It's so great seeing my hometown make progress here. Internet options have always been an absolute joke here.
I think a lot of people are going to be surprised in the near future (once the network rolls out to residents) just how cheap fast internet can be. And many people don't realize just how awful Comcast's uplink speeds are (1 Gb down won't save your Zoom calls if you only have <=20 Mbps up). Bountiful is in for a big quality-of-life improvement for internet users (which is basically everyone).
I jumped from comcast (whatever, 200 up/20 down or similiar) to 1Gbps symmetrical 4 years ago and now 10Gbps symmetrical. For less than half of what Comcast charges, with a local ISP (Sonic). It just makes you realize how much money is being funneled directly into shareholder pockets (and to lobbyists and congresscritters and local regulators). And then they brag about throwing $100k at some local schools or something.
Gotta make sure those g'ddamned pirates don't have enough bandwidth to seed their beloved cable-network-owned TV shows and movies, at the expense of everyone else who could benefit from faster uplink speeds. ;)
> why would people work hard without personal upside?
Define "personal upside" because people work hard all the time absent a path to power, or even material benefit! Come to think of it, why do people have children?
Humans are social animals and they are deeply moved to work extremely hard for the sake of love, dignity, and respect alone. Contrary to the nonsense picture you paint, humans only lose touch with such desires in the face of hopelessness to realize them.
> Humans are social animals and they are deeply moved to work extremely hard for the sake of love, dignity, and respect alone. Contrary to the nonsense picture you paint, humans only lose touch with such desires in the face of hopelessness to realize them.
This is bullshit, and obviously so. Humans are by nature lazy. If you give people food and comfort, they will work the barest minimum they can to not be bored, and practically speaking, they'll pick an unproductive hobby (like gaming or idle art) instead of the stuff that society needs to function.
People have kids because having a kid is a deeply rewarding experience. Very few people are going to volunteer to work in mines, maintain sewer systems, or farm for other people to eat.
I believe you are being sincere, which saddens me greatly. I hope one day you find your way to a community where the common good is celebrated rather than denigrated. I can only assume that it is a lack of experience that leads you to believe that the world must be so and cannot be otherwise.
If the phone line is obligatory it’s just a way of restructuring your bill to make the headline rate look lower. (I’ve not paid for a landline for 15 years.) I’d love to use Sonic but they stopped building out the street next to me.
The bill is itemized, the voice line is $10 and the taxes on the voice line is $15.
If Sonic likes their extra $10 of margin, that's fine, but I hate paying taxes on a service I don't even want! Keep the money but give me an option to decline the voice service.
It's wild to me how you people are like "I don't mind if private business fucks me up the ass a bit but gash dang if that gubmint so much as kisses me on the cheek I'm gonna lose my shit".
If we could harness energy from cognitive dissonance, this site could power us-east-1. To be fair though, I've only seen a bit of masked capitalism defense here, and no one outright trashing municipal/coop options. I'm oddly optimistic lately, as the state of things continue, some consciousness seems to be becoming inevitable.
I agree, though "if" is kinda key. And the number of concurrent users in your household. It can be easy to accidentally saturate your uplink if you have multiple users in your family and you aren't coordinating. Or at least that's been my experience.
Can't say specifically for Zoom, but I do know that during the pandemic lockdowns, with me on Google Meet or BlueJeans, and my two kids on Teams for their school, our Xfinity 500Mbps service really struggled, and going to their Gigabit service was needed. ISTR that 500Mbps had 20Mbps up and gigabit had 30Mbps, but I might be off there.
Switched to city fiber as soon as it was available and that's been a blessing.
Yea that upgrade caused something else to happen, because like OP said 20mbps of actual bandwidth will support 3-4 people on Zoom,Netflix(non 4k!),gaming just fine.
You probably got a different modem, with more channels, that opened up more actual bandwidth for you.
That's true, I did upgrade from a 3-4 year old DOCSIS 3.0 Surfboard to a 3.1 Surfboard at the same time. I didn't run any metrics to see what actual bandwidth usage was, I was just waiting for symmetric gig fiber at the time.
The actual issue which is often blamed on routers/modems is that DOCSIS can be horrendously overcontended, especially on the upstream. It can really vary depending on the CMTS you are on, which means it can change street by street. When the upstream is contended your TCP ACKs get lost/delayed which absolutely hammers performance.
When people replace modems they often get an upgraded one that can support more/better channels or DOCSIS versions. These new channels usually are much less contended (as only a tiny fraction of people have them at first), so it seems like a huge improvement, then as bandwidth demand grows and more people get new modems which can support the additional channel it begins to degrade.
However, I would say that with DOCSIS3.1 and DOCSIS4.0 you are starting to get to a point where there is so much more capacity available and bandwidth growth has slowed down so much you are starting to see a lot less capacity problems IMO.
I was thinking the same. I've been working from home on a rural DSL connection for the past 6 months. 10mbps down and 2mbps up. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, but Teams calls do seem to handle it surprisingly well.
This page isn't accurate to their new upgraded infrastructure (mid-splits, DOCSIS 4.0) they've gradually been rolling out over the last year or so. Currently only available in certain areas and limited to their rented xFi modems, but it increases speeds to something like 50 down/50 up, 100~900 down/100 up, 1200~2000 down/200 up.
I don’t trust Comcast and coaxial technology to actually deliver close to that if multiple people in the neighborhood are using. As far as I understand, Comcast splits a small amount of bandwidth between a ton of homes, and then applies QoS based on how much people pay. If you buy the 200Mbps up tier, then you might get 200Mbps up for a little bit as a “burst” speed while they take away from the rest of the neighborhood, but not continuous.
If it was comparable to fiber, then they would advertising the upload prominently like fiber ISPs advertise it.
Theoretically, yes. Practically, the fact that no coaxial cable internet prominently advertises upload bandwidth leads me to believe there is far less upload bandwidth available than fiber networks.
Who needs 20Mbit/s for Zoom? Are they sending 4K UHD from a pro DSLR?
My ISP (cable modem) was around 25Mbit/s down, 5Mbit/s up in the before times, and they've rapidly upgraded speeds a few times since the lockdowns, but mine's been max 20Mbit upstream, and no complaints. I've used every app there is for realtime meetings.
Zoom recommended 3.8Mbit/sec. Most third parties recommend 5. 20 is ridiculous, and will allow for 3 of your kids playing Fortnite and Netflix all day while Dad's in meetings.
4+ kids in a family is pretty common in Bountiful. Some I know have more than twice that (my own is >4). During COVID everyone would be in calls at the same time (school for kids, work for parent(s)). People are back in person now but we still have snow days occasionally.
So yeah, 20 Mbps up can really suck, especially when you realize the advertised speeds are only "up to."
Remember that Zoom became popular during Covid. Another less recent but massively popular thing is TV streaming.
The point is: it’s a thought error to look at what is mainstream today to determine the potential of tomorrow. It’s akin to dismissing cheap electricity based on that we already have enough light bulbs.
