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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?
To get the First Post.
EBP Fiber is great. Love my service.
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.
...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.
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.
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
These sorts of speeds are something to be ashamed of.
Then there's Brazil, which makes the USA look very good.
They're there in their room. You're on your own.
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?
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
...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.
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.
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