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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?
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?
3mbit down. Just doubled from from 1.5mbit. $30/month.
Central California.
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.
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.
To get the First Post.
EBP Fiber is great. Love my service.
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.'"
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...
... 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.
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...
...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 $30. I get this through this building being connected to my municipal city network in which multiple operators can do business. This method is getting very common here in Sweden.
100Mbps/10Mbps fiber for R$ 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
These sorts of speeds are something to be ashamed of.
... until I realised that "30 MB/sec" should have been "30 Mb/sec". Bits, not bytes.
Megabits, not megabytes? A minor point, but when it comes to network speeds, it makes all the difference...
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.
Pay as you Go on 3 UK:
300 minutes any network voice (excluding 101 and premium numbers) ...on top of that you're allowed to tether!
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!)
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.
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?
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!
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
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.
...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.
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
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 :-)
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.
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.
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.
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 $137/month)
The best plan I could get is 200/30 for 200$/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.
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.
flatrate 100mbit down/2,5mbit up ( :( ) + 1 telephone line without flatrate
30€/month
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.
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
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.
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/
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
http://gettys.wordpress.com/bufferbloat-faq/
Busy helping non technical users of OpenOffice.org - http://plan-b-for-openoffice.org/
I can't even get cable or DSL. Stuck with 3G, $80 for just one line w/ mobile hotspot & 7GB of data.
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.
I have fiber 100/100 at 30euro/month, by SFR, living in Lyon, France.
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
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.
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
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.
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 .. this is what I'm converting to soon .. might be a year or so before it's built, but once there -- hell yes
AT&T Uverse - unsure of pricing, but maxes out at ~18/1
Everest/Surewest maxes out at 50/50 symetrical
and when they build it
Google Fiber 1Gb symmetrical for $70 a month
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).
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.
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."
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.