds of that! (Not the windows 95 crap, but the operating system in a cloud, aka web browser with apps).

      Seriously. Everyone with a desk job (or student) doesn't need to drive into work. Get some good video conferencing solutions, a huge pipe to your office files, a cheap-as-dirt dumb terminal in your living room (or home-office), and now you actually have a fighting chance at staving off unimportant things like global warming (less gas for travel).

      No need for schools to pay for buses, more money for teachers. Unfortunately, probably a lot less teachers). More stay-at-home professionals, everyone get's to gain an extra hour of their life back per day (less travel). An extra hour means later wake-up times, which would probably have a better impact than daylight savings time.

      So what could people do with a fatter pipe? Oh, man, I don't know. Let's go back to 64kb of main memory. Or how about something a little easier to think of, let's go back to pre-cellphone times. Everyone doesn't need a cell phone. What can people not do with their existing land-lines?

      I'd rather think on the order of, if it's not infinite/instant, it's not good enough. Once you get there, then you can question why anyone would need anything more.

    19. Re:What do you do with this speed? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      On an end-user end - what exactly do you do with these speeds? I have fairly ho-hum Comcast running at about 15mbit/s. Frankly, I am not sure what to use that speed for. Web page opening speed is now governed by remote server processing capacity, files download instantly, movies stream (and in any case my movie consumption capacity is limited by low information to noise ratio :) ). What else? Am I missing something people really do with this?

      give me the speed and I'll figure out what to do with it soon enough... probably something I can't do now.

    20. Re:What do you do with this speed? by rbasham · · Score: 1

      A big question is what speed do you get from 8pm - 10 pm. I've had FIOS 25 Mbps for several years. Although it always hits the rated speed for 22 hours a day, it drops to around 3 Mbps, occasionally only 1 Mbps, during prime Netflix viewing hours. Since I like HD movie streams, which can require between 6 Mbps and 9 Mbps, my connection becomes worthless to me in the evening. I briefly tried Comcast, only to learn that they throttle back download speed after a certain number of MBs of download, to something like 20% of the rated speed. Since most speedtest apps run just brief download tests, that throttling back often gets overlooked. Too bad I don't watch movies in the morning. Does anyone suffer from this same Netflix effect? Or do I have more Netflix neighbors than most?

    21. Re:What do you do with this speed? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I get 3 down with COX and .5 up. it is 39.99 frankly I cant afford to buy more.

      I think I might be better off with a hotspot cell phone 4g on T-Mobile 30 month and a 10 dollar a month seedbox.me to up laod and down load.

    22. Re:What do you do with this speed? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You must be a single user living alone. Try multiplying your computer by 3 or 4 and then see how your bandwidth feels.

    23. Re:What do you do with this speed? by Type44Q · · Score: 1

      Frankly, I am not sure what to use that speed for.

      Sounds like a solution in search of a problem...

    24. Re:What do you do with this speed? by hawguy · · Score: 1

      As a consultant I do reliability and performance analysis and engineering for major manufacturers' production data centers. Right now, one of my biggest gating factors on how many clients I can handle, and how well I can handle them, is network bandwidth. In a 500 server data center, I can consume a billion data points (time-series data) in one day. I would prefer to host the analytics and database locally, but I have to host it on-site right now, and extract the data for post analysis (vs real-time analysis) which is very slow, hence the constraint on my ability to grow my business. With a 300-500Mbps connection I could easily fork the data stream so I can do better real-time analytics on server behavior and performance locally on my own machines. Making adjustments to the algorithms used to predict system failure and service levels would be much easier. If I make a mistake, then I only risk taking down one of my own servers, and not the customer's.

      Why wouldn't you just rent a sever in a coloc somewhere to do the work? Then you get redundant internet connections with as much bandwidth as you're willing to pay for, redundant cooling, UPS power, generator backup, etc, which becomes awfully expensive in a home network. Maybe one of your customers with a 500 server datacenter would be willing to give you a few U for your server in return for a small discount on your services. They're apparently providing you with a server for you to run your analysis on, so they may as well give you some rack space and let you run your own server.

      Running any business critical infrastructure at home sounds risky unless you're willing to build out a reliable datacenter at home.

    25. Re:What do you do with this speed? by hawguy · · Score: 1

      If network speeds were fast enough, then there'd be a way for us to store all of our information in "the cloud", and not have to worry about things like backups, or virus scanning on a at home basis. We could write operating systems that were designed to be run centrally, just like the good old mainframe era and dumb terminals. Then we wouldn't have as many grandma's out there running windows 95 in the year 2010.

      My 15mbit connection speed is already fast enough to let me store my data in "the cloud", 100mbit or 1gig wouldn't make any difference. The cost of cloud storage, plus the question of how I can access my data when my high speed internet connection is down for a week is what keeps me from storing all of my data in the cloud.

      Seriously. Everyone with a desk job (or student) doesn't need to drive into work. Get some good video conferencing solutions, a huge pipe to your office files, a cheap-as-dirt dumb terminal in your living room (or home-office), and now you actually have a fighting chance at staving off unimportant things like global warming (less gas for travel).

      No need for schools to pay for buses, more money for teachers. Unfortunately, probably a lot less teachers). More stay-at-home professionals, everyone get's to gain an extra hour of their life back per day (less travel). An extra hour means later wake-up times, which would probably have a better impact than daylight savings time.

      There are lots of good video conference systems that don't need 100mbit or more -- there were decent video conference systems 10 years ago that ran on 256kbit bonded ISDN lines. Bandwidth isn't the limiting factor that's preventing video conference systems from taking over from real life interactions.

      So what could people do with a fatter pipe? Oh, man, I don't know. Let's go back to 64kb of main memory. Or how about something a little easier to think of, let's go back to pre-cellphone times. Everyone doesn't need a cell phone. What can people not do with their existing land-lines?

      So what can people do with a fatter pipe? My company has multiple gigabit connections to the internet, but we don't do anything significantly different with the internet than I do at home.

    26. Re:What do you do with this speed? by YrWrstNtmr · · Score: 1

      Does anyone suffer from this same Netflix effect? Or do I have more Netflix neighbors than most?

      I have not noticed this at all on my FiOS connection. Noon, 7PM, midnight, 3 AM....all seems to be about the same. Download slightly faster, and upload slightly slower than the advertised 25/25 speed.

    27. Re:What do you do with this speed? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Try to put a 4k video phone wall to a service home or an institution per occupant for that life-like virtual meeting of the relatives. In other words, new applications which where not possible before, made possible (not with a cola drink though).

    28. Re:What do you do with this speed? by sjames · · Score: 2

      More likely, if such speeds were available, you might making lifestyle choices that aren't open to you now. People didn't get electricity in their homes because they wanted to stay up later watching TV in primetime, but they DID choose to stay up later (and eventually get a TV) because electricity in the home became nearly ubiquitous.

      Going back further, people didn't get indoor plumbing because they wanted a nightly shower rather than a weekly bath, but once they had indoor plumbing, they did mostly make that choice.

    29. Re:What do you do with this speed? by Jedi+Alec · · Score: 1

      Basically, I decide to buy a game online or watch a movie, start the download, prepare something to drink or snack and when I get back it's pretty much done. If it isn't, I can stream full HD alongside the download without a hitch.

      Pretty much instant gratification.

      Only downside is that there's few servers capable/willing to upload at speeds in the 80-120 Mbit area, but they'll catch up...eventually.

      --

      People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
    30. Re:What do you do with this speed? by xaxa · · Score: 1

      Virgin (UK cable) upgraded me to 60Mbit/s a few months ago. An ISO downloads in less than two minutes at that speed, and they generally did.

      However, I've recently moved house, and can't get cable here. but hopefully I'll be able to get the new FTTC service that should be available at the end of the month. The upstream on that is 9Mbits/s, which will be nice. At the moment, I've got normal ADSL (16Mbit/s or so, down, 0.0000001Mbit/s up), and my phone's 3G uploads faster.

      I'd really like this service: https://hyperoptic.com/web/guest/home (100/100 or 1000/1000) but it's not available here.

