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.

Comments

when?

[geoskd]

The first question that comes to mind is:

How long would it have taken comcast and AT&T, if it hadn't been for EPB?

Re:when?

[preaction]

Infinity. It would have taken infinity.

Re: when?

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean... xfinity...

Re:when?

[Shakrai]

The first question that comes to my mind is, "What the fuck is the point of 2 Gbps service for residential customers?" It's marketing department dick waving that serves no purpose. It would seem to me that society (both public and corporate) ought to be looking at the areas that are lucky to get T-1 speeds before it worries about upgrading cities that already have access to double and triple digit Mbps connections. For most people it's all gravy once you get past 10-15Mbps and I'm not aware of any consumer grade gear that can take advantage of 2Gbps.

By the way, where's my fucking IPv6? That would offer more future proofing than upgrading my connection from 100Mbps to 2Gbps. Tell me, what's on the horizon tomorrow that I can't do with my 100Mbps connection?

Re:when?

[Qzukk]

Tell me, what's on the horizon tomorrow that I can't do with my 100Mbps connection

Download two linux cd images in a second?

Re:when?

[Shakrai]

You're going for the sarcasm, but that's really the only point I see for these mega speed tiers. I do a lot of Android hacking and regularly download ROMs in the 300 to 700 megabyte range. When I had my 10Mbps connection that meant killing 10 or 11 minutes of time while I waited for it to download. Now I can do it in 2 or 3 minutes, which is certainly nice, but it's hardly a fundamental change in the way I use the internet.

I currently have the luxury of mooching off a business class symmetrical connection (30/30) which has completely spoiled me. It's dedicated speed and has more upload than any consumer grade connection I can obtain. When I have to go back to a residential line I will miss that upload more than anything else. I can't match it where I currently live (TWC, 50/5 is the best here) or where I plan on living (Cox, tops out at 150/20 and is totally out of my price range, the most affordable tier is 50/5).

Frankly I'd rather have 10/10 or 20/20 with good contention ratios (i.e., I should be able to count on getting full speed most of the time, barring exigent and/or unforeseen circumstances) than one of these overpriced mega speed tiers that offers shitty upload with massively oversubscribed download.

Re: when?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody cares if you don't use it. There is demand for it so it's useful enough. Not to mention ISPs have been teasing us with fiber since the 90's.
It's like asking "who needs more than 1 gallon per minute water service at home?" It isn't up to you.

Re: when?

[Shakrai]

This may be a glib answer but I don't give two shits about 4K HD. I am not enough of a videophile to discern the difference between 720p and 1080p.

Even if I cared about 4K most codecs I've seen fall in the 15 to 30Mbps range. Netflix claims that you need 25Mbps. A 100Mbps connection is certainly ample.

Re: when?

[hawguy]

Nobody cares if you don't use it. There is demand for it so it's useful enough. Not to mention ISPs have been teasing us with fiber since the 90's.
It's like asking "who needs more than 1 gallon per minute water service at home?" It isn't up to you.

Who is asking for it? Where is this demand coming from?

I think your analogy is a bit off -- I already have a 20 gallon per minute pipe to my house. Maybe 100 gpm would be useful from time to time, I could understand paying for that. And maybe once a year when I'm filling my pool, 1000 gpm would be nice but certainly not worth paying extra for since i'd utilize it so rarely. But 2000 gpm? Who needs that, and what are they doing with it?

I can't even use a 2 gigabit connection at home, I have no 10 gig router or ethernet switch to plug it in to, and I doubt many residential users do. I primarily use the internet over Wifi, and I can "only" get around 200mbit from my Wifi (if I'm in the same room).

Re: when?

[viperidaenz]

8k video!

Re:when?

[FlyHelicopters]

I currently have the luxury of mooching off a business class symmetrical connection (30/30) which has completely spoiled me. It's dedicated speed and has more upload than any consumer grade connection I can obtain. When I have to go back to a residential line I will miss that upload more than anything else. I can't match it where I currently live (TWC, 50/5 is the best here) or where I plan on living (Cox, tops out at 150/20 and is totally out of my price range, the most affordable tier is 50/5).

I hear you... I used to have TWC at 50/5... but thankfully I've had FIOS for several years now...

150 down, 150 up... really a wonderful thing... That 700MB download? About 39 seconds...

And I really do get those speeds... There is enough bandwidth to the neighborhood to support it.

Re:when?

[pr0fessor]

I have 3 smart TVs, PS4, Xbox, 4 Smart phones, 2 PCs, 2 Tablets, a wife and 2 sons that still live at home that use them all constantly. I may not need a huge connection for any one thing but I've noticed I have more and more connected devices. When my sons were little we had one PC with dial up I imagine after the kids are grown and move out the number of devices will drop but I have no intention of going back to dial up.

Re: when?

[Shakrai]

And the arms race between porn producers and porn consumers continues..... :)

1980s: Wait three hours for the xmodem bbs download of the latest low resolution images. Annoy your housemates that need to make or receive a telephone call. Discard 99% of the photos after viewing them once.

1990s: Wait three hours for the high resolution alt.binaries.erotica.* jpg photoset to download on your POTS modem. Annoy your housemates that need to make or receive a telephone call. Discard 99% the photos five minutes after the download finishes.

2000s: Wait three hours for the torrent of SD videos to download on your cable modem. Annoy all of your DOCSIS node neighbors who just want to surf the web without lag. Discard 99% of the videos five minutes after the download finishes.

2010s: Wait three hours for the torrent of HD videos to download. Annoy all of your DOCSIS node neighbors who just want to watch Netflix without buffering. Discard 99% of videos upon download completion.

2020s: Wait three hours for the 4K videos to download......

2030s: Wait three hours for the 8K videos to download......

2300s: Wait three hours for the holodeck programs to download. Annoy the Captain when his request for tea, earl grey, hot is delayed. Discard 99% of the programs......

Re:when?

[Shakrai]

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.

Re:when?

[Darinbob]

Well first off, the local power board has better service than Comcast, therefore Comcast probably felt obligated to up the bar lest they look like even bigger fools. Yes, it's dick waving to restore their bruised ego.

Also to get that market share back they had to either improve performance, improve service, or lower cost. And Comcast sure as hell would never improve service or lower cost...

Re:when?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have EPB. Trust me, you would like my 1 Gb symmetrical better than your 30 Mb symmetrical. EPB's reliability blows away every other residential ISP I've experienced (mostly cable companys.) Since the only thing they block is port 25 outbound my home server makes my media collection available anywhere I go, streaming or otherwise. Moving large files between home and work is so fast it feels like being on site. I'll admit that I don't max out the connection 95% of the time but it's great to have when you need it.

Re:when?

[FlyHelicopters]

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)

---

Just my personal experience, others will be different of course.

Re:when?

[FlyHelicopters]

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.

While I agree with you to a point, I wouldn't say 10/10. That is no longer fast enough for a lot of what people could be doing. Video is no longer a minor part of the web.

25/25 would be enough to give multiple streams of 1080p video, which would allow the cable companies to go away. :)

I used to have DirecTV, got rid of them a year ago or so, now everything for us is streaming. I'd be happy to pay some reasonable number per month to buy channels over the web à la carte.

Re:when?

[MisterSquid]

The first question that comes to my mind is, "What the fuck is the point of 2 Gbps service for residential customers?"

Your question is limited to existing technologies and platforms that are built around the assumption of 12/3Mbps connections at best.

Imagine a respectable percentage (or large enough market) where the network was reliably 2Gbps or more.

If the latency were low enough, there'd be less reason not to share multiple GB files on remote drives for editing locally, like agencies using Photoshop files between 700MB and 1GB large.

Hi quality VR conferencing might materialize if the machines connected to each other could exchange data at rates that today are considered too fast to do anything with.

Or what about existing or yet-to-exist distributed networks that might benefit from truly massive throughput? What would be possible with faster interconnectivity across great physical distances? Say 10Gbps. 100Gbps? 1Tbps? 2Exa bps?

Sure, none of those speeds even mean anything today let alone would be feasible in the current market, but hopefully you get my point, which is that the as-yet uncreated future technologies that would evolve and flourish under much faster and reliable Internet throughput can't be known in advance.

And like any resource rich ecosystem, you can bet that once those resources are there, someone and something will use them.

