11 ms·

Chattanooga to offer 10 gigabit internet service starting today

98 points by soccerdave 11y ago

kornholi 11y ago
Alternative link: http://www.chattanoogan.com/2015/10/15/310477/Chattanooga-Implements-Worlds-First.aspx http://www.chattanoogan.com/2015/10/15/310477/Chattanooga-Im...
faitswulff 11y ago
For anyone with a 1 gigabit or faster connection, how has it noticeably changed your life? I have broadband, but I find it difficult to visualize what I would get out of a significantly faster connection.
- martinald 11y ago
  I've got 1gig via hyperoptic in London. Compared to the 80/20 VDSL I had before, browsing is pretty much the same. The difference between enabling and disabling adblock is far far greater than having 1gig. Uploading files is generally a lot quicker. However, most internet services can't handle it. I rarely get more than 1-2mbyte/sec to bitbucket or git for example, which is annoying since that can be painfully slow on large repos. Even worse, hard drives struggle to keep up with high internet speeds. SSDs are fine, but considering how quickly you can fill even a large SSD you don't really want to be using them for giant file downloads which can take advantage of it. Finally, WiFi really can't deliver 1gig or anything close to it. I often drop back to 2.4GHz WiFi in some areas of my apartment and that is by far the biggest drawback. So really, you only get 1gig or anything close when you're on a very fast server or protocol, downloading to an SSD on ethernet.
  - ethbro 11y ago
    My freshman year of college was at a university with 1gb fiber connections to the dorm rooms. Naturally, this meant there were DirectConnect servers all over campus with a variety of files. Most servers had their motd set to "Please download media and watch locally," as there was enough bandwidth to direct-play video files over the network. Unfortunately, there was not enough hard drive bandwidth to service multiple requests for this simultaneously (this was before the SSD revolution). Definitely a moment of "Hunh. Never expected to run into that bottleneck."
  - 6t6t6 11y ago
    I have 2Gbps in Tokyo. Connected by gigabit Ethernet to the router I consistently get over 500Mbps symmetric, but with the wifi i never get over 50/20Mbps. Probably because every single 2.4 channel is occupied by several networks.
- chinathrow 11y ago
  On symmetric 1gbit/s FTTH here in Europe. It changed my life to the positive as I was able to finally cancel internet service from one of the old "rent collectors" such as a cable provider in my case. Also, ping times are down, hence faster browsing, also upload speeds are way up.
- zaphoyd 11y ago
  The killer feature for me at least is the ability to use remote machines (and especially their storage) as if they were on my LAN. Unfortunately, as the sibling comment mentioned some things that should be better aren't because bumping up the local connection speed is not always sufficient as the remote machine's connection speed and the intermediate protocol overhead also makes a large difference. Additionally, I've been quite disappointed in the performance of some of our quite expensive enterprise level NAS appliances (topping out at ~200Mpbs or so). Worse are cloud storage services, especially things like Dropbox / Box.com / github / iTunes downloads that have extensive throttling, especially on uploads, sometimes as low as 10-15Mbps. (these are super irritating because they feel like they should be fast but are clearly being traffic shaped to a perfect 10.0000Mbps). There are some cases where you get much better speeds. OS downloads tend to be unthrottled, Bittorrent stuff and downloads from some CDNs can keep up. Steam is pretty good as well. For work purposes where you can control the remote machines and protocols used, and have the ability to upgrade the remote storage systems to handle gigabit speeds, it makes a number of actions that used to take to long to bother with actually possible. Examples: - Grab a packet capture of a busy network interface and pull it down locally for analysis in wireshark - Download, edit, re-upload large media files in raw/intermediate working formats - In some cases work directly off of mounted network drives rather than using local scratch storage - Really anything where you want to use thick local applications to edit serious amounts of data. For a purely residential setting (where you might be dealing with wifi, spinning hard drives/thumb drives, and only have access to slow consumer level cloud storage services) there are probably diminishing returns after ~200Mbit. All that said, while the upload difference between 100Mbit and 1000Mbit might not be that great right now, the difference between 10Mbit and 100Mbit is pretty significant and sadly, at least in the places I've lived your options are often ~10Mbit or ~1000Mbit for upload without much in between. If consumer level hardware and cloud services pick up the pace I expect 1000Mbit connections to be a lot more useful. Those developments might not happen if there aren't enough annoyed people with 1000Mbit connections watching a 10Mbit dripbox uploads and complaining.