    31. Re:What do you do with this speed? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not a problem, I'm on fios and I'm getting FAR better than 15mbps, closer to 40 actually and my upload speed has proven to be up to the task as well :-)

    32. Re:What do you do with this speed? by BLKMGK · · Score: 1

      I'm not running Plex although I may look at it out of curiosity. I'm running multiple XBMC boxes on my home network on ION/Atom hardware with unRaid NAS supporting them. Overall I've had excellent service from this with no special server although for streaming to my iPhone I use PlayOn. I've got spare hardware so maybe this will be the next thing I play with. Working on a firewall upgrade presently - ClearOS - and it's being a pita lol.

      --
      Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
    33. Re:What do you do with this speed? by vokyvsd · · Score: 1

      Yeah, I'm getting that vibe too... He asks "what would you use this bandwidth for?" then when people answer, he says "well that wouldn't be useful to me" in a way that implies it would be *wrong* for it to be useful for anyone else.

      To continue your car analogy, he's like those assholes who go 45 in a 55, then speed up to 70 when you try to pass them, because he thinks the world would be a better, safer place if we all drove 45 or under.

    34. Re:What do you do with this speed? by BLKMGK · · Score: 1

      Okay took a eek at Plex. Looks interesting in that it can run as an app under unRaid for the server portion but there's no Linux client. Now I'm no snob when it comes to Linux but paying for Win7 or better on my front-ends and then apparently needing a much beefier computer for each of them strikes me as foolish. The IOS client looks great although $5 in the app store. I have no Intel Mac hardware that I could use, none of the MAC stuff I have meets their specs either.

      A neat idea and I may yet try their IOS app and unRaid app but for my watching shows on my TV this is a no-go. Seems odd too since I'm pretty sure their roots lie with XBMC...

      --
      Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
    35. Re:What do you do with this speed? by noc007 · · Score: 1

      EPB FTTH is symetrical. Their slowest speed is 50mb up and down.

    36. Re:What do you do with this speed? by noc007 · · Score: 1

      For starters, not having any lag on remoting into my home computer from wherever I am via RDP over SSH tunneling. Being able to upload and download a file at the same rate would be nice; I have had to upload a file to my home server from one place and download to another place to get around some routing or ACL issues. Running a mini-datacenter would be nice too.

    37. Re:What do you do with this speed? by buglista · · Score: 1

      I think this is because they are an amalgamation of (literally?) every cable company in the UK. What can I say? I get the advertised speed in general, and good uptime - but it does seem to vary a lot with area from what I hear. (I'm in Bristol)

    38. Re:What do you do with this speed? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's what they said back when 768 kb/s DSL lines were new.
      "Ooh, the servers can't do that anyway" "And what's the use?"

      Well...?

    39. Re:What do you do with this speed? by Tastecicles · · Score: 1

      I'm in Nottingham. My house almost straddles the friggin' trunk!

      --
      Operation Guillotine is in effect.
    40. Re:What do you do with this speed? by outsider007 · · Score: 1

      I've been unfortunate enough to visit Chattanooga and my guess would be streaming cock fights and incest porn.

      --
      If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
    41. Re:What do you do with this speed? by tehcyder · · Score: 1

      Seriously. Everyone with a desk job (or student) doesn't need to drive into work. Get some good video conferencing solutions, a huge pipe to your office files, a cheap-as-dirt dumb terminal in your living room (or home-office), and now you actually have a fighting chance at staving off unimportant things like global warming (less gas for travel).

      What a pile of old toot. You can work or study from home perfectly easily with a very modest internet connection already. It's just that most people don't want to, and most companies don't want them to. It's a social, not a technical issue..

      --
      To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
    42. Re:What do you do with this speed? by tehcyder · · Score: 1

      give me the speed and I'll figure out what to do with it soon enough... probably something I can't do now.

      How can you possibly know that?

      --
      To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
    43. Re:What do you do with this speed? by tehcyder · · Score: 1

      Pretty much instant gratification.

      That does not mean it is either necessary or desirable.

      --
      To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
    44. Re:What do you do with this speed? by Kookus · · Score: 1

      A 52x cd-rom drive is faster than your internet connection.
      Go download a linux live cd.
      Imagine that your cd rom is actually a substitute for your internet connection, and the cd is "the cloud". Kinda sucks doesn't it?

      So what can people do with a fatter pipe? My company has multiple gigabit connections to the internet, but we don't do anything significantly different with the internet than I do at home.

      In relationship to your job, maybe they don't do anything that drastically different...
      But, if you ever hear of someone using something like... ohhhh remote desktop, so they can get into their work computer from home, then you just hit the whole point of my argument.

      Remote desktop is a hack for a network problem. It's too slow to ship the actual programs running on the remote computer to your desktop. So instead, we duplicate unnecessary hardware (your computer), then ship over only the graphics, user input. The graphics try to only send the differences between screen transitions, and then do more hacks like limiting the amount of colors it'll actually represent on the other side.

      The people at my workplace have a slightly better hack for that problem. They use laptops and then sneaker-net the programs they need back to their home. Then hope they have everything they need while they are "remote".

      Then the other huge point of my argument is that you don't do anything different, because hardly anyone is building things that take advantage of fatter pipes since they just don't exist here in the US.

      I'd love to make wagers that after people finally get internet connections over 8gb/s up and download speed that they'll look at our current rates the same way we look at a 9600 baud modem, and that is that they'd rather shoot themselves than live in an era like that (again).

    45. Re:What do you do with this speed? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's considered the "Hundred Year Infrastructure"...granted, it's been that for the past 20 years, so we're down to about a theoretical 80 years...not that that actually means anything. Point is that yes it's more than any one needs, in anticipation of growing needs.

      Also, that's really fast, really reliable, you won't get throttled to make room for other data because there's no need.

      Also, it's the same speed regardless, so the same product you get is the same product a buisness class will get. It's not that they're offering you more, it's that a physical barrier (or physics barrier) that was there that required more monetary investment to provide different classes of service is no longer there.

    46. Re:What do you do with this speed? by Belizean · · Score: 1

      Good for you guys. For perspective in Belize we pay in excess of U.S. $400. (I am not making this up) a month for lousy 4 Mbit/s service from the government monopoly telephone company. http://www.belize.com/satellite-dsl-internet

    47. Re:What do you do with this speed? by Espectr0 · · Score: 1

      Me? Nothing. But if everyone increases their speeds, older/slower ISP's will be forced to at least try to catch up.

      I live in Venezuela, and the standard connection is 1Mbps. I can't even watch youtube at 360p any more, and 240p also stops while buffering.

    48. Re:What do you do with this speed? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I have EPB (was 50 mbps, now 100 mbps) and have not seen any lag at all between 8 & 10 pm. The only time anything is not downloaded at max speed is when the server you are connected to can't handle the traffic.

    49. Re:What do you do with this speed? by hawguy · · Score: 1

      A 52x cd-rom drive is faster than your internet connection.
      Go download a linux live cd.
      Imagine that your cd rom is actually a substitute for your internet connection, and the cd is "the cloud". Kinda sucks doesn't it?

      So what can people do with a fatter pipe? My company has multiple gigabit connections to the internet, but we don't do anything significantly different with the internet than I do at home.

      In relationship to your job, maybe they don't do anything that drastically different...
      But, if you ever hear of someone using something like... ohhhh remote desktop, so they can get into their work computer from home, then you just hit the whole point of my argument.

      I use remote desktop to work from home because I don't want to (or am not allowed for licensing reasons) to install the programs I have on my work computer. I could install MS Office on my home computer and work on docs from home, but I find it much more convenient to rdp into the terminal server at work to work on them.

      Remote desktop is a hack for a network problem. It's too slow to ship the actual programs running on the remote computer to your desktop. So instead, we duplicate unnecessary hardware (your computer), then ship over only the graphics, user input. The graphics try to only send the differences between screen transitions, and then do more hacks like limiting the amount of colors it'll actually represent on the other side.

