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Utah Locals Are Getting Cheap 10 Gbps Fiber Thanks to Local Governments

365 points by WarOnPrivacy 2y ago

mtnGoat 2y ago
We’ve had symmetrical 1gb fiber owned and installed by our public utilities for almost two decades here in central Washington. Was $80 a month until a year or two ago, then it went down to $60.
- wlesieutre 2y ago
  Just got gigabit in Knoxville for $65. Which is actually a tough sell since AT&T already offers 300 megabit for $55 and I’m not sure what I’d do with a faster connection. But $65 from AT&T would only get me 500 megabit, so for people who do want faster speeds the KUB option is looking good.
  - lillecarl 2y ago
    There's more to a connection than speed, there might be data limits, there might be latency differences and it might just be unavailable or expensive. I'm not from the US, but if it's somewhat economically viable, go for the underdog.
    - wlesieutre 2y ago
      Speed is consistently higher than advertised (330-350ish), latency is fine, 1 TB/month (it says this, but then also says X GB of unlimited used), and I don’t think I’ve had an outage in the two years that we’ve been here. I’ll be considering it still (just became available last week in my neighborhood) but since I work remotely I have to be risk averse on switching internet providers.
    - jwells89 2y ago
      In the US it’s also not uncommon for connections to be not only asymmetrical, but downright lopsided. Comcast sells “gigabit” in my area that’s 1.2Gbps down but only like 20Mbps up which is just silly. Thankfully a competitor offers true gigabit for about the same price, and so that’s what I subscribe to.
      - wlesieutre 2y ago
        AT&T currently doing 390 down / 340 up on my symmetric 300 plan, can’t complain
        rsingel 2y ago
        Except you are paying the company that built the NSA's domestic spying apparatus, paid to flood the FCC with millions of fake anti net neutrality comments, and paid Michael Cohen $600k to fight net neutrality and anti-trust. Other than than that, totally great
      - bee_rider 2y ago
        That is probably not a terrible configuration for a lot of users. It is disappointing that the internet didn’t remain a network of mostly peers where everyone might host something. But, realistically, lots of people approximately just use their bandwidth to stream video, right?
        ssl-3 2y ago
        Netflix themselves say that 15Mbps is enough for 4k. 1.2Gbps downstream is enough for >50 such 4k video streams without saturation -- something that will probably never happen in any household, even in Grandma's house on Christmas Eve with a bunch of grandkids around. Meanwhile, I've had single-player games of Factorio of medium complexity that would saturate 20Mbps upstream. Nobody needs a connection that is so heavily lopsided as 1.2Gbps/20Mbps is except for the marketing department, and the DOCSIS sunk-cost-fallacy department.
        basil-rash 2y ago
        Why is single player factorio phoning home so heavily?
        mschuster91 2y ago
        It's about video streaming. The challenge with Factorio is that there is always lots of very tiny little changes on the screen from all the tiny boxes and trays of stuff moving around on belts, which means if you want acceptable video quality, you need a lot of bitrate as the usual h264/h265 compression magic of just encoding differences between frames doesn't work out any more - too much change between frames, you're (effectively) forcing the codec to transmit full frames all the time.
  - nottorp 2y ago
    > I’m not sure what I’d do with a faster connection I have a 500 mbps and a 1 Gbps fiber into my home. For redundancy (WFH 100%) and because it's cheap (Romania). The only time I notice which one I'm on is when I install games from gog/steam/psn. Even operating system isos (which are only a few gigs, not 50-100 G like modern games) don't make a dent any more. Streaming is a-ok, but I'm stuck in the last century with an 1080p TV. Both of my providers^H^H^H one of my providers now offer 2.5 Gbps I think. And I wonder why :)
- qwerpy 2y ago
  Meanwhile over here in Bellevue, home of T-Mobile and (close enough) Microsoft, I’m stuck with Comcast or really crappy DSL. How is it that central WA gets way better internet than Bellevue? Oh right. Comcast lobbying.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - mtnGoat 2y ago
    The big telcos ignored us so we took it into our own hands. Had it been a bigger market I’m sure they would have lobbied our local ISP out of existence. They still do some questionable marketing around here.
falchy 2y ago
I used to work in one of the participating ISPs. The organization of Utopia was a PITA, but the idea was really good and generally well implemented, with some portable exceptions. My biggest issue is that they take huge subsidizations from the state to deliver internet, then turn that around and outbid competitors for state circuits using the subsidized rate. Not really saving them any money, but it looks good on a quote.
- latsu 2y ago
  Good on them. They are using the same tactics ISP's have used to screw the general public but instead they are at least providing the services they promise.
dheera 2y ago
Meanwhile I live 20 minutes from Google's heardquarters and I can't even get more than 25 Mbps uplink. Maybe these big internet companies should dig up all the infrastructure in their home turf and replace it?
- geodel 2y ago
  But they are evil so why will they do it?
- wmf 2y ago
  They're not allowed to. Regulatory capture is running wild.
  - dheera 2y ago
    They're fucking Google. If they dig the streets up and give me 10 Gbps fiber I will be more than happy to show up to city council and yell the shit away from any NIMBY old fart that says no.
    - lokar 2y ago
      It’s more that CA law makes it easy for comcast to tie it up in the courts forever, regardless of what your city council says.
    - TulliusCicero 2y ago
      And more NIMBYs will show up to scream about Google overrunning local government. It is extremely easy to make hugely powerful corporations the villain, for obvious reasons, and this doesn't stop being true in the case where they want something actually good.
      - consumer451 2y ago
        Sorry to have creeped into your bio, but what is your bandwidth in Munich?
      - 2y ago
pizzaknife 2y ago
ijust came here to abe simpson it about att. may they rot in hell
protocolture 2y ago
Best: Open Pit and Pipe Very Good: ULL Ok: Government Wholesale Shit tier: Any Monopoly.
theyeenzbeanz 2y ago
Comcast lobbied so hard to get our local mileage for fiber expansion voted down. When it passed, they suddenly decided they’re going to spend 6 figures worth of money to expand their own fiber backdown (they’re not even to the house). Its amazing when corporations will spend more money fighting something than actually implementing said thing.
- fragmede 2y ago
  when you can simplify things down to a number on a spreadsheet, it's a simple math equation. It doesn't make sense if you step back and look at what's actually best, but money warps everything it touches.
  - yourapostasy 2y ago
    > money warps everything it touches. I wonder what would happen if money transactions frame dragged transaction metadata along with the money. Today, the money is public data, but the far more interesting transactional metadata exchange is a hyper-fragmented market.
- rolobio 2y ago
  I’ve had fiber at my house from day one provided by a local ISP. Comcast came in and buried their own fiber lines (years later) for all the houses in my neighborhood. Soon after, my ISP bumped my speed and lowered my monthly bill. We desperately need more competition. It’s the only thing that actually lowers prices. Also, I will happily pay higher prices to never pay for Comcast again. So they won’t see a penny from me.
  - troupo 2y ago
    > We desperately need more competition. It’s the only thing that actually lowers prices. Unless it's a deep pocketed behemoth coming and stomping out local competition because they can afford to lose money on price dumping. Though I agree with the general idea of the competition.
