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Chattanoogan, here — providing perspective as a user of city-supplied fiber internet: Our local ISP, EPB Fiber (available to every. single. electricity. custom
by ProllyInfamous 3y ago
Chattanoogan, here — providing perspective as a user of city-supplied fiber internet:
Our local ISP, EPB Fiber (available to every. single. electricity. customer), is incredible. Synchronus 300/300, 1gps/1gps, 20gps/20gps... plus they just released the first qubit-capable fiber connections [I don't know/use this].
When they say "$57.99 per month," that's EXACTLY what appears on monthly invoices — including all taxes! And the product is revered for good reason(s).
It's SO GOOD that our state (Tennessee) has actually blocked other municipalities from implementing similar municipal fiber ISPs — and prevents EPB from offering fiber to customers outside of their electricity-supplying jurisdiction.
Asking new arrivals "Why'd you move here," you'll often find tech-types listing "The Internets" within Top5 reasons.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- reactordev 3y agoThis is why I'm looking for a place in the area... :D Not only for the beautiful scenery and wonderful people, but for the blazingly fast internets.
- ProllyInfamous 3y agoHere is a link to EPB's entire service territory (crosses into Georgia, briefly, and a bit into nearby Tennessee counties): https://epb.com/outage-and-storm-center/energy-outages/ https://epb.com/outage-and-storm-center/energy-outages/ If you get your power via Chattanooga's Electric Power Board (even out in the sticks!) you can get 1gps+ synchronous fiber. I am currently looking for land (to build upon) and without EPBfiber, I will not even consider purchasing. Welcome, new neighbor(s).
- tbyehl 3y agoMuch of the neighboring areas of north Georgia and western North Carolina also have widely available fiber from the local electric and telephone co-ops. Obama's broadband stimulus paid for much of a fiber backbone that connects them running from north of Atlanta through the Tennessee Valley to Asheville and beyond. My place in WNC is, sadly, just outside Blue Ridge EMC's footprint. Pay $100/m for 100/4 cable. The billboard on US-129 proclaiming "Big City Speeds & Performance, Small-Town Personal Service" irks me every time I pass by because the service is every bit as shitty as that slogan made me expect.
- codeslave13 3y agoOur county did basically same thing in rural va. Our coop who the county partnered with is now expanding to 5 other counties. 1gb 75 mo. Its been down once in 4 years
- mountainofdeath 3y agoI've actually seen this elsewhere as well. The local rural telephone cooperatives tend to have better service and better support if the customer base decides it and can afford it.
- esotericimpl 3y ago[dead]
- Agingcoder 3y agoHow can they block municipal fiber isps ? Or prevent epb from selling services ?
- jzb 3y agoMany states have laws blocking municipal broadband [1] -- basically regulatory capture in its most blatant. [1] https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadblocks https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc...
- surge 3y agoThe same happened in my state.
- thinkingtoilet 3y agoI'm sure it's within their regulatory laws to determine what can be rolled out where. Of course, the real question is where are all those free market Republicans in Tennessee when it comes time for the market to compete with their donors?
- ProllyInfamous 3y ago>where are all those free market Republicans in Tennessee when it comes time for the market to compete with their donors? "Privatize profits, subsidize losses." —My neighbor Tennesseans (when I used to live on Lookout).
- freedomben 3y agoI've lived in a lot of red states, and the same thing repeatedly happens. I've given up trying to change things. For every 1 person who will care, there are 25 who just check that there is an "R" next to the name of the person. Ignorant votes make educated votes irrelevant.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- latentcall 3y agoSame in Fort Collins CO. I think the director of EPB broadband headed the Connexion service here at the start. Also in Loveland, Estes Park. Incredibly good service for cheap.
- foobarian 3y agoWonder how we can reward people like this for being awesome. Or force them to take jobs leading FCC or similar govt orgs :D
- rpmisms 3y agoAlso in TN, my fiber is bundled with my electric and is absurdly good. TN has good infra, it's nice to feel the benefits.
- dylan604 3y agoIs this one of those situations where it went from practically non-existent to holybejeebusfast? I had friends that lived in an upper mountain valley that barely had POTs, no cable (not enough customers for provider to feel construction was worth it) all the way until ~2014. Finally, the utility strung fiber along the existing POTs poles, and they now had 1Gbps up/down as well as TV service. Being in a valley, the broadcast reception left a lot to be desired, so pretty much everyone had a satellite dish of some sort.