Yeah it'll be used for higher fidelity porn, more unwanted spam, and larger cat videos. But such a network will also be used for cool things like better medicine, more accurate physics, and more efficient manufacturing, in addition to stuff we can't know about yet.

Stop holding back the future by asking for comparisons from today.

Re:when?

[FlyHelicopters]

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.

Bleh, I feel for you... totally...

The state of Internet in the US is embarrassing... where there is a monopoly, the prices are stupid and the speeds are slow.

Re:when?

[swillden]

The first question that comes to my mind is, "What is the point of 2 Gbps service for residential customers?"

Today? There is no point. The available services have to be built for the speeds that are common; nobody is building Internet services that need several hundred megabits for reasonable performance -- because performance would suck for nearly everyone, because hardly anyone has that. The point of gigabit plus speeds is that if you have those speeds, reliably, the difference between local and remote storage almost disappears, which enables very different approaches to building systems.

In addition, define "residential". I work from home full-time, and 100 Mbps isn't anywhere near fast enough for me. The code management and build infrastructure I often use has been designed for low-latency gigabit connections, because most everyone is in the office. A 2 Gbps connection, for me, would still not work quite as well as being in the office, because I'd have higher latency, but it would be a lot closer. I work around the slow connection with various caching strategies, but I'd rather not have to.

Am I residential? Well, I have a business account, but in a residential area. Obviously I'm far, far from typical. But usage will change as the capacity is available.

From another of your posts:

I do a lot of Android hacking and regularly download ROMs in the 300 to 700 megabyte range.

Heh. I upload a lot of ROMs in that range, and bigger (asymmetric connections suck). I download full Android source repos... I just ran "make clean && du -sh ." in the root of one of my AOSP trees: 57GB[*]. I dread having to sync a fresh tree... It takes upwards of two days.

Again, my usage is far from typical, but how long will it be before typical users are streaming multiple 8K video streams, at 500 Mbps each? It can't happen until typical users have multi-gigabit connections, but it'll come.

By the way, where's my IPv6?

Comcast actually provides IPv6 for a lot of its customers. I had fully-functional IPv6 on the Comcast connection at my last home (Comcast doesn't serve the area where I live now).

* Yes, 57 GB is nuts, but that's what happens when you have a large codebase, with extremely active development, and you manage it with a DVCS. I could cut the size down with pruning, but that always seems to break something, so I just try to minimize the frequency with which I have to download it all. btrfs snapshots help a lot. Just making copies would work, too, but at these sizes it'd be slow even on an SSD. Much better than downloading, though.

Re:when?

[Shakrai]

It's one more reason to escape this dying area; I plan on moving to New Orleans in the next few months. If you think the state of our internet is sad try the dating or job pools in this part of Appalachia/the Rest Belt. :D

Re:when?

[dbIII]

Today? There is no point.

Working from home in some cases could do with as much bandwidth as you can find. I've got a contractor at a town 500km away that has to wait more than an entire day to download the data that is sent to him before he can work on it. If he was on gigabit or that twice over he could get it very quickly or possibly even use a remote desktop to a machine that already has the project data on it's disk.

Re:when?

[swillden]

LOL. Did you read the rest of my post?

Re:when?

[Shakrai]

If you're working from home on a regular basis you can spring for a business class connection with the money you're not spending on transportation. Better yet, your employer should be paying for it. This thread is about residential use. I know that's a blurry line for a lot of people (myself included) but let's at least acknowledge that residential service is not intended for business proposes.

Re:when?

[dbIII]

No. It appears I should have. It doesn't change the point I'm making where with enough bandwidth available you would become much closer to the typical case NOW.

nobody is building Internet services that need several hundred megabits for reasonable performance

If there is not a lot of length of copper or fibre between the two endpoints why not? It's only congesting a little bit of a network.

I could just about empty the office and send just everyone in one section of my workplace home if there was enough bandwith at their homes - ironically I'm the one that works remotely the most now but would have to be on the premises the most for hardware reasons. The groundwork was done in my workplace about six years ago and all it's waiting for is more than the two or three that telecommute every now and again to get enough bandwidth for it to be less painful for anyone that wants a GUI.

I'm also in the situation where source data comes in from people based in relatively large towns but the bandwith is shit so they courier tapes, or more recently USB hard drives, instead of just uploading it all in less than an hour which is what they could do if they were on fibre. I'm getting data from Laos many times faster than 50km away - sometimes a day or two earlier. Regional areas get filed under "residential" by Telecom companies in a lot of cases.

Re:when?

[Shakrai]

Stop holding back the future by asking for comparisons from today.

There are tens of millions of people that get to make the following choice:
1. Dial up.
2. High latency capped satellite.

If they're "lucky" they one or two more choices:
3. Slow and asymmetric ADSL
4. Fast but capped LTE.

I have no desire to hold back the future but if you ask me to rate my frustrations with the residential internet marketplace in the United States a lack of gigabit+ speeds doesn't make the list.

Incidentally, the sentence that you quoted had the word "residential" in bold. You listed a bunch of potential business and academic applications to refute my assertion that connections like these are useless in the residential setting.

Re:when?

[serviscope_minor]

Download two linux cd images in a second?

My laptop doesn't have a 2gbps ethernet port unfortunately, so I'll be stuck with one.

ITYM two in 10 seconds, since it's mega bits not mega bytes.

Re: when?

[Feral Nerd]

And the arms race between porn producers and porn consumers continues..... :)

1980s: Wait three hours for the xmodem bbs download of the latest low resolution images. Annoy your housemates that need to make or receive a telephone call. Discard 99% of the photos after viewing them once.

1990s: Wait three hours for the high resolution alt.binaries.erotica.* jpg photoset to download on your POTS modem. Annoy your housemates that need to make or receive a telephone call. Discard 99% the photos five minutes after the download finishes.

2000s: Wait three hours for the torrent of SD videos to download on your cable modem. Annoy all of your DOCSIS node neighbors who just want to surf the web without lag. Discard 99% of the videos five minutes after the download finishes.

2010s: Wait three hours for the torrent of HD videos to download. Annoy all of your DOCSIS node neighbors who just want to watch Netflix without buffering. Discard 99% of videos upon download completion.

2020s: Wait three hours for the 4K videos to download......

2030s: Wait three hours for the 8K videos to download......

2300s: Wait three hours for the holodeck programs to download. Annoy the Captain when his request for tea, earl grey, hot is delayed. Discard 99% of the programs......

1970s: Wait three hours for your arpanet dial-back modem to download ASCII porn of Jane Fonda. Annoy your workmates by monopolizing the Telex printer unit.

There was life before xmodems you young whippersnapper!

Re:when?

[Blaskowicz]

The solution to get those dial up users hooked to broadband is to run fiber, which is cheaper than running new last-mile copper (which would go to fiber after one hop anyway)
Then, fiber is at Gbps speed because the signal doesn't degrade (over the distance for one cable to the consumer anyway), else we'd be

So dial up users may or may not need 1Gbps, but they need that tech which gives them 1Gbps anyway.
What remains is only a political/economics problem ; if anything, fiber makes most sense in rural areas (much easier to get the cable through than in urban areas, cheaper to get 1Gbps fiber than 512K DSL)

Re:when?

[ultranova]

The first question that comes to my mind is, "What the fuck is the point of 2 Gbps service for residential customers?"

Not having to worry about my Steam downloads interfering my family's streaming video and still leaving enough room for comfortable web browsing and a torrent or two? All the while a computer is making a cloud backup?

Excess resources is what allows for growth, you know.

It would seem to me that society (both public and corporate) ought to be looking at the areas that are lucky to get T-1 speeds before it worries about upgrading cities that already have access to double and triple digit Mbps connections.

A city upgrading to Gbps service makes countryside seem backwards in comparison, increasing the chances that local public services win their legal battle against entrenched private interests and are allowed to increase speeds.

Re:when?

[dbIII]

Only possible if the "business class" infrastructure exists - hence the article.

Re:when?

[GrumpySteen]

The first question that comes to my mind is, "What the fuck is the point of having more than 640k of memory for residential customers?" It's marketing department dick waving that serves no purpose. 640k should be enough for anyone.

It's not like new technology gets developed to take advantage of new features, right? It's just a big waste of resources to develop these things.

Re: when?

[geekmux]

You mean... xfinity...

