Comcast, beware: New city-run broadband offers 1Gbps for $60 a month

AceGoober

AceGoober

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ArsTechnica is reporting Fort Collins, Colorado has built their own Municipal Broadband Service.

Comcast probably isn't too happy about as it is estimated to cost the corporation between $5.4 million and $22.8 million per year. I'm a fan of municipal run broadband as long as the support infrastructure is in place and there are no hidden costs for the consumer.

Currently, the service only covers a small part of the city yet they hope to have city edge coverage in two or 3 years.


Fort Collins Connexion, the new fiber-to-the-home municipal option, costs $59.95 a month for 1Gbps download and 1Gbps upload speeds, with no data caps, contracts, or installation fees. There's a $15 monthly add-on fee to cover Wi-Fi, but customers can avoid that fee by purchasing their own router. Fort Collins Connexion also offers home phone service, and it plans to add TV service later on.

Connexion is only available in a small portion of the city right now.

"The initial number of homes we're targeting this week is 20-30. We will notify new homes weekly, slowly ramping up in volume," Connexion spokesperson Erin Shanley told Ars. While Connexion's fiber lines currently pass just a small percentage of the city's homes and businesses, Shanley said the city's plan is to build out to the city limits within two or three years.
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AceGoober said:
ArsTechnica is reporting Fort Collins, Colorado has built their own Municipal Broadband Service.

Comcast probably isn't too happy about as it is estimated to cost the corporation between $5.4 million and $22.8 million per year. I'm a fan of municipal run broadband as long as the support infrastructure is in place and there are no hidden costs for the consumer.

Currently, the service only covers a small part of the city yet they hope to have city edge coverage in two or 3 years.
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And it makes surveillence even easier for the government. No longer do they need to go to an ISP and tap their lines or ask them to let them tap them. They own them!
 
Comcast will pull out some exclusivity contract a bunch of the sub divisions developers signed and throw a wrench into the whole thing.
 
Paul_Johnson said:
And it makes surveillence even easier for the government. No longer do they need to go to an ISP and tap their lines or ask them to let them tap them. They own them!
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Pretty sure they just let them in as it is, it’s Google, Microsoft, and Apple that constantly tell them to get bent. The ISP’s likely handed them the keys a long time ago in exchange for tax brakes and exclusivity contracts.
 
I have an xfinity line at $70 right now, in 12 months it goes up to $90 but I’m not bitching.

...yet lol
 
Paul_Johnson said:
When I had Comcrap, the price was not really the problem. It was the service. The outages on services made a kleptomaniac meth addict look honest and reliable.
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I really haven’t had a bad experience with them to be honest. Well, maybe one or two but in the few decades I’ve had them they haven’t really done me wrong.

I will say their “rental” fees are outrageous.
 
Trimlock said:
I really haven’t had a bad experience with them to be honest. Well, maybe one or two but in the few decades I’ve had them they haven’t really done me wrong.

I will say their “rental” fees are outrageous.
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I get your point. They have a huge network so experiences (and prices ) will vary. My biggest problem with them though was just the quality of their service in my area.
 
I've had good service with Comcast for years, pricing and plan options not so much. Since the phone co. actually got some fiber installed a few blocks south of me, the best deals area all 1-2yr contracts. The only way to get any decent deals is to call them and haggle with a real agent or in store. The last time I tried to use their website, even signed into my account the offer they gave me "wasn't available in my region". Then why'd you offer it to me ya morons?

If only CenturyLink would actually get fiber in my neighborhood like they started talking about 5 years ago.
 
Ranulfo said:
I've had good service with Comcast for years, pricing and plan options not so much. Since the phone co. actually got some fiber installed a few blocks south of me, the best deals area all 1-2yr contracts. The only way to get any decent deals is to call them and haggle with a real agent or in store. The last time I tried to use their website, even signed into my account the offer they gave me "wasn't available in my region". Then why'd you offer it to me ya morons?

If only CenturyLink would actually get fiber in my neighborhood like they started talking about 5 years ago.
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Ugh. Fuck CenturyLink.
 
Finally Murica is doing smth about this with their bad connections from 90s.. u cant do much with hard capped slow connections in these days when multimedia is everyday thing and u suck data from net like a true wh0re sucks d.. But in the end these old style isps like poopcast can only blame themselfs in this case coz they havent done anything to that.. just over charging peoples from bad bad connections and not using that money enough or not at all to build fiber connections to peoples.. just paying to their share holders.. it dosnt work like that.. but these smaller cities and google and who ever is building these fiber networks, will eat big isps easy and take their customers.. and that is a good thing..
 
Paul_Johnson said:
And it makes surveillence even easier for the government. No longer do they need to go to an ISP and tap their lines or ask them to let them tap them. They own them!
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Already happens at the exchange level, so it's not really an issue how they do it. AT&T NSA room etc and myriad of other cases in past prove this clearly. Five eyes/echelon is a pretty powerful system that was 'a conspiracy theory' to most until Snowden came along.
 
^Yeah people have been pwnd for so long it's funny that they think this removes a step.
 
Paul_Johnson said:
And it makes surveillence even easier for the government. No longer do they need to go to an ISP and tap their lines or ask them to let them tap them. They own them!
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LOL! God forbid something extremely easy already gets a tad easier by saving our rectums from shitty ISPs.
 