- ProllyInfamous 3y ago2016 - 2023, I lived inside a national forest in a 100+ year old cabin... not even within the city limits of Chattanooga. BUT, since I received electricity from the city's Electric Power Board... 20gbs syncronous internets was available for $299/month (all taxes included). Being a mere mortal, I settled for the 0.3gbs (300mb, synchronous, exactly $57.99/mo.) fiber, which allowed me to run a bitcoin node maintaining 100+ <9ms connections. In the middle of a national forest, "out in the sticks."
- dylan604 3y agoThis sounds heavenly. I think this will now be added to my list of potential retirement options.
- rpmisms 3y agoTennessee is a wonderful place, and I'd recommend it. Keep in mind that it's a brutally conservative place, and the typical Californian will likely be uncomfortable outside of Nashville. The people are lovely, just a note.
- flutas 3y ago> providing perspective as a user of city-supplied fiber internet: Yup, I live in another city that has a setup like this (Conway, AR of all places). Ours even goes a little further than EPB though. Electricity, Water, Sewer, Trash, Cable, Phone, Internet (already fiber for recent builds, upgrading all to it currently) all through one company that's owned by the city...it's amazing. One bill a month, and my bill is ~300/mo for all services including 1Gb/s fiber. Plus the other aspects of it. Tech support is someone sitting downtown, power outages are fixed in record time... just so much is right with the model. https://conwaycorp.com/ https://conwaycorp.com/
- ProllyInfamous 3y agoSound "dreamy..." our Scenic City still pays American Water for their monthly extortions =D
- ToucanLoucan 3y agoI wish we could get a setup like that going where I live, but sadly I live in the flyover states and this would NEVER play with our voter base, they'd be screaming socialism at the top of their lungs until they turned blue in the face. At least we got fiber, finally. It isn't state-run but it is a local telecom, the price is reasonable, the service is incredible and the uptime is great. I still get letters occasionally from Spectrum begging me to come back and their PROMOTIONAL PRICE is $10 more per month than my 600 parallel, for slower service. Absolutely brain-dead, I'm not entirely sure the marketing people for cable companies are still living in our reality. Why would you even bother sending these out? Who in their right mind is going to pay more money for worse service to possibly the single greatest and most widely known avatar for corporate avarice, the cable company? I don't know a single person in my area who still has cable internet if fiber is available to them. Spectrum must be hemorrhaging customers. Edit: and if it isn't obvious, yeah I'm a cord cutter too, though tbh there was never a cord in my life to cut. I haven't had cable since I moved out of my parents house, and if not for semi-frequent hotel stays for work, I'd not be exposed to television at all. And said minimal exposure lets me verify that I'm missing absolutely nothing by not having the idiot box in my home. I cannot comprehend people who pay up to the range of hundreds of dollars a month to have a firehose of ads and mediocre bullshit pointed at their faces as a recreational activity. Not gonna yuck someones yum, you like what you like, but it ain't for me and I truly cannot understand why anyone wants it at all, certainly not enough to spend that kind of money on it.
- BatmansMom 3y agoIs there a legitimate reason why TN blocks other municipalities from implementing similar service? Besides Regulatory capture or other forms of corruption as others suggest?
- Deprecate9151 3y agoHere's a link to the FCC attempt to preempt the law https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-releases-order-preempting-tn-nc-municipal-broadband-restrictions https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-releases-order-preempting-t... And the appeals decision overturning the preemption https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca6/15-3291/15-3291-2016-08-10.html https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca6/15... TN arguments were never really on why it would work besides claiming it would somehow protect TN residents from "mismanaged" municipal broadband. They mostly focus on how they can do it if they want to, no matter the reason.
- ikiris 3y agoTN is the HN libertarian paradise. Vast majority of the state's people hate anything the government provides and want to kill it with fire. Especially if their neighbors could benefit from it. They literally had situations where people were upset that fire service was going to be paid for, then got upset they had to pay for it to get it when their house was burning.
- hirvi74 3y ago> It's SO GOOD that our state (Tennessee) has actually blocked other municipalities from implementing similar municipal fiber ISPs It makes me so frustrated too. Calling our state leadership incompetent would actually be a compliment considering how poorly ineffective and self-serving many of them are. About a decade ago, EPB called a friend of mine. The representative on the phone said, "Hello <insert name>, we noticed that your internet has been slower than what you are paying for. Do you mind if we send someone out to fix it for you?" We were both so surprised that a company would volunteer their services like that. EPB is all I ever had when I was there, and I still miss them everyday. Absolutely 10/10 company to work with. I worked at a place that had a 10gb connection and the hardware to handle it when it first was released. Nothing like downloading a full movie in mere seconds.
