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.

Comments

Re:They aren't being sued?

[fustakrakich]

Doesn't always work that way

And the money flows as fast as the data.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:They aren't being sued?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, see http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Comcast-CenturyLink-Fail-to-Stop-Longmont-Fiber-116895
Longmont had a fiber ring since the 90s, but was blocked by Qwest from using it:

Qwest had just pushed what become known as the "Qwest law" through the Colorado legislature.... Now Longmont would have to pass a referendum to allow local businesses and resident to use a network the town built years earlier.

In 2009, Longmont attempted to pass the referendum but Comcast and allies dumped over $245,000 into a "Vote No" campaign that spread fear and misinformation far and wide, resulting in 56% of the voters saying no. They set a record in local campaign spending, dwarfing previous amounts from all sides in any Longmont election.

But after the election, when many learned they had been fooled by anti-competition propaganda, they wanted to revisit the issue.

We of course finally defeated them in 2011, even after they spent a boatload more with their propaganda

It's all about the money, honey

[Mycroft-X]

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.

Re:It's all about the money, honey

[jabuzz]

Assuming they have laid single mode fibre, then the deprecation can be over such a long time period that it is basically negligible. If you ran single mode fibre 20 years ago you could still use it tomorrow for 100Gbps with off the shelf components. It will be part of the upcoming 400Gbps Ethernet standard, and there are systems that will let you get 1Tbps over the very same fibre though these are specialist systems at the moment.

You could probably reasonably deprecate the fibre which is the main capital component over a 100 year period.