ftigis 2y ago
In Singapore there's a telco intending to launch 10 Gbps fiber for 30 SGD (~22.35 USD) per month. likely to be asymmetric though, since their 2.5 Gbps service at ~16.24 USD per month is advertised as 2.5 Gbps down and 1.25 Gbps up.
- denkmoon 2y ago
  The things you could do with 1.25gbps. Crazy stuff. Vastly different infrastructure/density situations but here in Australia I'm paying ~56USD per month for 0.04gbps up.
  - Nursie 2y ago
    Australia has Abbott and friends to thank for fucking the whole NBN plan up royally. We would have had fiber to the premises everywhere and affordable gigabit by now, but Abbott decided Australia shouldn't spend money on what he saw as merely a "video entertainment system" and binned it in favour of the current Mixed Technology mess. Which then actually cost more to implement.
    - Guthur 2y ago
      Pretty sure they intentionally screw it up. It means that the populous will generally think that the government can't provide effective utility at cost and so private equity can move in and provide equally bad utility at monopoly rent prices.
      - Nursie 2y ago
        There’s a bunch of stuff there but I think they were also trying to protect Foxtel so Murdoch could avoid having to compete with Netflix etc. Assholes all round
- jokteur 2y ago
  I'm getting symmetric 10 Gbps for 49CHF (~54$) per month in Switzerland, and this is one of the most expensive countries in the world.
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Official release: https://www.utopiafiber.com/2024/05/08/utopia-fiber-adds-three-new-residential-internet-service-providers-to-its-open-access-network/ https://www.utopiafiber.com/2024/05/08/utopia-fiber-adds-thr...
- tiffanyh 2y ago
  Utopia Fiber: 1Gbps for $45/mo 10Gbps for $150/mo AT&T Fiber: 1Gbps for $80/mo 5Gbps for $250/mo *** note: slower speed
  - jdeibele 2y ago
    I think there should be a $30/month charge for Utopia added to their service. https://www.utopiafiber.com/residential-pricing/ https://www.utopiafiber.com/residential-pricing/ So it's slightly cheaper than AT&T for 1Gbps and a more significant difference for their 10Gbps service which AT&T doesn't offer, as you point out.
    - tiffanyh 2y ago
      > So it's slightly cheaper than AT&T for 1Gbps Utopia is: 77% cheaper than AT&T (1 Gbps) 66% cheaper than AT&T (5 Gbps) yet delivers 2x the speed than AT&T That doesn't seem "slightly cheaper" to me.
      - jdeibele 2y ago
        You're using the wrong pricing. AT&T has one price. Utopia has 2 components, the ISP and Utopia itself, making up the total price. If you go to the website link I posted, it's not $45, it's $45 to the ISP and $30 to Utopia. That makes $75, which is slightly cheaper than $80. "Service from UTOPIA Fiber is billed in <two parts>. One part is for services provided by the Internet Service Provider (ISP) you select, and the other is for the physical network connection provided by UTOPIA Fiber. Check out our price list to help you compare service options from our various ISPs. " https://www.utopiafiber.com/residential-pricing/ https://www.utopiafiber.com/residential-pricing/ Emphasis mine. The cheapest service available from Utopia is $30 to them + $35 for 250Mbps service, totaling $65/month. There is no $45/month service.
cageface 2y ago
Our CenturyLink internet in Salt Lake City went down and it took them almost two weeks to come fix it. These companies have done a tremendous job of driving demand for municipal broadband with their unconscionably terrible service.
puppycodes 2y ago
Utah realizing people need extra VPN bandwidth to watch porn without a drivers license...
hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
Semi-rural residential Texas Triangle needs this. Some places have Spectrum (Charter) and nothing else. Google Fiber is fantasy outside of Austin. One notable exception is GVEC. https://www.gvec.net https://www.gvec.net
- jakebasile 2y ago
  Google Fiber is a fantasy for some people in Austin too. I was right outside their initially planned extent, literally by a block, and they have never bothered to extend out to my subdivision despite being within Austin limits. I got AT&T Fiber instead and it has worked great for a decade. I just upgraded to their 2Gbps because they gave me a pretty solid deal on it.
  - hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
    Yep. I had 1 Gbps for 2 years and 2 Gbps for 2 years. (Can get 5 or 8 Gbps, and possibly 20 with a beta program.) GF excludes most of the downtown core except for Google buildings. I've speculated it's some sort permitting cost or dark fiber cost issue. I don't understand the logic they use to select cities or wire some customers but not others while leaving holes randomly. https://broadbandnow.com/Google-Fiber https://broadbandnow.com/Google-Fiber
- drak0n1c 2y ago
  AT&T Fiber is expanding quickly in North Texas. Got 2.5 gigabit a couple years ago to my suburban home in the edge of DFW where it transitions to rural. Their headquarters are in Dallas so they are keen on expanding locally.
  - hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
    Makes sense in the Metroplex where there is already tons of dark fiber from the dotcom days and right-of-way already in place from cable, DSL, and other distribution networks.
nox101 2y ago
I know people disagree with me about this. I certainly hate it that governments gave local monopolies to companies like Comcast That said, I'm pretty confident municipal internet is bad thing in the long run (compared to actually competitive markets, not local monopolies) Problems: (1) Unlike say, water, sewage, power - internet tech changes 10gig might seem fast today. In 15 years it will seem slow. Will the government upgrade? My guess is they'll be slow to upgrade where as places with truly competitive markets will upgrade quick. I watched this happen in Japan. There were 4-5 different providers. One upgraded (twice the speed of competitors for same price), Competitors were forced to upgrade or lose their business (2) Government run internet is bound to eventually be lobbied to be safe (what do you mean my taxes are being spent so people can download adult content! Stop that! ... etc) (3) With Government run internet there is no competition so no one else can enter the market and compete. Come back to this comment and in 10 years. See what speed competitive markets are at and compare to municipal and non-competitive markets.
- bobthepanda 2y ago
  My understanding is that none of the municipal fiber networks are monopolies, so Comcast and co. still play ball in these markets. If this is truly bad then people will just leave. In reality I think that enough local governments recognize that high quality Internet is a competitive differentiator when trying to attract business.
- rayiner 2y ago
  > I know people disagree with me about this. I certainly hate it that governments gave local monopolies to companies like Comcast They didn’t do that. Exclusive franchises have been illegal under federal law for over 30 years: https://www.congress.gov/bill/102nd-congress/senate-bill/12 https://www.congress.gov/bill/102nd-congress/senate-bill/12 (“Prohibits a cable television franchising authority from granting an exclusive franchise or unreasonably refusing to award additional cable television franchises.”).
- mikeyouse 2y ago
  This is a pretty silly comment given the "private" options that could have been at gbps speed for a decade+ are still at DSL and Cable speeds. Blind faith in 'the market' to solve these things after it's failed to do so seems odd.
ubj 2y ago
I recently bought a house in Utah. Utopia is the best internet provider experience I've had so far (I've had Xfinity and Verizon previously). Speeds are typically 10-25 Mbps _faster_ than the advertised rate I'm paying for. Being able to have multiple (~5 or more) provider options to choose between is a welcome change from past monopolies I've been trapped in. Granted this all could change down the road (I hope not), but so far so good.
- snielson 2y ago