So that's what they call getting 50% of the advertised bandwidth.

Not sure why they had to patent it. Not too many ISPs are clamoring to meet or beat that metric.

Re:when?

[Aereus]

It's just a dick-wagging contest, since EPB "only" offers 1Gbps. Besides, the boilerplate undoubtedly says that is maximum theoretical and the guaranteed minimum is like 1% of that.

Re:when?

[Registered Coward v2]

The first question that comes to my mind is, "What the fuck is the point of 2 Gbps service for residential customers?" It's marketing department dick waving that serves no purpose. It would seem to me that society (both public and corporate) ought to be looking at the areas that are lucky to get T-1 speeds before it worries about upgrading cities that already have access to double and triple digit Mbps connections. For most people it's all gravy once you get past 10-15Mbps and I'm not aware of any consumer grade gear that can take advantage of 2Gbps.

More importantly, what are the caps on such service? You'll essentially wind up paying more for band width you really don't need and not getting any noticeable performance boost, at least for the average home user. The best result from Google's rollout is that incumbents may be forced to offer more competitive offerings, especially if Google offers $300/lifetime rates.

Re:when?

[Ogive17]

The state of Internet in the US is embarrassing... where there is a monopoly, the prices are stupid and the speeds are slow.

Which is basically everywhere!

Re:when?

[Khyber]

"You're going for the sarcasm, but that's really the only point I see for these mega speed tiers"

I'll rape a 2Gbps link with just Camfrog alone.

Re:when?

[RavenLrD20k]

It also depends on how many internet users you need to support. For a single person, having a 30/30 or even a 50/5 should be more than adequate for the modern web, where you're not going to notice much of any slowdowns. I have 4 very heavy internet users in my household, including myself, and we were consistently choking on Cox's 50/5. To give you an idea, there are 2 people who like their Netflix, 1 person downloading and uploading class assignments (sometimes very large projects), and 1 person who needs ready VPN access to his employer with VOIP capability as well as does a lot of hobby and Open Source development (me). All 4 of us are also heavy gamers both online and offline (almost every Nintendo System and 3 separate X-box 360's in the house, along with at least 1 computer per person, though if I were inclined to share there'd be 2 computers for 3 of us, plus several 'Bones and networked 'duinoes).

For this I went to Cox's second to best tier which was 100/10 (actual speedtests performed to my personal VPS as well as various speed checkers on the web were reporting in the neighborhood of 130/17). This speed was more than adequate for us, but we found ourselves bumping and jumping the 300GB soft limit almost monthly with various game updates and downloads (If we didn't have the gaming addiction we do, we'd have been fine..and no, none of us do the CoD thing, though I'm getting sick of the roommate's Destiny obsession...) so we have moved to the Top Tier which gives 150/25 and a 400GB soft limit (the same speed tests have been averaging at 132/33, though I'm fairly certain it's just the way I have to run the cables in the crawlspace to get signal to every outlet that's causing the download degradation, and right now I'm renting so it's not really worth it for me to re-run new lines. I'm more concerned with increasing the internal wireless bandwidth by adding a dual-band access point as the router is getting overloaded on its single 2.4GHz band channel trying to support all the devices that are trying to get a piece of it).

Re:when?

[jon3k]

Too expensive (cost per home passed). Money is better spent battling it out in high density areas with high demand for internet service. It's simple economics.

Re:when?

[jthill]

"What the fuck is the point of 2 Gbps service for residential customers?"

Right now that's enough speed to treat an online drive as local one. I'm guessing you could just plug one in as a Time Machine or ZFS or btrfs and never have to think about backups again. Lots of things along shared database/filesystem lines. With that kind of reliable bandwidth you could start considering shared VR. Collaborative video/3D work. See what you can get it to do with Microsoft's HoloLens.

Re:when?

[Totenglocke]

Have you seen how massive games are these days? GTA V is a 60 GB download, The Evil Within is a 50 GB download, Titanfall is 30 GB, etc - all just the base games, no DLC included in those sizes. If you're barely paying more than you used to pay for a 30 - 50 Mbps connection, why WOULDN'T you go for 1 - Gbps and not have to spend hours or days downloading a new game?

Re:when?

[jon3k]

I guess it depends on your opinion of slow. I think really it's just expensive. At my company we buy a lot of broadband backup for satellite offices (many, many dozens) and work with every cable provider in the southeast, and we can get 100-150mb/s in pretty much any area that isn't the total "sticks". Unfortunately it costs $250-$300/mo (this is for commercial service, residential is typically about one third that price). So yeah, pretty fast in my opinion, just pretty pricey. This includes Comcast, Mediacom, Brighthouse, Cox, you name it. Almost all of them offer 150Mb/s service I think Mediacom is the only one that stops at 100Mb/s, at least in the areas we run into them.

Re: when?

[Totenglocke]

I am not enough of a videophile to discern the difference between 720p and 1080p.

That's not a "videophile" thing, that's a "Dude, you should probably go to an optometrist and get that check out" thing.

Re: when?

[jon3k]

25Mb/s for a single 4K stream, which will be the defacto in a couple years. The price of 4K TV's has already dropped to the floor (just look at Vizio's new models you can pickup at Walmart). Now consider the standard family of four. Two to three simultaneous video streams, someone downloading something, add in some online gaming and you've got a normal American household every evening of the year and you're EASILY pushing 100Mb/s.

Re:when?

[jon3k]

We are never going to run fiber to ever single random household in the boonies. Ever. It's never going to happen. The cost of the labor alone makes it unfeasible. What we need to do is focus on deploying fiber in high density areas TODAY so we can start deploying the services of tomorrow. Then, overtime, continue to expand the availability of fiber. We cannot hold ourselves ransom to an unattainable dream of fiber to ever home and stop building towards the future. You create this false dichotomy that seems to imply we can't move forward with fiber in dense metropolitan areas because not every outhouse in Oklahoma has fiber. It doesn't work that way.

Re:when?

[jon3k]

So you think a government granted monopoly to a MSO (read: Cable Company) is a "free market" ? You're not a sharp one, are you?

Re: when?

[jthill]

I'm suspicious of any argument resembling "nothing we do today needs X, so therefore nothing needs X, so therefore nobody needs X, so therefore nobody should [almost always with an implicit ~be allowed to~] offer it".

I can't even use a 2 gigabit connection at home,

Yes you can. You have a _6_ gigabit connection at home. It 's your SATA link. That's getting slow, these days.

Re: when?

[kilfarsnar]

You mean... xfinity...

So that's what they call getting 50% of the advertised bandwidth.

Not sure why they had to patent it. Not too many ISPs are clamoring to meet or beat that metric.

You get 50%?! I'm on a supposedly 105 Mb connection and speed tests routinely report 10 - 12 Mb. I would be thrilled with 50% of advertised bandwidth.

Re: when?

[fibonacci8]

I know the ability to count the nose hairs of each actor certainly makes or breaks a show being enjoyable for me.

Re:when?

[Sique]

The first question that comes to my mind is, "What the fuck is the point of 2 Gbps service for residential customers?"

For instance, it would be feasible to use off site storage even for often used data. You could upload your movies to some file service and stream from there. No need for your own backup concept. You could even have your office file stuff on a remote filer and wouldn't notice much of a speed bump.

Re:when?

[swillden]

nobody is building Internet services that need several hundred megabits for reasonable performance

If there is not a lot of length of copper or fibre between the two endpoints why not? It's only congesting a little bit of a network.

Perhaps I wasn't clear. I wasn't referring to building of network connections, I was referring to the building of user services that rely on them. For example, YouTube is built to dynamically adjust video quality based on available bandwidth, but the range of bandwidths considered by the designers does not include hundreds of megabits, because far too few of the users have that capacity. They have to shoot for the range that most people have.

But as that range changes, services will change their designs to make use of it. We don't really have any idea how things will change if multi-gigabit connections become the norm, but you can be certain they will. Just as programs expand to fill all available memory, Internet services expand to fill all available bandwidth. To some extent that's because more capacity enables laziness on the part of engineers... but it also enables fundamentally different and more useful technologies.

Re: when?

[Totenglocke]

Yes, because that's totally why people like it and not for the fact that you can actually see detail and don't have pixelation or "jagged edges".

Re:when?

[pixelpusher220]

more than 2 separate 4K video streams?

