> It is perfectly possible to supply 1000Mbps symmetrical fiber service to end users for $20/mo because numerous self-sufficient non-profit municipal broadband organizations in the United States are doing just that.
Probably depends on a lot of things, but my local municipal broadband is an open provider model, my provider charges $95/month and the municipal network takes $59 of that (as of Jan 1 2023). The municipal network doesn't provide IP transit, just gets my bits to my ISP's office. Where in the US is it $20/month?
> This is 2.5% the capacity for 75% the money. If ISPs can't figure out how to do that profitably, they deserve to fail.
Most of the actual cost is maintaining a line to customer premises. My municipality charges ISPs $49/month for 100m and $59/month for 1G, although there's not a real difference in operating costs; either the fiber is up or it's down, and the truck roll to fix an issue is the same. There's maybe an argument that a 100m customer can't/won't cause congestion on the municipal network because (as implemented on my local network), the biggest oversubscription is 48 customers on a 10G uplink. A 25mbps plan would have the same basic costs for my municipality as a 100m plan, although it might actually be trickier because they couldn't just use an ethernet speed setting somewhere in the path to limit speed.
I suspect incumbent broadband providers have some cost advantages over my municipal system, because incumbents have better take ratios, but I honestly doubt they can actually cover costs of just providing a line with service to a home in their territory for $15/month or $20/month.
Probably depends on a lot of things, but my local municipal broadband is an open provider model, my provider charges $95/month and the municipal network takes $59 of that (as of Jan 1 2023). The municipal network doesn't provide IP transit, just gets my bits to my ISP's office. Where in the US is it $20/month?
> This is 2.5% the capacity for 75% the money. If ISPs can't figure out how to do that profitably, they deserve to fail.
Most of the actual cost is maintaining a line to customer premises. My municipality charges ISPs $49/month for 100m and $59/month for 1G, although there's not a real difference in operating costs; either the fiber is up or it's down, and the truck roll to fix an issue is the same. There's maybe an argument that a 100m customer can't/won't cause congestion on the municipal network because (as implemented on my local network), the biggest oversubscription is 48 customers on a 10G uplink. A 25mbps plan would have the same basic costs for my municipality as a 100m plan, although it might actually be trickier because they couldn't just use an ethernet speed setting somewhere in the path to limit speed.
I suspect incumbent broadband providers have some cost advantages over my municipal system, because incumbents have better take ratios, but I honestly doubt they can actually cover costs of just providing a line with service to a home in their territory for $15/month or $20/month.