- CyberDildonics 11y ago
  If you were going to stream video or work remotely it would be a huge deal.
  - rhino369 11y ago
    Streaming video is exactly where 10Gbps is total overkill. 50Mbps should stream 4k video in good quality. Remote desktop way less than that.
    - CyberDildonics 11y ago
      I meant uploading streaming video but all the same you should factor in high frame rates and multiple people. Also think about things like video editing for someone remotely or working with any other large chunks of data. All new technology is overkill compared to what someone absolutely needs to get by. If it wasn't they wouldn't be getting by in the first place. It is about cost and opening up new possibilities.
- secure 11y ago
  1 Gbps symmetrical FTTH here. I never need to prepare anything or think about bandwidth. Want to boot a Linux distribution from a USB memory stick? Don’t wait 15 minutes for the download to finish, just wget to your USB memory stick directly. Want to download that embedded toolkit? No more finding a different task until that multi-gigabytes download is done. Just start it, wait a couple of seconds, continue. Going over to a friend’s house? No more asking what movie we might want to watch beforehand and copying it onto my laptop. Just mount my workstation via sshfs and play it. When I used to live at my parent’s house, occasionally some family member would ask “who’s uploading something? I can barely browse the web”. This just doesn’t happen when you have more than enough bandwidth. To me, it’s like a flatrate for bandwidth. You just never need to worry about it.
btrautsc 11y ago
Founder in Chattanooga (our company went through YC). Pretty impressive announcement by EPB today. If anyone out there is being priced/ squeezed out of the Bay, or is interested in building a startup off the coasts - feel free to ping me. There are a lot of exciting things happening here.
- naveen99 11y ago
  Thank you. Download is $300/ month. What's the upload speed cost ? Edit: website says upload and download. Amazing. Tempted to rent or buy a little office space in Chattanooga.
  - symfoniq 11y ago
    I have the EPB 1 gigabit service, and it's 1 gigabit up and down for $69.99/mo. There is no reason to think the 10 gigabit service will be anything but symmetrical.
  - dtparr 11y ago
    Can you run commercial servers for that price or is that only for residential users?
    - symfoniq 11y ago
      EPB has different (more expensive) pricing for businesses. But it's still a whole lot cheaper and a whole lot faster than a DS3.
      - soccerdave 11y ago
        We have a business with 100mbit for $57.99, but last time I got a quote for higher speeds it was around $99.99 for 175 mbit and $153.99 for 270 mbit. They also charge us 14.99 for a static IP address.
  - joshmarlow 11y ago
    2nd data point here. I "only" have the 100 Mb plan and last time I ran a speed test I actually went a bit higher than 100 Mb on my upload speed.
callahad 11y ago
The article missed mentioning Minneapolis, which has been offering symmetric 10Gbps since December, 2014. Residential 10Gbps costs $399/mo, but normal 1Gbps is quite affordable at $65/mo: http://fiber.usinternet.com/plans-and-prices/plans-for-the-home/ http://fiber.usinternet.com/plans-and-prices/plans-for-the-h...
- dtparr 11y ago
  Any idea how many people that covers? Looks like just a couple square miles of coverage (roughly eyebyalled). Is that mostly business or residential areas?
  - callahad 11y ago
    Almost entirely residential; the closest they get to downtown is still about a 10 minute walk. I'm terrible at ballparking these things, but an average block in that area probably has around 15 duplexes/triplexes and 3-4 low-rise apartment buildings with 12-36 units each...
  - karlshea 11y ago
