Cities Start Demanding Gigabit Fiber

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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Google has disturbed the status quo of Internet service providers by rolling out Google Fiber in select markets across the US. Cities are now beginning to look for alternative methods of bringing gigabit speed Internet access to their cities, even if it means the cities take on the challenge themselves.

"If you compare our pricing to Chattanooga and Lafayette, who have already done citywide fiber to the home, and fiber to business networks, our commercial rates per megabit are 34 times higher. Our residential rates are 15 times higher.
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Here in the middle of nowhere I get 1.5Mb and I don't care.

Sure gigabit would be awesome, but my forested property and clean air mean a lot more to me.
 
Twisted Kidney said:
Here in the middle of nowhere I get 1.5Mb and I don't care.

Sure gigabit would be awesome, but my forested property and clean air mean a lot more to me.
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Yup, I have the same speed as you, but none of that forested property of clean air :(
 
I get 50Mbps cable for $50 a month in rural far East Texas, but the backup DSL is a very poor 2-3Mbps for the same price.
 
Twisted Kidney said:
Here in the middle of nowhere I get 1.5Mb and I don't care.

Sure gigabit would be awesome, but my forested property and clean air mean a lot more to me.
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People live in the boonies? How u get by without malls, pubs, party, bitches, ect ect...
 
I could have fiber to my home, if the fucking city didn't have so much red tape about installing it and by red tape I mean a shit ton of fees and permit requirements that makes them money.
 
Meh, I get 30Mbps out in bumfuck nowhere NW of Houston, faster would be cool but heck this is faster than I was getting in Kingwood.
 
I get 15Mbit down 1 up -- Time Warner cable for 35 dollars a month.

It's okay I suppose -- would be way happier with 20/5, but the prices go up fast after the deal I snagged. Supposedly my area is able to get 50Mbit down, would be awesome but I don't feel like paying 80+ month just for a data connection.

I realize the US has way more real estate and pipe to lay when it comes to getting infrastructure in place, but looking elsewhere in the world you can tell just how backwards and archaic our system is (in terms of cost per megabit)

The average price in japan for 100mbit straight into your house is $50/month. Hell you can't even get TV+phone for 50/month over here in the US.

If google fiber ever comes to DFW, TX sign my ass up.
 
57339749722668faf37ef5f142dcb6783dfcd691b0f59ab3cb9c759799fec9f7.jpg
 
From article
While businesses in the Bryan/College Station area pay $3,395 per month for 50Mbps download and upload
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either they screwed up and have a typo and that should be $33.95 or somebody is really get raped on price.

While the idea is nice, I think most of the big guys stopped trying to do anything with fiber as they didn't find it profitable enough. It takes a long time to recover the cost of what you put in so you have to be willing to wait awhile to recover your cost.


julliboo said:
Welp I always mix up the symbols for Mb and MB :D. I get ~1.5 MB
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Wrong symbol. Mb = Mega bit, MB is mega byte. Speeds are in bits. 1.5MBps would be 12Mbps.
 
collegeboy69us said:
I realize the US has way more real estate and pipe to lay when it comes to getting infrastructure in place, but looking elsewhere in the world you can tell just how backwards and archaic our system is (in terms of cost per megabit)
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The infrastructure argument dies off though once you start having multiple elevated tiers. The cost difference to give you 10Mbps or 100Mbps is extremely negligible.
 
caddys83 said:
People live in the boonies? How u get by without malls, pubs, party, bitches, ect ect...
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You sir, are missing out a whole 'nother world.

- says someone who grew up first half of life as a city kid then moved to rural boonies
 
To follow up... cities are imagining Google Fiber type of pricing, the reality though is if any of the big players pony up to lay fiber (AT&T, Comcast, any of the other big "telecom" companies) expect to see pricing of 10Mbps- $29.95/month, 50Mbps - $59.95/month, 100Mbps- $109.95, 200Mbps- $199.95/month, 1Gbps- $299.95/month
 
Exavior said:
From article

either they screwed up and have a typo and that should be $33.95 or somebody is really get raped on price.

While the idea is nice, I think most of the big guys stopped trying to do anything with fiber as they didn't find it profitable enough. It takes a long time to recover the cost of what you put in so you have to be willing to wait awhile to recover your cost.




