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

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.