      The people at my workplace have a slightly better hack for that problem. They use laptops and then sneaker-net the programs they need back to their home. Then hope they have everything they need while they are "remote".

      if they are going to drag their laptop home, why not just use the VPN to access the network share from home instead of taking the time to copy it to a flash drive? If they keep everything on the network share, then they know that they'll be able to access it from home or the office? Or why not just use the terminal server then they don't have to carry the laptop home, all of their software is on the terminal server.

      My work has a better "hack" for this network problem as you describe it. Even though every desktop has a 1 gbit switched connection back to our core network, instead of doing network boot which would allow everyone to boot their desktops over the network, we've started rolling out VDI, which is really just remote desktop with some software to help virtualize desktops. Does any large company still use network boot for their desktop infrastructure? If netboot doesn't really work in a company with 1Gbit/second of bandwidth, why will it have more penetration at home when more and more services are moving to the cloud with a web browser interface?

      Then the other huge point of my argument is that you don't do anything different, because hardly anyone is building things that take advantage of fatter pipes since they just don't exist here in the US.

      I'd love to make wagers that after people finally get internet connections over 8gb/s up and download speed that they'll look at our current rates the same way we look at a 9600 baud modem, and that is that they'd rather shoot themselves than live in an era like that (again).

      100Mbit/sec internet is common in South Korea, so what is it that they do differently with their high speed internet?

    50. Re:What do you do with this speed? by Kookus · · Score: 1

      100Mbit/sec internet is common in South Korea, so what is it that they do differently with their high speed internet?

      Lan partys don't count.
      http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/05/02/south-korea-internet-speed-17-5-mbps/

      Peak speeds of ~48mbps on average is no where near the speeds I'm talking about.

  2. Fastest here? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    3mbit down. Just doubled from from 1.5mbit. $30/month.

    Central California.

  3. Verizon FiOS in Boston by BingmanO · · Score: 1

    I have FiOS and the fastest we can get (residential) is 300mbps down with 65mbps up. This is part of their new FiOS quantum package it seems. In Boston MA.

    1. Re:Verizon FiOS in Boston by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      FIOS in PG county, Maryland

      $214 / mo :: 300/65
      $105 / mo :: 150/65
      $95 / mo :: 75/35
      $85 / mo :: 50/25
      $75 / mo :: 15/5

      * The top 4 are branded "Quantum"
      * This is for bare internet, the price per service drops substantially in bundles (i.e. TV/Internet, or TV/Internet/Phone)... i.e. 50/25 + 210 TV channels is only $89 + rental for STB

    2. Re:Verizon FiOS in Boston by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The last 5 years I paid 39 EUR/month for 100/100 Mbps. New subscribers pay 45 EUR. Top tier is 60 for 500/500. Thanks to a local coop: http://on.nl/

    3. Re:Verizon FiOS in Boston by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Identical prices here in Sarasota, FL. I just moved here, I have the 75/35 package and had to buy a newer firewall because the PCI bus in my ancient IPcop firewall machine couldn't handle that much traffic between the interfaces.

  4. Fastest by dentree4 · · Score: 1

    200Mbps/30Mbps upload, at $200 per month for the first three months. Other than that, 100Mbps/50Mbps upload Oh, don't forget about the 250GB Cap (Combined upload and download), it's $1 /GB after that. My ISP called me out of the blue and said they were changing their pricing, and I was using 450GB of data. My next bill "was going to be $300" but they were waiving it where it was a new policy. Fucking Canadian Duopoly.

    1. Re:Fastest by Tastecicles · · Score: 1

      heeh... that's where they get you on contracts... cellular is worst for this. 3 have unlimited data on prepay for £15 a month, but if you go contract, that same £15/mo gets you 3GB data - go over that and you're charged 1p/MB (remember this is overflow data on contract but you are getting a guarantee of service which you do not get on prepay - anywhere). That's £10/GB - $16 Can. You pull 450GB on a plan like that, you're looking at over seven thousand Dollars. With "normal" usage on contract you're not going to burn 450GB in a decade. Sometimes it's better to go prepay.

      --
      Operation Guillotine is in effect.
    2. Re:Fastest by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Télébec, cable internet. It's only 25$/month for 2Mbps, but it's a very low 35GB combined cap. I asked them for a higher monthly cap and they tried to sell me a faster service at more than twice the price, with only a 50GB cap. So I would still be better off, with a lower overall price and 20GB higher cap, to get their basic service twice rather than upgrading my current service.

      There's a bunch of idiots in their accounting department, that's for sure.

  5. Still not fast enough by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    To get the First Post.

    EBP Fiber is great. Love my service.

    1. Re:Still not fast enough by Skapare · · Score: 3, Funny

      OMG! I've been hunting for years! Now I know where Anonymous Coward is, and how he seems to get so much bandwidth.

      --
      now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
  6. My town sucks! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    5 Mb/s down
    1 Mb/s up
    $70/month lol

    1. Re:My town sucks! by morari · · Score: 1

      Don't feel too bad.
      7 Mb/s down.
      768 Kb/s up.
      $40/month.

      That's assuming fastest is meant to say "only" option.

      --
      "He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
    2. Re:My town sucks! by jjjhs · · Score: 1

      I can't even get cable or DSL. Stuck with 3G, $80 for just one line w/ mobile hotspot & 7GB of data.

  7. Damn rural monopoly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    10 Mbps/Sec, $59.95/Month plus a telephone line. Adds up to about $75/Month. They're the only game in town and they know it. What's worse, they actually own the phone lines and will not lease to other carriers for a reasonable rate, making competition effectively impossible.

    I suppose that's the price I pay for living in a rural area. I guess I could move to the city and get faster/cheaper/better but I think I'll stay put. I like it here.

  8. Fastest speed by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

    For $90 my local WISP will sell me 1.5 Mbps bursting to 3 Mbps for a psuedorandom period of time they will not explain which is limited not just by availability but also by some bullshit criteria they have invented to try to motivate me to pay for more access. Even at 0200h they still cut me down to the base 768k (bursting to 1.5 Mbps) after 20 minutes-ish. I pay $46/mo for this.

    I live within a bowshot of mediacom cable and AT&T DSL, but I can't get either.

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    1. Re:Fastest speed by jwm2pi · · Score: 1

      wow and I thought I had it bad at 5Mb down for $70 per month. It was like pulling teeth to get that kind of speed out of our local municipal utilities. You gotta love a monopoly its good for everyone :)

    2. Re:Fastest speed by Jessified · · Score: 1

      I pay $20, for 50mbps down and 25 up, 250Gb per month. I use Novus, which is available in select buildings in Vancouver.

    3. Re:Fastest speed by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      I felt compelled to comment because of all the people who can get something better than satellite, I'm probably one of the worst-off in the USA... but I'm willing to be proven wrong

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    4. Re:Fastest speed by vlm · · Score: 1

      I pay $20, for 50mbps down and 25 up, 250Gb per month. I use Novus, which is available in select buildings in Vancouver.

      So you can only use it for eleven hours per month. Which brings up the question of what you can do for "less than 10 hours per month" at that high speed.

      A new "super duper WOW like MMORPG" that requires 50 megs complete with smell-o-vision sounds cool, but you can only play for 10 hours a month, so maybe not so cool... Watch extra super triple resolution streamed hi def TV? Sure... just keep it under 20 minutes per day...

      The good news about the future is eventually we'll all have 10Gig ethernet fiber to our homes... the bad news is the cap of 1 gig / month to discourage piracy/abuse/file sharing. 800 milliseconds per month of full speed service....

      --
      "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
    5. Re:Fastest speed by Jessified · · Score: 1

      Good perspective. Thanks!

    6. Re:Fastest speed by volmtech · · Score: 1

      I feel your pain. I live one mile from the end of dsl and cable service. I pay $80 a month for 1.5 Mb capped at 475 MB a day. I have lived in the same house for forty one years. There is no prospect of growth in my area so I will be long dead before any new services are available on my road.

