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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: 2) by hwertz on Monday September 02 2019, @04:25PM
$15/month for wifi? Now that's a ripoff. (Actually it really is, but given the usual quality of the inbuilt wireless access points I've always liked to run my own anyway.)
Anyway, good on them. I'm sure this was one of those areas where the local monopoly (or duopoly if they have a DSL provider) was being quite uncompetitive. I mean, where I live, the duopoly (Mediacom and Centurylink), the cheapest plans are supposedly $35, so like $55 after taxes and fees (and don't blame the taxman on this, only about $2-3 of that is tax, they just love falsely advertising far lower prices than they really have through massive fees.) That's for like 3mbps. There's a "price for life" thing for $40 for "up to" 100mbps (but the fastest the DSL provider provides is 40mbps.) Gigabit? They cable co have it, but the promotional price is well over $100/month.. so who knows what the real price is.