  Utopia provides an active ethernet connection to each subscriber with the specified bandwidth. This is superior to most fiber deployments, which are passive optical networks (GPON) where groups of 16-32 homes share a connection (usually 2.4 Gb down and 1.2 Gb up). I live in Utah and actively worked to get fiber in my small city. Utopia requires cities to guarantee a take rate (40% if I recall correctly) and taxpayers must make up any deficiency. I've never heard of taxpayers actually doing that but it was enough to scare people from adopting Utopia in my city. Ultimately what brought fiber to my city was covid. The monetary tsunami unleashed by the federal reserve and the government made it possible for a local private company to build a fiber network. I just got hooked up last week. It is great. The other thing that happened is that the wireless companies offer high quality internet service. For a time I had both Comcast and T-Mobile home internet. I regularly got speeds of 1.2-1.4 Gb down on T-Mobile (100 Mbps up). Verizon also offers home internet but it was too unstable when I tried it. All this is to say that I have three high quality Internet connections at my home (fiber, T-Mobile, and Comcast), one marginal connection (Verizon), and one garbage connection (Century Link; however, they have also been installing fiber in the area). Competition is great!
  - Hikikomori 2y ago
    With active its just the last mile that is not shared, everything after that is shared. So it can suffer from the same oversubscription problem, just depends on how good the ISP is. But adding more capacity on those shared links is easier than fixing capacity issues on a PON deployment.
  - WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
zer00eyz 2y ago
I live in the bay area and just got sonic fiber to my house. 49 bucks a month for 10gbe. I have only seen it get up to 8gb in TESTING... I might be able to get to 9. That is a stupid amount of bandwidth. I give it 6 months before I get a call and they fire me as a client. Cause im going to try to use the hell out of it.
- jorts 2y ago
  I LOVE Sonic. I also have the 10Gb internet for $50/month and I can’t even use that much bandwidth. Also their customer service is amazing. I was caught off guard when I called in for an issue and a local person answered when I expected it to go to a machine. They also support net neutrality.
  - zer00eyz 2y ago
    > I can’t even use that much bandwidth. I built an opnsense box (part of my proxmox cluster) and passed through a dual 10gbe nic. That whole PC was cheaper than any off the shelf routing solution I could find. The rest of the network is going to take time... I suspect that im gonna end up with a few fiber runs in the house before all is said and done.
    - i2shar 2y ago
      What networking gear do you use inside your home? What router? Do they terminate an actual fiber connection (SFP+) to your home or you get 10GB Ethernet?
      - kbenson 2y ago
        You get a 10GbE port off the ONT.
      - erwincoumans 2y ago
        Sonic 10G rocks. I use Asus RT-AX89X router, with 2 10G ports, one input from Sonic, one output to 10G switches (Ubiquiti Networks UniFi Switch Flex XG 4-Port 10G).
userbinator 2y ago
As someone who has 1/1000th of that bandwidth to the Internet, and yet still only saturates that connection when transferring from some nearby sites, I'm curious how useful having a 10Gbps local connection will actually turn out to be in practice. Being able to download Linux ISOs faster is the prominent use case that comes to mind.
- nightfly 2y ago
  Large families.
  - bugbuddy 2y ago
    Is that a Jab at my friends in Utah?
- defrost 2y ago
  { Multiple people in household each having multi-party high resolution video calls | band practice | data manipulation collaborations | 4K TV on demand } can suck up the bandwidth when the priority is smooth real-time with low interactive latency. It's not always going to be peak demand, but it'll be noticable when everybody piles on at particular times of day. TBH I have relatively low bandwidth most of the time and don't notice download speeds at all as I queue the things I want and return to working on what's in front of me.
  - KeplerBoy 2y ago
    You absolutely cannot saturate a 10 Gbit link with today's consumer's needs, let alone with today's consumer hardware. That's hundreds of Netflix 4k streams.
    - Nursie 2y ago
      Sure, but the OP talked about being happy with a 10Mbps link. I think a lot of modern households might find that constraining, even if a 10Gbps link was massive overkill. There are two orders of magnitude in between of course :) Personally I found that going back from a 1Gbps link to ~100Mbps has felt a little sluggish, particularly when downloading games. It's not a huge thing, but being able to get that new game pretty much now was great.
alberth 2y ago
Wi-Fi speeds Most consumers will connect via WiFi. And that will be typically capped at < 1 Gbps
- LatticeAnimal 2y ago
  Wifi 7 is coming and is rated to 11.5-46.1 Gbit/s (depending on channel bandwidth). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11be
  - saagarjha 2y ago
    (In real use probably a gigabit or so)
Phiwise_ 2y ago
This is such a misleadingly narrow headline. Utopia's a decade old and has been a mess from the business side pretty much the entire time. Even Google fiber in Provo's somehow giving better rollout service than they are. I was excited when it was announced as a teen but it's been a long road of failing to live up to expectations for all but a tiny fraction of our residents in the rich parts of our cities. And it's supposed to be a public-good program!
- fooey 2y ago
  Provo built a municipal fiber network and then sold it to Google for one dollar, so I'm not sure that's a great counter example > Provo taxpayers still will have to make $3.3 million in bond payments on the system each year for the next 12 years, even though Google will own the network.
  - Phiwise_ 2y ago
    Did I say it's a "counter-example"? Both are operational dumpster fires. I obviously brought it up in a negative tone with the words "even" and "somehow". Utopia's a business, too. Why are you defending them? Do you even live here? They even did basically this same thing to their cities years back, which you'd know if you did.
- buffington 2y ago
  UTOPIA frustrates me. I live in a part of Utah where Xfinity is the only gigabit option. Despite a huge number of the UTOPIA providers claiming to serve my area, none of them actually do. My home is in a stupid weird bandwidth dead zone, with 10Gbps options available all around me. The house across the street from me has Google Fiber, yet Google Fiber won't install it at mine a mere 50ft away. I'd be a lot more upset if my Xfinity connection wasn't rock solid. It provides the exact advertised speeds, and in the 5 years I've had it, it's gone down maybe once. Still, I want 10Gbps. It's maddening.
  - rasz 2y ago
    You are this https://www.sunbeltrentals.com/equipment-rental/earth-moving/trenchers/trenchless-boring-tools/ https://www.sunbeltrentals.com/equipment-rental/earth-moving... away from fast internet
knicholes 2y ago
Lehi, UT opted to build their own infrastructure instead of using UTOPIA. Not sure if that was a good decision, but I'm not happy about the rates they're charging. I'd stay with Comcast if it wasn't a matter of principle.
- snielson 2y ago
  Lehi offers 1Gbps fiber for $80/mo, which is about the same as Utopia. The pricing seems pretty good for dinner in Utah.
tombert 2y ago
Ugh, it's a little annoying that I cannot get faster than 2 gigabit internet in NYC, and it cost me like $120/month. 2 gigabit is more than fast enough for pretty much anything I do, especially since most of the stuff in my house is on WiFi anyway, but I did get my house completely wired for 10 gigabits about a year ago to try and future-proof everything. It's frustrating that NYC is a super expensive place to live, and it's behind the times with internet speeds.
- rm_-rf_slash 2y ago
  Worst internet I ever had was at a Cupertino apartment…in 2013. Walked a mile to the office where we had blazing fiber. Manager said a lot of the valley outside of company offices was way behind cause of the cost of installation. Hope it’s improved.
  - tombert 2y ago
