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from the fiber-is-good-for-you dept.
DSLReports notes
Way back in 2005 we profiled the Massachusetts towns of Shutesbury and Leverett, two shining examples of the kinds of U.S. towns that have fallen into broadband connectivity black holes. Large regional providers like Verizon didn't want to upgrade the markets (Boston still hasn't been upgraded to FiOS), and could barely be bothered to keep aging copper in the region fully functional.
A decade later and Leverett last October formally launched LeverettNet, a new network that now delivers up to two gigabit speeds with no usage caps to the town's previously-underserved masses.
The company started by offering locals symmetrical gigabit connections for $65 a month. Starting January 1, locals will now be able two get 2 gigabit connections for $25 a month plus a $50 monthly LLMP operating fee ($75 a month). [* Correction - see update, below.]
Contrast that to Comcast's price tag for two gigabit service: $300 a month with $1000 worth of installation and activation fees. You'll quickly realize why ISPs have turned to protectionist stat laws to ban towns and cities from wiring themselves.
The town also announced this week that it's lowering prices for all of its services (the exact opposite of what usually happens this time of year). The cost of gigabit and phone service is dropping from $44.95 to $39.95 per month, while the price of telephone service is dropping from $29.95 to $24.95 per month (see all prices here). The outfit also announced this week that the project would have a notably lower impact on property taxes than expected.
[Update: We've since confirmed that LeverttNet isn't technically offering 2 Gbps, they're just dropping the price of their 1 Gbps service and associated bundles, and increasing the speed of their POP to 2 Gbps. The last mile connections for these users will remain 1 Gbps. We apologize for any confusion.]
So, what are y'all doing in -your- town?
(Score: 2) by gman003 on Thursday December 31 2015, @02:06PM
Paragraph three, "locals will now be able two get"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 31 2015, @02:07PM
And now that the infrastructure has been rolled out and paid for by the towns (bonds that will take years to pay back), I'm sure those People^W Companies will buy it up/force towns to sell it to them for cents on the dollar^W^W^W^W a reasonable price so that they can continue to provide an unparalleled service to these new suckers^W customers.
Man... my typing skills are off today...
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 31 2015, @02:14PM
Typos happen when you are angry.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 31 2015, @02:38PM
This actually happens.
You see, governments providing services are bad because they are "inefficient" (meaning the workers actually get paid a decent salary).
Here in Alberta we avoided such communism with a "Public Private Partnership". Bell built the Central third of the network, while the government built the less lucrative routes. I was not able to quickly find official-looking text to that effect, but here is the map (pdf warning) [servicealberta.ca]. As far as I know, The "base network" is privately owned, while the "extended network" is publicly owned.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by davester666 on Thursday December 31 2015, @08:26PM
same with power in Alberta. ever since it was deregulated, we've had the privilege of paying much more for power. We even have the 'california' thing going on here, where companies will shut down generating plants on high-usage days for 'maintenance' to drive up the spot price.
free enterprise at it's best.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Thursday December 31 2015, @02:09PM
I wish I could get the lowest tier. The difference between 1 and 2 Gbps is like the difference between a car that can do 200 mph and one that can do 400 -- your actual speed limit is defined by the servers you connect to / the roads you drive on.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday December 31 2015, @02:41PM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 31 2015, @03:19PM
Indeed GP misses the point. You don't know you need it because no one had it for significant amount of time to fully realize its benefit. But I am more than certain the benefit is there.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Hyperturtle on Thursday December 31 2015, @03:41PM
1 gb/s I think you mean.
1 GB/s is closer to a 10 gigabit connection.
Anyway, I am sort of surprised at what people toss out as to what they think they can do to make things faster. true routed gigabit connectivity does not come inexpensively; prices have dropped, but consumer devices that can do 1 gb routing often suffer from using one CPU to control it all in the router/whatever device.
The light is green (or high intensity blue), but once you enable features, performance plummets and traffic gets dropped (people may wrongly call it lag). Then, tech support recommends to get the speed you want, hook right into the internet and bypass all of that. THey said it was ok so security never once enters the minds of people when they bypass the firewall because Speed.
Then, they may learn that maybe they never had that gigabit or even 100mb speed because their local network, or the router, or even the computer in use... doesn't actually support the speed. The light is green, but... it's slow, blame comcast! May the lord save anyone with a realtek network card. The computer's CPU does the processing for the network; your speeds are tied to how you use the speed, and even if you have a nice NIC, the router/firewall you connect may not be able to actually route internet to private at a gigabit. Many can't do much more than 50mb, let alone 1000.
