Colorado repealed law limiting municipal internet

For those who don't know, Longmont Colorado's Nextlight internet service provides symmetric 1Gb/sec speed for 50 USD per month and they don't spy on your traffic.

It is the most reliable residential internet service I have had to date and is more reliable than the commercial internet at my places of work in Boulder.

0000011111• 3 years ago

What is the data cap?

bobwaycott2• 3 years ago

I don’t brag on Chattanooga, TN often, but when I do, it’s always about the municipal symmetric gig fiber—CHA/EPB was the first to do it in the US, it’s always been cheap, it’s more reliable than anything else anywhere I’ve been, no data caps or throttling, held off a Comcast lawsuit trying to stop them (so Comcast went to the state to legislate away meaningful competition), and (afaik) there’s no spying on you.

I was lucky enough to build a bunch of the software used consumer-side to enable signing up for and managing fiber internet/tv/phone service, was brought in to establish and run their first internal software team, and built even more cool software to make tech support real-time, improve the lives of CSRs, and more. And they’re now getting into quantum computing. Truly a great group of people trying to take care of their city, and every time I run into anyone, I’m still impressed by what they’re doing.

the_pwner224• 3 years ago

It's $70 per month. The $50 rate is for only for customers who joined years ago. If you move to Longmont and sign up as a new customer you'll be paying $70.

The pricing isn't super cheap, but it's very fair and the service quality is good. No data caps, symmetrical speed, good reliability. No IPv6 support though. They also recently started offering 2.5 and 10 gbps for $150/250.

teaearlgraycold• 3 years ago

I live somewhere with good competition between private companies and can get "up to" 10 Gb/s symmetric for $70/month. Realistically it's more like 5-7 Gb/s but I'm not complaining.

So you can get good results with municipal. Or in dense areas private works fine if there's competition.

thcipriani• 3 years ago

+100 Yay, Longmont!

My service has been rock solid: https://photos.tylercipriani.com/2023-05-25_next-light.png

SplitVengeance• 3 years ago

Another longmonster here. Totally agree that NextLight is awesome. However, as someone that runs a nonprofit in town, I wish that business/nonprofit pricing was more reasonable.

mplewis• 3 years ago

NextLight is a local gem!

donatj• 3 years ago

The actual difference is almost certainly moot at the end of the day since the ISPs are all in bed with the feds, but the concept of getting my internet from the same institution (read: Government) that brought us the patriot act sounds less than ideal.

wolrah3• 3 years ago

You're thinking about the federal government. This is about local governments developing last mile networks for the benefit of their residents.

ultrarunner2• 3 years ago

I'm personally skeptical of any level of government, but then I come from the place where Steven Seagal was given access to a sheriff's department tank (provided by the federal government, naturally), and drove it through a gate targeting alleged cockfighting [0]. There's plenty of horrible stuff Joe Arpaio did, but if county-level governments are receiving "tools" (including stingrays and other surveillance equipment) from the federal government, I don't see any reason they wouldn't just walk into the local government ISP whenever they wanted.

Not that I trust Cox et al much more, but I have at least passing sympathy for GP's overall point.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2011/03/23/134803230...

pessimizer• 3 years ago

Better to give access to people who don't need the Patriot Act to go through your stuff at will.

I don't think your city/county/state is administered by the feds.

jahlove• 3 years ago

Does any state (short of maybe California, I suppose) make it on the front page of HN as much as Colorado?

simlevesque• 3 years ago

New York ?

hesdeadjim2• 3 years ago

Well, we're a very polarized red/blue state, a tech hub, and the source of most of the water for the entire southwest.

kyrra• 3 years ago

Colorado has not been a purple state in 8+ years and is going more solid blue by the year. In the 2022 election, there was one thought to be close statewide election. It was a blowout, 55.9% dem, 41.3% GOP. The 2020 presidential election had very similar results.

https://www.politico.com/2022-election/results/colorado/

caseyohara2• 3 years ago

Colorado used to be very polarized, but that's not so true anymore. It leans pretty strongly blue now:

Biden won Colorado with over 55% of the vote, and by a victory margin of 13.50%, an 8.6 percentage point improvement on Clinton's victory in the state four years prior, the strongest Democratic performance since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, and the first time that it voted for a presidential candidate of either major party by a double-digit percentage since Ronald Reagan in 1984.
In this election, Colorado weighed in as 9.1% more Democratic than the nation as a whole. The results established Colorado as a Democratic stronghold, rather than the Democratic-leaning battleground state it had been for the past three election cycles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia...

thomasjb• 3 years ago

Principality of Sealand?

dredmorbius9• 3 years ago

1,477 results, just edging out Michigan (see my earlier comment).

dredmorbius9• 3 years ago

So, I just manually checked via Algolia for total story mentions for all time as of this writing. Keep in mind that this is not front-page mentions necessarily, though it might be possible to crawl the "past" links to get those: <https://news.ycombinator.com/front>.