    7. Re:Fastest speed by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      Ouch, with that cap, you "win".

      I'm gradually collecting access points that run Linux, solar panels and charge controllers, etc. I hope to move way into the boonies and build a mesh network one day soon :p

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  9. Being From Chattanooga... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I am really amazed at how the city has really gotten on the ball with this. I was back home a couple of years ago and wandered around downtown. I was really surprised to see the buses running around broadcasting wifi. What's more, with a population of less than 200,000 in the city and less than 500k in the metro area, as well as being one of the most conservative places you could ever visit in the U.S., I am truly amazed. Now... if only Baltimore could do this...

    1. Re:Being From Chattanooga... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Indeed, the conservative editorials in the paper vent about EPB's wasted money on their smart grid, and how it is so terrible a burden on tax-payers with some regularity.

      Nobody pays attention. Apparently the rest of the citizenry don't agree with being beholden to Comcast. We'd rather enjoy local investment for local needs.

  10. I'm more curious... by pnot · · Score: 3, Funny

    ... as to how much of a boost you get for your business when you manage to sneak a link to it into a /. summary.

    Well played sir.

    1. Re:I'm more curious... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      At least one. Wife and I will try it next weekend.

    2. Re:I'm more curious... by watice · · Score: 1

      i'm more curious as to why you need 300mbits for a restaurant that doesn't accept reservations because they seat "family style". I sincerely hope you're some kind of webhost and all that broadband isn't going to waste.

    3. Re:I'm more curious... by LinkX39 · · Score: 2

      Well, since no one actually ever clicks the links no boost whatsoever. ZING!

  11. 400 Mbit/s up and down by FaxeTheCat · · Score: 1

    Where I live I can get 400 Mb/s up and down (symmetric).
    The price? $1000/mo. I guess you will really have to need it to spend that kind of money...

    1. Re:400 Mbit/s up and down by petermgreen · · Score: 1

      Afaict you can get any speed you want pretty much anywhere you want if you are prepared to pay enough.

      OOI Is that price for a "boardband" connection or for a serious connection with dedicated bandwidth, service level agreement etc?

      --
      note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
    2. Re:400 Mbit/s up and down by FaxeTheCat · · Score: 1

      Afaict you can get any speed you want pretty much anywhere you want if you are prepared to pay enough.

      I think my employers networking people would love to see that in Siberia or in Africa... without spending our entire network budget, that is.

      OOI Is that price for a "boardband" connection or for a serious connection with dedicated bandwidth, service level agreement etc?

      This is for private use. The bandwidth is real, as the ISP has really good lines. This is not in a low cost country, by the way...

  12. What I have available is... by carlhaagen · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...an ethernet socket in my apartment. The maximum I can subscribe to is 1000/100 - yes, that's gigabit ethernet down - for 70 EUR/month. What I'm currently buying via the same socket is 25/10 mbit/s, which costs me about 24 EUR/month, which is just over $30. I get this through this building being connected to my municipal city network in which multiple operators can do business. This method is getting very common here in Sweden.

  13. Fastest here? by rbprbp · · Score: 1

    100Mbps/10Mbps fiber for R$ 500/month (about USD 250/month). Currently I have 10Mbps/1Mbps ADSL, but then I need to pay for a phone line that I do not use. Totals about USD 60/month. And then, I still consider myself lucky: some smaller cities have nothing better than WISPs which cost an arm and a leg and provide very bad service.

    --
    They're there in their room. You're on your own.
  14. Time-Warner crawls for $63/month by quixote9 · · Score: 1

    TW is the only ISP in my neighborhood. Officially we get 1MB/s up, 8Mb/s down. And ever since I signed up for the federal SAM speed testing program I heard about here on /., I've actually seen those speeds more than half the time. Before that, and now on weekends, we're generally at 50Kbytes/s (so 400 Kb/s) down, around 5% of the advertised "speed."

    People say you get what you pay for, but not with Time Warner.

    And those of you pissing about "well, whaddya need it for?" That's not the point. (In my case, it's mainly for downloading GBs of Debian distros....) The point is that we should get what we pay for.

    1. Re:Time-Warner crawls for $63/month by Rob_Bryerton · · Score: 1

      I have a 50Mb/s down Time Warner connection in Charlotte, NC and get the full throughput on torrets/ISOs/etc. It will sustain 5+ MB/sec on ISO downloads for example.

      There's something wrong with your connection. There is no conspiracy.

    2. Re:Time-Warner crawls for $63/month by quixote9 · · Score: 1

      No doubt what's wrong with my connection is that I'm not in Charlotte. I'm in a working class neighborhood in Southern California. No, it's not a conspiracy. It's a monopoly. (A few blocks over, where the condos start, everybody gets Verizon Fios.)

    3. Re:Time-Warner crawls for $63/month by guruevi · · Score: 1

      Same here, they (TWC) charge nearly $70 for 10/1 which blows out every so often (frequently the modem restarts and has to re-sync) and I barely get 8Mbps. YouTube test site tells me I get 8Mbps but the statistics shows me it actually averages out to 5 Mbps, the well-known SpeedTest and SpeakEasy test sites say I get up to 25Mbps down, the federal test sites say I get 15Mbps but that's ONLY to those sites, even my job which has 500 Mbps synchronous directly connected to the TWC PoP which I am terminated to myself still gets barely 5Mbps during the evening hours when everyone is active. I could be pulling down a full 8Mbps on Torrent and still get any test site to say that I get over 100% of my 10Mbps so they are fucking with the statistics but then rate limit the rest of my connection.

      --
      Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
  15. Umeå, Sweden by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    I have 100Mbps/100Mbps for about 75 sek (~11$ usd) per month though my housing cooperative.
    Could probably get substantially faster if I wanted to pay for a business-connection but it would probably cost a lot more.

    1. Re:Umeå, Sweden by shking · · Score: 2

      I was just about to post something like "wait until the Europeans, Koreans or Japanese start posting their speeds". The USA is so far behind that average speeds elsewhere seems screaming fast at home... Then there's Canada, which was amoung the fastest 10 years ago, but then stopped improving. Now they're trailing.

      --
      -- "At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1" -- PC Magazine, Nov. 1994
    2. Re:Umeå, Sweden by rbprbp · · Score: 2

      Then there's Brazil, which makes the USA look very good.

      --
      They're there in their room. You're on your own.
    3. Re:Umeå, Sweden by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Some Europeans.

      Belgium is the internet Somalia.

  16. Fastest I can get... by momikey · · Score: 2

    I can get 1 Gbps fiber for $300/month through EPB, as stated in TFA. But I'm happy with the 50 Mbps (formerly 30) for about $60, since my only alternative is AT&T, as Comcast never wired this part of the county.

    It's really funny when AT&T calls to "win us back", usually with an offer for something like 5 Mbps at about the same price as EPB's 50. One guy wanted to know how we were using that much bandwidth, and another just kind of sputtered and apologized for calling.

  17. Spectrum Networks and Condo Internet by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    In Seattle we have a residential provider by the name of CondoInternet that sells FastE for $60/mo and GigE for $200/mo. No limitations. You can even get a static IP. CondoInternet is owned by Spectrum Networks, another local company.

  18. Nearly getting 350Mbps, stuck with 2.5Mbps by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Down my street I am stuck with 2.5Mbps yet 3 streets away they get 350Mbps fibre ( http://lightstream.kc.co.uk/products/specialist/ ). They missed a few streets out when installing the fibre in my area. And its a monopoly in my area so I cannot switch provider either. Time to move I think!

  19. Stockholm, Sweden by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    ADSL, from www.prisjakt.nu, for Stockholm, Sweden:

    1000 Mbit/sec: 750-900 SEK/month (USD 115-140/month)
    250 Mbit/sec: 350-400 SEK/month (USD 65/month)
    200 Mbit/sec: 370 SEK/month (USD 65/month)
    100 Mbit/sec: 225-400 SEK/month (USD 35-60/month)

    Conversion 6.55 SEK = 1 USD

  20. Fastest available AFAIK in Montreal. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Fastest for consumers.. 200Mbit/s Down, 30 Mbit/s UP. for $199.95, through cable.
    Businesses have access to proper fiber network with Gbp/s speeds, none yet for the regular folks

  21. In 10 years you might catch up with 2007 Korea by ReallyEvilCanine · · Score: 2

    These sorts of speeds are something to be ashamed of.