As others have noted, not having to wait hours for downloads has benefits to productivity as well as creativity.

Re:when?

[Pascoea]

Pretty cool, but still not a fundamental change in the way you use the internet.

Actually, for me personally, it was...

What you just described doesn't fit the mold of the vast majority of internet users. If I had to pull a number out of my ass, the number of home users that have multiple TB of data that needs to be backed up in multiple cloud locations as well as cold storage and home backups, would put you in the top .01%. You just described a business scenario that should be kept to a business class connection, not a $50 or $100/month home connection.

I think the OP's post is reasonable. The other 99.99% of internet users out there would benefit far more from a stable 10x10 connection than they do from multi-Gb download speeds.

I'm not bashing you, it sounds like you've got a great setup that works for you. Just pointing out that your use case doesn't apply to very many people.

Re:when?

[Spencer Drager]

Exactly. Wireless ac wave 2, coming this year, is promising up to 7 Gbps of throughput.

Re:when?

[Anonymous Coward]

> What you just described doesn't fit the mold of the vast majority of internet users.

You left off the most important qualifier ... today.

That dude's usage is the future if 100+ symmetric mbps becomes the norm. HIs particulars are not, but the general idea absolutely is. Ask any middle class mother in America -- she's got thousands of photos of her kids and would absolutely love to have thousands of video clips of her kids. Making sure that she never loses a single one of them would be a big deal. Making sure her extended family can see them at a moment's notice would be a big deal. And that's just one application. If you build it, they will come.

Re: when?

[geekmux]

You mean... xfinity...

So that's what they call getting 50% of the advertised bandwidth.

Not sure why they had to patent it. Not too many ISPs are clamoring to meet or beat that metric.

You get 50%?! I'm on a supposedly 105 Mb connection and speed tests routinely report 10 - 12 Mb. I would be thrilled with 50% of advertised bandwidth.

My apologies. I'm not a (forced) Comcast customer. It was an obviously inaccurate assumption to grant you the luxury of receiving even half of what you're paying for.

And you likely don't have a choice in providers now. Just imagine how fun it will be when the rest of the world looks this shitty when it comes to choices.

It's coming.

Re:when?

[FlyHelicopters]

I guess it depends on your opinion of slow.

10 megabit strikes me as the minimum acceptable in 2015.

My Mom has 3 megabit ADSL, the fastest offered to her home. She is just outside of the service area of TWC, it is her only option.

That is slow. :)

Re: when?

[hawguy]

I'm suspicious of any argument resembling "nothing we do today needs X, so therefore nothing needs X, so therefore nobody needs X, so therefore nobody should [almost always with an implicit ~be allowed to~] offer it".

I can't even use a 2 gigabit connection at home,

Yes you can. You have a _6_ gigabit connection at home. It 's your SATA link. That's getting slow, these days.

I tried plugging my SATA cable into the cable box for faster internet and it didn't work -- plus that 1 meter cable length limitation means I have to sit on the floor in front of the TV to use it.

So I figured if SATA was good, then plugging it right into the PCI bus would be better, so I plugged the ethernet into my PCIe x16 bus so I could enjoy 120Gbit speeds. But that didn't work either.

What am I doing wrong? It's almost as if internet access and local system buses are completely different and incompatible.

Re:when?

[FlyHelicopters]

What you just described doesn't fit the mold of the vast majority of internet users. If I had to pull a number out of my ass, the number of home users that have multiple TB of data that needs to be backed up in multiple cloud locations as well as cold storage and home backups, would put you in the top .01%. You just described a business scenario that should be kept to a business class connection, not a $50 or $100/month home connection.

I think the OP's post is reasonable. The other 99.99% of internet users out there would benefit far more from a stable 10x10 connection than they do from multi-Gb download speeds.

I'm not bashing you, it sounds like you've got a great setup that works for you. Just pointing out that your use case doesn't apply to very many people.

Actually... you're right, I would have to agree with you...

It is easy to allow one's own person use case to color their views of things... My Mother has 3 megabit ADSL and any time I go to her house, it is painful to me, but to her, it is "normal". She has never had anything faster.

How about we aim for 25/25 then for everyone? 10/10 is too slow for a long term plan, IMHO. :)

Or better yet, how about we plan for and build out gigabit to everyone! :) AT&T just laid fiber in my neighborhood and is going to soon offer gigabit speeds (up and down!) for $120 per month, but with a 1 TB data cap (that is not nearly enough for that speed IMHO).

10/10 and even 25/25 sounds great today, and for a lot of people it would be nice, but if you're going to do a national roll out, think big and plan for the future. 100 years ago (give or take) we laid copper phone lines across the whole country. Why don't we now replace all that with fiber across the whole country and replace the whole phone system with fiber to every home.

Re: when?

[geekmux]

25Mb/s for a single 4K stream, which will be the defacto in a couple years. The price of 4K TV's has already dropped to the floor (just look at Vizio's new models you can pickup at Walmart). Now consider the standard family of four. Two to three simultaneous video streams, someone downloading something, add in some online gaming and you've got a normal American household every evening of the year and you're EASILY pushing 100Mb/s.

A couple of years? HDTVs have been on the market for how many years now and yet the overwhelming majority of broadcasts are well below the "old shit" 1080p level.

Wake me up in another decade when they might be close to being ready to stream 4K to the majority.

Re:when?

[RatherBeAnonymous]

While you are right that 10/10 is not enough for some use cases, it is sufficient for the great majority of people and a good baseline. Netflix at the highest bit-rate is only about 6 megabit. 10Mb would allow a comfortable amount of headroom. Simultaneous streams would work, just with a minor reduction in video quality. But as they say "The better is the enemy of the good". I'd rather see a movement to good serviceable bandwidth being universally available than an insistence on 25Mb if it takes three times longer to roll out.

Personally, I'm making due with 1.5 Mb x 384 Kb. I'm not out in the country either, but I'm just a little too far from the DSLAM for any faster DSL and my cable company's Internet service is notoriously unstable in my neighborhood. It's slow, but workable for most of what I need. Streaming video works fine as long as I limit it to standard definition. 10/10 Mb would make a lot of things more feasible for me, especially cloud backups, which are not doable with my current 384 Kb upload speed. 25/25? Sure it would be nice, but not essential, and not the quantum leap that 10/10 Mb would be.

Re: when?

[RatherBeAnonymous]

More than likely it's "I am not enough of a videophile to own a 1080p television." And that's exactly where I am. With a family, two cars, and only one income of any significance, I have better things to spend my money on than a TV when my existing 32-inch 720p television is still in working order.

It reminds me of the two or three years when I'd hear people complain about the fancy new HD cable channels not looking any better on their 15 year old Sony Trinitron.

Re: when?

[jfengel]

And that's where the arms-race ends. When we have holo-porn that good, the human race will be over.

Re:when?

[FlyHelicopters]

While you are right that 10/10 is not enough for some use cases, it is sufficient for the great majority of people and a good baseline. Netflix at the highest bit-rate is only about 6 megabit. 10Mb would allow a comfortable amount of headroom.

Today, for right now, at the 720p or crappy 1080p they are streaming...

What about 4k? Give it 5 years, that'll be more common..

We have 3 large TVs in the house, it is not uncommon that the adults are watching something on one and the kids on another. Sometimes two of the kids are on one TV and the third kid is on the iPad watching something.

So 3 HD streams.

Then we have about.... 20 some odd devices that like to auto-update... Say the PC or PS4 or whatever wants to download something while we're watching TV?

25 meg would do it, barely, with no headroom, but 10? Not even close.

I think there are a lot of homes today that would go to streaming, if they had 25 meg, but at 3, 6, or 10 meg? It isn't enough for multiple streams.

---

Don't get me wrong, I understand what you're saying, and yes universal 10/10 next year is probably better than universal 25/25 in 5 years. But I'd suggest both are crap.

We rolled out national telephone lines a very long time ago and provided for universal service.

We now have good quality fiber, there is no reason to do any of this slow stuff, be prepared for the entire next century and roll out gigabit to everyone in the country.

Lack of access to technology and the Internet will only hurt America going forward.

Re: when?

[david_thornley]

I'm not enough of a videophile to care about the difference, myself. If the video is interesting, I won't notice. If it isn't, I won't watch it no matter what the resolution.

Re:when?