My experience has been that if the device has a dedicated WAN port, then it probably can't go very fast between the WAN and LAN. I recently replaced a device that a friend had used for a while; he put DD-WRT on it and had a lot of pretty cool features. But it maxed out at 30mbps no matter what. Local network was 100mb just fine, on all ports. It's routing capability, though, tapped out at 30mbps. It didn't say that on the box, though... just 4 100mb mb ports as a switch and 1 routed wan port for internet use. The WAN port lit up at 100mb, but that was only because it connected faster than 10mb.
Replacing it with a newer device greatly boosted the speed, but the link lights -- those didn't change. The connection you physically have often bears little resemblance to the internet speed you can expect to receive, and that's not even considering the *Up To promises made by the ISP.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 31 2015, @05:16PM
these are all valid points!
also worth mentioning is that there's "networking" going on inside CPUs.
if you, for example, transfer from a SATA-HDD-port to gigabit lan card in a pci-e port -AND- are doing some heavy GPU stuff that
is loading to-and-from GPU memory to cpu-RAM ... well the CPU is the "router in this case and you then want a cpu with many
pci-e lanes -AND- BIG GT/s values, preferably something beyond 5GT/s.
also i have no problems with realtek .. maybe the intel nics know a "secret" way to talk to intel routers ..errr ... cpu that make them seem faster?
also worth mentioning are the ubiquiti routers: "REAL 1'000'000 packets switched (routed?)" for under 100 us$!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Hyperturtle on Thursday December 31 2015, @08:14PM
Thank you, and I'll return the favor:
Ubiquiti routers are a great best-kept-secret among us consultants. I think Ars Technica did an article a while ago and was shocked that the hardware inexpensive and not crap.
There are limits to what they can do -- but oh what they can do. They can do things you cannot do with what you get from the electronics store, and can do it at a fraction of the cost of "enterprise" hardware.
(Score: 2) by forkazoo on Thursday December 31 2015, @07:39PM
If you have a friend across town, you can easily copy data at full speed. You know, with the "every node is a peer" and "there are no special servers" philosophy that the Internet was built on.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 31 2015, @03:20PM
Part of the reason for the success of this set-up is probably because both of the towns are full of professors, who are high-income/job security and need internet for their jobs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 31 2015, @03:24PM
The fiber is probably replacing dial-up.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 01 2016, @12:34AM
Population of each town (which are neighboring, and far from Boston or any other major city) is 1800. So while this may be a victory for the little guy, it's a rather small victory.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 31 2015, @05:27PM
nothing much happening in my town. but that's because
my town belongs to a country and the country has declared
that there must be a government duo-poly that doesn't do
much except collect monies from taxes, have names that have "telecom"
in them and issue "licenses" for real business to do the "dirty" work.
ofc this whole internet business is lame and the really big money is
in mobile-phone-networks.
issuing licenses after a auction of a radio-wave spectrum get's big money.
it's amazing how radio-waves can travel through the whole universe (even if the source has no license)
and how on the planet earth with the stroke of a pen a few billion dollars can be conjured out of thin
air ^_^
for example, in my country, 10 Mhz (!) in the 900 Mhz spectrum were just "licensed" for ~ 2 billion us$.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by jmorris on Thursday December 31 2015, @07:15PM
So we have the usual idolaters of government singing the praises of government owned and operated Internet at it today. So lets look, shall we?
First off the prices discussed are meaningless since every resident is already paying a special property tax to fund the boondoggle. Considering property tax rates on the East Coast, probably comes to more than the lowest tier of service at least and you pay it whether you use the service or not and if it is a bond issue you will go right on paying for another decade or so even if this thing fails. Wow, wouldn't you like to start a business on those terms! Imagine Walmart coming into town and imposing a $50/home/year tax to build and pay the operating expenses of their store, bet they could offer even lower 'prices'.
$75/mo for Internet service (no lower tiers, no you buy max or nothing) isn't exactly a great deal. And yes, it is $75 I went through to their actual page to confirm. I guess everyone in MA is rich and needs super speed.... or so the government thought. They will add on a VOIP line for $25/mo. Which, again, is totally not competitive with the private marker but you won't have a choice for reasons I'll explain below.