  22. I thought this was impressive... by ebcdic · · Score: 1

    ... until I realised that "30 MB/sec" should have been "30 Mb/sec". Bits, not bytes.

  23. I assume small b, not capital B? by Aphrika · · Score: 1

    Megabits, not megabytes? A minor point, but when it comes to network speeds, it makes all the difference...

    1. Re:I assume small b, not capital B? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      All hardware connection speeds (aka layer 1) are specified in bits. Anyone that uses 'B' has no clue that there is a factor of 8 difference.

      Editors should do their work.

  24. my speed by __aaqvdr516 · · Score: 1

    I get 768k/512k for $90/mo with a 600MB/day cap over WISP. Alternately I could get satellite for the same price, but I'd have to deal with the 2000ms latency.

    The best phone service for my area is 2G with the choice of AT&T or T-mobile.

    Go 10 miles in any direction and you could have 5MB/sec cable.

    The broadband initiative did provide funding for infrastructure building in my area. 1 year of planning and 1 year of work and they're not done yet. I expect that I won't see any physical connection to my home, though I'm only around 100 yards from the main line through town. Likely I'll get some form of WISP. From what little has been published, I may end up with between 5-10MB WISP when it's done. No word on price.

  25. Telenet Belgium by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I personally have Telenet Fibernet (which is actually just EuroDOCSIS 3.0 cable, not fiber to home) here in Belgium, which is 60Mbps down, 4Mbps up (with "fair use policy") which boils down to unlimited with reduced speed in peak hours somewhere between 250GB and 512GB bandwidth use). That comes down to €44.95 (about $60). I have to add that price goes down a bit if you combine it with digital television and/or phone services.

    They also have Basic Internet at €24.95 (€33) which is 30Mbps down/2.5Mbps up and Fibernet XL which is 120Mbps down/5Mbps up at €64.95 ($85).

    I have to say that although the prices here are way too high imo (compared to countries like the Netherlands), but service is very good and the theoretical speeds are also the actual speeds on cable. DSL in Belgium has much lower speeds (even in VDSL) and actual speeds rarely come even remotely close to the theoretical speeds they try to seduce you with.

    1. Re:Telenet Belgium by wimpy · · Score: 1

      Here in the Netherlands I pay 52 euro for 60 Mbps down, 6 Mbps up, with television + telephone included. Doesn't seem to be a lot cheaper than what you have so Belgium might have caught up :-)

  26. Believe it or not... 3G cellular plan on 3 by Tastecicles · · Score: 1

    Pay as you Go on 3 UK:

    300 minutes any network voice (excluding 101 and premium numbers)
    3,000 SMS texts (excluding 5-digit text codes)
    the only truly unlimited data plan of ANY carrier in the UK (and free MSN/Facebook/Skype (which doesn't count toward any data even if you use your gear for video calls!) ...on top of that you're allowed to tether!

    All for £15 a month.

    I have about 0 downtime on it (not including computer restarts and moving around and occasionally rebooting my phone), and I can (and do most of the time) saturate at 3.8MBit. For an all you can eat wireless plan at that price, I'll never go back to a fixed line.

    It doesn't even bother me that I use probably 15 minutes talk a month and I've sent three SMS texts in four years. It's worth the fifteen quid just for the data.

    --
    Operation Guillotine is in effect.
  27. Bandwidth is great by Meeni · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Latency is better.

    I have comcast, I can download at some 20Mbit/s, for around $65/mo. Its expensive but if it worked properly, I'd be happy. But...

    Latency is catastrophic. On benchmarks it's great, on anything real it sucks. Actually, that's the story of that Comcast subscription. It does everything useless fast, but anything useful feels crippled. Skype? Unusable. Netflix? Never in HD. Youtube? Choppy. ssh? horrible latency. Web pages? super fast, but who cares?

    1. Re:Bandwidth is great by aktiveradio · · Score: 1

      Comcast does very heavy packet shaping, so things like speedtest.net look great but everything else is "shaped" so you don't actually get what you expect or pay for.

    2. Re:Bandwidth is great by girlintraining · · Score: 4, Informative

      Web pages? super fast, but who cares?

      Comcast employs a rather complex quality of service system that isn't configured like any QoS system you've seen before. Essentially, it's designed to act fast for the casual user who rarely does anything but look at Facebook.

      Many people have tried to research the system and find a pattern, but it varies by region and tier of service. There are some things that have been routinely found, however. Services like hulu (aka XFinity), Speedtest.net, and several others receive the highest priority. TCP/IP Traffic on port 80 and 443 get a bump, but only for the first 5MB of transfer per connection. Host-based filtering can pre-empt this however, like youtube.com, netflix.com, etc.; They receive no priority. UDP traffic receives a lower priority than TCP. Services like Skype and other services that compete directly with comcast get lumped into the lowest QoS tier -- any other connection on your line will max out, starving these out. It's the same story with SSL connections on any port other than 80 or 443.

      There is also active interference with certain connection types; Trying to upload a torrent to a tracker (not seeding, actually creating a new torrent) results in a deluge of fakes reset packets. When a torrent completes and switches to seeding, the incoming connection count and amount of bandwidth drop instantly and significantly. This is due to their "sandvine" software being installed at their border routers. They also transparently proxy HTTP in some locations -- on popular sites like Facebook, data is cached and even after it's updated and live on the internet, anyone accessing it through plain HTTP will get a cached copy. It appears to be based only on the top 100 or so websites, though anecdotally, some people have reported other sites seem to get cached as well. Windows updates also get cached, which was only noticed when Microsoft deployed XP service pack 1, and then re-released it as 1a due to a serious bug -- the buggy version continued to propagate for almost a day after the update was posted onto comcast customers' systems.

      In addition to all of this, comcast has massive buffers on all your IP traffic -- the classic case of buffer bloat. If you're using more than about 25% of your rated capacity, you're going to start seeing latency, and there are clear thresholds if you do TCP "pings" (rather than ICMP) with full payload packets (typically MTU = 1500). And then there's the clamping they do based purely on capacity used -- which is based both on the amount of traffic on your local segment AND the total rated speed for your tier of service, with the magic numbers being the "top 10%" for the former, and more than 75% for the latter. I put the previous in quotations because many report that throttling appears persistent, rather than transient, and may be based on billing cycle, despite customer services' assurances to the contrary. This is another one of those "region-specific" throttling problems.

      As you can see, there's a reason the FCC chose Comcast first on the list of ISPs to try to enforce network neutrality on: They are by far the worst offender.

      --
      #fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
    3. Re:Bandwidth is great by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Services like Skype and other services that compete directly with comcast get lumped into the lowest QoS tier -- any other connection on your line will max out, starving these out.

      Thank you. That explains why I can't use Skype on my phone over wi-fi (eventually going to a Comcast cable modem) but it works just fine over 3G... but Google Talk's VOIP is pretty usable over the same connection. Luckily VOIP doesn't use much bandwidth so just running over 3G works fine.

    4. Re:Bandwidth is great by rsmith-mac · · Score: 1

      When a torrent completes and switches to seeding, the incoming connection count and amount of bandwidth drop instantly and significantly. This is due to their "sandvine" software being installed at their border routers.

      I appreciate your post, but you're either misinformed or woefully out of date. Comcast dropped Sandvine years ago.

    5. Re:Bandwidth is great by girlintraining · · Score: 1

      I appreciate your post, but you're either misinformed or woefully out of date. Comcast dropped Sandvine years ago.

      Officially, yes. Unofficially, some people have reported problems. I ran the test here, along with others, on an otherwise idle connection; From about 5pm-1am local time during the week, and varying on the weekends, it's easy to trip the throttler -- simply loading a video on netflix, then quitting (as in, no active connections, confirmed with wireshark), waiting a minute, and running a bandwidth test, shows a 30% reduction in available bandwidth repeatedly with Speedtest.net, as well as test files downloaded from numerous FTP and HTTP sites. Total traffic transferred in the previous 30 minutes prior to each test was less than 5MB total, with a 30 minute cooldown after -- tests were run repeatedly and triggered off scripts automatically. All traffic was logged.