[dbIII]

Perhaps I wasn't clear. I wasn't referring to building of network connections, I was referring to the building of user services that rely on them.

You were clear, and I meant user services such as high quality video conferencing which will suck more bandwidth than seems sane if you let it as they are now. Also stuff designed to run on a LAN (with little thought of possible bandwidth limitations) becomes nicer to package up and deliver via VPN or whatever if you've got a fat pipe to the users home.

but it also enables fundamentally different and more useful technologies.

Stephen Hawking did a telepresence sort of presentation/performance from Cambridge to Sydney last week that was designed to look like a hologram. I'm sure that took a bit of bandwidth and I can see people going for that sort of thing in the future more than mere skype.

Re:when?

[FlyHelicopters]

You left off the most important qualifier ... today.

That dude's usage is the future if 100+ symmetric mbps becomes the norm. HIs particulars are not, but the general idea absolutely is. Ask any middle class mother in America -- she's got thousands of photos of her kids and would absolutely love to have thousands of video clips of her kids. Making sure that she never loses a single one of them would be a big deal. Making sure her extended family can see them at a moment's notice would be a big deal. And that's just one application. If you build it, they will come.

^ That too...

My Mom's upload speed is terrible, but she is on Carbonite and while it took a long time to upload the first time, it finally got uploaded (she had no backups before then).

She takes a lot of digital pictures, now they are also backed up to the cloud.

She also has a link to a folder on my wife's OneDrive that has our family pictures, she (and my wife's Mom) can go online and view them any time they want.

Backup has become cheap, $60 a year or so, $5 a month. A lot of people currently don't backup, but that will change as people lose their files and pictures and learn their lesson. I know it happened to me. :(

Re:when?

[FlyHelicopters]

Need a GPU in your phone? Fuck carrying one around. Fuckin powering the thing. I want to rent one, on an as-needed basis, sitting in a dark underground data center two states away where the weather is cooler and the power is cheaper.

Sound absurd today? Yep! Could arbitrary, on-demand, on-the-fly-provisioned remote computation be the next multi-billlion dollar idea? Could be if bandwidth was plentiful and cheap!

Isn't that what the game streaming services for the PS4 and XB1 are supposed to be doing?

Actually, it is rather smart... You could provide far more GPU power for less money, if everyone had enough bandwith... Same with CPU power...

Frankly, my internet connection is faster than my USB 2.0 memory sticks, which tend to read and write at about 10mb/s, while my internet is 18mb/s. When it comes to moving files around the house, my wired gigabit ethernet connection is FAR faster than copying stuff to USB and moving it by hand.

If I went with AT&T's new GigaFiber service, the same would be true there as well, assuming the speed is as stable as FIOS has been.

Re: when?

[Totenglocke]

32" 720p TV. Do you...do you sit four inches away? Or did you pay for binoculars? Still running a 486 with 2 MB of RAM for your desktop?

Re: when?

[Totenglocke]

I'm sorry, I just can't believe when someone says that they don't care about a blurry picture or extremely noticeable pixelation. That's like someone saying "If I like the restaurant, I don't care if there's a family of cockroaches in my food".

Re: when?

[SpeZek]

Does being able to see the actors' pores increase your enjoyment of the dialogue and the story that much?

Re:when?

[DiEx-15]

The first question that comes to mind is:

How long would it have taken comcast and AT&T, if it hadn't been for EPB?

That is not my first question.

My first question is: Is anybody truly surprised that Comcast did this?

If your answer is "Yes", then my next question is: What rock did you crawl out from under or what planet are you from?

Re:when?

[stdarg]

Google's lifetime plan only provides 5/1mbps, but the capacity for gigabit is still there. I wonder if they'll start selling that extra capacity to whoever wants it.. like if you sign up for Netflix, Netflix says "You can't stream our highest quality HD content, but for an extra $3.95/month we can enable that." Then they pay Google for 10mbps on your behalf just for use with their service.

Re:when?

[Registered Coward v2]

Google's lifetime plan only provides 5/1mbps, but the capacity for gigabit is still there. I wonder if they'll start selling that extra capacity to whoever wants it.. like if you sign up for Netflix, Netflix says "You can't stream our highest quality HD content, but for an extra $3.95/month we can enable that." Then they pay Google for 10mbps on your behalf just for use with their service.

Interesting idea,and I could see Google going for such a model considering how they are marketing their Fi service. A la carte higher speed access only when needed would be a good business model and the free, after initial instal, service is one way to get their pipe to the consumer. Once they have that in large enough numbers than it opens up a whole new set of ways to make money; for example they could gove everyone a 4300 credit towards higher speed services so people can see what they would get and drive demand for it.

Lucky bastards

[RingDev]

Meanwhile I'm lucky to get 1.2mbps off my DSL and my new place doesn't have cable or dsl access. I might be able to get 802.11n wifi, but with all likelihood I'm going to be stuck with the gawdaweful lag of a satellite. :(

-Rick

Re:Lucky bastards

[turkeydance]

moved there because my mother-in-law and father-in-law had No One Else to go to. my wife is the only responsible child (out of 4) who could/would handle their multiple health issues. we moved closer to them since daily duty would devour any travel-time. now...our internet options truly suck. either where we live or where the in-laws live, it's DSL or nothing. no cable, no sat, no nuttin'. welllll, there actually is SAT for $212/month with latency you would not believe. DSL is $44.

Re:Lucky bastards

[FlyHelicopters]

Meanwhile I'm lucky to get 1.2mbps off my DSL and my new place doesn't have cable or dsl access. I might be able to get 802.11n wifi, but with all likelihood I'm going to be stuck with the gawdaweful lag of a satellite. :(

My wife has been shopping for a new home in the county, she recently found a nice 10 acre place with a starter house on it not too far outside of Dallas for under 300k that would let us move there and then build a proper home when we're ready.

It is about 5 miles past decent internet. :)

My deal with her is that if I can't get at least 50/50 internet, I'm not going, otherwise she can have almost anything she wants.

I'm not going back to 50/5, that is just evil. I have 150/150 now, but frankly don't really need that much, 50/50 would be enough. It is the lack of upload on most home connections that would kill me.

Re:Lucky bastards

[jonwil]

+1 to this, when I moved into a new apartment, I ruled out whole suburbs just because they had crappy internet. I am currently getting DSL sync speeds of about 9/1 or so which is more than adequate for my needs (including all the crap I watch on YouTube and various YouTube clones and downloading large git trees and big files related to various game mods I work on)

Re:Lucky bastards

[i.r.id10t]

I'm right on the edge of the distance limit according to an old router firmware I had at the time. 1.5m down w/ 384 up is rock solid, 3m down w/ 512 up had too much S:N going on and would disconnect every 3-30 minutes.

Two weeks ago the local telco (windstream) drug a new fiber line past my house, but it comes from the opposite town exchange... and it is on the other side of the road. Don't care if I get fiber hookup direct, but I'd like faster DSL service...

Re:Lucky bastards

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Since you and your wife already have a careers elsewhere and would be supporting them, shouldn't they have moved closer to you?

Iddn't that kinda none of your fucking business? Not everybody can move to where the internet doesn't suck, that's the end of the discussion.

Re:Lucky bastards

[toddestan]

No kidding. If you're demanding that kind of speed at home, there's very few places in the US that you're going to be able to live. Even 50/5 is going to be somewhat limiting.

Re:Were they libtards?

[Seranfall]

Only libtards vote against rolling out human progress.

That doesn't even make any sense. Try actually contributing to an article with some actual feedback and not some BS troll. Where was there even a vote discussed in the story?

Correction

[Ignacio]

This isn't "if you can't beat them, join them", it's "BE A FLAMING ASSHOLE BECAUSE I'M COMCAST". All they need to do is price their offering at $50 or so for a year or two to kill off the municipal service, then they will be able to jack it up to $110 and watch it all burn.

Re:Correction

[ClickOnThis]

This isn't "if you can't beat them, join them", it's "BE A FLAMING ASSHOLE BECAUSE I'M COMCAST".

I'm hard-put to disagree with you, but IMHO it's more like "we can beat them, and then take their place when it f**king suits us."

Re:Correction

[ZipK]

All they need to do is price their offering at $50 or so for a year or two to kill off the municipal service...

You're probably right, but I'd keep paying $100/month to the local utility for the privilege of not dealing with Comcast. I would rather crumple fifty dollar bills and throw them in the gutter than have to deal with Comcast's worst-ever customer service.