Maine (22,890) and Iowa (19,353) both beat out Colorado and California. Why the Maine love I've absolutely no idea.

"Washington" appears 22,246 times, though that's massively confounded by appearances of "Washington Post" (18,634). Adding "state" as a qualifier (e.g., "state of..." or "... state") reduces that to 461 instances. "Seattle" alone appears nearly 5,000 times which would be 9th overall (sorry, Florida). "Redmond" gives another 892 occurrences.

Colorado is actually 11th most frequently occurring state name.

If you include cities and toponyms from within California (SF, SJ, Los Angeles, SD, SV, Hollywood, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Stanford, etc.), there are well north of 30k mentions of the state or regions within it.

10 most mentioned: ME (22,890), IA (19,353), CA (10,839), NY (9,009, including NYC matches as they're within the state), IN (6,151), TX (5,603), OH (5,085), FL (2,556), VA (2,369, excluding WV).

10 least mentioned: SD (93), RI (98), NH (136), ND (150), NE (159), WV (161), SC (178), WY (209), NM (213), VT (229).

Data (with additional cities/regions or confounding searches listed for some cases):

Alabama: 372

Alaska: 1,127

Arizona: 914

Arkansas: 264

California: 10,839 (Cities/regions: San Francisco: 7,221, San Jose: 493, Los Angeles: 1,540, San Diego: 732, Sacramento: 187, Silicon Valley: 13,782, Hollywood: 3,050, Palo Alto: 833, Menlo Park: 120, Redwood City: 33, Santa Clara: 199, Santa Cruz: 96)

Connecticut: 1,369

Colorado: 1,633

Delaware: 612

Florida: 2,556

Georgia: 1,350

Hawaii: 883

Idaho: 274

Illinois: 789 (Chicago: 3,634)

Indiana: 6,151

Iowa: 19,353

Kansas: 573

Kentucky: 301

Louisiana: 294

Maine: 22,890

Maryland: 921

Massachusetts: 620

Michigan: 1,456

Minnesota: 530

Missouri: 314

Mississippi: 248

Montana: 486

Nebraska: 159

Nevada: 580 (Las Vegas: 582, Reno: 84)

New Hampshire: 136

New Jersey: 491

New Mexico: 213 (Albequerque: 48, Los Alamos: 89)

New York: 9,009 (New York City: 1,905, Manhattan: 2,355, Wall Street: 2,934)

North Carolina: 368

North Dakota: 150

Ohio: 5,085

Oklahoma: 277

Oregon: 911

Pennsylvania: 358

Rhode Island: 98

South Carolina: 178

South Dakota: 93

Tennessee: 287

Texas: 5,603

Utah: 1,005

Vermont: 229

Virginia: 2,530 (less West Virginia: 161)

Washington: 22,246 (though many confounding matches: Washington Post: 18,634, Washington + state: 461, Washington DC: 369, Washington D.C.: 112. Seattle: 4,958, Redmond: 892.) Actual is closer to 461.

West Virginia: 161

Wisconsin: 387

Wyoming: 209

dredmorbius9• 3 years ago

And, after looking again at HN's API and determining that front pages aren't represented in it ... I'm crawling the 5,939 front pages from 20 Feb 2006 to 25 May 2023 and scraping those to find mentions of states on the actual front pages.

Aggressive crawls result in 403 after a few fetches, so my current attempt has an apparently-adequate delay parameter set. It'll take a day or two for the crawl to complete. Presently up through 22 Sept 2007.

State-name matches (with some false positives) in that set:

  Delaware corporate franchise tax is due today (March 1st)  (March 1, 2007)
  An Early Stage Entrepreneur's Guide to New York City  (March 5, 2007)
  Web 2.0 Expo 2007, April 15-18, 2007, San Francisco, California  (March 10, 2007)
  Zillow Becomes Illegal in Arizona  (April 16, 2007)
  New York Times on the social news uproar  (May 3, 2007)
  What Silicon Valley Could Learn from Columbus, Ohio  (May 22, 2007)
  New York Times Will Lower Editorial Standards Online And Reduce Size Of Print Newspaper  (May 26, 2007)
  eHarmony sued in California for excluding gays  (June 1, 2007)
  New York Times versus Digg  (June 6, 2007)
  A Patent Lie - New York Times  (June 9, 2007)
  Interactive Colorado Nightlife Guide - "Social Nightworking"  (June 16, 2007)
  In the state of Hawaii, tax breaks make tech investments nearly risk-free?  (June 27, 2007)
  Top Web Apps in Arizona  (June 28, 2007)
  Millionaires Cash Out Of California  (July 16, 2007)
  C.E.O. Libraries Reveal Keys to Success - New York Times  (July 21, 2007)
  Pics of Web Company HQs in California - Digg, Facebook, OpenDNS..  (July 25, 2007)
  Hackers find serious problems in California voting machines  (July 30, 2007)
  A Mystery Solved: "Fake Steve" Blogger Comes Clean - New York Times  (Aug 5, 2007)
  Colorado Startup Scene  (Aug 5, 2007)
  New York Times Sees Sense: Paywall Comes Crashing Down  (Aug 7, 2007)
  Parsing Miss South Carolina's Statement  (Sept 1, 2007)
  Texas Startup Says It Has Batteries Beat  (Sept 5, 2007)
  Spider-like vessel hits New York waters - can cross the Atlantic on one load of diesel fuel  (Sept 8, 2007)
  New York Times Launches Facebook App  (Sept 12, 2007)
  Theory Girl by the University of Washington CSE Band [mp3]  (Sept 15, 2007)

Note that seven of the "New York" mentions are for "The New York Times".

dredmorbius9• 3 years ago

For anyone still watching, the crawl's just completed. I'm processing stats now.

Currently looking at:

- Most mentioned states (may add territories).

- Most mentioned cities (330 or so largest US for now, may add selected global cities). .

- Most mentioned countries / country identifiers, including EU.

Also looking at submitters, submitted sites, associated votes and comments, and trends over time, though those may take a bit longer to complete.

Considering companies and universities as well.

Analysis is largely awk, grep, sort, uniq --- standard shell tool stuff. Amazingly powerful though really. Crawl via wget which performed wonderfully as usual. Thanks to HN/YC for not throttling too aggressively.

dredmorbius9• 3 years ago

Dates covered: 2007-2-20 -- 2023-5-25

Total stories: 178,072 (Should match 5,939 days * 30 stories, seems to come a bit short with 98 fewer stories than expected.)

- States mentioned: 50 (mentions: 1,344)

- Cities mentioned: 109 (checked against list of 330 largest US cities, plus a few additions of my own).

- Sites submitted: 52,687

Top 20 states by raw string-match (this is adjusted below for some overstatements):

   1.  new york:         316
   2.  california:       308
   3.  texas:             98
   4.  washington:        73
   5.  colorado:          38
   6.  florida:           38
   7.  arizona:           28
   8.  georgia:           24
   9.  utah:              24
  10.  kansas:            23
  11.  virginia:          23
  12.  oregon:            22
  13.  michigan:          19
  14.  minnesota:         16
  15.  north carolina:    16
  16.  ohio:              16
  17.  alaska:            15
  18.  indiana:           15
  19.  hawaii:            14
  20.  maine:             14

Confounding factors include other terminology, other name matches:

"New York" frequently appears in reference to newspapers or cities:

  new york times:            98
  new york city:             55

So adjusted NY score: 163

"Washington" is even harder to disambiguate, as it may refer to the state, city (DC), as a topnym for the US / US Government, etc., It's challenging to identify these textually, though the newspaper and monument mentions can be identified:

  washington post:           16
  washington times:           1
  washington monument:        1

Adjusted WA score: 55. And is probably lower.

California is often mentioned by toponym (e.g., "silicon valley", region (bay area), or specific cities (SF, LA, etc.). I'm NOT going to adjust for these but do note the following major occurences:

  silicon valley:           399
  bay area:                  65
  california ave:             2

There are a few other more minor examples such as "kansas city" (confounding "kansas"), "oklahoma city", and "iowa city", though those don't affect top results.

Adjusted top-5 state rankings:

  1.  california:       308
  2.  new york:         163
  3.  texas:             98
  4.  washington:        55
  5.  colorado:          38

So, answering the original question, Colorado is the fifth-most-loved front-page state.

The 10 least-represented states:

  41.  new mexico:         6
  42.  alabama:            5
  43.  idaho:              5
  44.  north dakota:       5
  45.  connecticut:        4
  46.  nebraska:           4
  47.  new hampshire:      4
  48.  rhode island:       3
  49.  south dakota:       3
  50.  south carolina:     1

Top-10 US city-name mentions (see confounding factors above):

   1. new york:         316
   2. san francisco:    192
   3. boston:           117
   4. seattle:           87
   5. hollywood:         76
   5. tempe:             69
   6. berkeley:          63
   7. chicago:           62
   8. cambridge:         50
   9. detroit:           41
  10. los angeles:       30

(This excludes the NYC burough of Manhattan, which gets 36 mentions itself, nudging out LA.)