    One of the founders stated on Reddit that they've wired over 35,000 homes.
- karlshea 11y ago
  What's interesting about USI is that they are funding it all themselves, and growing their fiber installations at a rate that seems sustainable. One of their founders posts fairly regularly on Reddit with updates on construction, and he's pretty open about how things are going. Unfortunately for me I'm about two blocks away from being covered, so I'm hoping they expand my direction next summer.
  - tacojuan 11y ago
    Could you link his posts? I'm curious, since I heard that they have some kind of contract with the school down the road from me which on the far side of Maplewood from where they are located
sciurus 11y ago
It's great to see Chattanooga retaking the lead for internet speeds in Tennessee. Hopefully that will spur increases throughout the rest of the state. In Nashville, we've gone from zero to three companies (google, at&t, and comcast) announcing gigabit service in the last year. There's lots of exciting developments here, as captured in http://southernalpha.com/commentary-why-nashville/ http://southernalpha.com/commentary-why-nashville/
- saboot 11y ago
  Knoxville is still a frustrating state of affairs. Comcast has really set it's place in stone throughout most of the city, with city representatives declaring they are not interested in developing municipal options and that comcast is fine. Even more aggravating are all the billboards listing "Get Ready Knoxville! Fiber is HERE" ... at a 2 year contract $300/mo price and $1000 setup. Gee thanks.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  I was thinking about moving out there. Had no idea they had gigabit. Extra motivation. :)
rasz_pl 11y ago
Meanwhile in Australia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeEAVj2Szbg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeEAVj2Szbg
- PebblesHD 11y ago
  Was just about to say 'Meanwhile in Australia where I pay $79/month for 100GB of ~500kbps'. And I live in a relatively modern populated area, I shouldn't have to fight my neighbours for open ports!
- 2ton_jeff 11y ago
  Only fixed wireless where I am on the Sunshine Coast, QLD .. and unfortunately my building is not line of sight to the tower, so I don't have any options whatsoever. ~2mbps/200kbps on a good day, otherwise the backhaul is so saturated it is practically unusable. :-( I can get satellite apparently, but last I checked they hadn't worked out the physics to get terminal lag/latencies down to acceptable levels for that to be an actually viable alternative. At least where I am, the NBN is a joke even for those that do have it.
- simplexion 11y ago
  Going by this video I think you mean: "Meanwhile in 'straya"
huntleydavis 11y ago
Being from Chattanooga, it is ironic to me that I moved to San Francisco for tech only to have slower internet here in SF than the small city in Tennessee that I left.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- simmons 11y ago
  I know the feeling. It's hard to believe that my old college town of Starkville, Mississippi has gigabit fiber to the home and I don't here in metro Denver. :/
theandrewbailey 11y ago
It's great that internet companies are pushing speeds up, but networking hardware to fully use 10G speeds isn't cheap. Unless I missed something, 10G ethernet NICs are $200+, and all the 10G routers are $1,000+ enterprise hardware. On the other hand, if you find that 1gig is too slow and can afford a $300/month bill for something faster, you probably can afford the requisite hardware.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  The hardware will get cheaper as more people will want it.
nickpsecurity 11y ago
Love the work Chattanooga is doing on this. In my area, you have to get a full leased line at prices that might net you new cars or houses if you ditched it. I've considered relocating there just for the Internet. At least have some servers over there with a thin client connected to them. This mostly benefits datacenters. Many medium-to-large companies have central datacenters that their branches, offices, stores, etc connect to. The connections that big cost huge money in most places. Keeping that cost this far down is quite an incentive to be there. Would also help people trying to seed torrents, boost Tor network, collaborate over high quality audio/video, and so on. Many uses. It will take time before people in the Tri-State Area realize that and start moving to these towns with their growth-focused startups.