Fast reliable internet is infrastructure, which is not exciting on its own. However, if widely available, new downstream opportunities open up that otherwise nobody would be foolish enough to invest in.
But most importantly, it’s not expensive for being infrastructure. Americans in particular are already overpaying insanely for internet.
I'm on board, but if 10-gig costs $500/month, I'm going to have to reconsider. 100 Mbit (symmetric) for $40/month is a bit closer to what my budget can handle.
> "Internet options have always been an absolute joke here."
Yep. You can totally thank the totally corrupt and pretty much borderline criminal Comcast and Centurylink (and their bribe-hungry pet politicians) for that.
Some of these hurdles and requirements are unbelievably ridiculous and so obviously manufactured by the ISPs that I can't believe anyone seriously thinking it has anything to do with taxpayer protection or whatever they're making up... As a non-US citizen, I am so frequently perplexed at how you can, at the same time, have so many smart, hard-working and enterprising people in your country, and so deeply relinquish your freedom, choice and quality of life to either hyper-capitalism, or just idiotic politicians (usually both in connection)...
> 1 Gb down won't save your Zoom calls if you only have <=20 Mbps up
while i agree with you, i just want to make everybody notice that almost no video-chatting application let's you lower your video quality or resolution.
I might be perfectly fine to stream a 640x480 version of me, it's not mandatory to always stream a 4k version of me.
I wish more video chatting application would allow for resolution and quality selection.
Meanwhile I live 2km from Google's headquarters and I can't get more than 20mbps up.
Part of the reason is I can't afford to own here (nobody can) and property owners don't want to upgrade either. Same with EV charging.
Places like this should require property owners who rent out their properties to get with the beat or leave. Property managers who don't install gigabit fiber, EV charging, and induction stoves aren't welcome in this community. This is Silicon Valley, not Utah, yet the Utahans have us one-upped already.
I have had great experiences with home internet from the likes of Comcast and Verizon for a decade now. What became true a decade ago? I moved to a city where there were two viable broadband providers (Comcast + municipal fiber, then Comcast + Verizon in two different locations). My conclusion: it doesn't matter who is offering the service, it matters that there is more than one viable option.
Municipal fiber is not special due to the ISP being municipal government. It is special because it is a path for a community to force a second option into existence.
Lest anyone misunderstand this post: this is an observation in wholehearted support of the linked article. It is wonderful that a community is able to move forward with getting better internet service.
Additionally, I am not trying to brag. I am very lucky to have been able to relocate as I have, and that my locations have had multiple viable options. I recognize that most of the US does not have this flexibility. Again, I offer these observations as full throated support for communities pursuing municipal fiber.
Edit, summarizing: Competition works. In my experience, the dominant factor determining ISP quality is the presence of another ISP with a substitutable offering.
I agree with you to a point, but man there are ways that Comcast and Verizon just can't compete with Municipal. If I want to upgrade a modem I can read some reviews of the best Wifi6 routers or whatnot, or I can ping the guy I know who works for my provider (who also basically introduced me to my partner of 8 years) and get his take on it. The closest thing I've gotten to that with a Comcast person was shooting the breeze about easement rights for his van and how that neighbor calling the cops on him is going to be disappointed.
When I call for support it's some lady a mile away who answers on the third ring, and if I break my modem she apologetically asks if it's OK if somebody's there in an hour to fix it for me for $35.
It's like buying local vegetables except its internet and cheaper. You can't beat it.
You make some good points. I was very focused on speed/price/quality of network service in my post.
This also reflects my own biases and preferences. All I want from an ISP is a reliable uplink at a decent price. The last piece of equipment that is the ISP's is the ONT. I built my own router. I used to have my own DOCSIS modem, but I gave that to a family member a while ago and have had fiber since.
Ideally, I never talk to someone from my ISP. I have had Fios since 2017, and I have only had to talk to them once, to cancel service when I moved. So, as long as I have had Verizon (importantly, in homes that were already wired for Verizon and a competitor), they have been an ideal ISP.
I recognize that my preferences are far from universal, but my original post did not reflect that.
>Competition works. In my experience, the dominant factor determining ISP quality is the presence of another ISP with a substitutable offering.
Yes. This is the root of the problem with Internet access in the US. The post-Reagan relaxation of antitrust enforcement has allowed many monopolies to grow, and combined with lobbying at all levels of government has created the stagnant environment we have now for Internet and wireless services.
I understand your point, and to that effect I'd opt for a duopoly over a monopoly ten times out of ten. That said, even duopoly for internet options sucks. Here in Canada your choice between Bell/Rogers, or Bell/Vidéotron, or Bell/Shaw, etc. makes almost no difference vs the choice between a single one of them. They just bought out almost all independant providers in the country (we're all enjoying huge discounts right now that are obviously temporary, and were used as a tool to undercut them to make the purchases pass more easily).
I would argue it's more important to have more than one option, but it still DOES matter who those options are.
> Municipal fiber is not special due to the ISP being municipal government.
Sorry but that's not true, it is special because it can do things a large profit-maximizing ISP can't. It can give free internet to schools and libraries, it can give subsidized rates to lower income neighborhoods, it also brings control of the ISP under democratic control.
By removing from it the need to be an entity seeking to extract maximum profits, a whole host of other things can be done.
There are more organizational structures than "large, profit-maximizing corporation" and "municipal government".
In support of my argument, I present: co-op and not-for-profit.
More broadly, since I wrote more than one sentence, my point was that the dominant factor in bringing down prices and bringing up reliability of service is having multiple viable options available.
I never made a claim that there are no other differences attributable to organizational structure, though I do see one might misinterpret in that way.
Co-ops and nonprofits aren't always great. We have a co-op grocery++ store (almost like Walmart I assume) in Norway named Coop. It's a fine store and all but they're no different than the rest.
They spend tons of money on advertising etc so they just end up acting exactly like a forprofit corporation except they can say they're a co-op and market themselves as "a little bit yours" because you can pay like $20 a year or something and "own" it.
I'm convinced there's a bunch of forprofits siphoning off the profits somehow. Just like with charities, they find ways to extract that cash flow. Slurping it up like black gold.
The benefit of a coop structure like this is for the workers. Worker owned coops tend to have flatter pay scales, retain employees longer, and are internally democratic.
Even if you're just narrowly looking at prices, a community run ISP will be cheaper even if it has a monopoly. Therefore the claim there is "nothing special" about them is untrue. The difference is one is run to maximize profit and the other isnt.
The existence of non profits or coops is irrelevant to the original claim. Although I'm fully in support of those also.
My experience has been similar. After many years of only having one viable choice of ISP, once another upgraded their lines and could compete suddenly things changed very quickly.
I recall a tragically comic phone call to cancel service with Cox (of course you were required to do all cancellations over the phone). I told them the speed and price I was getting from their competitor, which was already installed and confirmed, and they tried to convince me those numbers were not possible! Hahahaha! Bonus, the new provider's downtime also proved to be far less over the next few years.