I've also got a list of most-featured front-page sites, with the ten most frequent being: nytimes.com, techcrunch.com, arstechnica.com, bloomberg.com, wired.com, wsj.com, youtube.com, wikipedia.org, BBC (as both bbc.com and bbc.co.uk), and theguardian.com. The mean votes and comments for each are interesting, with Bloomberg topping by both average vote (255.46) and comments (178.04), from the top-10. (There are obviously sites with much higher mean scores but less frequent appearance, including singletons).

I've broken submitters by freqency, points, and comments as well, with 43,745 submitters accounting for the stories analised. The long-absent nickb tops front-page appearances at 1,322, followed by ingve (1,177) and tosh (679). I've apparently landed 60 front-page submissions averaging 329.00 points and 147.52 comments (both fairly respectable --- I'm apparently not submitting total tosh).

I'm still updating my code and checking data (and found a couple of glitches writing out the above, e.g., whatever I'd done to tabulate city mentions didn't work). Data exist presently in flatfiles, I'm thinking of dumping to sqlite for possibly easier/faster analysis.

A rough and preliminary look at countries represented in front-page titles, again with numerous issues:

   1.  US:  1350
   2.  U.S.:  1073
   3.  China:  634
   4.  Japan:  526
   5.  India:  477
   6.  UK:  288
   7.  EU:  225
   8.  Russia:  221
   9.  Germany:  165
  10.  Canada:  162
  11.  Australia:  157
  12.  Korea:  140
  13.  France:  116
  14.  Iran:  91
  15.  Dutch:  80
  16.  United States:  75
  17.  Brazil:  69
  18.  North Korea:  69
  19.  Sweden:  68
  20.  Cuba:  67
  21.  Egypt:  60
  22.  Norway:  60
  23.  USA:  59
  24.  E.U.:  54
  25.  Israel:  53
  26.  Iceland:  52
  27.  New Zealand:  47
  28.  Mexico:  45
  29.  Spain:  43
  30.  Finland:  39
  31.  Italy:  38
  32.  South Korea:  38
  33.  Switzerland:  38
  34.  Singapore:  36
  35.  Mali:  35
  36.  Chile:  33
  37.  Turkey:  33
  38.  Argentina:  27
  39.  Netherlands:  25
  40.  Syria:  25

"Cuba" often appears as "Mark Cuban", Jordan is the country most often confounded with a major celebrity and/or IT/tech personality ("Michael Jordan" and "Jordan Hubard" respectively), "Mali" is most likely to be confused with a car or AMD chipset, the United States has multiple possible references (US, U.S., USA, U.S.A., America, American), some of which are confounded (e.g., "North America"). But this provides a rough sense.

dabluecaboose3• 3 years ago

I had a brief moment of hope that this might mean decent internet would be available to me, before remembering the entire reason I don't have fiber internet in-unit is because my condo HOA is a bunch of boomers who turned down the install. Kickin' it 2007-style with my DSL

samtho• 3 years ago

This is infuriating and would have led me to start a smear campaign against the leadership ultimately leading to a vote of no confidence.

dabluecaboose3• 3 years ago

As a filthy renter, I have very little leverage with the HOA unfortunately.

ilyt2• 3 years ago

Senate Bill 152 was promoted by the cable industry as a way to prevent wasting taxpayer money on infrastructure projects, like municipal internet.

Yes, I'm sure it was to "not waste taxpayers money" and not to remove competition...

Hell, why cable companies had a say in that in at all?

kevviiinn3• 3 years ago

Because in a capitalist society, capital owners are in control

zx8080• 3 years ago

Can it be called democracy then?

DubiousPusher3• 3 years ago

It's hard to remember but this is the level of tech discourse in 2010. Though I guess it's not any better now.

https://twitter.com/SenTedCruz/status/531834493922189313

ilyt2• 3 years ago

The saddest part is that he's still in power.

the_only_law• 3 years ago

I’d be particularly curious if there were any projects in between that truly were a “waste of tax payers money”. That should tell you something.

dopidopHN3• 3 years ago

Companies are people and money is speech? And we’re all very free.

p_l• 3 years ago

Consider that unrelated to all the slavery stuff, Confederacy had constitutionally banned infrastructure improvements by government...

linsomniac4• 3 years ago

I'm in Fort Collins and have had city fiber for a couple years now and it's a game changer. We got it during earlyish covid and having 4 of us on video calls was bringing Comcast gig service to it's knees, I imagine because of the limited outbound bandwidth. The city fiber service is gigabit symmetric, no caps, $70/mo, or 10gig for $200/mo. They also are introducing a 2.5gbps, I think that's $100.