98 points by soccerdave 11y ago

Alternative link: http://www.chattanoogan.com/2015/10/15/310477/Chattanooga-Implements-Worlds-First.aspx http://www.chattanoogan.com/2015/10/15/310477/Chattanooga-Im...

faitswulff 11y ago

For anyone with a 1 gigabit or faster connection, how has it noticeably changed your life? I have broadband, but I find it difficult to visualize what I would get out of a significantly faster connection.

martinald 11y ago
I've got 1gig via hyperoptic in London. Compared to the 80/20 VDSL I had before, browsing is pretty much the same. The difference between enabling and disabling adblock is far far greater than having 1gig. Uploading files is generally a lot quicker. However, most internet services can't handle it. I rarely get more than 1-2mbyte/sec to bitbucket or git for example, which is annoying since that can be painfully slow on large repos. Even worse, hard drives struggle to keep up with high internet speeds. SSDs are fine, but considering how quickly you can fill even a large SSD you don't really want to be using them for giant file downloads which can take advantage of it. Finally, WiFi really can't deliver 1gig or anything close to it. I often drop back to 2.4GHz WiFi in some areas of my apartment and that is by far the biggest drawback. So really, you only get 1gig or anything close when you're on a very fast server or protocol, downloading to an SSD on ethernet.
- ethbro 11y ago
  My freshman year of college was at a university with 1gb fiber connections to the dorm rooms. Naturally, this meant there were DirectConnect servers all over campus with a variety of files. Most servers had their motd set to "Please download media and watch locally," as there was enough bandwidth to direct-play video files over the network. Unfortunately, there was not enough hard drive bandwidth to service multiple requests for this simultaneously (this was before the SSD revolution). Definitely a moment of "Hunh. Never expected to run into that bottleneck."
- 6t6t6 11y ago
  I have 2Gbps in Tokyo. Connected by gigabit Ethernet to the router I consistently get over 500Mbps symmetric, but with the wifi i never get over 50/20Mbps. Probably because every single 2.4 channel is occupied by several networks.
chinathrow 11y ago
On symmetric 1gbit/s FTTH here in Europe. It changed my life to the positive as I was able to finally cancel internet service from one of the old "rent collectors" such as a cable provider in my case. Also, ping times are down, hence faster browsing, also upload speeds are way up.
zaphoyd 11y ago
The killer feature for me at least is the ability to use remote machines (and especially their storage) as if they were on my LAN. Unfortunately, as the sibling comment mentioned some things that should be better aren't because bumping up the local connection speed is not always sufficient as the remote machine's connection speed and the intermediate protocol overhead also makes a large difference. Additionally, I've been quite disappointed in the performance of some of our quite expensive enterprise level NAS appliances (topping out at ~200Mpbs or so). Worse are cloud storage services, especially things like Dropbox / Box.com / github / iTunes downloads that have extensive throttling, especially on uploads, sometimes as low as 10-15Mbps. (these are super irritating because they feel like they should be fast but are clearly being traffic shaped to a perfect 10.0000Mbps). There are some cases where you get much better speeds. OS downloads tend to be unthrottled, Bittorrent stuff and downloads from some CDNs can keep up. Steam is pretty good as well. For work purposes where you can control the remote machines and protocols used, and have the ability to upgrade the remote storage systems to handle gigabit speeds, it makes a number of actions that used to take to long to bother with actually possible. Examples: - Grab a packet capture of a busy network interface and pull it down locally for analysis in wireshark - Download, edit, re-upload large media files in raw/intermediate working formats - In some cases work directly off of mounted network drives rather than using local scratch storage - Really anything where you want to use thick local applications to edit serious amounts of data. For a purely residential setting (where you might be dealing with wifi, spinning hard drives/thumb drives, and only have access to slow consumer level cloud storage services) there are probably diminishing returns after ~200Mbit. All that said, while the upload difference between 100Mbit and 1000Mbit might not be that great right now, the difference between 10Mbit and 100Mbit is pretty significant and sadly, at least in the places I've lived your options are often ~10Mbit or ~1000Mbit for upload without much in between. If consumer level hardware and cloud services pick up the pace I expect 1000Mbit connections to be a lot more useful. Those developments might not happen if there aren't enough annoyed people with 1000Mbit connections watching a 10Mbit dripbox uploads and complaining.
CyberDildonics 11y ago
If you were going to stream video or work remotely it would be a huge deal.
- rhino369 11y ago
  Streaming video is exactly where 10Gbps is total overkill. 50Mbps should stream 4k video in good quality. Remote desktop way less than that.
  - CyberDildonics 11y ago
    I meant uploading streaming video but all the same you should factor in high frame rates and multiple people. Also think about things like video editing for someone remotely or working with any other large chunks of data. All new technology is overkill compared to what someone absolutely needs to get by. If it wasn't they wouldn't be getting by in the first place. It is about cost and opening up new possibilities.
secure 11y ago
1 Gbps symmetrical FTTH here. I never need to prepare anything or think about bandwidth. Want to boot a Linux distribution from a USB memory stick? Don’t wait 15 minutes for the download to finish, just wget to your USB memory stick directly. Want to download that embedded toolkit? No more finding a different task until that multi-gigabytes download is done. Just start it, wait a couple of seconds, continue. Going over to a friend’s house? No more asking what movie we might want to watch beforehand and copying it onto my laptop. Just mount my workstation via sshfs and play it. When I used to live at my parent’s house, occasionally some family member would ask “who’s uploading something? I can barely browse the web”. This just doesn’t happen when you have more than enough bandwidth. To me, it’s like a flatrate for bandwidth. You just never need to worry about it.

btrautsc 11y ago

Founder in Chattanooga (our company went through YC). Pretty impressive announcement by EPB today. If anyone out there is being priced/ squeezed out of the Bay, or is interested in building a startup off the coasts - feel free to ping me. There are a lot of exciting things happening here.

naveen99 11y ago
Thank you. Download is $300/ month. What's the upload speed cost ? Edit: website says upload and download. Amazing. Tempted to rent or buy a little office space in Chattanooga.
- symfoniq 11y ago
  I have the EPB 1 gigabit service, and it's 1 gigabit up and down for $69.99/mo. There is no reason to think the 10 gigabit service will be anything but symmetrical.
- dtparr 11y ago
  Can you run commercial servers for that price or is that only for residential users?
  - symfoniq 11y ago
    EPB has different (more expensive) pricing for businesses. But it's still a whole lot cheaper and a whole lot faster than a DS3.
    - soccerdave 11y ago
      We have a business with 100mbit for $57.99, but last time I got a quote for higher speeds it was around $99.99 for 175 mbit and $153.99 for 270 mbit. They also charge us 14.99 for a static IP address.
- joshmarlow 11y ago
  2nd data point here. I "only" have the 100 Mb plan and last time I ran a speed test I actually went a bit higher than 100 Mb on my upload speed.