Yes, a few years ago I was paying half of what my mom paid for internet through affinity, despite only living 15mi away, because I also lived extremely close to Google Fiber. They’re well aware of when they have actual competition and will tune prices accordingly. I’m surprised there haven’t been massive lawsuits about it considering how obviously they are abusing their regional monopoly status.
I disagree, it’s special because it’s owned collectively by the people living in the community without some for-profit middleman rent seeking inflated payments for sub-par service. This isn’t some victory for capitalism and free markets. This is the government having to step in because of the failure of the market to provide a basic 21st century service to the people at a reasonable price. The same way the market has failed to provide healthcare access at a reasonable price in the US.
I think your conclusion is also incorrect. A for profit corporation only has incentive to maximize profit for their shareholders so if they are the only provider in town they will likely jack prices up. But a municipality/town does have incentive to improve the lives of their constituents and even if you don’t believe that argument, there is always the argument that a fast reliable internet at a reasonable price could spur economic investment in the community. So a single municipal owned internet provider could be a decent option without competition but that’s unlikely to be the case for a for profit business.
A co-op is owned collectively. Therefore collective ownership is not a unique feature of a municipal service.
Additionally a municipal service can certainly be contracted out to a private company (for-profit or otherwise). So there may still be middlemen.
I don't know where you read me claiming this article or anything like it would be a victory for capitalism.
If I count, I say twice that I am in full support of this endeavor and others like it. So I am not sure why you are arguing as if I am opposed.
But if you do want to argue, I have lived in mid-sized cities in the US and observed abysmal municipal services in the form of public transit and also community wifi. I have also been in municipalities where these services are wonderful.
I would argue that public transit, even more than internet, can spur economic activity and improve the lives of residents. Nevertheless, despite the potential value of the service, there is no guarantee that a municipality does even a halfway decent job of it. Why should I necessarily expect different in the case of this particular service, internet access?
Before this conversation devolves I will remind you that I voiced my full throated support for this initiative twice in my original post and have noted that twice in this post. My response here is specifically addressing the points that you raised that municipal service is unique in its ownership structure and more likely to be good because of its incentive structure.
We had CenturyLink for over 20 years here. They recently sold us to Brightspeed who raised our monthly fee to $60 for what's really the very lowest end of "Highspeed" access (if that). The first thing Brighspeed did was throttle our bandwidth.
Our local electric co-op (White River Valley Electric Cooperative) is currently laying fiber optic lines to all the homes and businesses they serve now and will be offering real high speed internet (gb both up/down) next year for $30 a month to all their customers first, and then those who are not that live in the area.
When we moved here in the 90s and bought our home we really didn't think about who was providing our electricity, but we've learned since there is a huge difference.
Just this week we had a vicious storm that blew power poles down and 1000s were without power. Our power was back on in around 36 hours, others nearby were down for 3+ days.
Those who live outside the co-op are paying more than twice as much for power depending on the time of day and load on the grid.
We have a flat rate that's lower than their lowest rates.
You don't even need a co-op for this. Local, municipal, non-profit power companies are like this too. The city of Santa Clara, in the heart of Silicon Valley, has its own power company. Their rates are less than 1/2 of PG&E (which they are surrounded by) and they were for example offering green energy back in 2005. And as you point out, were much better about maintenance.
Munis will almost always beat any other electric provider including rural coops because their customer per mile is a multiple of a rural operator. It ends up making the coops look terrible because we have to cut an order of magnitude more vegetation for the same amount of customers.
Add corruption to that. PG&E was insolvent (liabilities >> assets) and required a bailout from the state (because nobody would pay more than zero dollars for the company).
That the state didn't simply take the assets and indemnify the previous owners for the liabilities (thus turning it into a giant "municipal" power company) speaks to corruption in CPUC and the state in general.
We may pay more than urban areas around us, I'm really not sure, but not all rural areas around us are serviced by the co-op and they do pay quite a bit more.
We have 3 damns generating power very close by us, two that are pretty big, but I doubt that has much to do with our rates. If anything it's slowed the need for a natural gas or coal fired power power plant nearby, but there are those within 50 miles near the bigger metro areas around us. No nukes close by though.
Co-op utilities (and other forms of small local utilities) can have problems, but in general I prefer them. The bad isn't really that bad, and they can be very, very good.
How expensive the laying operation is? Are they using some existing channels / piping / utility poles? The last mile is usually the biggest problem and expense.
Yeah that was Longmont, CO's big expense. We had a fiber ring around town since '96 or something, used for traffic light management I guess? It took about three years to get the fiber to most peoples' doorsteps.[1]
They used existing poles here. I'm pretty sure that a big part of the cost is funded by a U.S. gov grant designed to get rural areas high speed internet.
Corruption and attempts to control markets are everywhere and if you don't fight them they will win.
In Switzerland fiber needs to be accessible to all providers which results in many places having fiber run by the local power providers and the large state owned telephone company. This is what allows providers to offer 25gbit synchronous for under 70 USD per month.
However this did not stop the large state owned communication provider to attempt to kill competition by no longer running p2p (1 or 4 fibers directly from a home to the local exchange bulding) fibers but p2mp (1 fiber to a splitter in the street with a backbone to the exchange) which requires active splitters (the environmental impact of this was completely ignored). This automatically limits any other provider from offering a faster service than the phone company.
Even after a court case and then an injunction they spent millions to expand this network thinking they can somehow perswaid the courts and use people complaining that they can't have fiber because of an injunction (they told customers on the phone that fiber is available but can't be connected due to a court case). In the end they however back peddled and it appears they will loose the case now.
Thanks to the small provider that took this to the courts (init7) it appears we will keep a network open for competition and future proof.
There are fines pending but those are a 2 edges sword. The tax payer effectively pays it since the majority stake belongs to the tax payer. So a large fine is bad and a small fine is bad because it's not a deterrent. The executives that caused the mess's are already mostly gone (hence the back peddling) but the correct action would be to claw back their pay and bonus or something like that so the next "hot shots" don't try such shit again.
What use cases are there for residential (or even most business) connection to be 25Gb/s (or even >10 Gb/s)? Are there 'practical' application for homes or offices to have this much?
At $WORK we have both 10 Gbps to both our office and our DC, and we don't come close to saturating that.
There's really only so many Linux ISOs that you can download at home.
(I'm not "against" having it, just curious on possible uses.)
Games. These days the average new AAA games approach 100GB. the biggest ones like Ark Survival are 400GB.
A 5 minute download vs a 50 minute download is a totally meaningful difference in quality of life. It might sound crazy but a top end gaming rig can definitely take advantage of that 10G connection.
Honestly when it comes to bandwidth: if you build it, they will come? It's a chicken and egg problem most of the time. People aren't going to invent a new widget if there's no infrastructure and no sign of there ever being infrastructure to support it.
For instance: who in their right mind would have built Netflix in 1992?