Wrong symbol. Mb = Mega bit, MB is mega byte. Speeds are in bits. 1.5MBps would be 12Mbps.
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I think it has more to do with mobile. Once data plans came into price ranges people could afford many companies saw the impending doom, imagine a block with only 1 family actually purchasing a hard line internet service. That is where phones went. Verizon FIOS was a great example they talked all big about how they were going to roll it out then just stopped. Realizing LTE was cheaper and faster to deploy and not enough customers cared about the better connection. The only reason cable is doing so well is bundling with TV. If not for TV I think tons more people would still be hanging out on the bottom of the barrel DSL.
 
sfsuphysics said:
To follow up... cities are imagining Google Fiber type of pricing, the reality though is if any of the big players pony up to lay fiber (AT&T, Comcast, any of the other big "telecom" companies) expect to see pricing of 10Mbps- $29.95/month, 50Mbps - $59.95/month, 100Mbps- $109.95, 200Mbps- $199.95/month, 1Gbps- $299.95/month
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Maybe one of the advantages of being a city is you could do things like roll it into peoples taxes, so you just give everyone, lets say a starter plan for free and then let them upgrade. The major problem with any connection is it gets more profitable or sustainable if you can get more people in the system. FIOS had trouble because Comcast could just under cut their prices and for whatever reason Verizon was not willing to fight back hard. I am not really for state run monopolies but in practice I see no difference between a state run monopoly and a state sanctioned monopoly which is what most of have now with cable. Fact is the governments ultimately decide one way or another.

That said I was once in the city of Wyandotte MI and they have city run cable, looking it over their prices were rather similar to Comcast. Not pointing one way or the other but I would be interested in seeing how things panned out if some cities tried this.
 
sfsuphysics said:
The infrastructure argument dies off though once you start having multiple elevated tiers. The cost difference to give you 10Mbps or 100Mbps is extremely negligible.
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yes and no. Depends on how you are being offered the service and what the ISP has for the backbone.

Are we looking at fiber itself of any type of internet connection?

for xDSL you can offer 10Mbps to a decent sized area, to get 50 - 100Mbps you are going to have to put in new equipment closer to the customer as you can't offer that high of a rate very far, so that requires more equipment to be installed closer and closer to customers.

If looking at FTTH. Again to offer 10Mbps, one could go with GPON, with is 2.5Gbps split up to 32 times to feed customers. So without any overselling you get about 78Mbps. But only need 1 fiber out to the area to start with and then can split it closer to the customer. With overselling you could offer them 100Mbps each. Won't be able to offer anyone 1Gbps. For that you have to go to ActiveE, 1 fiber from the office (or where ever you are servicing from) to every house, which means more fiber is needed, more equipment as now instead of a 1 port in the office servicing up to 32 people it is 1 to 1.

You also have to look at the backbone. 10,000 people at 10Mbps maxing out their connection uses 100,000Mbps (100Gbps). at 100Mbps that is 1,000,000Mbps (1,000Gbps). Depending on how the network is setup that might require splitting up people into multiple feeds back to the main office.

To give some real world numbers. My work services 5 rural towns, we have a 10Gbps ring connection them all for our newer equipment we are putting in. Only have about 1000 out of 7000 internet customers on it so far. and they mostly only have our 4Mbps down/1up package, some have 10Mbps, very few had 30-50Mbps. We use maybe 500Mbps at peak. All equipment right now combined uses about 3Gbps for all of our customers combined. I am wanting to try to push for us to make our slowest package something like 10Mbps down / 4 up or something like that given that next year we will have to do at least 6/2 anyway. of course I don't know our regulations, nor am I in marketing or accounting so can't just change what we offer, but I still want to try to push for that anyway. Right now the only thing keeping us around 3Gbps really is that a lot of people are maxing out connections between some of our older devices we are fixing by moving them into newer equipment. But that cost money to do. Once we get them moved to newer equipment our need going out to the rest of the world will need to increase, which we are looking at dual 10Gbps uplinks right now. Which requires newer equipment. Cost of a 1Gbps SPF and a 10Gbps SPF are a decent jump, so are routers and switches that support 10Gbps interfaces instead of 1Gbps.

So it does depend a lot on what is in place and what you are looking at to know how much of a price difference going from 10 to 100Mbps to 1Gbps is going to be. If the network was designed to ensure everyone could get around 10Mbps or less and that was it, they might have to replace a lot of stuff in the background to get a large number of people up to 100Mbps. Even with fiber you might be looking at a change in the type of technology being used to up your speed too much at a given point.
 
Ashbringer said:
57339749722668faf37ef5f142dcb6783dfcd691b0f59ab3cb9c759799fec9f7.jpg
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Nice image but to counter this refer to my above posts about Verizon. Their are some businesses in America that have done very well by avoiding the big competitive markets. Why try to run Google fiber in a big city when they can already choose from FIOS, Comcast, and plethora of DSL providers? Heck some of them even have multiple cable provider choices. All you do is spread out your customer base. Going to a city that is big but not huge and might only have one other fast provider, and maybe one that isn't even that good means you can probably get a lot more people / area on your plan and for society as a whole it brings up the average. Basically is it better to scrap for dinner in a big city, or be the king of the hill in a smaller city?

