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?

[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?

[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?

[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]

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?

[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?

[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!

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

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."

$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.

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

[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

[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: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:So... relevance?

[Darinbob]

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

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.

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: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.