We were experimenting with IGMP on the Mbone back then, in terms of teleconference and webinar capabilities. We sort of envisioned that large groups of people would tune in simultaneously to live events, but Netflix's VOD and YouTube made for a markedly different architecture.
“Futureproofing” feels like a lame answer but when you’re talking about laying cables in the ground it’s a good one. Just imagine a future where we’re streaming 4K 360 degree video for VR headsets or something.
I’m sure all the folks that have had to tear up 100Mbps LAN cables wished there was 1000Mbps cable in there instead.
The laying of cables is the same: it's single-mode fibre with a PON architecture. Once you have that possible future speeds are 'infinite' with end-point upgrades.
I'm asking: why even get the 25Gig service over the 10Gig? What are you doing with a 25G down/uplink that you cannot accomplish with 10G?
If the price is under $70 for 25G, I'd imagine most people pay half that for less bandwidth, but the 25G works for a number of people who need or want it, plus is great marketing. Also selling 25G that's underutilized is probably substantially cheaper.
I get it's stated. It still seems awful. It's like owning a euro performance car in an area with exclusively straight roads. I mean yeah, you can go fast but that's it. Most of the fun can't happen.
I used my symmetrical upload for work. I'd copy virtual machines home to fix and then copy them back. I hosted VMs that I used as a template. I'd host huge ISOs so I didn't have to carry install DVDs with me.
Past that, it's pretty sweet to be able to access every bit of my home network as if I were there.
But then I moved to an area with one internet option, a cable ISP. I now drive a LOT more than I used to.
Ever transfer a file more than a few hundred gigs? This makes that take less time. Even if I’m only pulling down files at 1800 mbps Ive got plenty of headroom for everything else.
It's not PON thats why they are able to provide 25 Gbit/s. And they choose 25 Gbit/s because the switches for it where only slightly more expensive than the 10 Gbit/s version would have been. They did a talk about it some time ago.
True but the "state owned ISP" in Switzerland only has XGS-PON hardware. So Init7 could only provide 25Gbit/s in the parts of the network thats not PON.
Latency of fiber vs copper isn’t a thing you will notice within any cities. The latency you are probably thinking of is related to shared mediums and having to wait to transmit (e.g. DOCSIS).
>Latency of fiber vs copper isn’t a thing you will notice within any cities. The latency you are probably thinking of is related to shared mediums and having to wait to transmit (e.g. DOCSIS).
You're saying fiber's low latency (within a metro area) is more tied to it's carrying capacity as opposed to it's transmission nature. You're correct. Maybe also pedantic but certainly correct.
> I'd buy an old shed and turn it in to a make-shift data centre, plug an ethernet cable in to a mushroom.
My various jobs in recent years is to run HPC data centres: a little while ago one with 12PB of total storage (along with lots of Ceph storage for ~300 on-prem, private cloud OpenStack instances), a more recent one had about a thousand GPUs (our power usage was high-five digit kWh each month).
Whenever I looked at our routers/firewalls, we never came close to saturating 10Gb/s even with all data sets we dealt with.
That sounds like a limitation on the remote end that doesn't support high bandwidth. If you have 10Gbps connections on both ends, your link should be saturated (minus some overhead).
Blu-ray 4K content is an absolute maximum of ~150Mbps, but can be below 100Mbps. So with a 1G/1000M connection you can stream have 7-10 streams of 4K Bluray quality video simultaneously.
What does going to 10G, let alone 25G, get you? Are you really planning on 70-100 4K simultaneous movie streams on 10G, or 160-250 simultaneous streams on 25?
That's missing some of the bigger picture. One of the reasons streaming 4k content is at a lower bitrate is because it has to deal with network hiccups and fit inside the buffer of most playback devices. A computer or phone has plenty of room, but streaming 4K content to a TV or chromecast/roku/firestick/etc. does not. Faster bandwidth means keeping the bucket full more reliably.
Are we sure that is true? Why would Netflix or similar pay out to give a better picture? Outside of a few AV aficionados, I doubt the average consumer would know or care.
For streaming, probably true. However my 2016-era 4K camera records at up to 150Mbps and I noticed recently that due to compression I was totally unable to show off some gorgeous telephoto video of a hummingbird bathing in a river because the fast running water looked truly horrible under compression, even though the original video looked great. I would love 100mpbs streaming options.
Bitrate on a camera and on a video aren't comparable. The camera has to use a compression algorithm that can run real time on very low power (the cpu in a camera is probably ~5-10 watts. Anything non-real-time video will have been re-compressed and can probably maintain quality at roughly half the bitrate.
Why do people want the extra bandwidth? Isn't latency in distant end server response times generally much slower than speeds, unless the concern is bandwidth for streaming?
This reminds me of "640K ought to be enough for anybody".
Right now I have 1gpbs up and down at home. That was an upgrade I did from 50 down about five years ago. The reason we upgraded was because at night when everyone was streaming things would slow down and we'd be fighting with each other. The 1g stopped that issue.
Right now the 1g is more than enough. But I'm sure there will come a time when it won't be. Maybe we'll have 8k streaming from AR headsets that require one stream for each eye. Or who knows what else.
I'd rather get ahead of it.
And right now it still takes a few minutes to download a movie at full quality. I have to say that when we went from 50m to 1g it was nice to be able to download TV shows in seconds.
High latency is not the same thing as low throughput.
It is wild how many people do not understand this.
Latency can inform throughput if your windows do not scale. But the whole reason we have window scaling schemes is to optimize throughput in the face of latency.
With regards to remote server performance - yeah - CDN's exist for this reason. I may not saturate my gigabit connection while downloading game patches, but I get close enough. I have also had the experience on a different ISP of having spent more time downloading and installing updates than I ever did playing my PlayStation.
High latency means low throughout in the beginning in addition to the latency itself, and for most things on the web by the time the window is scaled up the request is already done. Sure, if you download 100GB games every day or have other special needs like torrenting <s>pirated movies</s> Linux ISOs all day, 10GbE (which also requires expensive equipment) helps, but for 99.9% of people, once you hit 1Gbps, latency is what affects your Internet experience the most, bandwidth is hardly ever an issue.
Latency drives throughput for a single session - but most people that want that kind of bandwidth don't care about a single stream going at the full 25Gbit. Things like torrents or lftp will allow you to create multiple data streams for a single file if you need higher throughput than you can get through a single session.
If you're self-hosting something like a web server, no one user is ever going to hit you with 25Gbit of requests, it'll be coming from multiple sources.
Peaks. If you have a home with 5 people in it - watching 4k content, downloading games, etc. There can be contention and performance gets degraded. This is a case where size of pipe matters more than latency.
I pay $90 a month for 1Gbps up/down fiber to the home. To pay $70 a month for 25x that speed is ludicrous. I imagine I could pay half of what I do or less to get the same speeds.
This still reads like a success story of municipal networks to me. It is much easier to hold public institutions like this accountable than private regional monopolies. A private company is not subject to the whims of the Democratic process, and regional monopolies ensure that free market forces have a much harder time cultivating competition or disruption. The fact that your courts were able to put an end to these practices and the executives responsible are gone while Comcast continues to operate unchecked throughout large swaths of the US really demonstrates this.