      --
      #fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
    6. Re:Bandwidth is great by biochozo · · Score: 1

      Thank you. I have comcast (before and after moving) and this explains a lot. I'm constantly dropping skype calls (while enduring terrible quality) while getting a 30mbps 5ms speed test at the same time. I'm paying 45USD for 6mbps in Michigan. I get 30mbps somehow and it acts like 256kbps on anything that isn't Facebook. Honestly... this should be it's own /. topic. If I don't get what I pay for... how could I even begin to prove it and help change their shaping of my internet? Thanks again!

    7. Re:Bandwidth is great by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's really sad that UDP is not given highest priority. I know why, it because torrents are now using UDP by default.
      Sucks if you play games.

  28. Beware of FTTx (in some situations) by cianduffy · · Score: 1

    My house has FTTH. Except its dark, ever since the firm providing it went bankrupt and was bought by another that promptly went bankrupt itself. It *was* sold at 10mbits and 20mbits when they were in business, at a time when DSL was usually 512k or 1mbit. So I'm stuck with 3mbit DSL, due to the estate having been connected to a second-string exchange as the telco never thought anyone would want DSL with FTTH. The rest of the town gets either 8mbit or 24mbit depending on who they get service from. Then, to make it worse, as the FTTH provider had an early IPTV package, the cable company never cabled this estate. They legally could (totally unregulated market) but they decided it wasn't worth it. They have the rest of the town cabled. They now offer 150/10mbit. I've decided its time to move house!

    1. Re:Beware of FTTx (in some situations) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This is where Chattanooga has an advantage, as the Electric Power Board is a municipal company, it's also the source for electric power. That's a service they have to offer to everybody in their service area. So since they have to run electric lines, why not string a fiber alongside it? The cost is next to inconsequential.

      So...why not buy a house in Chattanooga? Sure, you'll have to put up with Rednecks and Church Biddies, but that's solved by more Internet Access.

  29. Upgrade to fiber by AliasMarlowe · · Score: 5, Informative

    you know that 15 Mbit down on a cable connection is not the rate at which you upload right? upload speeds are typically 1 Mbit, 2 if you pay extra.

    So true. We have a 100/100 Mbps symmetric link on fiber at home. It's also uncapped, etc. Apparently a couple of km from here, there is a 200Mbps or 350Mbps service available, but not where we live.

    What do we use it for? Well, there are generally two adults and two teenagers at home, and the need for bandwidth adds up. Downloading an ISO does happen occasionally (reaching speeds up to 60Mbps from sites within Finland, dropping to 5Mbps from overseas), but mostly it's just web surfing and viewing youtube or vimeo.

    We also have a web server at home, which delivers - according to its stats package - 15-30 GByte per month, and mostly serves pictures and videos of the kids and adults performing in the local dance school and in the local riding school. Although the average bandwidth is not huge, we get two or three videos being viewed simultaneously just after the server is updated for some new event, and the videos typically require 2Mbps to 4Mbps for streaming.

    The alternative for us would be a 40/10 Mbps link, which would be quite inadequate.

    --
    Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
    1. Re:Upgrade to fiber by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yep .. I use my connection for photos and videos of your kids too :]

  30. It's actually better than advertised by topher_k · · Score: 1

    My SpeedTest after the announcement had me at 60 Mbps down and 30 Mbps up. More importantly, in two years I have had exactly zero downtime, as compared to my former monthly visits from Comcast. Topher

    --
    They'll get my encryption algorithm when they pry it from my cold, dead hard drive.
  31. 1Gb/s in Ukraine for $18/month with 75 TV channels by OneMadMuppet · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...though real-world benchmarks give me ~800Mb/s both ways. It's also native IPv6, so I don't need my tunnel anymore. Internet is dirt cheap here, you can get 30MB/s for about $3/month with TV and phone.

  32. crappiest deal evah by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Living among the Canadian sticks, (Fiber / Fibe / DSL isn't available here, so I use Fido's 3G) and upon having a craptastic LOS to the tower, I can pull about 200KB/s down, can't really upload crap (A 2MB picture to FB times out on upload) and for about 10GB/mo equates to $100. Better than dial-up, sure, but wow. It's quicker (and cheaper!) to mail somebody a USB key if you need to get a chunk of data out.

    Having an Autodesk Flame here (it was a gift!) I'd certainly have fun with some of the speeds and caps that you guys are raving about. (Always in search of high bit-rate/bit-depth HD sources, such as REDraw) If I do want to download a torrent / distro, I go to the village and tap into free wifi for the price of a regular coffee. (16Mbps down, 1Mbps up, unlimited cap) Perform a quick ifconfig, log into the router with default uname and password, set QOS to favour my IP, however yet leave the cafe's POS terminals to have priority over me. That way, everyone is happy! ;D

  33. Canada: 250 Mb/s, $110/mo for 1TB by rbrander · · Score: 1

    Shaw covers quite a lot of Canada and the prices are the same wherever they cover:

    http://shaw.ca/Internet/Broadband-250/

    and $190/mo for "unlimited" though you'll want to check the fine print on that word. And speaking of loopholes, for this you get "up to" 250 Mb/s...where "up to" includes the number zero, not to mention every number lower than 250.

    This isn't bad, but whatever is decent in Canadian services are due to regulation as the competition is pretty thin. There are perhaps two services in any large city, which amazingly have about the same prices and services.

    As somebody who watches the costs on maintaining municipal networks of big heavy water and sewer pipes we have to expensively bury 10 feet down to stay below the frost line, it's painfully obvious what a bonanza providing Internet has been for these companies. The big bucks aren't in the little black boxes at the ends of wires that get upgraded every few years anyway; the big bucks are keeping all those thousands of miles of line maintained. And since we never got fibre-to-the-home out of the commercial world, they've been able to supply this whole new service down the same wires that paid for themselves in the 50's (for POTS copper wires) and the 80's (for TV coax cable).

    Every city on the continent should have just declared Internet to be a municipal network, too important to the public to leave to private hands, and built FTTH that way a decade ago. There are private water/sewer utilities (many very good), but in most places, voters get very nervous at the very suggestion of privatizing water - because you gotta have it and privatized utilities in various places have doubled and tripled rates in the past.

    A public utility is basically owned by its own customers and has no interest of its own, just theirs. Private utilities love gaming the pricing model. Every utility network has fixed costs (maintaining those lines cost the same whether more or less product is flowing through) and product-relative costs: the amount of water or power or gas or bytes. Netflix figures have shown that the real incremental cost of bandwidth in large bulk is only about 2-3 cents per gigabyte. Keeping a set of lines to you house running that are lightweight and do not have to be deeply buried costs maybe $25/month in most large cities. And if it's fibre you chose to bury rather than a 40 or 70 year-old network for a different kind of communication, everybody gets hundreds of MB/s. Then your cost is all about the number of gigabytes you care to buy - at a quarter or so per Blu-Ray grade movie. $25+ two movies a day = $40/month.

    Instead, you get the fixed and product costs blended together into $110 per month and a bandwidth cap. Note the healthy profit.

  34. OpenCape on Cape Cod - 100 gig/sec by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    We are in the middle of the construction of the OpenCape fiber backbone being built on Cape Cod & The Islands. It will connect every town, most of the libraries, schools with a 100 gig pipe. Construction will be completed by Jan. 1, 2013. It is available to private companies to lease and offer commercial service to residents. Many businesses are getting their laterals connected as well as neighborhood associations. Anyone want to move their business here? We are typically ten degrees warmer than Boston in the winter and 10 degrees cooler in the summer with lots of beaches and year round towns.

  35. My worst fear... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I remember hearing about people rant about this, because they considered it unfair government competition against private industry. (Cue calls of "socialism".)

    I wish this town luck, but it may only be a matter of time before telcos and cable companies sue and win, similar to how mesh networking was killed in most towns a few years back.

