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Municipal ISP Makes 10Gbps Available To All Residents
An anonymous reader writes: Five years ago, the city of Salisbury, North Carolina began a project to roll out fiber across its territory. They decided to do so because the private ISPs in the area weren't willing to invest more in the local infrastructure. Now, Salisbury has announced that it's ready to make 10 Gbps internet available to all of the city's residents. While they don't expect many homeowners to have a use for the $400/month 10 Gbps plan, they expect to have some business customers. "This is really geared toward attracting businesses that need this type of bandwidth and have it anywhere they want in the city." Normal residents can get 50 Mbps upstream and downstream for $45/month. A similar service was rolled out for a rural section of Vermont in June. Hopefully these cities will serve as blueprints for other locations that aren't able to get a decent fiber system from private ISPs.
I mean, isn't that the way it works? The companies that refuse to provide service sue for 'unfair competition' anyway? Then the nice judge shuts the whole operation down?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
If they don't offer static addressing, then it's a waste of time.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Why not buy up one 10Gbps line and sell 50Mbps lines for $30/mo while making a nice profit?
How much for an anonymous seedbox?
EPB has said they'll be rolling out 10gb in the near future (within the next year). Given their 1GB prices, I expect they'll be far cheaper than $400 per month.
I might get it just because. I've got their 1GB service and about the only times I peg it are if I'm downloading a torrent.
They lost $ 12.5 Million last year. They owe the Water & Sewer Department $ 7.6 Million. They already offer 1 Gig service and have all of two customers. The reason they aren't getting sued is because it isn't worth Time Warner's trouble.
State and local taxes are deductible from federal taxes, so the more a state or municipality taxes to subsidize a service, the greater the implicit federal subsidy.
Cities should stop being ideological about this. The federal government is willing to take money from communities that rely on the private sector and give it to those that use local government instead.
Take the money and run!
Socialists!
http://www.homes.com/for-sale/salisbury-nc
Municipal broadband is outlawed in my state, and most others too. Ironically, even with Chattanooga, one of the most famous of the municipal broadband cities, the rest of Tennessee can't get it because it's been outlawed in the rest of the state.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
More like ground beef!
In 2014 they generated $4.8 million in revenue and after expenses had $229,000 to show for it. Add in depreciation (a substantial expense for a capital intensive company), amortization, interest, and other expenses and they were taxpayer funded to the tune of $144,110. That's almost 1% of all property tax revenues.
It will be interesting to see if they can be profitable as their services scale past 3,000 customers and service more of their 33,000 residents and even more businesses.
While I mostly think this is great, I wonder if they should be in the "business" of supplying actual layer-3 connectivity or whether they should just be maintaining the fiber plant and selling access to it to other companies willing to provide actual IP connectivity?
Maybe a purely internal municipal ISP makes sense for supplying IP connectivity to municipal offices, schools or other parts of the government.
The part that makes me kind of leery is the fact that the government is the ISP and this creates a certain conflict. Does the fact that the municipality runs it mean that the police have greater access to monitor the network or some increased motivation to use municipal control to go after "evildoers"?
It's not hard to see how this could also morph into the kind of local political control that those in power use to stay in power.
Public utilities. All it accomplishes is letting some cronies skim off the top. Is the myth of capitalist efficiency really so attractive that we'll keep ignoring the 97% profit margin isps have?
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What about the Gulags that residents of Salisbury were shipped off to, and the political commissars patrolling the streets? Didn't these people pay any attention to the warnings from the telecommunications companies about what would happen if the government was allowed to institute socialist internet? ..what do you mean none of that happened?
Well, what about the crippling taxes to pay for it, while fatcat government bureaucrats refuse to answer the phones, harass people, change their customer account names to things like "Asshole", refuse to let them cancel service, and generally make their customers' lives a living hell? ...what do you mean, that was Comcast?
Wait a year or two and see what happens to the Cable and Satellite providers in the area.
That's what I want to see
I want the freedom to have the slowest internet my corporate overlords decree.
Meanwhile there's 40 Gbps ports all throughout campus and 3 100 Gbps ports, while most people rarely get 20 Mbps in the rest of the city.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Salisbury's solution to this problem is on the right track but it's not the correct solution. If companies sue for unfair competition, they'll win. Governments should not be ISPs or content providers.