They give everyone GigE, no caps (apparently because they are too incompetent to implement it or tiered speeds) and an out of town connection to a single 2Gbps fiber that is itself linked into an almost certainly oversubscribed "Mass Tech Collaborative". Oh holy fuck. Only government could build something this stupid and have the "We don't have to give a damn how much the customers complain" attitude to pull it off. I suggest ever idiot demanding every home Internet link be uncapped be forced to live in this town for a year. Then you will understand what we who have actually dealt with superpiggie users have to build around. You certainly won't be subscribing to an outside VOIP provider, running Skype or any of that crap once even a half dozen users get the BitTorrent bug.
And of course, with all of these "Government owned" projects there is always the Crony Capitalist angle. Since government itself knows itself to be to incompetent to even suck, there is always the politically connected local business who ends making off with the lions share of the cash. Enter Crocker Communications, a small local outfit mostly in the answering service business who has apparently found itself running a network... poorly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 31 2015, @08:47PM
$75 a month for internet is a great deal when private companies neglect an area (at least that is what the people of Leverett think). Internet in nearby towns is about $50 a month and slower.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 31 2015, @09:53PM
No, it's not that! It's this:
So we have the usual idolater of anti-government
jmorris, ideologically, cannot admit that people might be able to work together for the benefit of all. It will always, for him, go to the dark side! Always two there are, a libertarian, and a neo-nazi.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 31 2015, @10:27PM
After A Decade Of Waiting For Verizon, Town Builds Itself Gigabit Fiber For $75 Per Month [techdirt.com]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 31 2015, @10:13PM
1-word rebuttal: Chattanooga
.
You folks who are mired in Cold-War propaganda and insist on calling Stalinism|Maoism "socialism" are missing the whole point.
That was NOT (bottom-up) Socialism (though they liked to call themselves that--and the "First World" liked to repeat that nonsense).
That was (top-down) Totalitarianism.
The mark of Socialism is the collective ownership of the means of production.
The best definition I've seen (in 15 words, no less) comes from this guy. [google.com]
(Insight throughout the whole article.) [counterpunch.org]
When you own something, you get to say what happens with that something.
If what THE PEOPLE say doesn't matter, what you have is NOT Socialism.
Socialism can also be defined as "Democracy everywhere".
If you don't have that then, again, you don't have Socialism.
...and if you (and a supermajority of the people) want something and aren't getting it, you clearly don't have a Democracy.
Socialism can be done correctly.
So far, "locally" is the way it has been successful.
As more and more of these successes are available as examples|boilerplates, the "locally" thing can spread and, in time, scale up.
N.B. Those who depend on Lamestream Media for their "information" won't be seeing/hearing about these challenges to the incumbents who (like you) are quite contented with wealth and power concentrated in a few hands.
For good measure, I'll leave you with this:
Social and economic decisions should be made by those whom they most affect. [google.com]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 01 2016, @07:11AM
It used to be a new fiber network for Australia. It was estimated to cost billions and fiber was needed to replace the aging copper network. The speed was promised to be 20 Mbps but may be between 12Mbps to 100Mbps. The cost is more expensive than existing DSL2 plans. All competition is being killed by Federal law. In many cases people are being forced off the old copper network and the NBN is the only option so say goodbye to unlimited plans for the sake of .. what? Speed? They charge extra for higher speed. I will pay an extra $20 per month for the same plan I have on DSL2. Some people will be better off.
Except.
Now.
The govenment has decided that fiber to the home is too costlyand will take too long. So they are putting in "mixed technology" which means that perhaps only 25% of homes will get fiber, and the rest will be connected to the NBN network by copper and cable.
That's right. It is not a misprint. They touted spending billions on this fancy new fiber network to.upgrade Australia to put us ahead and fututeproof our network giving us the potential for 100M to home then turned around to deliver a solution which is about the same as what we have for a similar cost.
See whingepool for debate and links to newspaper articles covering all of this.
The worst part is that if they had not futzed around jumping into bed with Telstra they would currently be on track to deliver the fiber NBN promised to Australians.
Polititions believed that 100M to the home was excessive. Not needed. So they cut back on the fiber rollout in favour of mixed technology. Then Netflix came online and the sht hit the fan. The public quickly found that we need a new network now. Today. Fiber is a good solution. The NBN would be just the thing. Like the Harbour Bridge, cost be damned, we need this infrastructure today.
.. and our government is rolling out cable, copper, and some fiber.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 01 2016, @07:14AM
Sorry
I am just a little upset at how badly the australian government has screwed up the NBN