- MrBuddyCasino 3y ago> Calling our state leadership incompetent would actually be a compliment considering how poorly ineffective and self-serving many of them are. Its not incompetence, just corruption. The large and ever growing bureaucratic apparatus of modern democracies are very vulnerable to this covert form, because responsibilities are unclear and diluted and at the end of the day, you need campaign money to win an election.
- ProllyInfamous 3y ago>Absolutely 10/10 company to work with. EPB's customer support is 24/7/365.25 (i.e. no holidays off). And the people working there, dealing with typically-grateful customer, aren't all burnt-TF-out. The rare call for support is thus pleasant and provides immediate resolution. If your house-mounted fiber/copper modem ever "burns out," a technician will typically respond within a few hours to replace the device (it is mounted outside, they don't even call first, they just fix it). I'm a retired electrician, and even when you "call in" a panel replacement, an ISP tech usually shows up to "fix" the "problem" (went offline because consumer meter/unit/main panel was being upgraded). It's actually kind of cute =P
- simfree 3y agoThat is an incredibly tightly run organization. It might be reactive, dispatching a technician as soon as the ONT goes offline, or the router plugged into the ONT stops pinging, but this is first class customer service.
- dontlaugh 3y agoCollective ownership works so well, especially for natural monopolies.
- Spivak 3y agoLines like this really ought to be public infrastructure like roads and power lines. At least where I live tax payers paid for them anyway.
- ProllyInfamous 3y agoI lived in Austin (grew up there) until 2016. When Google Fiber began its rollouts, I remember the cable providers simply NOT ALLOWING GOOGLE ACCESS TO THEIR UTILITY POLES (they owned <10%, but in vital places this essentially crippled gFiber rollout for the first few years of litigation). I got google fiber (Austin) in 2015, and when I chose to leave The Violet Crown, fiber internet was an absolute requirement... which is how I found myself in Chattanooga, Tennessee (thank god)!
- bonestamp2 3y agoI would throw insurance into this mix too. At the end of the day, the government is on the hook for rolling out money when there are major disasters, so why not just start there instead of backstop there? How about we pool all our money in one big place (the government) instead of spreading it around in a bunch of smaller pools with different rules (private insurance). In 1945, the government of Saskatchewan (Canada) recognized this and has been handling province wide insurance since then (Health, Home, Auto, etc). This has meant drastically lower insurance rates, because they aim to operate with no profit, and you don't have insurance companies suing each other for damages because everyone has the same insurance company. It creates lots of jobs, and better service for the residents. States like Florida, California, North Carolina, and others have had to start their own insurance companies to handle residents who cannot get fire/flood/hurricane/etc insurance from a private insurance company because the private insurance companies have decided the risk is too high. It seems silly to maintain this broken patchwork system when there are several examples of governments creating entities to handle these ubiquitous needs in a better way.
- nottorp 3y agoFunny enough, if the state would offer internet service in my eastern european country, it will be expensive and shitty, while the private fiber offers are dirt cheap and compete with each other on price. I didn't think the Romanian competition authorities can do a better job than the US ones. [And they probably can't, see high natural gas and electricity prices.]
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago> blocked other municipalities from implementing similar municipal fiber ISPs — and prevents EPB from offering fiber to customers outside of their electricity-supplying jurisdiction. much freedom
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- foobarian 3y agoHuh. Is Chattanooga a posh locale? House prices don't look too far from New England.
- ProllyInfamous 3y agoOur housing market typically "lags" national markets by a few years (up & downs); but the recent whiplash effect has made the median homesale about 2x what it was in 2020. Also, inventory is lagging massively, and NIMBYism has prevented recent citywide attempts at allowing ADU's / increased density (e.g. see St.Elmo Historic District, which even though part of Chattanooga, exempts itself from most density rules by "being historic" — BS). Also, there is A LOT OF MONEY here, concentrated in such mountaintop locations as Lookout Mountain [cited in MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech, specifically as an example of wealth/cronyism].
- oh_sigh 3y agoSimilar to your last comment, here in the Boulder region, you will find a lot of techies actually living in Longmont, about 15 minutes north of Boulder, because they have a really good municipal fiber ISP.
- qmarchi 3y agoI feel called out ...as I sit in my apartment connected to Nextlight (Longmont Power & Communications) at 2.5Gbps symmetrical for $150/m.
- rbax 3y agoHaving a techy wife has made internet access speed our #1 qualifier for any moves over the past decade. Great neighborhood and price but it only has DSL or slow cable internet? Automatic veto. I can only hope this becomes more and more obvious to politicians that wonder why their constituency is stagnating. Even my less techy parents recently shared that they voted yes on their city's project to build a local fiber ISP.
