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Gigabit Internet Access Now Supported By 84 US ISPs
An anonymous reader writes: According to Michael Render, principal analyst at market researcher RVA LLC, 83 Internet access providers have joined Google to offer gigabit Internet access service (all priced in the $50-$150 per month range).Render's data shows that new subscribers are signing up at an annualized growth rate of 480 percent each year. That "annualized" is an important thing to note, though; this is early days, and adding a few households, relatively speaking, means an impressive percentage change.
How is someone going to track an ISP in someone's head? Townships are not going to allow some ISP to pull out the 15% most profitable customers so that Comcast or Time Warner pull out and 85% of their township has no internet or all. Which means the contract is going to highly regulated and expensive. Someone is going to have to come in with a credible claim. To do that they are often going to need to provide other utility services cable TV and phone being the most common. Those are both regulated industries.
The business internet market is a much less regulated market and while the quality is much higher, the prices are many times higher. Commercial gigabit connections are generally a few thousands not a few hundred dollars a month. Connection charges can range from say $1500 to $11k, they aren't $99-129.
Smart people are doing a very good job weighing the various interests in networking and putting together compromises that meet most of them. Those dinosaurs are doing a very good job of providing tremendous bandwidth at low cost to 99% of America's 130m households. There is no conspiracy and there are no easy fixes. Government is tremendously supportive to increasing bandwidth almost everywhere. I'm sure there is some corruption but corruption is a lazy excuse for people who have no clue about the economics of the industry to pretend that things could be fixed if only the government got out of the way.
Of note - ALL current US ISPs offering RESIDENTIAL gigabit service do so on the oversell model, such that they CAN deliver UP TO 1Gbps to a customer
My Midwest USA ISP sells 1Gb/s residential, and they do not say "up to". Instead they guarantee that you will not get congestion on their network or to their transit provider. I have called in on 10ms ping increased and they have fixed the issues. They take congestion spuriously.
Taken from marketing
1 Gbps Symmetrical. It’s dedicated symmetrical fiber so speeds never go down or change.
Extremely large online backups
Web hosting
Webinar hosting
Cloud computing
Online gaming
Uninterrupted HD streaming (Netflix, YouTube, Hulu)
Taken from terms and conditions
No Unreasonable Discrimination
The Company does not unreasonably discriminate in its transmission of lawful traffic over the broadband Internet access services of its customers.
The Company does not block, impair, degrade or delay VoIP applications or services that compete with its voice services and those of its affiliates.
The Company does not block, impair, degrade, delay or otherwise inhibit access by its customers to lawful content, applications, services or non-harmful devices.
The Company does not impair free expression by actions such as slowing traffic from particular websites or blogs.
The Company does not use or demand “pay-for-priority” or similar arrangements that directly or indirectly favor some traffic over other traffic.
The Company does not prioritize its own content, application, services, or devices, or those of its affiliates.
The Company does not retain, store or provide customer traffic information, except as required by law under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act