callahad 11y ago

The article missed mentioning Minneapolis, which has been offering symmetric 10Gbps since December, 2014. Residential 10Gbps costs $399/mo, but normal 1Gbps is quite affordable at $65/mo: http://fiber.usinternet.com/plans-and-prices/plans-for-the-home/ http://fiber.usinternet.com/plans-and-prices/plans-for-the-h...

dtparr 11y ago
Any idea how many people that covers? Looks like just a couple square miles of coverage (roughly eyebyalled). Is that mostly business or residential areas?
- callahad 11y ago
  Almost entirely residential; the closest they get to downtown is still about a 10 minute walk. I'm terrible at ballparking these things, but an average block in that area probably has around 15 duplexes/triplexes and 3-4 low-rise apartment buildings with 12-36 units each...
- karlshea 11y ago
  One of the founders stated on Reddit that they've wired over 35,000 homes.
karlshea 11y ago
What's interesting about USI is that they are funding it all themselves, and growing their fiber installations at a rate that seems sustainable. One of their founders posts fairly regularly on Reddit with updates on construction, and he's pretty open about how things are going. Unfortunately for me I'm about two blocks away from being covered, so I'm hoping they expand my direction next summer.
- tacojuan 11y ago
  Could you link his posts? I'm curious, since I heard that they have some kind of contract with the school down the road from me which on the far side of Maplewood from where they are located

sciurus 11y ago

It's great to see Chattanooga retaking the lead for internet speeds in Tennessee. Hopefully that will spur increases throughout the rest of the state. In Nashville, we've gone from zero to three companies (google, at&t, and comcast) announcing gigabit service in the last year. There's lots of exciting developments here, as captured in http://southernalpha.com/commentary-why-nashville/ http://southernalpha.com/commentary-why-nashville/

saboot 11y ago
Knoxville is still a frustrating state of affairs. Comcast has really set it's place in stone throughout most of the city, with city representatives declaring they are not interested in developing municipal options and that comcast is fine. Even more aggravating are all the billboards listing "Get Ready Knoxville! Fiber is HERE" ... at a 2 year contract $300/mo price and $1000 setup. Gee thanks.
nickpsecurity 11y ago
I was thinking about moving out there. Had no idea they had gigabit. Extra motivation. :)

rasz_pl 11y ago

Meanwhile in Australia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeEAVj2Szbg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeEAVj2Szbg

PebblesHD 11y ago
Was just about to say 'Meanwhile in Australia where I pay $79/month for 100GB of ~500kbps'. And I live in a relatively modern populated area, I shouldn't have to fight my neighbours for open ports!
2ton_jeff 11y ago
Only fixed wireless where I am on the Sunshine Coast, QLD .. and unfortunately my building is not line of sight to the tower, so I don't have any options whatsoever. ~2mbps/200kbps on a good day, otherwise the backhaul is so saturated it is practically unusable. :-( I can get satellite apparently, but last I checked they hadn't worked out the physics to get terminal lag/latencies down to acceptable levels for that to be an actually viable alternative. At least where I am, the NBN is a joke even for those that do have it.
simplexion 11y ago
Going by this video I think you mean: "Meanwhile in 'straya"

huntleydavis 11y ago

Being from Chattanooga, it is ironic to me that I moved to San Francisco for tech only to have slower internet here in SF than the small city in Tennessee that I left.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
simmons 11y ago
I know the feeling. It's hard to believe that my old college town of Starkville, Mississippi has gigabit fiber to the home and I don't here in metro Denver. :/

theandrewbailey 11y ago

It's great that internet companies are pushing speeds up, but networking hardware to fully use 10G speeds isn't cheap. Unless I missed something, 10G ethernet NICs are $200+, and all the 10G routers are $1,000+ enterprise hardware. On the other hand, if you find that 1gig is too slow and can afford a $300/month bill for something faster, you probably can afford the requisite hardware.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
The hardware will get cheaper as more people will want it.

nickpsecurity 11y ago

Love the work Chattanooga is doing on this. In my area, you have to get a full leased line at prices that might net you new cars or houses if you ditched it. I've considered relocating there just for the Internet. At least have some servers over there with a thin client connected to them. This mostly benefits datacenters. Many medium-to-large companies have central datacenters that their branches, offices, stores, etc connect to. The connections that big cost huge money in most places. Keeping that cost this far down is quite an incentive to be there. Would also help people trying to seed torrents, boost Tor network, collaborate over high quality audio/video, and so on. Many uses. It will take time before people in the Tri-State Area realize that and start moving to these towns with their growth-focused startups.