In Utah, we've been fighting the corruption and anti-competitive practices of Comcast and CenturyLink for over two decades. And despite many small victories like the recent one in Bountiful, many residents are still getting screwed over with no viable recourse. The city my parents live in fell for Comcast's intense lobbying a few years ago and now they have no real path towards getting a meaningful alternative.
>The tax payer effectively pays it since the majority stake belongs to the tax payer. So a large fine is bad and a small fine is bad because it's not a deterrent. The executives that caused the mess's are already mostly gone (hence the back peddling) but the correct action would be to claw back their pay and bonus or something like that so the next "hot shots" don't try such shit again.
If it's state owned, they should be allowed to determine how the penalty is levied. Make the fine directly payable by the executives in charge, it'll stop immediately.
Also not to nitpick as I'm guessing English is a second language and it's quite excellent -
I think this is the best kind of typo. The spelling given by the original comment pronounces the same way as the correct spelling, we've just all memorized that one of them is the correct way to go from verbal to written.
IMHO many of these US and EU comparisons don't pan out due to scale.
Switzerland is a small, wealthy and densely populated country compared to the US.
Utah alone is five times the size of Switzerland. Swiss GDP per capita is ~20% higher and most importantly, the population density of Switzerland is 213 people per sq km versus 34 in the US (and undoubtedly that number is even lower in Utah which has one of the lowest population densities in the US).
It was calculated to save about 50 USD per connection (p2p vs p2mp). Why active I don't know, they may not all be. There were probably also other interests which I would love to know about but I wasn't a fly on the wall when those decisions were made.
The sheer amount of money spent to expand the network after the court injunction forbid connecting those seems sus to me. It will take many years and many more millions to undo.
I should also point out that a lot of this money to expand the fiber network comes from government grants.
If you're talking about 25 Gb/s specifically, standards didn't exist until relatively recently (e.g., IEEE Std 802.3ca-2020, 25GS-PON/G.9804), so if you want to handle those speeds you had to go active.
If you were building out in later 2022 or 2023, you have have (more) 25Gb PON parts available. Pre-2021 your options may have been more limited.
Does anyone have a good playbook around getting fiber started/prioritized in your city? My city has done some brief exploration, but seemingly is dragging its feet on fiber in general and I'd love to see that change, especially if we could capitalize on a municipal offering that would benefit the city + residents.
"Smart City" sounds like a corporate buzzword and tied to the moribund standards quagmire of IoT, but all we really need is connectivity. Is there a reserved spectrum for municipal 5G networks?
I have a Starlink and while it is expensive, if you are rural, it is like having cable internet (as in, not-gigabit) anywhere you need it.
There's already fixed point wireless, WISP services, that are fairly easy for any town to set up and install. The issue isn't so much getting the physical layer down (although that is always going to be a big stopping point) but keeping it running
- Community Networks, part of ILSR, is a great resource. They also have a good podcast called Community Broadband Bits. (https://communitynets.org)
- If you or someone else you know is involved with the city in any way (an employee, elected official, city board member, etc), the Fiber Broadband Association has a Public Officials Committee Meeting every month where we discuss these things. Many of the members are from municipalities that have their own municipal broadband
I've got Utopia 10Gig at my house, and its honestly the best, most consistent internet I've ever had. Bountiful's new fiber will be an expansion of Utopia, which is awesome.
Fun bit of information: Utopia (Utah's fiber+wireless broadband network) is 100% Ethernet. Which leads to some really interesting circumstances. During a period there was construction somewhere upstream of me, my internet got cut a couple of times. It would always fairly quickly come back, but sometimes my IP would change, as would my promised speeds. Investigating why it was slow once, I discovered that I had a Comcast IP address. Called up the support and asked what was going on, and we eventually tracked it down: Someone had bridged a Comcast business network and Utopia connected network somewhere, and when my router couldn't get DHCP from the ISP, it grabbed one from this Comcast network, and happily sent my traffic through their network. Got that fixed pretty quickly.
I live a little north of Bountiful. I was a big advocate of municipal fiber and pushed my city to build a network. In hindsight, I'm glad the city didn't do it.
The neighboring city (Kaysville) voted down a municipal fiber network in 2019 (the vote was super close). The fiber contractor (Connext) Kaysville planned to use to build the network decided to build it themselves (they were a small WISP in the area).
Covid happened and suddenly there was a lot of money for infrastructure like fiber networks. The fiber contractor expanded and it's now installing fiber throughout many cities in northern Utah including mine (the fiber is in the box in front of my house but hasn't been run inside yet).
I'm the meantime, T-mobile and Verizon began offering home ISP plans for low rates.
All of this means that most people in my area have a choice between five ISPs--Comcast, CenturyLink, T-mobile, Verizon, and Connext. Our city has also granted a franchise agreement to another company (Allwest) to build a second fiber network. I'm doubtful it will happen, but who knows.
If my city built a fiber network, I don't think its prices would have been low enough to get the required take rate for it to be self sustaining, especially with the entry Tmobile and Verizon as ISPs. The fiber contractor, on the other hand, is able to offer low prices because it is building the network at cost and making profits off the subscriptions. The end result is great for our community. Lots of competition and low prices.
> Someone had bridged a Comcast business network and Utopia connected network somewhere, and when my router couldn't get DHCP from the ISP, it grabbed one from this Comcast network, and happily sent my traffic through their network.
It's called unofficial redundancy. It was slow, but it still worked, didn't it?
As a Comcast customer who's paying 5x what I was paying in Europe for half the bandwidth I want this to succeed. However let's not celebrate a win before actually delivering the service to the customers. There's more to building a business than seed funding it. The pessimistic in me would say if there was a viable path to providing high-speed internet with low cost in the US surely companies with a lot on the line like Netflix, Google, Amazon, etc. would make that happen. If you think it's all Comcast profit margins you can always go and buy Comcast stocks to get your share of that profit. They are doing well but not spectacularly well.
These entrenched groups can only win by stopping the municipal options from starting. Once they've started using it they'll never go back (willingly) to these big corporate messes.
I am on a big corporate mess, but its a decent one (AT&T fiber).
After being on this connection for ~2 years, I cannot imagine going back to Comcast. I've actually been looking at moving, and my #1 filter is fiber network availability. I will literally skip an otherwise perfect property if it doesn't have access, or the ability to add access for <6 figures.
Same. I our old house we were on Verizon (which became Frontier which became zipplyfiber) fiber optic network for 17 years. It was relatively cheap, reliable, and fast. When we moved a few years ago, I refused to consider any house that wasn’t on ZipplyFiber.
I've had AT&T Fiber in 2 different states and it's been an awesome product. I think they did a really good job with it and it's still improving.
