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This is true, but not in the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Chattanooga through EPB has had 25Gbit residential fiber service since 2022. EPB is the most succ
by tristor 7mo ago
This is true, but not in the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Chattanooga through EPB has had 25Gbit residential fiber service since 2022. EPB is the most successful municipal fiber program in the US, and has resulted directly in the creation of other municipal fiber programs in other parts of the US, as well as telco lobbying causing 16 states to enact laws banning it, because it was so successful it made Comcast and AT&T scared.
I have 5gbit symmetric fiber at my house in Texas, and it is only available here because Google Fiber entered the city offer 1gbit symmetric fiber for 60% less than you could get a 300mbit cable link or 75mbit DSL link. Suddenly everyone was building out fiber infrastructure, and I now pay less for 5gbit symmetric fiber than I did for a brief while for gigabit cable (DOCSIS 3.1) which was 1gb/50mb.
The primary piece about this that's relevant is the difference in deployment architecture. P2MP is much cheaper for providers to deploy, but it does lock you in, and more to the point it means even your symmetric links aren't guaranteed to get full throughput at all times because they oversubscribe the backhauls. Still, in most major US cities that now have fiber service, you will rarely see any performance drops. I can confirm that I get close to 5gbits bidirectionally during peak hours, which is a testament to the fact that it was completely possible to have done this a decade ago and it just required some actual competition for AT&T to get off its ass and do it. Unfortunately I don't have Google Fiber at my address because they're now offering 8gbit symmetric in the city.