    There are parts of NY that are getting 8 gig fiber apparently, but it doesn't appear that Brooklyn is one of those parts, which annoys me. 2 gigabits if fine, at least for now, but it would be nice to be able to increase the number of concurrent downloads I could have.
  - saagarjha 2y ago
    Just moved out of Cupertino and the best speeds we could get was 1 Gbps down/50 Mbps up on Comcast. The other option was AT&T DSL. So…not really.
  - Aqua_Geek 2y ago
    I doubt much has changed. The Bay is lagging in terms of infrastructure — it’s hilariously sad. My only options currently are Comcast or DSL. I’m anxiously waiting for Sonic to become available.
renewiltord 2y ago
It's funny. For eons, Americans on the Internet could be relied on to say that the reason they don't have fiber is because their country is big. But their more rural areas get it first and best, revealing the lie everyone tells. But forget that, these ISPs absolutely rule https://www.brigham.net/residential-pricing/ https://www.brigham.net/residential-pricing/ That's so much nostalgia. I adore it!
- seattle_spring 2y ago
  Brigham City is not really that rural (more suburban), and it's maybe 0.05% of all suburban / rural areas in the US. Not really evidence that "rural areas get it first and best." Most truly rural areas have absolutely awful internet options, or none at all save for Starlink or satellite.
- refurb 2y ago
  Brigham City isn’t rural.
alex_young 2y ago
I had symmetrical 10GB fiber in Lugano Switzerland 5 years ago. It was ~$30 / month. No commitment.
swarnie 2y ago
> Two decades later and the coalition just announced that 18 different ISPs now compete for Utah resident attention over a network that now covers 21 different Utah cities. In many instances, ISPs on the network are offering symmetrical (uncapped) gigabit fiber for as little as $45 a month (plus $30 network connection fee, so $75). Some ISPs are even offering symmetrical 10 Gbps fiber for around $150 a month: Congratulations, you've invented European style internet access with prices that almost match, super proud of you Utah. Personally our local fibre network was built as a joint venture between 8 or 9 companies who then openly compete to run the service to customers so its mostly down to customer service and perks. A 1gb symmetrical unlimited connection (sold as 900mb due to some legal shenanigans) is about $38 with a 250mb package unlimited going for $24
- kristopolous 2y ago
  For however conservative Utah is, they are very community oriented so in practice, they seem to implement some fairly socialist policies. They were real early in housing first and they have a pretty nice built-out public transit system, a bunch of coops, 3x the average of credit union membership ... things like that.
  - rayiner 2y ago
    There’s a communitarian-libertarian axis that’s distinct from the conservative-liberal axis. While libertarianism tends to dominate both the left and right in the U.S., I suspect most American conservatives outside the coasts are more communitarian, closer to Christian democrats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_democracy. Conversely, while American liberals have putatively communal ambitions, they’re often too fragmented and individualistic to accomplish them.
    - kristopolous 2y ago
      If you're referring to the political compass, that thing is just an astrological star chart for politics. It's just about as accurate. Go to Wikipedia for that, about 70% of the word count is calling it nonsense https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Political_Compass https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Political_Compass Those are the numbers you get with topics like homeopathy
nashashmi 2y ago
This is another failure for capitalism. Why is it that socialism is working better here?
underdeserver 2y ago
This reminds me of Longmont, Colorado's city-managed ISP (NextLight). They fought the Comcast / Verizon duopoly for a while before founding it. Turns out when good people who live next door are the ones responsible for your basic utilities, you get better, faster, more reliable service with better customer support. Who knew.
wildrhythms 2y ago
I'm in NYC and I have a local ISP called Honest Internet that gives me gigabit for $50/mo. Comcast/Xfinity, Verizon, Spectrum all wanted $90/mo for this. I also have a direct email address to get support rather than some useless "chatbot" and endless phone queue. Support local ISPs.
- tracker1 2y ago
  Cox is more than that in Phoenix... I've got 2gb down (100mb up) currently. I do wish they didn't charge 2x or more to host a server at home though (business account).
  - radlad 2y ago
    > I do wish they didn't charge 2x or more to host a server at home though (business account). How is this enforced? Is it an IP address (instead of NAT) you're paying for?
    - tracker1 2y ago
      The cable company blocks common inbound server ports for residential connections... I've considered just using DNS for letsencrypt and a non-standard port for http/https, but would rather not. For less than the cost difference, I have a good sized VPS on OVH that I use.
tiffanyh 2y ago
0.10Gbps down & 0.02Gbps up… FCC updated just 2-months ago the minimum “broadband” as defined to now be 0.10Gbps up and 0.02Gbps down. https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-401205A2.pdf https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-401205A2.pdf EDIT: updated typo (on "up/down")
- arijun 2y ago
  Other way around, 100 Mbps down and 20 up.
rekoil 2y ago
> Cheap 10 Gbps Fiber Thanks to Local Governments > $150/month Meanwhile I'm here in Sweden rocking 10 Gbit symmetrical from Bahnhof (<3) for 349 SEK/month (~$33/month).
jlokier 2y ago
Reading about all these >= 1 Gbps connections, I'm envious. The fastest I've been able to get quoted to my office in the centre of a UK town is 17 Mbps, and to home it's 34 Mbps. The speed limits are both due to old infrastructure that's outside my control unless I move. Landlords aren't going to upgrade. In the central library where they have "superfast broadband" in this "superconnected city", it seems to be capped at 10 Mbps per user. None of those products are worth it - my mid-range phone is faster and gets 20 to 100 Mbps down at different times of day, so I use that for internet connectivity instead. I was surprised at the phone connection speed recently, when I downloaded 30GB of LLMs in 30 minutes on the phone. But the latency is noticably poor.
xyst 2y ago
The private ISPs also tend to have under the table agreements with each other to avoid competing with one another in some regions. Keeps the prices high while spending the bare minimum to keep the network running (which means low bandwidth and asymmetrical options). Occasionally you may live in an area with more than 2 options, but that’s rare. I have moved around a dozen times and only recall a single instance where I was able to choose between 2 providers. I would absolutely love to build out municipal internet. We have plenty of good examples to build off of (Utah and Chattanooga, TN). The only thing holding a majority of us back is: state bans on municipal internet. This would have the added benefit of creating local high paying jobs as well. Keep the money circulating within the region for as long as possible. Money doesn’t escape via temp out of state workers or corporate bonuses to C level executives
- buffington 2y ago
  Can you point to any evidence of these "under the table agreements" or is that speculation?
tracker1 2y ago
As a Libertarian, I've always felt that govt should be limited to ensuring (not necessarily providing) essential infrastructure. At this point, internet access as part of communications should be considered essential infrastructure. I always find it kind of wild how Utah tends to be a Progressive Republican state. Projects like this are definitely nice to see.
Proven 2y ago
[dead]
PhantomLink29 2y ago
The Utopia rollout has been so poorly done. Where I live, the entire area was supposed to get it and they missed houses here and there. Ours is one of them. Gladly forking out $$$ to Comcast for their coax gigabit until the city gets it right.