Re:Correction

[internerdj]

As I understand it, the fiber roll out was done to support smart metering by the utility. Much of the infrastructure the city is supporting for fiber to the house is supported by electricity costs not the internet cost. It is hard enough to undercut the competition if it is a government provider, but this is a government provider that is providing a lot of the business expenses through a service sector you can't even compete in.

$50-$120? try more like $150-$300 + 250-750 instal

[Joe_Dragon]

$50-$120? try more like $150-$300 + $250-750 install with 3 year contract with a $200+ ETF and $20 mo modem rent fee.

surprise!

[NostalgiaForInfinity]

But not until this year has Comcast had an Internet offering that can match or beat EPB's $70 gigabit service.

Yes, if you screw rate payers and force them to subsidize service most of them don't want or need, they get that service earlier. What's the point?

Re:surprise!

[Darinbob]

This had been approved by the duly elected city council. From what I can see this looks like the voters actually like this. A 25 year bond with a 4.64% increase in rates and in return the city *finally* gets reasonable internet service, I don't see who's being screwed except Comcast.

Re:surprise!

[Anonymous Coward]

The TN legislature has passed a comcast-written law to prevent EPB from expanding their service area. There are towns and counties bordering chattanooga (hamilton county) begging EPB to extend coverage to them.

http://www.chattanoogan.com/20...

Re:surprise!

[NostalgiaForInfinity]

This had been approved by the duly elected city council. From what I can see this looks like the voters actually like this.

Many voters also like increasing the minimum wage, "free" public education, and buy "luxury" foreign cars and live above their means. Many voters are just not very prudent with their money and aren't experts in economics, personal finance, or networking. The people presenting this to them may not have been honest about the actual costs and benefits either. If you tell them that Gigabit service is 100 times better than 10 Mbit service, they may think that they should get it "for their kids" or "to help the poor" to get "decent Internet" like "other civilized countries". Furthermore, they may reason rationally that EPB is going to screw them on rates anyway, so they might as well get something a little more useful out of it.

It is precisely because people "like" stuff that they should pay for it themselves, because if they can simply shift the costs of stuff they "like", we get into a fiscal mess.

in return the city *finally* gets reasonable internet service,

Gigabit service isn't "reasonable", it's a joke, a waste of money. There is no conceivable way in which the vast majority of people need that kind of service; filling that kind of pipe requires many parallel pipes to many sites. I'm a FOSS developer, telecommute, watch Netflix, listen to music; often, there are multiple streams from our home. We have 50 Mbps and even that is far more than we need.

Re:surprise!

[NostalgiaForInfinity]

Do some basic math. According to your own article, the cost of the EPB expansion is "up to $60 million", and it would provide service for about 1000 people, many of whom obviously don't want high speed Internet. That's at least $60000 per user (probably a lot more)! And that's not going to be paid for by the beneficiaries of this largesse, because they will pay the same rates as everybody else.

The assertion that "EPB will not use taxpayer money" is bogus, because as a city-owned public utility, they are implicitly subsidized in numerous ways, starting with issuing bonds. Then there are the rate increases, which are also paid for by "tax payers", just not as taxes, and you don't have a choice but to pay them.

And for what? People who have moved to an area where dial-up is still the main option obviously don't care about high speed Internet. This mainly makes the area attractive for upper middle class folks to move into and gentrify the place.

Re:surprise!

[Darinbob]

1Gbit may be more than they need, but they weren't even getting reasonable internet either.

Re:surprise!

[NostalgiaForInfinity]

1Gbit may be more than they need, but they weren't even getting reasonable internet either.

So what? When you move to rural areas like that, you already have decided that city infrastructure isn't something you care a great deal about. EPB is proposing spending $60 million (!) to serve at most 1000 customers, many of which are likely not going to be interested in spending $70/month on Gigabit Internet service. I mean, that's a subsidy of upwards of $60000 per customer. If you want to make people that happy, just give them the cash and forget about the Internet connection.

standard operating procedure for monopolies

[circletimessquare]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

Predatory pricing (also undercutting) is a pricing strategy where a product or service is set at a very low price, intending to drive competitors out of the market, or create barriers to entry for potential new competitors. If competitors or potential competitors cannot sustain equal or lower prices without losing money, they go out of business or choose not to enter the business. The predatory merchant then has fewer competitors or is even a de facto monopoly.

In many countries predatory pricing is considered anti-competitive and is illegal under competition laws. It is usually difficult to prove that prices dropped because of deliberate predatory pricing rather than legitimate price competition. In any case, competitors may be driven out of the market before the case is ever heard.

many morons think markets don't need government regulation. that they "self-regulate"

predatory pricing must be an example of what they are talking about i suppose

Re:standard operating procedure for monopolies

[diamondmagic]

The competitor here was taxpayer funded. That's the closest thing we'll ever see to immortality: When they fail, they don't go bankrupt, they get increased funding.

But let's assume EPB didn't engage in rent-seeking, the same article you link to describes how predatory pricing is almost entirely hypothetical:

Obviously, predatory pricing pays off only if the surviving predator can then raise prices enough to recover the previous losses, making enough extra profit thereafter to justify the risks. These risks are not small.

However, even the demise of a competitor does not leave the survivor home free. Bankruptcy does not by itself destroy the fallen competitor's physical plant or the people whose skills made it a viable business. Both may be available-perhaps at distress prices-to others who can spring up to take the defunct firm's place.

Further, the threat of litigation discourages entry into the market and price competition.

The term predatory pricing comes from the time when massive consolidation of railroads and oil was driving down prices. Smaller competitors sought reasons to stop it.

The price increases never came, of course. Same as computers today.

Re:standard operating procedure for monopolies

[circletimessquare]

it's like dealing with a creationist or an antivaxxer

simple basic history and well-established economic facts just don't mean a damn thing to you deluded fucks. it's like the religious tenets of some low iq cult: just keep asserting a simpleminded wrong belief, contrary to all facts and history, and you can continue in your quasireligious moronic bullshit

1. predatory pricing is real

2.. predatory pricing happens constantly

3. only government regulations can catch it and punish it

these are all ironclad bedrock truths of the world you live in

predatory pricing is being used here to drain the upstart fiber service of customers

now cover your eyes and ears like a pridefully ignorant asshole, right?

learn you dumb fuck:

http://www.google.com/#q=preda...

that's a random dip into current news. predatory pricing examples everywhere. tomorrow there will be dozens of new examples

what did you say?

The term predatory pricing comes from the time when massive consolidation of railroads and oil was driving down prices. Smaller competitors sought reasons to stop it. The price increases never came, of course. Same as computers today.

you're a moron

not baseless insult. an objective description of the quality of your thought

what you wrote is hilariously solidly wrong. you blindly and blatantly deny basic facts of a subject matter you inject your puerile ignorance into

you're deluded uneducated wackjob and if you had any shame you would stop lying and making yourself look like a feeble crackpot to anyone who actually understands the simple basics of this subject matter

just shut the fuck up about what you clearly do not understand you dumb ignorant fuck

Re:standard operating procedure for monopolies

[circletimessquare]

no one has the money to rebuild an entire redundant fiber rollout

you would need to sink billions to just begin to compete, with no guarantee of a profit (and less with predatory pricing shutting you down)

it's called a natural monopoly

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...

the financial barrier to market entry is too high

nevermind no one wants their streets constantly torn up to lay competing fiber even if there were multiple googles willing to try to compete as just a sideshow because they have a large cushion of billions in the bank

the problem you identify as the government is actually the corporations: they corrupt and bribe local and state officials

how is that the corporation corrupting your government is the fault of government? you want to remove the corruption and corruptors, not remove the regulations and the government. those are the only things protecting you

this is the problem:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

so you want to pass laws against that, and enforce them. i didn't say that was easy, but it's certainly a hell of a lot better than no government regulation and complete uncontrollable and unstoppable oligopolies that rip customers even more and abuse start up competitors even more, with no accountability or redress (since you removed the government regulation)

if you like capitalism, and i do, what you do is you have the government own the fiber, and maintain it. then various companies lease fractional portions of the cable and offer various services. that pays for the infrastructure. kind of like how we handle wireless spectrum: auction off portions of it. that's how you have fair competition

but that fair competition only works with a platform provided by the government

Re:standard operating procedure for monopolies

[Darinbob]

The claim Comcast had that a government should not compete with private business is ludicrous because the private business in question was inadequate or unavailable. Internet is infrastructure. If municipal governments are allowed to create and fund electric boards, water boards, gas boards, sewage services, and so forth, then the governments should be allowed to create internet services where none effectively exist.

Re:standard operating procedure for monopolies

[MisterSquid]

[...]

you're a moron

not baseless insult. an objective description of the quality of your thought

what you wrote is hilariously solidly wrong. you blindly and blatantly deny basic facts of a subject matter you inject your puerile ignorance into

you're deluded uneducated wackjob and if you had any shame you would stop lying and making yourself look like a feeble crackpot to anyone who actually understands the simple basics of this subject matter

just shut the fuck up about what you clearly do not understand you dumb ignorant fuck

Come on. Tell us how you REALLY feel.

; )

Re:standard operating procedure for monopolies

[ckatko]

Except sadly, you're a moron who doesn't realize the reason they won in court is that they weren't tax payer funded. Their electrical service is funded completely separate from their internet service.

But of course you posted anon, because you're either retarded or a Comcast shill.

Re:standard operating procedure for monopolies

[Firethorn]

1. They don't need their streets torn up. My area is finally getting natural gas, and the 4" pipe is larger than what fiber needs. They're just pushing the pipe through, they can do that with the fiber.

I just wish that I had been around when this was proposed to suggest that as long as they're at it, run fiber with the NG pipe...

Re:standard operating procedure for monopolies

[diamondmagic]

Find me a case where a vaccine caused autism. Go on, I dare you.

Now find me a case where predatory pricing benefitted a corporation. Or, stop denying basic facts of economics.

Re:standard operating procedure for monopolies

[diamondmagic]

That's a non sequitur. What if I replaced "Internet" with "Food"? You get a bunch of nonsense that, without exception, has caused famine and millions of deaths.

Who decides what is "infrastructure"? Of course /. will think Internet is vital; someone else might think food is vital. But that's not a reason to leave food to the government! Why would the Internet be different?

The Internet is too important to leave to the government. Or does the NSA and FCC need to tell you?

Re:standard operating procedure for monopolies

[diamondmagic]

Furthermore, taxpayers have funded verizon, qwest, etc to the tune of $200 billion. Compared to the so-called "private" business, EPB are fucking capitalist sharks.

That's exactly what I'm arguing against.

Re:standard operating procedure for monopolies

[diamondmagic]

Ah, an NSA shill. Welcome to the conversation.

If you wanna be taken seriously, maybe present a coherent point?

Re:standard operating procedure for monopolies

[Darinbob]

The sole reason cable companies have monopolies in cities, is because the cities granted them the monopoly in exchange for them to build out the infrastructure. This is the same as the federal government granting monopoly status to Bell Telephone, with the provision that they provide service to everyone.

The reason the feds did this is because they wanted telephone service to be universal, they knew it was a vital service in many ways. Health, civil defense, etc. There were people at the time who probably thought the way you do, why give phone service to people too stupid to live in a big city. Win/win, Bell gets to be a monopoly and the citizens get better service and the phone networks get connected together.

So towns gave monopoly status to cable companies for a bit less important reasons, mostly because the citizens wanted cable, they were tired of poor reception, limited options, etc. But the thinking was the same in other ways, grant the monopoly and let them spend their own money on it.

Then fast forward. Now the cable companies own that infrastructure but refuse to share it. AT&T was forced to share its lines when its monopoly was removed, which spurred a lot of competition. Cable companies still refuse though, and are getting state governments to forbid towns from doing things that might bring in competition.

Today, the internet provides phone service and television. So it's like the phone infrastructure plus the cable infrastructure, but a whole lot more besides. Maybe some think it's ok to have people still be on dialup even in the middle of a major town perhaps, just like some thought rural bumpkins shouldn't have dial phones. But this is going to be a huge and vital service. It's going to supplant broadcast tv in short order. It already is a vital service in more advanced parts of the world, and it really is sad that the USA is falling so far behind. You would think that all the "America, Rah Rah Rah" people would be all behind efforts to keep up with the neighbors.

Oh ya, food is left to the government, check out how much they give out in ag subsidies each year, how they use food surpluses to feed the poor, etc. We've got a whole cabinet level department devoted to agriculture.

If the private sector bothered with the concerns of actual citizens then we wouldn't need the government to step in on occasions. The free market is utterly incapable of solving many problems, and history has shown this time and time again.

Re:standard operating procedure for monopolies

[diamondmagic]

Ok? I'm here arguing against legal monopolies. Patents, government utilities, crony capitalism, it's all the same here.

I'm not sure how you "force" someone to share Internet, the Internet is built on sharing. I want to run a packet over your network, I pay or peer to connect to your network, problem solved, we're sharing a connection.

If a no network service provider is providing service, that probably means it's unprofitable, i.e. the total number of resources that would have to be expended to provide service exceeds the benefit the service will provide. Most people living in these areas aren't going to be running businesses, they'd be perfectly well served with some form of wireless connection which would do just as good a job with far less expense. No act of Congress can overturn this fact of economic law.

It's like subsidizing people to live in flood zones with federal flood "insurance", Housing is great, especially if you want to take the risk and assume the cost, but that's wasteful and just stupid.

Lessons learned

[Anonymous Coward]

When you have more than one company actually competing with someone else on a reasonably level playing field, you get..... competition on price and service levels! Who would thought..

All this crap about investments in broadband and if you give us a monopoly and if you give us a tax break, and if you give us a merger and if you give us right of way and no way for anyone else and if you give us assistance etc... we promise to eventually build something wink wink.

Bandwidth if FUCKING cheap, it became commodity years ago. It is only not low cost because of artificial barriers. It takes no natural resources or a constant supply of electrons mined from the hills or valleys of Nevada. The last mile is a challenge because it requires foot work and shovels and that should not be monopolized and never should have been.

You ignore real household use

[SuperKendall]

Well thank you Mr Gates for being so sure normal people couldn't use high speeds to advantage - what if two kids are watching YouTube in 1080p, another person is using Netflix, and then someone fires up a PS4? I just got one the other day and wanted to play two game demos - over *2GB* each thank you very much. I had to play the next day because *I* don't have 2GB fiber...

Plus we all know that 2GB is shared so it's almost always going to be a percentage of the rating speed. Might as well be a percentage of a much higher number.

Re:You ignore real household use

[Shakrai]

hat if two kids are watching YouTube in 1080p, another person is using Netflix, and then someone fires up a PS4? I just got one the other day and wanted to play two game demos - over *2GB* each thank you very much. I had to play the next day because *I* don't have 2GB fiber...

Are you being factitious or serious? Because that scenario is well within the range of a 100Mbps connection:

YouTube @ 1080p = ~6Mbps x 2 = ~12Mbps
Netflix HD = ~5Mbps

That leaves you with more than 80Mbps for your PS4. At 70Mbps (a fair approximation of what you'll achieve with overhead) your 2GB game will download in about four minutes. You can bump the Netflix stream up to 4K (25Mbps) if you insist and still have more than half your connection left over for the game download that you just can't wait for.....

OK

[koan]

Tar and feather the CEO's of Comcast, break it up, and force upgrades to the existing network.

They keep raising prices and selling the same shitty service... they have a name for this kind of deal..

Side note: spell check keeps trying to put "compost" in place of "Comcast", maybe machine intelligence does exist.

Re:So... relevance?

[Darinbob]

I think they are related. Comcast would never have rolled out it's own system if there was no competition.

Does not match EPB's gigabit service

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in chattanooga. EPB's 1gig service is symmetrical because it is fiber to the home. Comcast's is fiber to the node which is a box in the neighborhood from which they run docsis 3.1 over coax to the houses. It is not symmetrical. At best it is going to be 4:1 i.e. 2gbps down and 500mbps up. They still haven't actually released the specifics on this new service other than to say it will be cheaper than their current $400/month 500/100 service. I pay EPB about $70 for full blast 1gbps and I get full speed on a regular basis, sustaining 90+MB/s from supernews.

Also, there is the matter of Comcast's 300GB data cap. At 2gbps, you can theoretically blow through that in 25 minutes. After which it is 50GB/$10. EPB has no stated limit and I've been doing a couple of terabytes per month for over a year now.