  36. Megabytes? by HaZardman27 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Submitter needs to turn in his geek card for confusing Mb with MB multiple times in the summary.

    --
    Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
    1. Re:Megabytes? by matty619 · · Score: 1

      Ya, that's one of my pet peeves too. That and less/fewer and RPM's/RPM.

  37. In reply to Timothy's question about options by Shinobi · · Score: 1

    In the area I live in, there are multiple options:

    Multiple *DSL options
    Cable up to 500Mbit/s down/200 up
    FTTP/ethernet up to Gbit/s down and 250-500Mbit/s up

    I'm currently on 100Mbit/s symmetrical, and pay SEK379/month(roughly $57/month), but I'm considering the Gbit/s option, which is SEK899/month(roughly $137/month)

  38. Meanwhile... by Nemyst · · Score: 1

    The best plan I could get is 200/30 for 200$/month, and that's when combined with another service from the ISP like TV or mobile.

    The kicker though is that it also has a 200gb down/50gb up monthly cap. Yes, you read that right: you can bust your cap by saturating your connection for less than 3 hours. You can then buy up to three packages of 60gb per month for 12.50$ each.

    It's absurd.

  39. Verizon FiOS (SE Virginia) by YrWrstNtmr · · Score: 1

    15/5 @ $70
    50/25 @ $80
    75/35 @ $90
    150/65 @ $100
    300/65 @ $210

    Bundling TV and/or phone brings down the price significantly. Next summer, when my 2 year price lock-in runs out, I'll switch from 25/25 to 50/25, for about the same price. Currently, our 25/25+phone+TV is $125/mo. And currently, Verizon has no bandwidth cap.

  40. 38€ for 100/10Mbps download/upload in Madrid by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    38€ is because one of the householders is employee of Telefonica (the main telecommunications company in Spain), normal price is about 75€.

    The line is very stable and worked almost flawlessly for about 1 year.

  41. bla by Ruede · · Score: 1

    flatrate 100mbit down/2,5mbit up ( :( ) + 1 telephone line without flatrate 30€/month

  42. Rural is still slow by homesteader · · Score: 1

    I pay $60/month for 1mbit dsl and my only other option is satellite. Local telco still has a regulated monopoly because we are classified as rural. I have high hopes for cellular, but those speeds are currently slower than my 1mbit dsl and they are capped.

  43. Meanwhile, In Nawth Ca'lina by Toad-san · · Score: 1

    Howling Wilderness of Computerdom [tm], they passed a law against any such shenanigans. The godz forbid we should actually have a CHOICE in our broadband!

    http://www.wired.com/business/2011/05/nc-gov-anti-muni-broadband/

    http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/cities-consumers-lose-municipal-broadband-fight/Content?oid=2440390

    Of course they also passed laws forbidding any study of global rising seawater .. outside the limits they felt were politically correct, that is.

    Gotta love 'em.

    1. Re:Meanwhile, In Nawth Ca'lina by virgnarus · · Score: 1

      Time Warner's fault. Always.

  44. Speed and latency are important by Conficio · · Score: 1

    How about latency and bufferbloat effects? Since the discovery of bufferbloat (http://gettys.wordpress.com/bufferbloat-faq/) I have become increasingly aware that raw speed is not all there is to Internet quality.

    My Verizon FIOS 20/5 should be plenty to do remote screen sessions to work, but it does slow down considerably in the afternoon and becomes painful in the prime time evening hours.

    --
    Busy helping non technical users of OpenOffice.org - http://plan-b-for-openoffice.org/
  45. Damn it! by cfkboyz · · Score: 1

    I moved to TN a few years ago. I was just about to move to Chattanooga, but found a super cheap home just north of there. Damn did I screw myself. LOL I see the EPB Fiber ads all the time on TV since I get it from Chatt. Now I am stuck with my little Telephone Co-Op with the max speed of 10mbit/1mbit and you can only get the 10/1 if you do not have their IPTV which I do. The max with TV is 6mbit/768kbit and if you are watching HD channels your speed fluctuates between 4-5mbits :(.. Best part is that I pay $69.95 a month just for the Internet.... Should have moved to Chatt... Anyone want to buy a House? LOL

  46. Bufferbloat at work? by Conficio · · Score: 1
    --
    Busy helping non technical users of OpenOffice.org - http://plan-b-for-openoffice.org/
  47. I pay... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I pay $70/month for 512K DSL, which is the fastest speed available. I live in semi-rural Missouri.

  48. Meanwhile, in South Carolina by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The legislature just granted AT&T a statewide monopoly on network services, meaning that my county had to stop rolling out its own fiber network that it is legally required by federal law to implement.

    It's getting interesting, thank you NIkki Haley, you useless piece of shit, and the teapublicans who are being idiots and violating federal law.

  49. OK, let's hear it by sjames · · Score: 1

    OK all you free market privatization fans, care to explain to us how it's all an illusion and if they would just sell out to AT&T things would be so much better for Chattanooga residents?

    I hear a lot of crickets out there.

    1. Re:OK, let's hear it by matty619 · · Score: 1

      I'm a "free market fan". But I would hardly suggest that at&t is participating in a "free market". It is a state sanctioned near monopoly. This is probably why you hear crickets when you make such an argument ;)

    2. Re:OK, let's hear it by sjames · · Score: 1

      I'm not making that argument at all. I am arguing that the municipal network in Chattanooga has performed far better than any private business in the U.S.

    3. Re:OK, let's hear it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'd suggest you read the right side of the local paper's editorials on the subject.

      I have my opinion on them, but I shared it directly.

  50. Fiber ftw! by mZHg · · Score: 1

    I have fiber 100/100 at 30euro/month, by SFR, living in Lyon, France.

    1. Re:Fiber ftw! by mZHg · · Score: 1

      I forgot to say, no bandwidth limitation.

  51. Gigabit fibre by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I get 1000Mbps down and 100Mbps up, costs £60/month. Which is nice, but there's a 50GB/month cap. It's like drag racing - I can go really really fast for a really short time; about 7.5 minutes if saturating. Overage is 30p/GB so it's not hideously expensive but monitoring it is a pain, and I'm already paying an extra £10/month for an extra 50GB. I use the upstream for broadcasting, and the downstream for not having to worry about what other household users or machines may be doing. I could drop down to 100/10Mbps for £45/month with the same cap, but hey, this ensures no impact on other users.

  52. Re:1Gb/s in Ukraine for $18/month with 75 TV chann by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Internet is dirt cheap here...

    Yeah, but the heating bill probably makes up for it.. Could I interest you in a heated toilet seat?

  53. Bastards by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I can get a 50Mb fiber for $1350/mo (US), and I am getting 1.5Mb T1 for 350/mo. The only other option (I live 10 minutes from a small city) is dial up which is ridiculous in this day and age. Of course in the US, most locations are a monopoly supported by the state, and this particular area is no different.

  54. Lafayette, Louisiana has 1 GB across entire county by beejhuff · · Score: 2

    Of course, we call it a 'parish' but there's no need to split hairs. I'm incredibly proud of my community and local government. They saw an opportunity decades ago when fiber was cheap and ran a lot of it wherever they had rights of way for electrical...turns out it was a brilliant strategy as we have just become self-sufficient - that's right, there's enough customers purchasing Internet, TV, Voice through the new fiber to be self-sustaining at this point. I've got the 50 / 50 mbps plan at home, and it's unbeleivably fast. Even better, whenever you connect directly to someone else on the local fiber ring, you get m,ax 100 / 100 mbps speeds. Which is nice since my office uses it as well as my home....X sessions and rdp back and forth from office to house are about as fast as I can ask for... Of course, we just rolled out 1 GBPS for all homes and businesses in the parish, which gives everyone even more bandwidth. It's one of the reasons my wife and I moved back to Lafayette from Austin. I really beleive these kinds of investments are what are going to differentiate communities who want to attract the best and brightest to build and grow the businesses of the future. Our available consumer plans can be seen here - http://lusfiber.com/index.php/internet/pricing-guide

    --
    Bryan "BJ" Hoffpauir
  55. 100mb/s in Taiwan by Eugene · · Score: 1

    in Taiwan, you can get 100mb/100mb down/up for USD $60-ish if you can get FTTH (Fiber To The Home) installed, otherwise your next best solution would be 100mb/40mb FTTB/VDSL2 for $50 USD.