The correct solution to this, which is also the correct solution for the last mile problem, is for the city government to own and maintain the infrastructure that exists in public rights of way, and create a new utility just like most cities have for their water and sewer systems. Then, run all the fiber to a "connection point" where any number of private providers can bring their content and any house or building may connect through the public fiber utility. Of course, any number of ISPs, telephone companies, and other content providers may bring their stuff to the city's connection point, and thus our capitalist free enterprise system is allowed to function unimpeded by the government. End consumers can freely choose between providers, and that will be the end of the bullshit shoveled by Comcast, Time Warner, Wave Cable, et al.
I really don't understand why governments don't jump at the chance to do this. A brand new public utility is a WHOLE NEW INCOME STREAM, where the government gets to send out bills and collect money. All the have to do is hire a contractor to maintain the infrastructure, buy insurance to protect from natural disasters, and then collect money from everyone FOREVER.
For the record, I'm a conservative, and I'm very much pro capitalism and against excessive government. However, unlike the anarchists and other extremists to the right of me, I recognize that we need government to provide certain basic minimum functions for the public good. So before I get accused of being a pro-government communist, I humbly submit that providing utilities to all the city's homes and businesses is one of those necessary functions.
Capitalism will keep all the private providers in check. There's no way Comcast and it's ilk would behave the way they do if they had to compete for your business. If the voters become unhappy with the prices they're charged by the fiber utility, it's their responsibility to vote the bums out and elect representatives who will change maintenance contractors, change insurance companies, and do whatever else is necessary to keep prices low. Therefore, on both public and private fronts, all the power lies in the hands of the people. It's exactly that kind of individual empowerment that conservatives stand for.
With so much money hanging in the balance and knowing the government has no actual work to perform, why doesn't every municipal government jump on the bandwagon and solve the last mile problem once and for all? ...and use the same solution to provide service to towns like Salisbury?
One of the things that we've seen in the USA is that there's a very positive correlation between competition amount and service provided.
Areas where there's no competition tend to languish and suffer slow speeds for high amounts of money. Areas with competition tend to get lots of bandwidth at very reasonable prices in comparison.
I'll note that the 'competition' has to be competitive - sometimes you get the Cable & DSL companies essentially colluding so they're more or less the same level of mediocre.
I don't read AC A human right
locations that aren't able to get a decent fiber system from private ISPs.
What? Invisible hand of the free market not working? How strange, we were all told that capitalism solves every problem, through magic.
Apparently it's better at turning trees into toilet paper (see article above) than infrastructure. Which, btw., is also falling apart in the US.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
No mention on if the 10Gbps plan is capped.
Also business plan pricing is not public information and I feel that's dishonest.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
...Cox is also generously putting infrastructure in place for higher internet speeds. Google has already worked out some deals with municipalities for fiber as well, though I'm sure Cox was already working on it before Google came sniffing around.
I have seen some smaller communities do this kind of thing with electricity, phone and of course water. But its nice to see a city wide investment in communications like this. Probably at the time the private internet provider felt their was not enough payback for investment in a small community for fiber. Let's be honest, Google certainly sought out a community with the best potential for people to buy into the investment. Otherwise, Google would not do it either. The long term payback in fiber is pretty good, but it would take a while which many private companies are not willing to wait. In my area we saw a big investment in a area wide development of fiber cable trunk lines being installed. But unfortunately they benefit only government, private business, and education. Everyone else was kept out of the loop. This is unfortunate when you see a big technology improvement but many in the community are locked out. I guess nobody in private business was interested in taking that fiber trunk system and branching out connections to the community. Its not a great system when only a few benefit.
I'm not joking. I've been on the business side of buying high-availability internet access and some businesses will assume that such a low price means they can expect lots of downtime and/or extended periods of reduced performance. While the price of three nines has gone down from "my day", it hasn't gone down that much and I would be wary of a service provider who undercut the competition by such a significant amount.
Wow. Only way they'd be getting away with that is if the $135 also includes a pretty good cable package. Or they're like me, my phone company doesn't want to offer me DSL, so cable was my only choice.
I don't read AC A human right
OK where I live I pay $48 per month. And its 5 Mb/s down, 1.5 Mb/s up. So they get 10x the speed I get for less money. And I live in a city of over 1 million people. Sick!
It is easy to build and easy to fund and great to have...we did ourselves...
http://fiber.annehem.net //Anders
another approach is to build a fibre infrastructure that providers can lease on a per-premise basis. then they all have use of the same network (no basis for those "road rage" lawsuits) and the city still gets the advantage of being a place with speed. "per-premise" means one home can have one internet provider while their neighbor has another.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars