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CenturyLink, in particular, but also Comcast, has brought this upon themselves... They are doing everything they can to protect their existing infrastructure a

CenturyLink, in particular, but also Comcast, has brought this upon themselves... They are doing everything they can to protect their existing infrastructure and do as little as possible to upgrade services. I'm thinking of back in '98 when QWest was rolling out DSL, the would only connect you to a central office. They refused to put DSLAMs in the pedestals, because if they did that they had to allow CLECs to do the same and CLECs could start "cherry picking" service locations for DSL. One very rural community ("Ruby Ridge?") had to sue to get the right to put in DSLAMs. DSL was dependent on how many wire feet you were from one of the two central offices in town. Compared to my inlaws up in Saskatoon Canada: Similar size city, they deployed DSLAMs in the remote terminals and ran fiber to them and used the copper to the house for the last mile and covered the whole city. Remember, the telcos got a $2 billion rate hike to enable them to deploy fiber to the home by the year 2000. Except for a few small trials (I used to work at QWest), they just pocketed the money, no large scale fiber buildout was done. Until Fort Collins passed the "we are going to build out our own fiber network", Comcast was really dragging their feet on upgrades. You can get gigabit now for around $100/mo, if you commit to a year. I'm just sitting on 120mbps for $90/mo, because people the next neighborhood over are getting door hangers saying the city fiber is coming soon.