  56. Fastest connexions? by manu0601 · · Score: 1

    What's the fastest service actually available where you live, and what does it cost?

    Universities pipes are not cheap for the university itself, but they are fat

  57. Really Tried To Move To Chattanooga by noc007 · · Score: 1

    I took my time looking for a new job a couple of years and ended up expanding my search outside of Atlanta. When I found out about the EPB's internet services, I really tried to find a job over there. The IT market over there is quite small and I could only find two jobs that could utilize my skill set. I got a really good offer in Atlanta, but I wish the rest of the country had this level of service.

  58. Kansas City Missouri choices by satsuke · · Score: 1

    Well .. here I can get

    Time Warner at 15/1 for $50 a month, with various options going up to $120 a month for 50/5
    AT&T Uverse - unsure of pricing, but maxes out at ~18/1
    Everest/Surewest maxes out at 50/50 symetrical .. this is what I'm converting to soon
    and when they build it
    Google Fiber 1Gb symmetrical for $70 a month .. might be a year or so before it's built, but once there -- hell yes

  59. Austin, TX, USA by buddyglass · · Score: 1

    AT&T U-verse: 24 Mbps downstream (not sure about up) w/ 250 GB/month for $45/mo (first 12 months; $63/mo after that).
    Time Warner Cable: 50 Mbps downstream (5 Mbps up) (not sure about monthly usage cap) for $80/mo (first 12 months; not sure after that).

  60. Re:1Gb/s in Ukraine for $18/month with 75 TV chann by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    For ~$25 per month all you can get in India is a (wireless broadband) connection @ 2-4Mb/s which too has a cap limit of 10GB after which they will downgrade your speed to 512kbps unlimited data connection. And that is approximately same for the broadband connections too. Though latency is carrier dependent. I am soo likely to move to Ukraine (if I get a job there) + they got way better weather (if you compare it to India which is probably shitty)

  61. Speed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I have ~300Kb over 3G phone modem and I pay 1eur/month, that's 1.2935 US dollars. Just an example of a good price/quality ratio.

  62. Jersey, Channel Islands Gigabit speeds by tiznom · · Score: 1

    Here in Jersey you can get Gigabit down / 100Mbit up for £59.99/month (about $100USD) which will be island-wide within a year. It's a small market but we will be very well connected soon. I'm limping along on a 4Mbit DSL connection for now, waiting for the build out.

    Note that the local telco JTGlobal, have placed a comically low bandwidth cap of 50GB/Month. Doing the math, you would use your 50GB monthly ration in less than ten minutes going flat out.

    Fortunately two other re-sellers here offer unlimited plans for the savvier shoppers.

  63. subject by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Here in Romania, most people that have an internet connection, have optic fiber at 100/100 Mbps with unlimited traffic for 39 lei/month. (1 euro = 4.5 lei; less than 10 euros)
    No, I am not joking. RCS&RDS is the ISP.
    Check out it's site. http://www.rcs-rds.ro/internet-digi-net/fiberlink/pachete

  64. New Delhi, India : 2m/5k for $40 a month by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I have a 2mbps/5kbps unlimited line from MTNL($40/month), the public sector provider in Delhi; It's down at least once in two weeks and the pings to anywhere outside of Asia are horrific, but it's the only real alternative to Airtel, where you can't get an unlimited plan or even one with a reasonable download limit. Airtel is even rolling out fiber now, but their most expensive fiber plan, which is $100/month and is 80mbps downlink, is limited to 2mbps uplink and maxes out at 150 gigs, which is not a pittance but definitely not great considering the 150gb is combined for down and up. Also, after you cross 150 gigs, your connection gets throttled to 512kbps, never mind the fact that Airtel throttles P2P& BitTorrent 16 hours a day, and even RDP when they feel like. 512kbps on a FTTH line, it makes me want to weep. The last time I saw an Airtel store I started contemplating arson.

  65. Western Loudoun County, VA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    We don't get much choice. Verizon has deployed FIOS in the east of the county, but not the west towns. (7000 people waiting for service in my town)

    My choices:

    Comcast up to 105mbit/sec down. I get the 25/4mbit plan. Its perfect really, doesn't slow down. Nodes fed out of same headend as the FIOS areas so we get all the upgrades. My service includes 150 channels of HDTV and Nationwide calling for $125 a month. (No DVR, 1 HD box, 1 SD box)

    Verizon, on ANCIENT DSLAM's and Remote Terminals installed by Bell Atlantic in 1999. Blazing speeds of up to 12mbit/sec, 768k (At $100 a month) if your local loop is short enough (you have to be right off the Central Office on the Main Street, or fed off of a nearby Remote). Most people can get a max of 3mbit/sec down, 768k up. At the price point VZ sells their wire-line services, Comcast murders them. Their lines have not been maintained in about 5 years, its starting to show. Open Pedestals, sagging lines, Trash Bag repairs, thats a "network ahead". HAHAHAH

    Verizon, your a fail. Signed, all areas you abandoned your copper.

  66. Is a move afoot? by servant · · Score: 1

    To get that kind of a speed, a move to Chattanooga would be the cheapest way to go.

    The fastest wired speed I can get now is 20Kbps on a dial-up modem. There is cable and DSL 3 miles away, but neither will be extended here.

    The nearest WISP (clearwire) is about 50 miles away, and the hills get in the way (and we live in a valley between 2 hills). Broadcast TV is limited to NBC and FOX, sometimes CBS but only occasionally. Also have Christian stations and 2 other independent that seem to be all sales all the time.

    We tried satellite Internet but got a real speed of about 150kbps, but the 2500ms propagation delay (measured with traceroute), and we had outages about half the time. Once the required contract ran out, it was canceled. (Vendor was Wildblue, they are now Excede. Hughes or others might be better but I can't get any info from apparent real users to date, so we haven't gone back there.)

    So currently we use a Sprint3G air card and drops signal occasionally at about - current speed is 7.09Mbit download, 1.33Mbit upload.

    AT&T has better service, but the cost goes prohibitive at about $10/G before long.

    Basically, 25 miles outside Nashville TN, we may as well be in the proverbial BFE!

    --
    ... "When you pry the source from my cold dead hands."
  67. Need new pants now by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Alright! lets all Google maps this place and start packing our bags! TOOOO the promised land woooooooooT!

    Oh and please help any friends or relatives who want to join you but were unfortunate enough to get a new iphone5 or that silly Apple "map" thing. Unless you don't care if they don't get there? More bandwidth for you!

    Ok, anyways on a serious note, Why can't they do this anywhere I live? grrrr. I think All drug war / prison money should instead be used for things like this all over the entire country. Hell, if I opened my comcast or verizon wireless bill and it was like, congrats you just got a free 250% increase in your speed and or bandwidth, oh and no more caps, you are also permanently on unlimited data! and your cost will stay the same!.
    I think i'd prob think it's a joke (or someone drugged my drink and I was tripping bad) and toss it lol. Well, with those two idiot companies that would be a joke, sadly.

    That's just awesome to read. I hope more and more places start doing similiar.

  68. Love EPB by FreeBaGeL · · Score: 1

    I live in Chattanooga and EPB is a godsend. I had comcast for a year before they got fiber in my area and was on the phone with them every week working out one issue or another. In 2+ years of EPB I've had maybe 10 seconds of combined downtime, during a massive storm that probably knocked comcast out for a week. Pings are low, speeds are high. I hope google fiber is as good and it puts pressure on the awful cable companies to create a better service.

  69. Love Chattanooga EPB by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This is the second boost of speed by EPB. Everyone started with 15mbps symmetrical and were doubled over a year ago to 30 Mbps and now the boost to 50 mbps, without the first mention of cost. Add EPB's amazing service team and one wonders how you could ever leave EPB. I really feel sorry for the folks that move out of town.

    www.chattanoogagig.com