365 points by WarOnPrivacy 2y ago

We’ve had symmetrical 1gb fiber owned and installed by our public utilities for almost two decades here in central Washington. Was $80 a month until a year or two ago, then it went down to $60.

wlesieutre 2y ago
Just got gigabit in Knoxville for $65. Which is actually a tough sell since AT&T already offers 300 megabit for $55 and I’m not sure what I’d do with a faster connection. But $65 from AT&T would only get me 500 megabit, so for people who do want faster speeds the KUB option is looking good.
- lillecarl 2y ago
  There's more to a connection than speed, there might be data limits, there might be latency differences and it might just be unavailable or expensive. I'm not from the US, but if it's somewhat economically viable, go for the underdog.
  - wlesieutre 2y ago
    Speed is consistently higher than advertised (330-350ish), latency is fine, 1 TB/month (it says this, but then also says X GB of unlimited used), and I don’t think I’ve had an outage in the two years that we’ve been here. I’ll be considering it still (just became available last week in my neighborhood) but since I work remotely I have to be risk averse on switching internet providers.
  - jwells89 2y ago
    In the US it’s also not uncommon for connections to be not only asymmetrical, but downright lopsided. Comcast sells “gigabit” in my area that’s 1.2Gbps down but only like 20Mbps up which is just silly. Thankfully a competitor offers true gigabit for about the same price, and so that’s what I subscribe to.
    - wlesieutre 2y ago
      AT&T currently doing 390 down / 340 up on my symmetric 300 plan, can’t complain
      - rsingel 2y ago
        Except you are paying the company that built the NSA's domestic spying apparatus, paid to flood the FCC with millions of fake anti net neutrality comments, and paid Michael Cohen $600k to fight net neutrality and anti-trust. Other than than that, totally great
    - bee_rider 2y ago
      That is probably not a terrible configuration for a lot of users. It is disappointing that the internet didn’t remain a network of mostly peers where everyone might host something. But, realistically, lots of people approximately just use their bandwidth to stream video, right?
      - ssl-3 2y ago
        Netflix themselves say that 15Mbps is enough for 4k. 1.2Gbps downstream is enough for >50 such 4k video streams without saturation -- something that will probably never happen in any household, even in Grandma's house on Christmas Eve with a bunch of grandkids around. Meanwhile, I've had single-player games of Factorio of medium complexity that would saturate 20Mbps upstream. Nobody needs a connection that is so heavily lopsided as 1.2Gbps/20Mbps is except for the marketing department, and the DOCSIS sunk-cost-fallacy department.
        basil-rash 2y ago
        Why is single player factorio phoning home so heavily?
        mschuster91 2y ago
        It's about video streaming. The challenge with Factorio is that there is always lots of very tiny little changes on the screen from all the tiny boxes and trays of stuff moving around on belts, which means if you want acceptable video quality, you need a lot of bitrate as the usual h264/h265 compression magic of just encoding differences between frames doesn't work out any more - too much change between frames, you're (effectively) forcing the codec to transmit full frames all the time.
- nottorp 2y ago
  > I’m not sure what I’d do with a faster connection I have a 500 mbps and a 1 Gbps fiber into my home. For redundancy (WFH 100%) and because it's cheap (Romania). The only time I notice which one I'm on is when I install games from gog/steam/psn. Even operating system isos (which are only a few gigs, not 50-100 G like modern games) don't make a dent any more. Streaming is a-ok, but I'm stuck in the last century with an 1080p TV. Both of my providers^H^H^H one of my providers now offer 2.5 Gbps I think. And I wonder why :)
qwerpy 2y ago
Meanwhile over here in Bellevue, home of T-Mobile and (close enough) Microsoft, I’m stuck with Comcast or really crappy DSL. How is it that central WA gets way better internet than Bellevue? Oh right. Comcast lobbying.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- mtnGoat 2y ago
  The big telcos ignored us so we took it into our own hands. Had it been a bigger market I’m sure they would have lobbied our local ISP out of existence. They still do some questionable marketing around here.

falchy 2y ago

I used to work in one of the participating ISPs. The organization of Utopia was a PITA, but the idea was really good and generally well implemented, with some portable exceptions. My biggest issue is that they take huge subsidizations from the state to deliver internet, then turn that around and outbid competitors for state circuits using the subsidized rate. Not really saving them any money, but it looks good on a quote.

latsu 2y ago
Good on them. They are using the same tactics ISP's have used to screw the general public but instead they are at least providing the services they promise.

dheera 2y ago

Meanwhile I live 20 minutes from Google's heardquarters and I can't even get more than 25 Mbps uplink. Maybe these big internet companies should dig up all the infrastructure in their home turf and replace it?

geodel 2y ago
But they are evil so why will they do it?
wmf 2y ago
They're not allowed to. Regulatory capture is running wild.
- dheera 2y ago
  They're fucking Google. If they dig the streets up and give me 10 Gbps fiber I will be more than happy to show up to city council and yell the shit away from any NIMBY old fart that says no.
  - lokar 2y ago
    It’s more that CA law makes it easy for comcast to tie it up in the courts forever, regardless of what your city council says.
  - TulliusCicero 2y ago
    And more NIMBYs will show up to scream about Google overrunning local government. It is extremely easy to make hugely powerful corporations the villain, for obvious reasons, and this doesn't stop being true in the case where they want something actually good.
    - consumer451 2y ago
      Sorry to have creeped into your bio, but what is your bandwidth in Munich?
    - 2y ago

pizzaknife 2y ago

ijust came here to abe simpson it about att. may they rot in hell

protocolture 2y ago

Best: Open Pit and Pipe Very Good: ULL Ok: Government Wholesale Shit tier: Any Monopoly.

theyeenzbeanz 2y ago

Comcast lobbied so hard to get our local mileage for fiber expansion voted down. When it passed, they suddenly decided they’re going to spend 6 figures worth of money to expand their own fiber backdown (they’re not even to the house). Its amazing when corporations will spend more money fighting something than actually implementing said thing.

fragmede 2y ago
when you can simplify things down to a number on a spreadsheet, it's a simple math equation. It doesn't make sense if you step back and look at what's actually best, but money warps everything it touches.
- yourapostasy 2y ago
  > money warps everything it touches. I wonder what would happen if money transactions frame dragged transaction metadata along with the money. Today, the money is public data, but the far more interesting transactional metadata exchange is a hyper-fragmented market.
rolobio 2y ago
I’ve had fiber at my house from day one provided by a local ISP. Comcast came in and buried their own fiber lines (years later) for all the houses in my neighborhood. Soon after, my ISP bumped my speed and lowered my monthly bill. We desperately need more competition. It’s the only thing that actually lowers prices. Also, I will happily pay higher prices to never pay for Comcast again. So they won’t see a penny from me.
- troupo 2y ago
  > We desperately need more competition. It’s the only thing that actually lowers prices. Unless it's a deep pocketed behemoth coming and stomping out local competition because they can afford to lose money on price dumping. Though I agree with the general idea of the competition.

