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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?

3 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.