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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: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 02 2019, @07:36AM (1 child)
Serious question, will the city put up at least the same level of resistance to the RIAA/MPAA and copyright trolls as the ISPs currently do? I loath Comcast as much as anyone but they have pushed back against some of the more abusive requests from those groups. They also have large legal departments that handle warrants and other legal requests and have released stats showing they reject many of them. Is there any significant difference between corporate and municipal in that sense? I'm for municipal and want to see it take off but these questions need to be asked.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 02 2019, @01:59PM
First, if your think there is something secret about the mapping from ip address to name and address, then you may be misusing or misunderstanding the Internet.
But if you feel you have an exception to this, then with Municipal fiber, you can go to the city council meeting to talk about it, or even run for office to fix it.
Try that with a commercial provider.