ftigis 2y ago

In Singapore there's a telco intending to launch 10 Gbps fiber for 30 SGD (~22.35 USD) per month. likely to be asymmetric though, since their 2.5 Gbps service at ~16.24 USD per month is advertised as 2.5 Gbps down and 1.25 Gbps up.

denkmoon 2y ago
The things you could do with 1.25gbps. Crazy stuff. Vastly different infrastructure/density situations but here in Australia I'm paying ~56USD per month for 0.04gbps up.
- Nursie 2y ago
  Australia has Abbott and friends to thank for fucking the whole NBN plan up royally. We would have had fiber to the premises everywhere and affordable gigabit by now, but Abbott decided Australia shouldn't spend money on what he saw as merely a "video entertainment system" and binned it in favour of the current Mixed Technology mess. Which then actually cost more to implement.
  - Guthur 2y ago
    Pretty sure they intentionally screw it up. It means that the populous will generally think that the government can't provide effective utility at cost and so private equity can move in and provide equally bad utility at monopoly rent prices.
    - Nursie 2y ago
      There’s a bunch of stuff there but I think they were also trying to protect Foxtel so Murdoch could avoid having to compete with Netflix etc. Assholes all round
jokteur 2y ago
I'm getting symmetric 10 Gbps for 49CHF (~54$) per month in Switzerland, and this is one of the most expensive countries in the world.

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

Official release: https://www.utopiafiber.com/2024/05/08/utopia-fiber-adds-three-new-residential-internet-service-providers-to-its-open-access-network/ https://www.utopiafiber.com/2024/05/08/utopia-fiber-adds-thr...

tiffanyh 2y ago
Utopia Fiber: 1Gbps for $45/mo 10Gbps for $150/mo AT&T Fiber: 1Gbps for $80/mo 5Gbps for $250/mo *** note: slower speed
- jdeibele 2y ago
  I think there should be a $30/month charge for Utopia added to their service. https://www.utopiafiber.com/residential-pricing/ https://www.utopiafiber.com/residential-pricing/ So it's slightly cheaper than AT&T for 1Gbps and a more significant difference for their 10Gbps service which AT&T doesn't offer, as you point out.
  - tiffanyh 2y ago
    > So it's slightly cheaper than AT&T for 1Gbps Utopia is: 77% cheaper than AT&T (1 Gbps) 66% cheaper than AT&T (5 Gbps) yet delivers 2x the speed than AT&T That doesn't seem "slightly cheaper" to me.
    - jdeibele 2y ago
      You're using the wrong pricing. AT&T has one price. Utopia has 2 components, the ISP and Utopia itself, making up the total price. If you go to the website link I posted, it's not $45, it's $45 to the ISP and $30 to Utopia. That makes $75, which is slightly cheaper than $80. "Service from UTOPIA Fiber is billed in <two parts>. One part is for services provided by the Internet Service Provider (ISP) you select, and the other is for the physical network connection provided by UTOPIA Fiber. Check out our price list to help you compare service options from our various ISPs. " https://www.utopiafiber.com/residential-pricing/ https://www.utopiafiber.com/residential-pricing/ Emphasis mine. The cheapest service available from Utopia is $30 to them + $35 for 250Mbps service, totaling $65/month. There is no $45/month service.

cageface 2y ago

Our CenturyLink internet in Salt Lake City went down and it took them almost two weeks to come fix it. These companies have done a tremendous job of driving demand for municipal broadband with their unconscionably terrible service.

puppycodes 2y ago

Utah realizing people need extra VPN bandwidth to watch porn without a drivers license...

hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago

Semi-rural residential Texas Triangle needs this. Some places have Spectrum (Charter) and nothing else. Google Fiber is fantasy outside of Austin. One notable exception is GVEC. https://www.gvec.net https://www.gvec.net

jakebasile 2y ago
Google Fiber is a fantasy for some people in Austin too. I was right outside their initially planned extent, literally by a block, and they have never bothered to extend out to my subdivision despite being within Austin limits. I got AT&T Fiber instead and it has worked great for a decade. I just upgraded to their 2Gbps because they gave me a pretty solid deal on it.
- hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
  Yep. I had 1 Gbps for 2 years and 2 Gbps for 2 years. (Can get 5 or 8 Gbps, and possibly 20 with a beta program.) GF excludes most of the downtown core except for Google buildings. I've speculated it's some sort permitting cost or dark fiber cost issue. I don't understand the logic they use to select cities or wire some customers but not others while leaving holes randomly. https://broadbandnow.com/Google-Fiber https://broadbandnow.com/Google-Fiber
drak0n1c 2y ago
AT&T Fiber is expanding quickly in North Texas. Got 2.5 gigabit a couple years ago to my suburban home in the edge of DFW where it transitions to rural. Their headquarters are in Dallas so they are keen on expanding locally.
- hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
  Makes sense in the Metroplex where there is already tons of dark fiber from the dotcom days and right-of-way already in place from cable, DSL, and other distribution networks.

nox101 2y ago

I know people disagree with me about this. I certainly hate it that governments gave local monopolies to companies like Comcast That said, I'm pretty confident municipal internet is bad thing in the long run (compared to actually competitive markets, not local monopolies) Problems: (1) Unlike say, water, sewage, power - internet tech changes 10gig might seem fast today. In 15 years it will seem slow. Will the government upgrade? My guess is they'll be slow to upgrade where as places with truly competitive markets will upgrade quick. I watched this happen in Japan. There were 4-5 different providers. One upgraded (twice the speed of competitors for same price), Competitors were forced to upgrade or lose their business (2) Government run internet is bound to eventually be lobbied to be safe (what do you mean my taxes are being spent so people can download adult content! Stop that! ... etc) (3) With Government run internet there is no competition so no one else can enter the market and compete. Come back to this comment and in 10 years. See what speed competitive markets are at and compare to municipal and non-competitive markets.

bobthepanda 2y ago
My understanding is that none of the municipal fiber networks are monopolies, so Comcast and co. still play ball in these markets. If this is truly bad then people will just leave. In reality I think that enough local governments recognize that high quality Internet is a competitive differentiator when trying to attract business.
rayiner 2y ago
> I know people disagree with me about this. I certainly hate it that governments gave local monopolies to companies like Comcast They didn’t do that. Exclusive franchises have been illegal under federal law for over 30 years: https://www.congress.gov/bill/102nd-congress/senate-bill/12 https://www.congress.gov/bill/102nd-congress/senate-bill/12 (“Prohibits a cable television franchising authority from granting an exclusive franchise or unreasonably refusing to award additional cable television franchises.”).
mikeyouse 2y ago
This is a pretty silly comment given the "private" options that could have been at gbps speed for a decade+ are still at DSL and Cable speeds. Blind faith in 'the market' to solve these things after it's failed to do so seems odd.

ubj 2y ago

I recently bought a house in Utah. Utopia is the best internet provider experience I've had so far (I've had Xfinity and Verizon previously). Speeds are typically 10-25 Mbps _faster_ than the advertised rate I'm paying for. Being able to have multiple (~5 or more) provider options to choose between is a welcome change from past monopolies I've been trapped in. Granted this all could change down the road (I hope not), but so far so good.