BTW one of those companies that did that was Wal-Mart and it worked out pretty well for them I would say.
 
Hopefully it doesn't turn out like Montecello MN.

The city had asked the local telco to start offering fiber, and the telco refused. So when the city started running their own fiber, this same local telco sued the city claiming unfair competition.

It went through the courts for a few years, and the city eventually won, bu the city ended up wasting a bunch of money on legal fees and it set the project back several years.

Telcos and Cablecos will do whatever it takes to avoid competition. Even if it means spending millions on a lawsuit that they know they will lose, in the hope that their opponent is broke by the time the lawsuit ends.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/06/monticello-appeals-court-win/
 
No shit it costs more per megabit. We're talking about speeds of 20-40 times what people already have, and unless you expect fiber to cost thousands of dollars per month, of course it will cost significantly less per megabit, otherwise nobody would bother. Thanks for the bullshit marketing analysis though, Mr. City Council member. :rolleyes:
 
maxius said:
why is not chicago on the list god damn it i want it now
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Then you need to get the people of Chicago behind municipal fiber. Lafayette did this back in 2007 or 2008. I don't know when Chattanooga did it, though their move to cheap Gigabit is fairly recent. Lafayette doesn't have cheap gigabit options at this time. Could they do it? I don't know. The symmetric 15mb and 40mb plans are their most reasonable options and honestly 40mb is as much as I'd need for now. It's not as good a deal as 80 for a Gb, but if I had the option of either, I'd opt to save the $30/month. Hell, I might opt for the 15Mb service and save $45/month.
 
Stiletto said:
No shit it costs more per megabit. We're talking about speeds of 20-40 times what people already have, and unless you expect fiber to cost thousands of dollars per month, of course it will cost significantly less per megabit, otherwise nobody would bother. Thanks for the bullshit marketing analysis though, Mr. City Council member. :rolleyes:
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are you referring to my post?
 
I have to say I think College Station is doing it wrong. It took Lafayette about a year (maybe 2) to build out it's infrastructure, which encompasses roughly 120k people. I really don't see any incumbent providers building out a FTTH network for less than College Station can do it themselves. There are other cities that have done and they can talk to those cities for advice on how to do it and the issues that they've had.

The bottom line is the only companies that are going to do it are Telecom companies and Cable. These are two of the most loathed industries in the U.S. Personally, if I was a long time resident of a city, I'd rather just own the network. Then again, I suspect Entergy provides power to CS, so maybe they have no experience running utilities, other than water and sewer.
 
sir-gold said:
Hopefully it doesn't turn out like Montecello MN.

The city had asked the local telco to start offering fiber, and the telco refused. So when the city started running their own fiber, this same local telco sued the city claiming unfair competition.

It went through the courts for a few years, and the city eventually won, bu the city ended up wasting a bunch of money on legal fees and it set the project back several years.

Telcos and Cablecos will do whatever it takes to avoid competition. Even if it means spending millions on a lawsuit that they know they will lose, in the hope that their opponent is broke by the time the lawsuit ends.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/06/monticello-appeals-court-win/
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The same thing happened in Lafayette LA. Cox Cable and AT&T (then Bell South) tied it up in courts for roughly 5 years.

Oh and in the case of Lafayette, Cox Cable joined some small cable (or independent cable) coop that smaller providers join to get better prices on cable. Cox did that to prevent LUS from joining and thus increasing their cost for video. Cox, of course, is the 3rd largest Cable provider in the U.S. Small they are not.
 
I've got my Gigabit from my electric coop. $149.00 per month unlimited downloads. I'm in the country and very fortunate to have this.
 
DooKey said:
I've got my Gigabit from my electric coop. $149.00 per month unlimited downloads. I'm in the country and very fortunate to have this.
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Wow - that's impressive. Awesome! My folks are in the country and can only get DSL - at 1.5 Mbps at $60/month. :(
 
Stiletto said:
No shit it costs more per megabit. We're talking about speeds of 20-40 times what people already have, and unless you expect fiber to cost thousands of dollars per month, of course it will cost significantly less per megabit, otherwise nobody would bother. Thanks for the bullshit marketing analysis though, Mr. City Council member. :rolleyes:
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Well the statement isn't 100% accurate, because Lafayette doesn't currently offer cheap gigabit fiber. Nevertheless, the cost of a Symmetric 40Mb connection from LUS is $1.00 more than Cox cable's regular price for 5Mb/1Mb service. It's the same price as Cox's special price for 25Mb/5Mb (which jumps $13 after 6 months) and is $11.00 less than Cox's 50Mb/10Mb special price (which jumps to $73 after 3 months).