metalliqaz 7y ago
Fiber is slowly making its way through my town and I'm looking forward to the speed, but more than that I'm looking forward to telling Comcast that I don't have to put up with them anymore. I picture it like that episode of South Park, except with the roles reversed.
- cptskippy 7y ago
  In the late 90s fiber was widely deployed by Telcos in the US in anticipation of future demand growth that never occurred due to the ability to extract greater bandwidth out of single fibers. Bellsouth had fiber laid in much of suburban Georgia in the late 90s that remained dark. In the early 00s they were offering internet to some communities by running fiber to a box on the side of the house that converted it to 10mbit Ethernet capped at 1.5mbps and calling it "DSL". I'm not sure what ever became of this infrastructure. I know that Google and others were buying up dark fiber networks but my understanding was that they were acquiring long haul links and not stuff deployed in communities.
  - linsomniac 7y ago
    The stories I heard about the expansion that was anticipating growth that never came was all about long-haul fiber: Fiber between cities and across the country. Some of that, one could speculate, was because these long haul fibers were being sold to businesses, who were paying ~$100/mbps, but the residential endpoints were still very slow (1.5Mbps DSL was blazing fast in 1998, if you could even get it), because the telcos were holding onto their in-ground copper investment.
    - reaperducer 7y ago
      It was more than just long-haul. Some cities suffered from the growing pains of the fiber feeding frenzy. City streets would be torn up five or six times within a couple of months as competing fiber startups tried to cash in on the anticipated gold rush. Those towns with good planning departments put together "street cut coordination" plans to minimize repeated disturbances. But most didn't get their acts together before the fiber bubble burst.
      - linsomniac 7y ago
        3-4 years ago the town in this article got tired of the tearing up of its main street, and refinished that street, after telling the likely suspects that they'd better put down extra capacity now if they were going to need it, because future digs would require the diggers to completely redo the road rather than just trench and fill.
        cptskippy 7y ago
        I'm kind of surprised they weren't installing conduits and vaults. Isn't that common practice to facilitate easier repair of faults?
        reaperducer 7y ago
        Fiber companies aren't interested in spending the extra money for conduits and vaults. They just want to get quick cash to feed to their investors.
thedaemon 7y ago
I have CenturyLink 1Gbps in Colorado Springs. Not sure what you mean about not upgrading their infrastructure. The price is $75 fixed forever as long as I always pay my bill on time.
- bravoetch 7y ago
  Centurylink in Fort Collins offer 'up to 40 mbits' but it's rarely that fast and costs about $48 a month. Plus router rental. That's what we mean about them not upgrading infrastructure. They had their chance, and now the city will compete with them.
  - linsomniac 7y ago
    They used to quote their speeds in ATM frame rates, not in IP speed, and ATM has a lot of overhead. 15%? I wonder if their 40mbps is still quoting frame rates rather than actual IP throughput. Not sure, because 40mbps isn't enough for my home use, so I haven't even talked to them.
    - lonelappde 7y ago
      What is your home use scenario?
      - linsomniac 7y ago
        Where 40mbps isn't sufficient you mean? A family of 4 with a hell of a lot of video streaming being the primary one, but also not wanting my own Youtube videos to take 3-4 hours to upload 20 minutes. :-)
- floatingatoll 7y ago
  Could you please talk more about how why you consider the facts you've cited "$75 fixed forever" relevant to the "not upgrading their infrastructure" discussion?
  - 7y ago
nostromo 7y ago
This isn't true for Century Link. Lots of people in Seattle, and a growing number of other cities, have Century Link gigabit fiber to their residence. I pay less than $70 a month for this. Comcast is losing marketshare fast in Seattle because of this. https://www.centurylink.com/fiber/img/Gigabit-Launch-Map-resized.jpg https://www.centurylink.com/fiber/img/Gigabit-Launch-Map-res...
- linsomniac 7y ago
  I don't understand, what are you referring to that isn't true?
  - bonestamp2 7y ago
    I guess he's opposing the statement that they're doing as little as possible to upgrade their service.
    - ohyeshedid 7y ago
      When you've been beaten by a stick for years that first carrot can taste pretty good.
- ehsankia 7y ago
  But are there competing gigabit internet in Seattle? Obviously they will stay competitive, that's beside the point. It's like how Comcast happened to bring cheap gigabit internet to every city Google Fiber entered... The fact that it takes a local competitor to get these big companies to bring cheap gigabit is exactly the problem. Your anecdotal evidence about a city full of competition doesn't really prove anything.
  - aloknnikhil 7y ago
    There are far more options in Seattle than ever before (and possibly than any other city in the US). WaveG, CenturyLink, CascadeLink, WebPass (Google Fiber), Comcast
bonestamp2 7y ago
That's what can happen when the provincial government runs the telco -- it's not a guarantee of course, but they act in the best interest of the stakeholders (the people). My brother lives in Saskatoon as well and I remember going there in the early 2000s and his "cable" TV was IPTV (the cable box for his TV was connected with an ethernet cable -- it didn't even have a COAX connection). That blew my mind at the time but it made so much sense from a network health/bandwidth standpoint and allowed them to offer great options for movie rentals, etc.
nicholasjarnold 7y ago
CenturyLink has been acting in what appears to be good faith within Denver city limits in the past few (~4) years or so. They've been offering gigabit fiber service in select parts of the city for around $60-70/month for at least that amount of time. While I agree with the general sentiment about large providers needing to do more for less and faster, it seems that CL is being a good corporate citizen in Denver at least. Personal Anecdote: I signed up for gigabit fiber at a previous residence and experienced consistent 850+ Mbps synchronously, often exceeding 900Mbps. Then upon purchasing a home in another part of the city I cancelled this newly-installed (< 1 year) fiber service with no charges. Fast-forward to last week when I see CL contractors installing fiber in my alley. I'm now signed up for an install of this same gigabit fiber service for $70/month with no data caps, blocked ports, or other random charges (excluding tax) or restrictions. It's quite a good deal compared to other offerings here. A friend in another neighborhood is also set to receive his service soon, so it appears they're investing quite heavily in their fiber-to-the-home rollouts.
- Osiris 7y ago
  Denver has it but it's not expecting to are outside the metro area. I had an installer tell me that fiber would never come to my neighborhood despite it only being a 10 year old development in a fast growing city (Castle Rock, south of Denver).
- jahlove 7y ago
  The availability area for CenturyLink gigabit in Denver is tiny [1] and hasn't grown much over the last few years as far as I can tell. [1] https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1iOdQ6O5Nv9AkqN29de7XLgEPow3li_Rt https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1iOdQ6O5Nv9AkqN29de...
  - nicholasjarnold 7y ago
    I had a gigabit fiber-to-the-home connection in an area inside of Denver city limits (more than 3 years ago by the way) that is not shown on your linked map, so your data source for this is not accurate.
diminoten 7y ago
Cox is now offering universal 1 gbps services, so I'm not sure the "do as little as possible to upgrade services" is accurate any longer.
jorblumesea 7y ago
Can't speak for Comcast, but for Centurylink, they've been rolling out fiber like crazy. In Seattle I have a fiber connection for $70 / month. This was maybe 3-4 years ago and never had an issue with it. It doesn't appear to be in bad faith. Now, who knows if they'll continue to roll it out.
- linsomniac 7y ago
  Nice! Only 20 years late! :-) (referring to the $2B rate hike they were given to deploy fiber by Y2K)
bproven 7y ago
>You can get gigabit now for around $100/mo, if you commit to a year. I'm just sitting on 120mbps for $90/mo, because people the next neighborhood over are getting door hangers saying the city fiber is coming soon. I'm in FoCo and I think that gigabit is now $70 bc of the city announcement, but that is only an "intro" price (love that about comcast). It is also AFAIK not bi-directional gig. Uploads are still capped and you have a data transfer limit as well.
- linsomniac 7y ago
  I think I checked 3 weeks ago, right about the time Connexion was saying they were lighting their first household in the next couple days. I MIGHT be misremembering the $100 gigabit, because they had a staggering number of offers (many different speed options with many different terms), but I think I recall there being a 400Mbps@$60/mo offer and the gigabit was $90 or $99 with a year commitment. Would be VERY entertaining if they dropped it by $30-40 in the weeks since... I was thinking about getting one of the lower levels because I'm on an older 120Mbps plan, which started out at $60 for a year or two, then jumped up. I'm not expecting Connexion any time soon, because of my location, but then I realized I need a new cable modem to get the new offer, so most of the saving over a year would be eaten up ($130 for a Surfboard). Then the roads a block away started getting marked for utility locates. Hmm, I should ask one of my neighbors how crazy utility locates are, he works for a company that does utility locates...
jyrkesh 7y ago
I'm in a combo CenturyLink / Comcast market, and it's AMAZING what competition between even just those two firms does to my offerings. Switched from Comcast's $90/mo gigabit with a 1 TB data cap and only 90 Mb/s upload to CenturyLink's $60/mo symmetric gigabit with no data cap. I have a contract-less "lifetime price guarantee", they did free install (which included running a fiber line from the pole to my house with a cherrypicker), and threw in a free fiber endpoint box (I don't know what it's really called) and a modem/router that's actually pretty good. I get 980 Mb/s up/down with a 1ms ping in speed tests. Games are amazing, downloads are amazing, hosting files to myself is amazing...all it takes is a little competition.
- cdeutsch 7y ago
  Make sure you do your speedtest to a server beyond CenturyLink. My speeds were about that to the CenturyLink data center, but anything outside that was slower than Comcast 150 Mbps. Which leads me to believe they don't have a fat enough pipe to the internet in my area. Which was too bad, because the $60/mo price was a deal
- linsomniac 7y ago
  I wonder why we are stuck with these options (in the town referenced in the post): 1gbps Comcast and 40mbps CenturyLink.
  - jyrkesh 7y ago
    Lots and lots and lots of regional lobbying.
  - peterlk 7y ago
    Colorado has laws that give monopolies on the infrastructure to whoever owns it. But in order to get around anti-trust laws (or for some other cynical reason), so in your case, there is really only one provider, but they share their infrastructure with their competition and throttle them to nothing. So your options are "whatever comcast offers" and "whatever comcast decides CenturyLink can offer"
wmeredith 7y ago
> They are doing everything they can to protect their existing infrastructure and do as little as possible to upgrade services. Well, that's how rent-seeking works.
chocolatebunny 7y ago
Saskatchewan has a government run telco called Saskatel, that's why you're inlaws have decent service. Every where else in Canada has worse service than Comcast.
alexis_fr 7y ago
I’m in a major city in France and I use a gigabyte fiber for my 4 employees and it’s 19,90€ per month. And at home I have ADSL and the 3G is faster (12€ for 100Go per month, 8Go in Europe). For the first time, France has one thing working correctly ;)
Thorentis 7y ago
> fibre to the home by the year 2000 weeps in fibre to the home axed for Australia in 2015

metalliqaz 7y ago

Fiber is slowly making its way through my town and I'm looking forward to the speed, but more than that I'm looking forward to telling Comcast that I don't have to put up with them anymore. I picture it like that episode of South Park, except with the roles reversed.

cptskippy 7y ago
In the late 90s fiber was widely deployed by Telcos in the US in anticipation of future demand growth that never occurred due to the ability to extract greater bandwidth out of single fibers. Bellsouth had fiber laid in much of suburban Georgia in the late 90s that remained dark. In the early 00s they were offering internet to some communities by running fiber to a box on the side of the house that converted it to 10mbit Ethernet capped at 1.5mbps and calling it "DSL". I'm not sure what ever became of this infrastructure. I know that Google and others were buying up dark fiber networks but my understanding was that they were acquiring long haul links and not stuff deployed in communities.
- linsomniac 7y ago
  The stories I heard about the expansion that was anticipating growth that never came was all about long-haul fiber: Fiber between cities and across the country. Some of that, one could speculate, was because these long haul fibers were being sold to businesses, who were paying ~$100/mbps, but the residential endpoints were still very slow (1.5Mbps DSL was blazing fast in 1998, if you could even get it), because the telcos were holding onto their in-ground copper investment.
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    It was more than just long-haul. Some cities suffered from the growing pains of the fiber feeding frenzy. City streets would be torn up five or six times within a couple of months as competing fiber startups tried to cash in on the anticipated gold rush. Those towns with good planning departments put together "street cut coordination" plans to minimize repeated disturbances. But most didn't get their acts together before the fiber bubble burst.
    - linsomniac 7y ago
      3-4 years ago the town in this article got tired of the tearing up of its main street, and refinished that street, after telling the likely suspects that they'd better put down extra capacity now if they were going to need it, because future digs would require the diggers to completely redo the road rather than just trench and fill.
      - cptskippy 7y ago
        I'm kind of surprised they weren't installing conduits and vaults. Isn't that common practice to facilitate easier repair of faults?
        reaperducer 7y ago
        Fiber companies aren't interested in spending the extra money for conduits and vaults. They just want to get quick cash to feed to their investors.

thedaemon 7y ago

I have CenturyLink 1Gbps in Colorado Springs. Not sure what you mean about not upgrading their infrastructure. The price is $75 fixed forever as long as I always pay my bill on time.

bravoetch 7y ago
Centurylink in Fort Collins offer 'up to 40 mbits' but it's rarely that fast and costs about $48 a month. Plus router rental. That's what we mean about them not upgrading infrastructure. They had their chance, and now the city will compete with them.
- linsomniac 7y ago
  They used to quote their speeds in ATM frame rates, not in IP speed, and ATM has a lot of overhead. 15%? I wonder if their 40mbps is still quoting frame rates rather than actual IP throughput. Not sure, because 40mbps isn't enough for my home use, so I haven't even talked to them.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    What is your home use scenario?
    - linsomniac 7y ago
      Where 40mbps isn't sufficient you mean? A family of 4 with a hell of a lot of video streaming being the primary one, but also not wanting my own Youtube videos to take 3-4 hours to upload 20 minutes. :-)
floatingatoll 7y ago
Could you please talk more about how why you consider the facts you've cited "$75 fixed forever" relevant to the "not upgrading their infrastructure" discussion?
- 7y ago