snielson 2y ago
Utopia provides an active ethernet connection to each subscriber with the specified bandwidth. This is superior to most fiber deployments, which are passive optical networks (GPON) where groups of 16-32 homes share a connection (usually 2.4 Gb down and 1.2 Gb up). I live in Utah and actively worked to get fiber in my small city. Utopia requires cities to guarantee a take rate (40% if I recall correctly) and taxpayers must make up any deficiency. I've never heard of taxpayers actually doing that but it was enough to scare people from adopting Utopia in my city. Ultimately what brought fiber to my city was covid. The monetary tsunami unleashed by the federal reserve and the government made it possible for a local private company to build a fiber network. I just got hooked up last week. It is great. The other thing that happened is that the wireless companies offer high quality internet service. For a time I had both Comcast and T-Mobile home internet. I regularly got speeds of 1.2-1.4 Gb down on T-Mobile (100 Mbps up). Verizon also offers home internet but it was too unstable when I tried it. All this is to say that I have three high quality Internet connections at my home (fiber, T-Mobile, and Comcast), one marginal connection (Verizon), and one garbage connection (Century Link; however, they have also been installing fiber in the area). Competition is great!
- Hikikomori 2y ago
  With active its just the last mile that is not shared, everything after that is shared. So it can suffer from the same oversubscription problem, just depends on how good the ISP is. But adding more capacity on those shared links is easier than fixing capacity issues on a PON deployment.
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago

zer00eyz 2y ago

I live in the bay area and just got sonic fiber to my house. 49 bucks a month for 10gbe. I have only seen it get up to 8gb in TESTING... I might be able to get to 9. That is a stupid amount of bandwidth. I give it 6 months before I get a call and they fire me as a client. Cause im going to try to use the hell out of it.

jorts 2y ago
I LOVE Sonic. I also have the 10Gb internet for $50/month and I can’t even use that much bandwidth. Also their customer service is amazing. I was caught off guard when I called in for an issue and a local person answered when I expected it to go to a machine. They also support net neutrality.
- zer00eyz 2y ago
  > I can’t even use that much bandwidth. I built an opnsense box (part of my proxmox cluster) and passed through a dual 10gbe nic. That whole PC was cheaper than any off the shelf routing solution I could find. The rest of the network is going to take time... I suspect that im gonna end up with a few fiber runs in the house before all is said and done.
  - i2shar 2y ago
    What networking gear do you use inside your home? What router? Do they terminate an actual fiber connection (SFP+) to your home or you get 10GB Ethernet?
    - kbenson 2y ago
      You get a 10GbE port off the ONT.
    - erwincoumans 2y ago
      Sonic 10G rocks. I use Asus RT-AX89X router, with 2 10G ports, one input from Sonic, one output to 10G switches (Ubiquiti Networks UniFi Switch Flex XG 4-Port 10G).

userbinator 2y ago

As someone who has 1/1000th of that bandwidth to the Internet, and yet still only saturates that connection when transferring from some nearby sites, I'm curious how useful having a 10Gbps local connection will actually turn out to be in practice. Being able to download Linux ISOs faster is the prominent use case that comes to mind.

nightfly 2y ago
Large families.
- bugbuddy 2y ago
  Is that a Jab at my friends in Utah?
defrost 2y ago
{ Multiple people in household each having multi-party high resolution video calls | band practice | data manipulation collaborations | 4K TV on demand } can suck up the bandwidth when the priority is smooth real-time with low interactive latency. It's not always going to be peak demand, but it'll be noticable when everybody piles on at particular times of day. TBH I have relatively low bandwidth most of the time and don't notice download speeds at all as I queue the things I want and return to working on what's in front of me.
- KeplerBoy 2y ago
  You absolutely cannot saturate a 10 Gbit link with today's consumer's needs, let alone with today's consumer hardware. That's hundreds of Netflix 4k streams.
  - Nursie 2y ago
    Sure, but the OP talked about being happy with a 10Mbps link. I think a lot of modern households might find that constraining, even if a 10Gbps link was massive overkill. There are two orders of magnitude in between of course :) Personally I found that going back from a 1Gbps link to ~100Mbps has felt a little sluggish, particularly when downloading games. It's not a huge thing, but being able to get that new game pretty much now was great.

alberth 2y ago

Wi-Fi speeds Most consumers will connect via WiFi. And that will be typically capped at < 1 Gbps

LatticeAnimal 2y ago
Wifi 7 is coming and is rated to 11.5-46.1 Gbit/s (depending on channel bandwidth). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11be
- saagarjha 2y ago
  (In real use probably a gigabit or so)

Phiwise_ 2y ago

This is such a misleadingly narrow headline. Utopia's a decade old and has been a mess from the business side pretty much the entire time. Even Google fiber in Provo's somehow giving better rollout service than they are. I was excited when it was announced as a teen but it's been a long road of failing to live up to expectations for all but a tiny fraction of our residents in the rich parts of our cities. And it's supposed to be a public-good program!

fooey 2y ago
Provo built a municipal fiber network and then sold it to Google for one dollar, so I'm not sure that's a great counter example > Provo taxpayers still will have to make $3.3 million in bond payments on the system each year for the next 12 years, even though Google will own the network.
- Phiwise_ 2y ago
  Did I say it's a "counter-example"? Both are operational dumpster fires. I obviously brought it up in a negative tone with the words "even" and "somehow". Utopia's a business, too. Why are you defending them? Do you even live here? They even did basically this same thing to their cities years back, which you'd know if you did.
buffington 2y ago
UTOPIA frustrates me. I live in a part of Utah where Xfinity is the only gigabit option. Despite a huge number of the UTOPIA providers claiming to serve my area, none of them actually do. My home is in a stupid weird bandwidth dead zone, with 10Gbps options available all around me. The house across the street from me has Google Fiber, yet Google Fiber won't install it at mine a mere 50ft away. I'd be a lot more upset if my Xfinity connection wasn't rock solid. It provides the exact advertised speeds, and in the 5 years I've had it, it's gone down maybe once. Still, I want 10Gbps. It's maddening.
- rasz 2y ago
  You are this https://www.sunbeltrentals.com/equipment-rental/earth-moving/trenchers/trenchless-boring-tools/ https://www.sunbeltrentals.com/equipment-rental/earth-moving... away from fast internet

knicholes 2y ago

Lehi, UT opted to build their own infrastructure instead of using UTOPIA. Not sure if that was a good decision, but I'm not happy about the rates they're charging. I'd stay with Comcast if it wasn't a matter of principle.

snielson 2y ago
Lehi offers 1Gbps fiber for $80/mo, which is about the same as Utopia. The pricing seems pretty good for dinner in Utah.

tombert 2y ago

Ugh, it's a little annoying that I cannot get faster than 2 gigabit internet in NYC, and it cost me like $120/month. 2 gigabit is more than fast enough for pretty much anything I do, especially since most of the stuff in my house is on WiFi anyway, but I did get my house completely wired for 10 gigabits about a year ago to try and future-proof everything. It's frustrating that NYC is a super expensive place to live, and it's behind the times with internet speeds.