We're in the same boat - we won't buy a house if AT&T Fiber (or at least Sonic Fiber) isn't available at the address. Showing that only Xfinity is available is a legit dealbreaker for us. Xfinity has frequent outages here in Sacramento.
Indeed, each win against Corporate Last Mile persists. High value effort in inhibiting the success of their lobbying efforts. Get the fiber on the poles or in the ground and drive them out of town.
I used to support municipal fiber in my home town (Seattle) -- but after many years of dollars spent and zero progress, the city finally mothballed the effort.
And now I have fiber to the home (Centurylink) at a price so low I don't even think about it.
I think the key is competition. If your city doesn't have competition, it absolutely makes sense to create competition from the municipality.
I mean if you never actually switched to a municipal service than it doesn't really count as a refutation. I thought seattle had issues doing this sort of stuff in general.
I don't think its the company as much as the nature of the product.
Fiber is simply in a completely different universe of quality compared to DOCSIS & DSL.
AT&T is literally the worst thing on earth... unless you have access to their fiber offerings. Then it might be among the best. I can get 5gbps in my area now but I don't bother. Internet is solved for me as far as I am concerned now.
I don't know. I know that I despise Comcast, although my problem with them isn't the actual service itself. That's been great. My problem is dealing with them as a company.
If I had any other option, even one with worse service, I'd switch away in a heartbeat if the new company were easier to deal with.
That’s true, but it was a pretty early attempt at creating municipal broadband. The “industry” has learned a lot from the negative outcomes about how to do it successfully.
There is this famous physics quote that nature abhors a vacuum (and will instantly fill it with air) but this effect is far more appropriate for human affairs. If people let their guard down, do not get informed, are not civic-minded, organized, active, hence create a vacuum in oversight and governance, somebody will take advantage of it and will fill the vacuum.
The details vary over time and space but the essence is always the same. Somebody will influence the decision making bodies to make decisions that are suboptimal for the many and advantageous for a few. It may blatant corruption or more involved and nuanced "capture". There is no real difference for the societal calculus.
A well functioning society is not an utopic place where nobody tries to take advantage of the commons. It is rather an immune system where signals, feedback loops and deterrent mechanisms instantly neutralize any parasitic attempt.
Ironically, a well connected digital society is technically fully equipped to create such immune systems. All it takes the right frame of mind.
Very amusing that CenturyLink is complaining about FTTH. Back in the '90s (when they were USWest) they pocketed billions of dollars in increased tariffs with the express purpose of them delivering FTTH. Short of a few trial locations, they didn't seem to do anything but pocket the money.
They could have been out in front with FTTH, but instead decided to just sit on their existing copper infrastructure. Which, at least in my town, seems to just be rotting away; seems like everywhere I go I see one of their boxes that's broken open with the innards spilling out and exposed directly to the weather.
This is the same company that refused to deploy DSLAMs anywhere but in the CO, because if they put them in neighborhoods it would allow CLECs to also deploy them around towns, and USWest didn't want to deploy full coverage, so they worried about CLECs deploying to neighborhoods that USWest didn't. So if you weren't within 18K feet of a CO, you were screwed for DSL service.
I had a call with a Comcast sales/tech dude just yesterday. I really ripped into them. We pay $225/mo for coax 200/20 right now. They wanted more than $600/mo for fiber, didn't even say the speed, but I assume it was 1Gbps up/down. I have 10Gbps Sonic.net for $50/mo at home.
Mostly what I spent time ripping on him for was not being able to disable SecurityEdge (DNS hijacking) and outages (~7 multi-hour ones this year). His only answer was "if you want an SLA you need to get fiber" which is 100% BS.
The second there is an alternate (other than AT&T) I will jump to them. Too bad Sonic doesn't have fiber in my office area, but I hope they will at some point.
Comcast is my 2nd most hated company. First is AT&T.
I'm the "tech guy" at my church. I've had no less than SEVEN Comcast sales people hassle me over the past couple of years about "upgrading" to fiber. They even had our pastor talked into to it for a second. "It's the same price!" "Yeah, for a TENTH of the speed as coax." Luckily, he finally saw through this. I keep asking them to leave me alone, but the sales staff turns over every 3 or 4 months, and then someone new goes through the customer list all over again. I kind of get it. A new company is laying fiber all over the city, and pre-selling the service at MUCH lower pricing, so Comcast sees another market about to slip through their fingers.
Currently suffering my third multi-hour Comcast/Xfinity outage in as many months. When I called the support line to try to get a support tech to escalate an inquiry into why I've had so many outages, the robot literally said, "An agent cannot help you. Goodbye." No, I'm not paraphrasing.
Trying to get to an agent is practically impossible. I called recently to make an account change, but after I went through the automated system I got an "I'm sorry, we see there is an outage in your area. Please wait for the outage to be resolved and then call back."
When I worked for Xerox doing outsourced Verizon phone support, the fastest way to get someone on the phone who actually worked for Verizon, was paid twice as much, had 100x the credit limit etc, was too tell the IVR "Disconnect service". I use this every time I have to call anything and usually get half decent service.
I wasn't even offered the phone tree to try that! It looked up my account from my phone number, told me there was an outage, said what I wrote above, and hung up.
> Too bad Sonic doesn't have fiber in my office area, but I hope they will at some point.
Aerial (telephone pole) deployment is vastly cheaper than trenching (and many business parks and newer neighborhoods were built with conduit buried with AT&T/Comcast already in them), so Sonic's deployment generally has followed where there are aerial options to utilize. That said, I think (micro)trenching is becoming more viable, so I believe plans to start delivering to some areas through that are moving ahead.
This aerial deployment maybe cheaper, but there is on going rent for having your line on someone else's poles. I have no knowledge of those rental agreements other than they exist. I wonder if the trenching style deployment also has some sort of agreement with the city?? Whenever I do see the trenching teams installing fiber lines, I'm always curious why such a small amount is being installed. I know there are many many fiber strands in the "cable" they are burying, but why just the one. Every connection needs a pair, so how ever many strands are in that "cable", there's half that number of connections.
> This aerial deployment maybe cheaper, but there is on going rent for having your line on someone else's poles.
I don't think it's much, if anything, depending on the location. My understanding is it's governed by public use policies, since it's public infrastructure. I do know it requires some work for those putting more infrastructure on there to figure out the new load and stress and submit plans for required work, and sometimes poles are identified that are degraded to the point that it requires replacement or retrofitting, but I can't recall whether that's a burden taken by the public utility, the company looking to utilize the space, it's shared, or it's situational and depends.
> I wonder if the trenching style deployment also has some sort of agreement with the city?? Whenever I do see the trenching teams installing fiber lines, I'm always curious why such a small amount is being installed.
You do need to get permits in both cases. I think microtrenching is easier to get permitted because it causes less issues with the road. You're cutting a line an inch or so wide, so there's less worry about car tires compacting the filling material and making the road bumpy. Since it's deep but not wide, it could also be they're stacking multiple runs one on top of each other, which at any one point in time may look like a very small amount being inserted (I don't know, not my department).