Master_shake_ said:
How long till comcast sues ?

Why compete when you can litigate?
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soon tm.. spokane tried to bring in a lowcost fiber service for the rural regions around the county because comcast refused to follow through with what they said they would do.. comcast instantly came out and said it was a breach of their contract and that they'd remove their data center that's in Spokane if they didn't kill the deal.. even though the contract it's self is illegal to begin with.. city caved and cancelled it so the rural area's are still suffering through dialup and sat internet.
 
N4CR said:
Already happens at the exchange level, so it's not really an issue how they do it. AT&T NSA room etc and myriad of other cases in past prove this clearly. Five eyes/echelon is a pretty powerful system that was 'a conspiracy theory' to most until Snowden came along.
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Its almost like I said they already do.........

And Echelon was well known in the 1990's and not just as a conspiracy theory as it had been disclosed a couple decades earlier. We learned about it in normal classes in college.
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
soon tm.. spokane tried to bring in a lowcost fiber service for the rural regions around the county because comcast refused to follow through with what they said they would do.. comcast instantly came out and said it was a breach of their contract and that they'd remove their data center that's in Spokane if they didn't kill the deal.. even though the contract it's self is illegal to begin with.. city caved and cancelled it so the rural area's are still suffering through dialup and sat internet.
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I'll be in your neck of the woods the first weekend of October to visit some family.
 
*Shrug* I will probably never have that option where I live, in the Buffalo, NY area or, City of Tonawanda, specifically. I have only one high speed option and that is Spectrum and no, I do not want to spend $200 for a install fee alone just to get gigabit speeds.
 
Good luck to them.

AT&T fiber keeps "accidentally" cut the Google fiber lines around here all the dame time while leaving their stupid AT&T flyers all the place.

Comcast might start laying out more fiber lines in the same fashion as AT&T in that city.
 
86 5.0L said:
Guess who has jurisdiction over these local/city goverbmebts?
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Yes and no. Federal government has some pretty strict limitations over what it can and cannot tell local governments to do. Whether that extends to things like data privacy is not entirely clear however. Not that it matters anyway since your traffic is already being monitored by your current ISP (unless you're hiding it behind a VPN, of course).
 
86 5.0L said:
Guess who has jurisdiction over these local/city goverbmebts?
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FFS, if the government asks most telecoms for info, they just turn it over. I worked at a company where it just took a phone call. It supposedly required a subpoena, but in practice that wasn't always the case. What's more, we had a data warehouse with every call made for years. I don't know if the SMS team warehoused text messages, but it wouldn't surprise me if they did. I know we did with MMS, and that included all the text in your message, but I don't know if the group that controlled the MMS servers warehoused the images themselves (the text was part of the billing record).

Regardless, I've got friends/family ina place which got municipal fiber with symmetric connections more than a decade ago and everyone loves it. It's cheaper. The service is better and you get better speed for less money. If you don't want the ISP to see your shit, get a VPN service, because no matter who you use, if you're not doing that, your stuff can be turned over if the feds or locals want it (even if you're using Comcast).
 
nilepez said:
FFS, if the government asks most telecoms for info, they just turn it over. I worked at a company where it just took a phone call. It supposedly required a subpoena, but in practice that wasn't always the case. What's more, we had a data warehouse with every call made for years. I don't know if the SMS team warehoused text messages, but it wouldn't surprise me if they did. I know we did with MMS, and that included all the text in your message, but I don't know if the group that controlled the MMS servers warehoused the images themselves (the text was part of the billing record).

Regardless, I've got friends/family ina place which got municipal fiber with symmetric connections more than a decade ago and everyone loves it. It's cheaper. The service is better and you get better speed for less money. If you don't want the ISP to see your shit, get a VPN service, because no matter who you use, if you're not doing that, your stuff can be turned over if the feds or locals want it (even if you're using Comcast).
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Your team was archiving text messages.

And you think VPNs are safe? They aren't.
 
Paul_Johnson said:
Your team was archiving text messages.

And you think VPNs are safe? They aren't.
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Definitely not my team. We only archived the billing records (but as I said, MMS billing records included the text). If the feds can crack a VPN, then it really doesn't matter what ISP you're using. The ISP itself, AFAIK, can see that you're using a VPN, but they can't tell what you're doing behind the VPN. If they could, it'd pretty much negate the usefulness of a VPN. If you know something, then explain, because my cursory look shows they can't see what you're doing.
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
soon tm.. spokane tried to bring in a lowcost fiber service for the rural regions around the county because comcast refused to follow through with what they said they would do.. comcast instantly came out and said it was a breach of their contract and that they'd remove their data center that's in Spokane if they didn't kill the deal.. even though the contract it's self is illegal to begin with.. city caved and cancelled it so the rural area's are still suffering through dialup and sat internet.
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They should have challenged them. If Comacast put the money into building a data center, they're not going to suddenly pull it out. In Louisiana, Cox and AT&T fought for years to stop LUS from building out municipal fiber (even found "people" to be part of a lawsuit when other lawsuits had failed). It took longer to fight the case than it did to build out fiber throughout the city (maybe the entire parish...can't remember). AT&T bailed (not sure if they came back). Cox is still there.
 
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