rm_-rf_slash 2y ago
Worst internet I ever had was at a Cupertino apartment…in 2013. Walked a mile to the office where we had blazing fiber. Manager said a lot of the valley outside of company offices was way behind cause of the cost of installation. Hope it’s improved.
- tombert 2y ago
  There are parts of NY that are getting 8 gig fiber apparently, but it doesn't appear that Brooklyn is one of those parts, which annoys me. 2 gigabits if fine, at least for now, but it would be nice to be able to increase the number of concurrent downloads I could have.
- saagarjha 2y ago
  Just moved out of Cupertino and the best speeds we could get was 1 Gbps down/50 Mbps up on Comcast. The other option was AT&T DSL. So…not really.
- Aqua_Geek 2y ago
  I doubt much has changed. The Bay is lagging in terms of infrastructure — it’s hilariously sad. My only options currently are Comcast or DSL. I’m anxiously waiting for Sonic to become available.

renewiltord 2y ago

It's funny. For eons, Americans on the Internet could be relied on to say that the reason they don't have fiber is because their country is big. But their more rural areas get it first and best, revealing the lie everyone tells. But forget that, these ISPs absolutely rule https://www.brigham.net/residential-pricing/ https://www.brigham.net/residential-pricing/ That's so much nostalgia. I adore it!

seattle_spring 2y ago
Brigham City is not really that rural (more suburban), and it's maybe 0.05% of all suburban / rural areas in the US. Not really evidence that "rural areas get it first and best." Most truly rural areas have absolutely awful internet options, or none at all save for Starlink or satellite.
refurb 2y ago
Brigham City isn’t rural.

alex_young 2y ago

I had symmetrical 10GB fiber in Lugano Switzerland 5 years ago. It was ~$30 / month. No commitment.

swarnie 2y ago

> Two decades later and the coalition just announced that 18 different ISPs now compete for Utah resident attention over a network that now covers 21 different Utah cities. In many instances, ISPs on the network are offering symmetrical (uncapped) gigabit fiber for as little as $45 a month (plus $30 network connection fee, so $75). Some ISPs are even offering symmetrical 10 Gbps fiber for around $150 a month: Congratulations, you've invented European style internet access with prices that almost match, super proud of you Utah. Personally our local fibre network was built as a joint venture between 8 or 9 companies who then openly compete to run the service to customers so its mostly down to customer service and perks. A 1gb symmetrical unlimited connection (sold as 900mb due to some legal shenanigans) is about $38 with a 250mb package unlimited going for $24

kristopolous 2y ago
For however conservative Utah is, they are very community oriented so in practice, they seem to implement some fairly socialist policies. They were real early in housing first and they have a pretty nice built-out public transit system, a bunch of coops, 3x the average of credit union membership ... things like that.
- rayiner 2y ago
  There’s a communitarian-libertarian axis that’s distinct from the conservative-liberal axis. While libertarianism tends to dominate both the left and right in the U.S., I suspect most American conservatives outside the coasts are more communitarian, closer to Christian democrats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_democracy. Conversely, while American liberals have putatively communal ambitions, they’re often too fragmented and individualistic to accomplish them.
  - kristopolous 2y ago
    If you're referring to the political compass, that thing is just an astrological star chart for politics. It's just about as accurate. Go to Wikipedia for that, about 70% of the word count is calling it nonsense https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Political_Compass https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Political_Compass Those are the numbers you get with topics like homeopathy

nashashmi 2y ago

This is another failure for capitalism. Why is it that socialism is working better here?

underdeserver 2y ago

This reminds me of Longmont, Colorado's city-managed ISP (NextLight). They fought the Comcast / Verizon duopoly for a while before founding it. Turns out when good people who live next door are the ones responsible for your basic utilities, you get better, faster, more reliable service with better customer support. Who knew.

wildrhythms 2y ago

I'm in NYC and I have a local ISP called Honest Internet that gives me gigabit for $50/mo. Comcast/Xfinity, Verizon, Spectrum all wanted $90/mo for this. I also have a direct email address to get support rather than some useless "chatbot" and endless phone queue. Support local ISPs.

tracker1 2y ago
Cox is more than that in Phoenix... I've got 2gb down (100mb up) currently. I do wish they didn't charge 2x or more to host a server at home though (business account).
- radlad 2y ago
  > I do wish they didn't charge 2x or more to host a server at home though (business account). How is this enforced? Is it an IP address (instead of NAT) you're paying for?
  - tracker1 2y ago
    The cable company blocks common inbound server ports for residential connections... I've considered just using DNS for letsencrypt and a non-standard port for http/https, but would rather not. For less than the cost difference, I have a good sized VPS on OVH that I use.

tiffanyh 2y ago

0.10Gbps down & 0.02Gbps up… FCC updated just 2-months ago the minimum “broadband” as defined to now be 0.10Gbps up and 0.02Gbps down. https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-401205A2.pdf https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-401205A2.pdf EDIT: updated typo (on "up/down")

arijun 2y ago
Other way around, 100 Mbps down and 20 up.

rekoil 2y ago

> Cheap 10 Gbps Fiber Thanks to Local Governments > $150/month Meanwhile I'm here in Sweden rocking 10 Gbit symmetrical from Bahnhof (<3) for 349 SEK/month (~$33/month).

jlokier 2y ago

Reading about all these >= 1 Gbps connections, I'm envious. The fastest I've been able to get quoted to my office in the centre of a UK town is 17 Mbps, and to home it's 34 Mbps. The speed limits are both due to old infrastructure that's outside my control unless I move. Landlords aren't going to upgrade. In the central library where they have "superfast broadband" in this "superconnected city", it seems to be capped at 10 Mbps per user. None of those products are worth it - my mid-range phone is faster and gets 20 to 100 Mbps down at different times of day, so I use that for internet connectivity instead. I was surprised at the phone connection speed recently, when I downloaded 30GB of LLMs in 30 minutes on the phone. But the latency is noticably poor.

xyst 2y ago

The private ISPs also tend to have under the table agreements with each other to avoid competing with one another in some regions. Keeps the prices high while spending the bare minimum to keep the network running (which means low bandwidth and asymmetrical options). Occasionally you may live in an area with more than 2 options, but that’s rare. I have moved around a dozen times and only recall a single instance where I was able to choose between 2 providers. I would absolutely love to build out municipal internet. We have plenty of good examples to build off of (Utah and Chattanooga, TN). The only thing holding a majority of us back is: state bans on municipal internet. This would have the added benefit of creating local high paying jobs as well. Keep the money circulating within the region for as long as possible. Money doesn’t escape via temp out of state workers or corporate bonuses to C level executives

buffington 2y ago
Can you point to any evidence of these "under the table agreements" or is that speculation?

tracker1 2y ago

As a Libertarian, I've always felt that govt should be limited to ensuring (not necessarily providing) essential infrastructure. At this point, internet access as part of communications should be considered essential infrastructure. I always find it kind of wild how Utah tends to be a Progressive Republican state. Projects like this are definitely nice to see.

Proven 2y ago

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PhantomLink29 2y ago

The Utopia rollout has been so poorly done. Where I live, the entire area was supposed to get it and they missed houses here and there. Ours is one of them. Gladly forking out $$$ to Comcast for their coax gigabit until the city gets it right.