- metal_am 3y agoI wouldn’t say it’s blocked in Tennessee. KUB (the Knoxville utilities company) recently introduced fiber
- englishspot 3y agoI pay 59.99 before tax with "500/500" that is more realistically 140/140 with cox. and that's after negotiating for a 2-year contract. :(
- deepspace 3y agoCanadian here. I also live in a city with municipal fibre. No fancy additional services like some others here, but I pay around US$20 per month for Gigabit symmetric internet. The major national ISPs start at around 4x higher.
- boppo1 3y agoCan anyone explain why free market competition has so thoroughly failed while a state utility provides such a dramatically better product? I'm not being snarky, I'm usually a pretty strong 'let it be decided by markets' guy.
- warble 3y agoI don't see any free markets?
- kevingadd 3y agoThe telecom market isn't free, that's why
- delecti 3y agoISPs largely don't compete. They're legalized regional monopolies. There was a single cable TV provider, and they became the single cable internet provider, and so they don't need to reduce prices or improve the service offering, at least not until an alternative competitor emerges.
- belthesar 3y agoI imagine there's a handful of solid reasons for this. - Greenfield tech is simpler, and more stable. There's only 1 or 2 CPEs, a handful of distribution gear types, and a much smaller network. As a result, the support cost is much cheaper, more stable, and less prone to failure from equipment damage. These networks aren't traversing over 40, 50, 60 year old coax or 80, 90, 100 year old copper, it's fiber all the way down. - Profit as a motive for the ISP is purely to pay for the costs of the service. Wages, equipment, investment in the service. Without a need to spread dividends to investors, and those investors leading a board to shift the motive of the service provider to generate revenue as a first priority, pricing priorities can be much more simple. This also mitigates choices to stay on existing infrastructure to squeeze more money purely for the purposes of paying more dividends. Those choices will happen, but they should be to buy time for the next upgrade that is planned. - Manufactured monopolies by virtue of connection agreements (Cable provider X is allowed to have a monopoly as a service provider for a municipality so long as they provide service to N% users) have turned out to be a poor incentive to provide up to date, quality, affordable service as the service matures. New fiber providers, whether muni or independent, seem to be taking a much more sustainable approach to buildout and growth. As a result, because they are capturing the market by virtue of a better product, at a better price, whenever these ISPs onboard a new neighborhood, they have to do what they do well to retain the subscriber base, because the alternatives may not be as good, but they're not awful.
- jp191919 3y agoMeanwhile in Tacoma,WA our mismanaged muni ISP turned over managment to a local private company, which was then bought by global company Palisade Infrastructure. https://www.thenewstribune.com/opinion/article270126722.html https://www.thenewstribune.com/opinion/article270126722.html
- vluft 3y ago10gb & 25gb are the higher tiers. I have the 10, it's pretty great. :)
- ProllyInfamous 3y agoI'm just going to guess: radiologist?
- vluft 3y agonah I just sling large files around now and again. If they did 5 I'd probably do that instead, frankly; I can barely route 10 (effective speed of about 8, typically).
- topaz0 3y agoI have fiber provided by the city utility in Knoxville... is this an exception to that rule? (Moved here fairly recently).
- rconti 3y agoAgreed. It's stunning how quickly I went from paying $100+ to Comcast for 250Mbps down / 20 up (or whatever), to $80 to AT&T for symmetric gigabit, to $50 to Sonic for symmetric 10gig. And presumably they're still making money! Comcast has insane economies of scale, the rip they must make every single month on customers who are stuck with them is just sick.
- thomastjeffery 3y agoI live in SLC. There are basically 3 categories of internet here: 1. Big Telecom: This includes Comcast, CenturyLink, etc. You are basically guaranteed to overpay, but service is usually pretty reliable. Last year I was paying >$100 for 1gbit down & 40mbit up on Comcast's coax; while every one of my neighbors had UTOPIA FTTH (the house I was renting was not connected to the network). 2. UTOPIA or Google Fiber: Yes, Google Fiber is another big telecom, but it's pricing ($70 for 1gbit symmetric FTTH) and reliability are practically identical to UTOPIA (the municipal network). 3. Residential lock-in: This is what I'm stuck with right now. I pay $100/mo. for ~120mbit with noticeably bad peering. The price is literally written into my apartment's lease, with no mention of speed or reliability. I miss having actually good internet, but what I have is still much better than what I have lived with before.