An EPB Customer's Perspective

[DenaliPrime]

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.

Re:An EPB Customer's Perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:An EPB Customer's Perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:An EPB Customer's Perspective

[DenaliPrime]

Howdy neighbor! :)

Re:An EPB Customer's Perspective

[DenaliPrime]

This. Absolutely this.

That just shows my point

[SuperKendall]

Thanks for totally ignoring the last point that actual speeds are a fraction of the rated speeds... the 2Gb connection may well be just a 100Mbps connection most of the time.

But your own post as it stands refutes your counter-argument. Waiting even four minutes for a demo is fairly long, which shows that higher speeds are in fact needed by average users today - even if they are not being used continuously. Having a high burst speed IS very useful to even the average person today.

Re:That just shows my point

[Shakrai]

Waiting even four minutes for a demo is fairly long

First World Problems. I feel for you. I really do.

Re:That just shows my point

[tburkhol]

Thanks for totally ignoring the last point that actual speeds are a fraction of the rated speeds.

If your cable company is only providing a fraction of the nominal bandwidth, what makes you think that fraction will stay the same when you upgrade? ie, you're buying 100M and getting 10M, and you imagine that buying 1000M will get you 100M. It's just as likely that you'll continue to get 10M, because the bottleneck is somewhere other than the wire between your house and the CO. Are you sure the game company is prepared to deliver their demo to 10 or 100 concurrent users, each at 1G bps?

Re:That just shows my point

[thaylin]

Or, you know, it could be that the bottle neck is that cable is a shared pipe with your neighbors, and if they upgrade that pipe the split is scaled and the 1000M will get you 100M, or thereabouts..

I have 4 heavy users in my house, we typically are streaming several videos at the same time, and downloading other shit as well.

Re:That just shows my point

[Khyber]

" Waiting even four minutes for a demo is fairly long, which shows that higher speeds are in fact needed by average users today"

No, that just shows that programmers need to learn to tighten up their bloated code. I've seen demoscene stuff pushing PS3-level graphics before the PS3 was even available.

Oh, and the demo was written in 96 KILOBYTES.

Re:That just shows my point

[Totenglocke]

Thanks for totally ignoring the last point that actual speeds are a fraction of the rated speeds

Depends on provider / where you live. I pay for 50 Mbps from TWC and while it varies some (it's cable, of course it'll vary some), I usually a little OVER 50 Mbps, even during peak hours. That's with multiple gamers / Netflix addicts in the house. The only time speed becomes an issue is if someone is being inconsiderate and running several torrents at a time while everyone else is trying to stream movies / download games off Steam.

Re:That just shows my point

[Totenglocke]

I enjoy your work of fiction and wish to subscribe to your monthly short stories email. Where do I sign up?

Re:That just shows my point

[fibonacci8]

Since you seem unfamiliar with reality, here are some useful links for you.

http://www.pouet.net/

http://modarchive.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

With a bit of cleverness, very impressive graphics and music can be conveyed using a tiny amount of storage space. Haste makes waste.

Re:That just shows my point

[Khyber]

http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?...

Here's one done in 4 kilobytes. Hope you've got at LEAST a GTX680 to get it running, because it's some serious fucking code and needs serious hardware to operate.

Re:That just shows my point

[RatherBeAnonymous]

No, that's not how it works... at all. If you are paying your ISP for 25 Mb and you only get 10 Mb at prime time it's not because your connection is too slow, it is because there is a bottleneck at your ISP. Upgrade to 2 GB if you want, you will still only get 10 Mb at prime time.

Re:That just shows my point

[RatherBeAnonymous]

It likely doesn't scale linearly. It comes down to how requests are queued at the routers. Chances are that the routers at your ISP use FIFO (First In First Out) queuing because it's cheap and efficient. On an over-saturated link that will mean each requester will get roughly equal shares of the available bandwidth. The neighbor paying for a 10 Mb link will get about the same throughput as the neighbor paying for 100 Mb.

Now they will have two fiber networks?

[Collin]

So, the only way to get Comcast or AT&T to build a fiber network in your city is to build your own fiber network and then that will force them into competing by building yet another fiber network. Now the city has two or three fiber networks and most other cities still have none.

If only they could come to the conclusion that they could build a fiber network first in a city that doesn't have any at all. But that would just make too much sense.

Re:Now they will have two fiber networks?

[Firethorn]

If only they could come to the conclusion that they could build a fiber network first in a city that doesn't have any at all. But that would just make too much sense.

Yeah, but the power company building a fiber network shows that there's *demand* in that city! /snark

Re:Now they will have two fiber networks?

[PPH]

Currently, there is no mechanism in place to track demand. Other than what the broadband companies do for themselves. With regulated utilities (which broadband providers should become), service requests and response times are tracked and reported to various utilities commissions.

If there were some centralized point where requests for service could be accumulated, then Comcast and its ilk couldn't claim that there is insufficient demand in a particular area to justify construction.

Re: So... relevance?

[oobayly]

Exactly this. BT (I'm in the UK) hadn't given a shit about improving the infrastructure on our business park for the last 10 years. Then along comes a privately (funded by a bloke in The City) who is installing 100Mb/s fibre to homes, mainly to rural areas. More expensive than BT, but so what, it was 50 times fate.

We also got a leaflet about their business services - 1Gb/s (including 4hr on-site), was about half the price of our 100Mb/s leased line. Granted it doesn't have a 100% SLA.

Suddenly BT send around or local business manager, are doing site surveys, looking into putting a couple of 1GB/s pipes in. They only put in investment when the monopoly rug is about to be pulled from under their feet.

The landlord doesn't help either. He didn't want a company digging up his precious tarmac (he gave ownership of his conducting to BT a decade ago for some reason and they don't share), not realising that better internet connectivity is a lifeline of modern businesses.

Speed tiers don't exist

[Blaskowicz]

I learned that there exist a 2.5Gb/s ethernet speed on RJ45 cable, which should be a credible upgrade for future consumer hardware (10Gb is not it seems)

As to the fiber, well the equipment and the fiber do it. Perhaps that 2Gbps is just 1Gbps full duplex by the way, but it's not like installing 1Gbps fiber and network interface is more expensive than installing 10Mbps or 100Mbps fiber. In fact you would have to go out of your way to find or build equipment that only supports 100Mbps, so it would be more expensive than 1Gbps.

If you don't want or need 3D acceleration (OpenGL/Direct3D), you can possibly get hardware that only supports 2D but that's specialty hardware for server boards, you'll pay more for it (I looked it up, there's a 2-watt 2D card on PCIe 1x that costs > $70 + shipping from a far away place, while a 2D/3D card that eats up to 9 watts costs less than half that)

Re:Speed tiers don't exist

[jon3k]

You can do 10Gb/s over "RJ45 cable". More accurately you're referring to 8P8C (8 position, 8 ccontact) modular connector that goes on the end of the cable. The cable itself has another rating (i.e. CAT5, CAT5e, etc). Category 6 cable is rated to carry 10GBASE-T, or 10Gb/S.

Re:Speed tiers don't exist

[Blaskowicz]

You can do indeed, but it's still expensive, relatively power hungry so it doesn't get built into desktop motherboards and laptops or consumer networking equipment.
So it is still years away, even though it's many years old already. If it does come around I think by then we'll have PCIe 4.0 in our computers, 10nm CPU for Intel and 14nm for everyone else (or 7nm for Intel, 10nm or 14nm for competitors).

Re:100% of Cable company's throttle bandwidth, esp

[Phreakiture]

That 20Mb/4Mb, most cable internet users are advertised was throttled to less than 300Kbps/101Kbps in every city I have ever lived in. Thanks to my dd-WRT router I know this to be absolutely 100% true. You can learn it to, but not from a lying Speedtest!

I can confirm Speedtest's results independently by uploading/downloading content to an Amazon EC2 instance. I am, in fact, getting what both the cable company and Speedtest.net have told me I'm getting, which is good, because I refuse to do business with Verizon.

Obvious proof

[chilenexus]

Here we have (yet more) obvious proof that allowing more competition increases the level of services available to, and decreases the prices for, the public - while granting limited monopolies causes stagnation and/or insufficient innovation and increased/unjustified pricing. There's no reason to continue allowing limited monopolies.