nostromo 7y ago

This isn't true for Century Link. Lots of people in Seattle, and a growing number of other cities, have Century Link gigabit fiber to their residence. I pay less than $70 a month for this. Comcast is losing marketshare fast in Seattle because of this. https://www.centurylink.com/fiber/img/Gigabit-Launch-Map-resized.jpg https://www.centurylink.com/fiber/img/Gigabit-Launch-Map-res...

linsomniac 7y ago
I don't understand, what are you referring to that isn't true?
- bonestamp2 7y ago
  I guess he's opposing the statement that they're doing as little as possible to upgrade their service.
  - ohyeshedid 7y ago
    When you've been beaten by a stick for years that first carrot can taste pretty good.
ehsankia 7y ago
But are there competing gigabit internet in Seattle? Obviously they will stay competitive, that's beside the point. It's like how Comcast happened to bring cheap gigabit internet to every city Google Fiber entered... The fact that it takes a local competitor to get these big companies to bring cheap gigabit is exactly the problem. Your anecdotal evidence about a city full of competition doesn't really prove anything.
- aloknnikhil 7y ago
  There are far more options in Seattle than ever before (and possibly than any other city in the US). WaveG, CenturyLink, CascadeLink, WebPass (Google Fiber), Comcast

bonestamp2 7y ago

That's what can happen when the provincial government runs the telco -- it's not a guarantee of course, but they act in the best interest of the stakeholders (the people). My brother lives in Saskatoon as well and I remember going there in the early 2000s and his "cable" TV was IPTV (the cable box for his TV was connected with an ethernet cable -- it didn't even have a COAX connection). That blew my mind at the time but it made so much sense from a network health/bandwidth standpoint and allowed them to offer great options for movie rentals, etc.

nicholasjarnold 7y ago

CenturyLink has been acting in what appears to be good faith within Denver city limits in the past few (~4) years or so. They've been offering gigabit fiber service in select parts of the city for around $60-70/month for at least that amount of time. While I agree with the general sentiment about large providers needing to do more for less and faster, it seems that CL is being a good corporate citizen in Denver at least. Personal Anecdote: I signed up for gigabit fiber at a previous residence and experienced consistent 850+ Mbps synchronously, often exceeding 900Mbps. Then upon purchasing a home in another part of the city I cancelled this newly-installed (< 1 year) fiber service with no charges. Fast-forward to last week when I see CL contractors installing fiber in my alley. I'm now signed up for an install of this same gigabit fiber service for $70/month with no data caps, blocked ports, or other random charges (excluding tax) or restrictions. It's quite a good deal compared to other offerings here. A friend in another neighborhood is also set to receive his service soon, so it appears they're investing quite heavily in their fiber-to-the-home rollouts.

Osiris 7y ago
Denver has it but it's not expecting to are outside the metro area. I had an installer tell me that fiber would never come to my neighborhood despite it only being a 10 year old development in a fast growing city (Castle Rock, south of Denver).
jahlove 7y ago
The availability area for CenturyLink gigabit in Denver is tiny [1] and hasn't grown much over the last few years as far as I can tell. [1] https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1iOdQ6O5Nv9AkqN29de7XLgEPow3li_Rt https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1iOdQ6O5Nv9AkqN29de...
- nicholasjarnold 7y ago
  I had a gigabit fiber-to-the-home connection in an area inside of Denver city limits (more than 3 years ago by the way) that is not shown on your linked map, so your data source for this is not accurate.

diminoten 7y ago

Cox is now offering universal 1 gbps services, so I'm not sure the "do as little as possible to upgrade services" is accurate any longer.

