
Chattanooga to offer 10 gigabit internet service starting today - soccerdave
http://www.timesfreepress.com/news/local/story/2015/oct/15/chattanooga-becomes-first-10-gigabit-city-world/330691/
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callahad
The article missed mentioning Minneapolis, which has been offering symmetric
10Gbps since December, 2014.

Residential 10Gbps costs $399/mo, but normal 1Gbps is quite affordable at
$65/mo: [http://fiber.usinternet.com/plans-and-prices/plans-for-
the-h...](http://fiber.usinternet.com/plans-and-prices/plans-for-the-home/)

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dtparr
Any idea how many people that covers? Looks like just a couple square miles of
coverage (roughly eyebyalled). Is that mostly business or residential areas?

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callahad
Almost entirely residential; the closest they get to downtown is still about a
10 minute walk. I'm terrible at ballparking these things, but an average block
in that area probably has around 15 duplexes/triplexes and 3-4 low-rise
apartment buildings with 12-36 units each...

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rasz_pl
Meanwhile in Australia:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeEAVj2Szbg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeEAVj2Szbg)

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PebblesHD
Was just about to say 'Meanwhile in Australia where I pay $79/month for 100GB
of ~500kbps'. And I live in a relatively modern populated area, I shouldn't
have to fight my neighbours for open ports!

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btrautsc
Founder in Chattanooga (our company went through YC). Pretty impressive
announcement by EPB today.

If anyone out there is being priced/ squeezed out of the Bay, or is interested
in building a startup off the coasts - feel free to ping me.

There are a lot of exciting things happening here.

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naveen99
Thank you. Download is $300/ month. What's the upload speed cost ?

Edit: website says upload and download. Amazing. Tempted to rent or buy a
little office space in Chattanooga.

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dtparr
Can you run commercial servers for that price or is that only for residential
users?

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symfoniq
EPB has different (more expensive) pricing for businesses. But it's still a
whole lot cheaper and a whole lot faster than a DS3.

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soccerdave
We have a business with 100mbit for $57.99, but last time I got a quote for
higher speeds it was around $99.99 for 175 mbit and $153.99 for 270 mbit. They
also charge us 14.99 for a static IP address.

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

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

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sciurus
It's great to see Chattanooga retaking the lead for internet speeds in
Tennessee. Hopefully that will spur increases throughout the rest of the
state.

In Nashville, we've gone from zero to three companies (google, at&t, and
comcast) announcing gigabit service in the last year. There's lots of exciting
developments here, as captured in [http://southernalpha.com/commentary-why-
nashville/](http://southernalpha.com/commentary-why-nashville/)

~~~
saboot
Knoxville is still a frustrating state of affairs. Comcast has really set it's
place in stone throughout most of the city, with city representatives
declaring they are not interested in developing municipal options and that
comcast is fine.

Even more aggravating are all the billboards listing "Get Ready Knoxville!
Fiber is HERE" ... at a 2 year contract $300/mo price and $1000 setup. Gee
thanks.

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

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martinald
I've got 1gig via hyperoptic in London.

Compared to the 80/20 VDSL I had before, browsing is pretty much the same. The
difference between enabling and disabling adblock is far far greater than
having 1gig.

Uploading files is generally a lot quicker.

However, most internet services can't handle it. I rarely get more than
1-2mbyte/sec to bitbucket or git for example, which is annoying since that can
be painfully slow on large repos.

Even worse, hard drives struggle to keep up with high internet speeds. SSDs
are fine, but considering how quickly you can fill even a large SSD you don't
really want to be using them for giant file downloads which can take advantage
of it.

Finally, WiFi really can't deliver 1gig or anything close to it. I often drop
back to 2.4GHz WiFi in some areas of my apartment and that is by far the
biggest drawback.

So really, you only get 1gig or anything close when you're on a very fast
server or protocol, downloading to an SSD on ethernet.

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ethbro
My freshman year of college was at a university with 1gb fiber connections to
the dorm rooms. Naturally, this meant there were DirectConnect servers all
over campus with a variety of files.

Most servers had their motd set to "Please download media and watch locally,"
as there was enough bandwidth to direct-play video files over the network.
Unfortunately, there was not enough hard drive bandwidth to service multiple
requests for this simultaneously (this was before the SSD revolution).

Definitely a moment of "Hunh. Never expected to run into _that_ bottleneck."

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nickpsecurity
Love the work Chattanooga is doing on this. In my area, you have to get a full
leased line at prices that might net you new cars or houses if you ditched it.
I've considered relocating there just for the Internet. At least have some
servers over there with a thin client connected to them.

This mostly benefits datacenters. Many medium-to-large companies have central
datacenters that their branches, offices, stores, etc connect to. The
connections that big cost huge money in most places. Keeping that cost this
far down is quite an incentive to be there.

Would also help people trying to seed torrents, boost Tor network, collaborate
over high quality audio/video, and so on. Many uses. It will take time before
people in the Tri-State Area realize that and start moving to these towns with
their growth-focused startups.

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theandrewbailey
It's great that internet companies are pushing speeds up, but networking
hardware to fully use 10G speeds isn't cheap. Unless I missed something, 10G
ethernet NICs are $200+, and all the 10G routers are $1,000+ enterprise
hardware.

On the other hand, if you find that 1gig is too slow and can afford a
$300/month bill for something faster, you probably can afford the requisite
hardware.

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

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

