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Comcast, beware: New city-run broadband offers 1Gbps for $60 a month
A municipal broadband service in Fort Collins, Colorado went live for new customers today, less than two years after the city's voters approved the network despite a cable industry-led campaign against it.
[...] Fort Collins Connexion, the new fiber-to-the-home municipal option, costs $59.95 a month for 1Gbps download and 1Gbps upload speeds, with no data caps, contracts, or installation fees. There's a $15 monthly add-on fee to cover Wi-Fi, but customers can avoid that fee by purchasing their own router. Fort Collins Connexion also offers home phone service, and it plans to add TV service later on.
[...] "The initial number of homes we're targeting this week is 20-30. We will notify new homes weekly, slowly ramping up in volume," Connexion spokesperson Erin Shanley told Ars. While Connexion's fiber lines currently pass just a small percentage of the city's homes and businesses, Shanley said the city's plan is to build out to the city limits within two or three years.
"Ideally we will capture more than 50% of the market share, similar to Longmont," another Colorado city that built its own network, Shanley said. Beta testers at seven homes are already using the Fort Collins service, and the plan is to start notifying potential customers about service availability today.
[...] In November 2017, voters in Fort Collins approved a ballot question that authorized the city to build the broadband network.
The Colorado Cable Telecommunications Association (CCTA), of which Comcast is a member, donated $815,000 toward a campaign against the ballot initiative. The Chamber of Commerce also opposed the plan. Comcast didn't participate in the campaign publicly, but the company would have been the main beneficiary of a vote against the municipal option.
In all, the industry-led opposition spent more than $900,000 fighting the ballot question, while the pro-broadband group led by residents spent about $15,000.
Before the election, a study by a pro-municipal broadband group estimated that "Competition in Fort Collins would cost Comcast between $5.4 million and $22.8 million per year."
Fort Collins Connexion promises to follow net neutrality principles, saying it will not "intentionally block, slow down, or charge money for specific websites and online content."
The municipal ISP's privacy pledge says that it does not "share, distribute, or sell a User's specific Internet usage history, call history, voicemail, or other electronic data generated from a User's Internet and phone Service to any external third party."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 02 2019, @12:59AM (1 child)
Once more, coherent this time. The idea is the same: The new technology will drive the world's wealth upwards and the old technology will keep the wealth at a certain level until the technology becomes obsolete. And this is not a speculative thing, it's a fundamental idea that will determine how the world operates and what the nature of the technological singularity will look like. But is it a great deal to ask whether the idea is as simple as it seems? What if the theory is a bad idea? In which case, could it actually be that we only have to wait until the technology becomes obsolete to figure this out?
How many of the technological singularities have been predicted, and then not realized?
It's hard to say, because I didn't bother investigating these singularities to begin with. So I have to go with the theory that we've already seen some of them. Consider: The singularity may not be a specific technology, but rather an idea. (Note that this isn't really a prediction of a given singularity, but that the concept is well.)
(Score: 2) by TheGratefulNet on Monday September 02 2019, @02:24AM
"meow said the dog"
either that, or its pretty good computer-written garble.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."