jorblumesea 7y ago

Can't speak for Comcast, but for Centurylink, they've been rolling out fiber like crazy. In Seattle I have a fiber connection for $70 / month. This was maybe 3-4 years ago and never had an issue with it. It doesn't appear to be in bad faith. Now, who knows if they'll continue to roll it out.

linsomniac 7y ago
Nice! Only 20 years late! :-) (referring to the $2B rate hike they were given to deploy fiber by Y2K)

bproven 7y ago

>You can get gigabit now for around $100/mo, if you commit to a year. I'm just sitting on 120mbps for $90/mo, because people the next neighborhood over are getting door hangers saying the city fiber is coming soon. I'm in FoCo and I think that gigabit is now $70 bc of the city announcement, but that is only an "intro" price (love that about comcast). It is also AFAIK not bi-directional gig. Uploads are still capped and you have a data transfer limit as well.

linsomniac 7y ago
I think I checked 3 weeks ago, right about the time Connexion was saying they were lighting their first household in the next couple days. I MIGHT be misremembering the $100 gigabit, because they had a staggering number of offers (many different speed options with many different terms), but I think I recall there being a 400Mbps@$60/mo offer and the gigabit was $90 or $99 with a year commitment. Would be VERY entertaining if they dropped it by $30-40 in the weeks since... I was thinking about getting one of the lower levels because I'm on an older 120Mbps plan, which started out at $60 for a year or two, then jumped up. I'm not expecting Connexion any time soon, because of my location, but then I realized I need a new cable modem to get the new offer, so most of the saving over a year would be eaten up ($130 for a Surfboard). Then the roads a block away started getting marked for utility locates. Hmm, I should ask one of my neighbors how crazy utility locates are, he works for a company that does utility locates...

jyrkesh 7y ago

I'm in a combo CenturyLink / Comcast market, and it's AMAZING what competition between even just those two firms does to my offerings. Switched from Comcast's $90/mo gigabit with a 1 TB data cap and only 90 Mb/s upload to CenturyLink's $60/mo symmetric gigabit with no data cap. I have a contract-less "lifetime price guarantee", they did free install (which included running a fiber line from the pole to my house with a cherrypicker), and threw in a free fiber endpoint box (I don't know what it's really called) and a modem/router that's actually pretty good. I get 980 Mb/s up/down with a 1ms ping in speed tests. Games are amazing, downloads are amazing, hosting files to myself is amazing...all it takes is a little competition.

cdeutsch 7y ago
Make sure you do your speedtest to a server beyond CenturyLink. My speeds were about that to the CenturyLink data center, but anything outside that was slower than Comcast 150 Mbps. Which leads me to believe they don't have a fat enough pipe to the internet in my area. Which was too bad, because the $60/mo price was a deal
linsomniac 7y ago
I wonder why we are stuck with these options (in the town referenced in the post): 1gbps Comcast and 40mbps CenturyLink.
- jyrkesh 7y ago
  Lots and lots and lots of regional lobbying.
- peterlk 7y ago
  Colorado has laws that give monopolies on the infrastructure to whoever owns it. But in order to get around anti-trust laws (or for some other cynical reason), so in your case, there is really only one provider, but they share their infrastructure with their competition and throttle them to nothing. So your options are "whatever comcast offers" and "whatever comcast decides CenturyLink can offer"

wmeredith 7y ago

> They are doing everything they can to protect their existing infrastructure and do as little as possible to upgrade services. Well, that's how rent-seeking works.

chocolatebunny 7y ago

Saskatchewan has a government run telco called Saskatel, that's why you're inlaws have decent service. Every where else in Canada has worse service than Comcast.

alexis_fr 7y ago

I’m in a major city in France and I use a gigabyte fiber for my 4 employees and it’s 19,90€ per month. And at home I have ADSL and the 3G is faster (12€ for 100Go per month, 8Go in Europe). For the first time, France has one thing working correctly ;)

Thorentis 7y ago

> fibre to the home by the year 2000 weeps in fibre to the home axed for Australia in 2015