> Every connection needs a pair, so how ever many strands are in that "cable", there's half that number of connections.
Depending on what you mean by "connection", they don't. Fiber strands are split out with optical splitters, one or more times, so a single strand back to the CO can handle multiple actual installation locations (but not too many). Planning out how many you allow generally and how much you'll allow max is a balancing act. Sometimes you deliver to a building with multiple units and you don't want to drop a line to every unit but you don't want to serve twenty units off a single strand that might be split once upstream already).
I'm paying $72 for Google Fiber in Taylorsville if that is an option for you. Best Internet I've ever had. Blazing fast. Practically 0 down time. Haven't had to reboot my router ever. Great equipment with no dead spots in my house. 0 complaints.
I'm paying about $425 CAD for TV/Internet ($225) 350/10Mbps, two cell phones w/20GB data ($100), and a land line ($80) plus 15% tax.
My ISP won't bundle them since TV/Internet, landline, cellphone are all different lines of business. They are one of the cheapest ISPs though. Bell Canada is aggressive (continual salesman visits to my door) and has poor service, with Rogers the same. There are resellers of my ISPs service but they are very small and support is limited.
The land line and TV and one phone is for my elderly mother. She doesn't even watch a lot of TV but the land line in her mind is essential. The cellphone is like the modern version of Medical Alert she has it in case of an emergency. If she remembers. Yet last year during a hurricane we lost all comms landline and cell for nearly a week.
Even more fun so many people moved here it's overloading all the cell towers.
Then sounds like you live in a place where the competition is driving down the prices. Where I lived before Comcast wanted ~$250/mo for something like 600/200. Now after I've moved (only like 20 miles) I live in a place where we have a municipal fiber network. So now last time I checked Comcast is offering gig speeds for $70/mo
That may be, but it's expensive in my area and their support is legendarily terrible. I had ADSL for 6+ years and it was an absolute shitshow. Near the end, they told me I needed to switch providers because they couldn't fix the problem, which was in the drop cable from the pole to house. I had one tech tell me to have a "tree trimming accident" and just cut the line, as they wouldn't replace it otherwise.
Also, I remember a year or two ago a discussion on reddit and possibly here about customers with HTTPS certificate errors and it was ultimately traced after months to a bad router that was mangling packets. MONTHS.
Most people at AT&T are incompetent and the ones that aren't are hobbled by the ones that are. Just my experience. YMMV.
Yeah, I seriously considered it. I was worried they'd try to bill me for it and I wasn't up for the fight. I knew I was moving to Comcast, at that point. The move from AT&T to Comcast to Sonic, each time, has felt like a 10x improvement.
I'm always flabbergasted by the price of fiber plans in NA. The max you could pay for a household in France is less than 50€ for 8Gbps (and i assume prices are similar or lower in other EU countries), even accounting for wage gap it's quite a difference.
With comcast, it was cheaper to have internet+tv than just internet. The scam is that it's only cheaper for the first year, so you have to keep threatening to cancel.
The internet-only plans had no specials, so WYSIWYG but it looks expensive in year 1.
It is never actually cheaper to bundle TV once you count the Regional Sports Fee, Franchise Fees, STB rental and taxes atop all these fees.
Sales reps will happily tell you the pre-fee, pre-hardware rental cost of service, when they actually know within a few cents what your total bill will be
I subscribe to a combo TV/Internet plan because it costs less in absolute terms than an internet-only plan. I returned the set-top box to avoid the rental fee, and don't hook the cable TV up to anything.
This is almost certainly their business service, not residential. Our office has a similar level of service via Comcast Business, for basically the same price.
I pay $90 for 1gigabit fiber AT&T in Miami. It's one of the main reasons I bought my house since it was a new development one of the first with fiber in the area.
One of my criteria for a 'forever home' is that the community must have municipal internet.
My, and my family's experience with private internet companies has been horrendous, for years. My parent's only internet option, up until a few weeks ago, was $65 6mbit dsl. They are maybe half a mile from a fiber connection serving the local school, but they refuse to expand it. ATT did not want their business. When they complained about the poor quality of the internet, they were told repeatedly that the only reason their street had any service what so ever was that they were 'grandfathered' from the days of dail up.
As for me. I live in one of the largest metropolitan areas in the south east. I have heavy rail passenger transport to the city center not even a mile from my house, yet comcast is really the only option I have for internet. They know I don't have options, and their prices, offerings, and customer service reflect this.
I think I'd consider sending my data packets via smoke signal before ever handing comcast another dime. I have actually planned my geographical location (i.e. buying a house) around whether or not I had alternatives to Comcast.
> after decades of predatory behavior, slow speeds, and high prices by regional telecom monopolies.
Plus some serious fraud as well: cable customers and taxpayers paid into various universal service funds for decades without actually providing the rural access we all paid for repeatedly. The FCC of course is being very gentle [1], not wanting to hurt any corporate feelings, and we shell out more billions to help them out [2] in case they didn't steal enough the first few decades.
So this is just infuriating when communities want to provide their own broadband -- because cable will not ever -- and the same fraudsters jump in their way.
Romania was an unregulated market for the first years after broadband became available, as a result there was immense competition for customers leading to rock bottom prices for huge amounts of bandwidth, while in the rest of Europe the local telcos were up to their old games.
In Canada the situation was so bad you simply had zero choice as to which provider you would get, it was whoever supplied your cable connection, unless you wanted dial up.
Unbelievable that even today these companies are trying to gauge their customers and would deny them options to do this themselves. It's the bloody internet, not something they had a hand in creating.
How does a gigabit fiber network get access to the internet? Is it connecting to smaller nodes owned by Comcast or ATT? Or does this connect to Level3, etc.?
With all the data prioritization that these companies have set up, does that mean this network will fall apart if a lot of people in the neighborhood start watching Netflix, for example.
Mainly just curious. I am supportive of this effort and hope we continue to build out more providers.
Utopia fiber is owned by a combination of Utopia and the cities/counties the physical layer is installed in.
Different ISPs peer into it, and they're responsible for connecting it to the larger internet. One of the nice things about it being an open network is that you can have multiple ISP accounts simultaneously, and only one physical connection to your property.
> One of the nice things about it being an open network is that you can have multiple ISP accounts simultaneously, and only one physical connection to your property.
I wasn't considering that. It's been a long time (DSL days) since we had open access laws safeguarding us. It sucked that the telcos were able to bribe that away.
We need more of these type of projects in different markets. These huge corporations get away with the worst support, price gouging and a lack of competitive technical ingenuity, as an example look how long it took us to get into the 5G race, it wasn’t until it became a national security interest to get the ball rolling. Can go on and on; internet, rail, etc.
They formed a “concerned taxpayers” group in my area to gaslight and lobby against our towns own fiber proposal. It passed, but barely due to all the propaganda. So after spending 100k to go against it they’re suddenly going to lay their own fiber since they’ve got proper competition now.
Are these ISPs using our money to lobby against their customers?
