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Comcast Brings Fiber To City That It Sued 7 Years Ago To Stop Fiber Rollout
An anonymous reader writes with the latest update in Comcast's "if you can't beat them, join them" fiber plan. In April 2008, Comcast sued the Chattanooga Electric Power Board (EPB) to prevent it from building a fiber network to serve residents who were getting slow speeds from the incumbent cable provider. Comcast claimed that EPB illegally subsidized the buildout with ratepayer funds, but it quickly lost in court, and EPB built its fiber network and began offering Internet, TV, and phone service. After EPB launched in 2009, incumbents Comcast and AT&T finally started upgrading their services, EPB officials told Ars when we interviewed them in 2013. But not until this year has Comcast had an Internet offering that can match or beat EPB's $70 gigabit service. Comcast announced its 2Gbps fiber-to-the-home service on April 2, launching first in Atlanta, then in cities in Florida and California, and now in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
150 down, 150 up... really a wonderful thing... That 700MB download? About 39 seconds...
Pretty cool, but still not a fundamental change in the way you use the internet. I'd rather see society make a concerted effort to get everybody a 10/10 connection than roll out gigabit speeds to a handful of lucky cities. We've got whole swathes of the country that are lucky to see T1 speeds on the download side and a pittance on upload. Of course, 25/25 would be better, 50/50 awesome, and 100/100 future proof.
As an aside, I'm jealous that you can max out your 150/150 FIOS connection but my old 15Mbps Verizon DSL connection dropped to <5mbit/s during peak hours. They haven't bothered to maintain their ATM network and gave up all pretenses several years ago when they capped DSL connections in our market at 3Mbps regardless of how good your loop is. My current apartment has a loop under 1,500 feet but they won't sell me a DSL connection faster than 3Mbps.
TWC neglects our area nearly as badly as Verizon; we didn't have DOCSIS 3 until 18 months ago and if you were unlucky enough to live on a congested node you'd see peak hour speeds dip below 1Mbps. This is a city of 50k with metro area of 250k, we're not talking about cow country. Head out into the sticks and you've got nothing but satellite or (maybe) LTE, neither of which makes for an acceptable wireline replacement.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Pretty cool, but still not a fundamental change in the way you use the internet.
Actually, for me personally, it was...
With TWC and 50/5, I made a point to download anything I might think I wanted, because in the evenings, I never actually could get 50 down because it was shared with about 150 houses (actually I'm sure it was faster than that, but a 500 down connection shared with 150 homes is crappy at 7pm).
Now that I get a solid 18 megabytes per second, 24 hours a day, it has changed that behavior. Steam is a good example, I used to have the whole collection downloaded. Then it grew and I needed more space to keep it, and it was running slower keeping everything up to date.
Even a 10GB game would only take about 10 min to download. Now granted, I'd prefer faster, but what it means is that if I really want to play something, 10 min is enough time to go make coffee, use the bathroom, etc.
The "cloud" has become much more useful as such. With "more or less" unlimited space in my OneDrive, it has become practical to upload a copy of everything there. I would never have tried that before with just 5 up. I also run two online backup services, BackBlaze and Crashplan, to make sure I haev copies of everything. In addition, about 2 TB of critical files (mostly work related) are stored on Amazon Glacier. Again something I wouldn't try with 5 up, but with 150 up, becomes no big deal.
And yes, in addition to 4 copies in the cloud, I also have multiple external hard drives that I rotate on backups. I lost data once, nearly 20 years ago... NEVER AGAIN! :) (and yes, I test restores from time to time)
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Just my personal experience, others will be different of course.
I was one of the first customers to snag 1 Gbps when EPB dropped the price to $70.
Even though Comcast has announced 2 Gbps, I have 0 intentions of switching. My service is rock solid. Whenever I have a rare question concerning the service, I call EPB and it's a local person who is friendly, helpful, knowledgeable and doesn't immediately blame the problem on user side equipment.
This is the lesson yet to be taught to the cable companies, cellular companies and telcos. They honestly believe that if you move away from them, you will be back in a few years...thus they have no fear of doing things that make you mad at them. Especially getting laws passed to prevent competition.
After 30+ years of cable companies ripping you off, they would have to severely discount their price and even then customers like you and I would not go back to them.
Perhaps if they got all the anti-FTTH legislation in every state removed from the books we might believe them. Yet still there are 14 states where a city can not put in FTTH.
North Carolina did it after Greenlight put FTTH in Wilson, NC and Raleigh, NC got Fiber To The Home. Other cities in NC can not get it thanks to Republican and Tea Party anti-competitive legislation pushed through by the Cable - Cellular - Telco industry. And in NC, the Republican Governor does not have to sign the bill for it to become law...what a coward!
There was a reason John Hancock's signature was so large...he had a pair!
I have EPB as well. No complaints. Rock solid, blazing fast. Local support who are competent for the 2 times in five years I have had an issue.
The store I worked at a couple years ago was a Comcast reseller. We seldom went two weeks without having to have Comcast on the phone or make a trip out to poke at the wiring - which did not make us feel "Comcastic" (their slogan at the time). Comcast earned a reputation for themselves on piss-poor internet service and even worse customer service. Everyone I know who has jumped to EPB (and not looked back) as soon as it became available in their area for the "hassle free" aspect first, fast speeds second.