Cox/AT&T also charged much more before LUS entered the market. In addition, the result of that competition was Cox deployed its first DOCSIS 3 network in Lafayette. I can't touch that level of service where I'm at my prices are higher too.
 
sfsuphysics said:
To follow up... cities are imagining Google Fiber type of pricing, the reality though is if any of the big players pony up to lay fiber (AT&T, Comcast, any of the other big "telecom" companies) expect to see pricing of 10Mbps- $29.95/month, 50Mbps - $59.95/month, 100Mbps- $109.95, 200Mbps- $199.95/month, 1Gbps- $299.95/month
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We shall see. AT&T's FTTH roll out start next month. Initially 300Mb U/D they intend to move to 1Gb (for the same price) starting mid 2014. Prices aren't known, but a company in MS is also rolling out Gb service next year for $80, so I have to believe that in Austin, where Google will be a competitor, AT&T will have very similar prices.

On the topic of FTTH the ATT CEO said, "The cost dynamics of deploying fiber have dramatically changed. … The cost dynamics look good, the revenue implications look good, the market implications look good, so you’re going to see more of this over time, and I fully expect you’ll see us doing markets like this over the next few years.”
 
If only cable monopolies didn't spend so much money lobbying states to pass laws effectively killing municipal broadband....
 
I'd like to see a push to bring the infrastructure up to speed (no pun intended). Bring fiber into neighborhoods. They did a huge push with telephones back in the day, and most of those old ass lines are still around. Being everything up to date. That seems to be the expensive part. Get the PUD's to help push it. Get some tax cuts to the utilities to help. It's the 21st century, and many are still using copper from the 60's... The Internet is huge, and getting bigger. Soon, LTE and these measly 10Mb connections will be ancient. I'd rather see a build up of the underlying infrastructure and then let the ISP's pay to use it.

Some small towns will probably never have enough customers to support a big fiber rollout. I know my town has a good number of DSL and wireless customers, but it's not enough to support a fiber. Even then, the prices would need to be equal or less than the DSL for higher speeds to be competitive. Some people are happy with 10Mb. I'm not. Gamers would easily go for a low latency fiber connection with 50-100Mb.
 
Ur_Mom said:
I'd like to see a push to bring the infrastructure up to speed (no pun intended). Bring fiber into neighborhoods. They did a huge push with telephones back in the day, and most of those old ass lines are still around. Being everything up to date. That seems to be the expensive part. Get the PUD's to help push it. Get some tax cuts to the utilities to help. It's the 21st century, and many are still using copper from the 60's... The Internet is huge, and getting bigger. Soon, LTE and these measly 10Mb connections will be ancient. I'd rather see a build up of the underlying infrastructure and then let the ISP's pay to use it.

Some small towns will probably never have enough customers to support a big fiber rollout. I know my town has a good number of DSL and wireless customers, but it's not enough to support a fiber. Even then, the prices would need to be equal or less than the DSL for higher speeds to be competitive. Some people are happy with 10Mb. I'm not. Gamers would easily go for a low latency fiber connection with 50-100Mb.
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Actually the small towns are the places with fiber, as long as they aren't given service by a big Telco that is. There were two government programs in places that helped with that. Years ago the government started doing stimulus packages, where if you were under a certain size the government would give you X amount of money to do FTTH projects. I know of at least 4 places within about 300 miles of me that were small telcos that have about 400 customers in a single town and they now have fiber to every home from that program. The government then came out with a new program with the USDA and the FCC teamed up to offer loans to some telephone companies. Again aimed at smaller companies. Many more got these and did FTTH build outs. Of course that was before the looked at the entire picture and figured out how horrible of a position they would be in after about 10 years trying to pay back a multi mil $$ loan.

The problem is that tax breaks won't help as they already don't pay taxes on stuff. Anything that a Telco buys that is to provide service to a customer they don't pay sales tax on. Even if they added more breaks in other areas the saved money would just go into the pockets of execs at the larger companies and end up like the funds that the government collected back around 2000 or whenever that was.
 
one issue i see is most people do not actually need, nor could come close to saturating 1Gig, now i am not talking [H] but the other %99 ofthe population who are happy on their 3G/4G cell phones for internet.
 
Don't read this.

Call your ISP. Complain that your speeds are terrible.

Tip the guy at least $40 for his trouble.

Now, put in some good equipment. Reap the rewards.

How about 220mb on a 50mb contract? He tried to boost the speed when it was just a crappy router doing it.

What router did it? Netgear Nighthawk. It's faster than my $1100 SonicWall dual band.
 
Doh! Upgrading from a $200 DLink to the Netgear Nighthawk fixed the issue and then some.
 
I'd love to see cities lay fiber, even if we had to pay the install cost running the lines from the poles to our houses.
Cable and DSL companies have screwed us over long enough without any competition.
Let our cities make it a public utility providing competition and tell those idiots that refused to reinvest in infrastructure to stick it where the sun don't shine.
 
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