My parents in (poor) rural Michigan will soon have county wide fiber internet provided by the local electrical co-op. I'm sure the support will be semi-local and so will the technicians. So you'll actually get people that at least pretend to give a shit about your problems all for a better price than whats available in the city from Comcast.

And yes, they and ATT lobbied extensively to block communities from building out their own ISPs because they didn't want to compete. Michigan has a law in place where a municipality can't build out a service if at least 3 companies are willing to bid on running 'high speed' internet service in a town.

I have WK&T and have symmetrical gigabit w/ 24/7 chat support in a town with a population of 300 in TN. Spectacular service, but I did sit on a waiting list and pay $1000 for installation. My bill has gone down over time (WK&T is a co-op.)

I have only ever had issues for a period of 2 months during peak times when my traffic was being routed through another ISP that I would always get ~0.2% packet loss from. WK&T helped me identify some routes that were unaffected to set up a tunnel to work around it for the few times I was affected.

its weird, I live in a tiny little town with about 400 households and I now have access to 1G symmetrical fiber for about $80/month - but we (the town) had to pay for the fiber build out with increases taxes and user fees...well worth it in my case. I would have been OK with only Comcast as previously it was just 3Mb Verizon DSL for almost my entire WFH career (20+ years).

A cynical person might say that large telecoms company aren’t interested in monopolizing your market and so you are free. I’m astounded by how bad/expensive my internet is in massive cities that should be easy to connect. I live in an apartment in LA and have very few options. I lived in a loft in downtown before (5 years ago) and the building only allowed DSL. I have a business connection in Portland and pay around 100/month for 15Mb.

I'm in Brooklyn by prospect park and only have 1 ISP choice for my apartment. And it's coax based, so every plan caps at 20Mbs upload. It's that or satellite internet. I miss having fiber.

Yeah, seems some rural communities are getting fiber faster. My house in northern GA far from Atlanta has symmetrical(?) fiber. It gets 1000 up and 1000 down.

A big part of the reason for this is that rural areas/exurbs get heavily, heavily subsidized.

A few years ago my local ISP (Cincinnati bell) literally stopped their profitable roll out of fiber in the city for the better part of a year. They got a huge subsidy to put fiber in the exurbs around the city, and shifted all of their people to those areas. Go figure.

Chattanooga is actually almost in Georgia, and not too far from Atlanta.

But yeah, it just goes to show that with the right opportunity and motivation, you can really do some cool things in places you wouldn't expect. I used to work remotely for a company in Chattanooga, and I was always blown away by the internet speeds whenever I visited the HQ. I remember downloading a 300mb file in 10s, in 2015. The story behind how it all came to happen is quite cool too.

This has been going on for a while, comments like this and the recent Tennessean article/debacle are a bit eye opening to the naivety of technology and accomplishments outside of major hubs.

Let me tell you the story of CA attempting to build high speed rail..

“real estate is expensive and NIMBYs don’t want it”… the end.

(Also the story of why Hyperloop is pointless. technology isn’t the problem that needs solving! Fast rapid transit tech has existed since the 1980’s and it’s not the cost issue.)

That, and don‘t let the fox in the henhouse (namely, if you decide that contracting to consultants is a good idea, you do need in-house staff to make sure they‘re just not perpetuating an endless gravy train, and other consultants are not a substitute for this)

Thats not the end... the project has secured funding and is estimated to have a route from sf to la by 2030.

Also Elon Musk admitted that he had no intention of building hyperloop, it was just a way to detail HSR so he could sell more cars.

Detail? Derail?

source?

Why would a story about building high speed rail be relevant to installing fiber adjacent to existing utilities?

Because the power poles aren't owned by the cities, and the owners prevent other companies from getting access:

https://www.dwt.com/blogs/broadband-advisor/2015/03/googles-...

Still a far cry from the engineering complexities, legal challenges, and costs involved in constructing high speed rail.

It is cool, but I imagine it's expensive. Tried their site with a random address, and 10Gig is $300/month...their 1Gig is $68/month. 25Gb isn't yet listed.

Reported elsewhere as $1,500/m residential and $12,500/m commercial. I think they're not aiming for much residential uptake...

Source? I've been looking for the price just out of curiosity.

>Initially, EPB will charge residential customers $1,500 a month for the 25G service and $12,500 a month for commercial customers.

https://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2022/aug/24/chattanoogas...

I have an employee in chatt who reported the same pricing on slack.

Seems reasonable! Comcast Business in San Francisco is $130/mo for only 600/35.

Thanks for posting, I was also very curious about pricing. I pay around $150/mo. in Austin TX for 2G Google Fiber.

Haha, I work remotely now in a rural unincorporated area near Knoxville, and we get AT&T fiber at 5 Gbps, with the local municipality rolling out 10 Gbps soon. When I was living in Redwood City, nothing like that was available at our address. I was astonished at the poor internet provider options in Silicon Valley.

Check with sonic, they cover a big chunk of silicon valley with symmetrical gig fiber.

Every 3mo or so I check their website and all that's on offer is resold AT&T DSL.

> Meanwhile I have traffic-shaped Comcast and no fiber in sight in Silicon Valley.

Isn't the SF bay area more of a geography issue than an incumbent monopoly issue? I'm sure its a mixture of both, but also a geography issue.

It's a five minute bike ride on flat land from Google HQ (mostly along utility right of way) to housing with < 6mbit DSL.

Drive 10-20 miles, and you'll be in areas where AT&T decided to sell the lines to a bankrupt telco. Looking at the lines in those areas is entertaining. The telephone poles were installed by some ancient secret society named "GTE", and now have 20 degree bows. When lines loosen up and block traffic, the usually just tie them up on to some nearby tree branch.

If you look really carefully, you'll occasionally see fiber points of presence dangling precariously from this mess of caution tape and guy-wire.

It's not all bad news: I know of communities outside of telco right of way that managed to tap into one of those.

Last time I heard they were debating between 1 gig symmetric to each home or paying a couple hundred bucks (one time) per house to get something comparable to what you'd expect in Tennessee.

It's definitely a problem with incumbent monopolies.

  Drive 10-20 miles, and you'll be in areas where AT&T decided to sell the lines
  to a bankrupt telco. Looking at the lines in those areas is entertaining. The
  telephone poles were installed by some ancient secret society named "GTE", and
  now have 20 degree bows. When lines loosen up and block traffic, the usually just
  tie them up on to some nearby tree branch.

The way I remember it GTE did not go bankrupt and instead became part of Verizon. Most of the Bay Area was PacBell (landline) territory, but there were a few pockets here and there where GTE had a monopoly. For wireless it was a different story with AT&T / CellularOne getting Side A and GTE / Verizon getting Side B with PacBell being relegated to the PCS band.

In fact I just took a quick peek at their Wikipedia page. GTE went bankrupt in 1933 and recovered. They were not part of the Bell system until 2000 when they were acquired by Bell Atlantic as part of the creation of Verizon.

Monopolies suck but GTE (and Verizon) were almost always better about building out higher speed DSL and fiber than PacBell/SBC/AT&T ever were.

> where AT&T decided to sell the lines to a bankrupt telco

Is that frontier? I'm pretty sure those lines were never at&t. A local phone company, then gte, then verizon, then frontier. IIRC.

Verizon is a descendent of babybells, but that doesn't make everything they touch at&t.

No, what would geography have to do with it? Fiber can be run on poles or underground throughout the Bay Area — it’s an incumbent monopoly issue.

Whut? You don't have internet in Silicon freakin' Valley? Lol