It just now occurred to me broadband advocates might be able to copy the renewable energy advocates. Like passing laws to prevent energy companies from lobbying against their own rate payers.
I'm so angry that Comcast is getting away with advertising their 200Mbps service as "10G". I have seen repeated confusion from folks online who think it means 10Gbps. I sent a complaint to the FCC, FTC, and the CA AG, but doubt anything will happen. The funny thing was, in their rebuttal to the FCC, Comcast even calls their rebuttals "talking points". I thought "talking points" was well known as a slightly derogatory term, where it's just crap you parrot because it sounds good.
Things like this really piss me off because it "poisons the pool". The "regular" person doesn't know the difference and I don't expect them too but they do remember such things and in the future it leads to issues.
Talking points aren't themselves a derogatory idea. You can have good talking points for defensible ideas, and in fact in public communication planning these is critical. It's only derogatory when you use talking points to try to slip something unethical or corrupt through by obfuscating.
I recently upgraded to their 2.5Gb service and it's pretty fast (I had a sustained 110MB/s download over 150GB yesterday,) and generally get 50Mbps upload. It's unfortunately a bit unreliable.
Some days I have 4-5 router resets / blips in connectivity and then can go weeks without it. Two or three times I have been severely throttled by something for an hour or two. This happens at specific times of day - i.e, around 2pm.
When previously on their more basic plan I never had any of these issues.
All of that said, while I have personally not had any issues with Comcast, I'd switch to a local ISP like sonic.net in a heartbeat if it was available in my area.
It looks like iProvo was started nearly two decades ago [0]. A lot has changed since then. Especially after the pandemic lockdowns, public awareness of the importance of home internet and the stranglehold of the monopolies has gone up dramatically. I would not expect to see a repeat of iProvo in 2023.
Yeah. Another thing that changed during that period where Utah was deliberately sabotaging iProvo was a bunch of states made it illegal for a municipality to use debt financing for buildouts.
In another instance of politicians intentionally harming rural broadband, over in Tennessee, EPB was extending their fiber network to neighboring communities outside their electrical footprint that wanted it, and they made that illegal, too.
This is great to hear. We have CenturyLink fiber installed to our home but we don’t use it. They’re a truly incompetent company and I hope they get bought out by someone that can actually run an ISP. Community ownership would be even better.
Good to hear, it seems UTOPIA has really turned a corner after a rough start. They expanded to my city recently and I have had no regrets about switching. No wonder Comcast / CenturyLink / etc are fighting so hard.
I used to think that almost nobody who opposed socialism actually knew what socialism is. That's true but what I've realized more recently is that almost nobody who defends capitalism actually knows what capitalism is. It's just a kneejerk reaction without thought.
The fight by large telcos against municipal broadband is the perfect representation of capitalism vs socialism.
Municipal broadband is a fundamentally socialist idea. The people of a town, city, county or whatever essentially own the means of production, being the Internet connectivity in this case.
Comcat, AT&T, Spectrum, etc perfectly exemplify capitalism: these companies exist solely to extract as much value from the end-consumers as possible while doing the least possible, all for higher profits for shareholders. it is pure rent-seeking and using the political process and the courts to create and maintain monopolies to keep those profits as high as possible.
All of this is entirely obvious within the context of the labor theory of value [1] and dialectical materialism [2].
The last mile should be muncipally owned, operated and maintained and Internet access should be a basic utility like water and electricity.
Excellent. I really wish more of the US would wake up to the possibility of more localized self-ownership of just about everything, especially in things like utilities. It's sad the extent to which the worst of Libertarian "thought" tends to torpedo efforts like this.
IMO it's the opposite, like everything else we have optimized corruption, packaged it in a shiny package, and convinced the populace we either can't live without it or there's no way around it.
I think it is a little more nuanced. The case in this article is pretty bad, and I am certainly inclined to call it both a bad, and an inappropriate influence. But that is mostly because of how they are trying to disguise it as not being from the internet companies. But they are not handing money to a government official (personally) in order to get what they want, and I want to reserve the word "corruption" for things like that.
However, I do think that companies should have a voice in how they are regulated. Not control by any means, but a voice. This voice needs to be out in the open (so no backroom deals), and clearly labeled what it is. And regulating this sort of thing is really difficult to get right (in part because of legislators self-interest in these things).
Part of the problem here is that money, and the advertising it buys, has become so necessary in our politics. So if money is necessary for people to be able to hear "free speech", how can you prevent or limit people from spending that money? And if the only way candidates can get their message heard is to spend a lot of money, of course they are going to listen to those people and corporations who can provide that money (directly or indirectly). And if that is the way they are going to be listened to, then of course rich people and corporations are going to spend the money. It is a nasty cycle.
More generally, the vast majority of the opinions people hear (through advertising and also on various media) are presented in forums where only one side is speaking. To take the case of (Former) President Trump's indictments, his supporters are simply not hearing any voices talking about the merits of the cases. They are only hearing people talk about the potential politicization. Yes, there are lots of places where the merits are being debated, but most people have no interest in broadening their horizons. And the gatekeepers on the political Right have found it is easier to capture attention through rage, and being fair or balanced does not engender the rage they are selling.
they are not handing money to a government official (personally) in order to get what they want, and I want to reserve the word "corruption" for things like that.
Can we call it institutionalized corruption then, when the handing of money to policitians is made legal through PACs?
Lobbying (petitioning one's government) is fine. Bribery and corruption are not.
When spending cash money to garner influence is considered Freedom Speeches™, something is very, very broken.
Further, great wealth inequity and democracy are incompatible. Sure, there's a balance to be worked out. All reasonable observers will agree our current setup is way out of balance.
The argument is that it is U.S. companies that are insanely competitive at making high-fructose corn syrup, and that the EU has largely banned it as a shield to European companies making other sweeteners (e.g.: sugar).
I would argue that the ban on genetically modified organisms (GMO) is a cleaner example of European protectionism (not that all other countries, the U.S. included, do not also practice protectionism).
You can find lots of sources for the fact of this near-ban, but this one is nice and pointed:
"Because of its low cost and long shelf-life, HFCS is used widely in manufacturing many food products, including candy, throughout the United States. However, due to strict EU regulations, HFCS is banned in much of Europe"
https://www.sugarjoy.com/pages/hfcs-gmos-and-trans-fats
The whole reason soda tastes better outside the US is because bottlers in most other countries still use real sugar. HFCS is cheaper in the US because we heavily subsidize corn production for some reason.
So it seems weird to me that people would complain that the EU made it harder for Coca-Cola to make their product taste shittier. There is a reason there is a huge market for "Mexican Coke" throughout the US.
I think a lot of people are going to be surprised in the near future (once the network rolls out to residents) just how cheap fast internet can be. And many people don't realize just how awful Comcast's uplink speeds are (1 Gb down won't save your Zoom calls if you only have <=20 Mbps up). Bountiful is in for a big quality-of-life improvement for internet users (which is basically everyone).