I'm working on upgrading my internal network to be able to take advantage of upgrading to 10gig.

And one of the best parts is that when I had a weird networking issue, I was on the phone with a legit networking person in 15 minutes, rather than stuck with someone who couldn't do anything more than read from a script.

The issue ended up being a Comcast routing issue, which I told them from the top, but figured they'd like a heads-up about it. Me and one of my coworkers on the city fiber couldn't reach the office on Comcast, but 2 other coworkers also on city fiber could. I eventually got ahold of a Comcast Business network engineer later that day and they had it resolved the next day.

throwbadubadu4• 3 years ago

4 of us on video calls was bringing Comcast gig service to it's knees, I imagine because of the limited outbound bandwidth...upgrading to 10gig

Huh, what? Stop imagining and do the math with numbers, maybe Comcast is shitty in general and other metrics.. but still doing here regularly 2 concurrent video calls with sometimes Netflix on top without any issues... on 50 Mbit still! (also asymmetric btw, I may be undemanding, but so a bit wtf on reading that)

(Or Comcast cable internet? There is often more bandwidth sharing involved than they tell, especially upstream, or what does gig service mean?)

froggit• 3 years ago

Comcast gig is 1gb/s downstream. I don't know what the upstream rate is and they avoid mentioning it, but based on my experience with them I could see 4 video calls being enough to choke it. It's hard to really appreciate the symmetric data rate until you really start using some decent upstream traffic, then it becomes a day and night kind of difference.

hedora3• 3 years ago

Back when we had 100mbit down with comcast, it couldn’t reliably stream at 3mbit.

linsomniac4• 3 years ago

As others have said, it is the outbound that was really killing it. Sure, we could watch multiple Netflix, but streaming our camera video and audio and it'd get flaky. ISTR I had 250Mbps inbound at the beginning and outbound was ~25Mbps. Upgrading to gigabit got us the fastest outbound they offered at the time, I think it was 40 or 50Mbps. Also, as others have said, Comcast really doesn't like talking about the upstream speed. When I got the upgrade to gigabit, I did their chat support to ask them and even when their support people were directly asked they were reluctant to say. ISTR they kept asking why I wanted to know.

barkerja• 3 years ago

I'm on Spectrum with 1 gig down, 25 Mbps up. It's not difficult to saturate my upstream.

wyclif2• 3 years ago

I'm working on upgrading my internal network to be able to take advantage of upgrading to 10gig.

I'm curious about the best way to do that. What are the upgrades you're thinking about doing?

csunbird• 3 years ago

10gig switches, cat7 cables/fiber cable and 10gig ethernet cards for computers?

willis936• 3 years ago

Microtik and Xyzel switches, MM fiber and SFP+ modules, and ConnectX-3 NICs from ebay. I did this last year and it was cheap and has been working great.

linsomniac4• 3 years ago

Sure, I'm happy to go into it.

Prior to 2 years ago I had been running cat5e shielded cable around the house (security cameras wanted shielded). cat5e for shorter runs apparently can do 10gig. But once I heard I'd be able to get 10gig, I started doing runs as cat6a. Significantly more expensive, but YOLO.

I got an Aruba 2500 PoE switch for ~$100, it has two 10gig SFP ports.

I have an old Dell R720 coming that I'm going to put a $75 dual 10gig card in. My plan is to hook that up to the fiber ONT, and run Proxmox or Ganeti on it, then run a VM for my firewall. Then hook that to the switch at 10gig.

Currently I don't have any interior devices that will do 10gig, so there's not much day-to-day use I'll see from it currently. When I get there, I'll probably be looking at adding a Mikrotik 10gig switch because they're relatively affordable, though maybe I'll be able to find some old enterprise gear as well. So far I haven't really seen any. The Netgear 10gig switch we have at the office seems to work fine and was ~$800 new, but is EOL, so maybe something like that will be cheap. It's only fallen over once. :-)

So the big question is why I'd go to 10gig... My primary machines are laptops, my work machine stays on my desk, so I could add one of those $300 USB-C to 10gig adapters, but probably won't. My primary personal machine is a macbook I use 100% wireless, so not really going to get any better there until I replace my Ruckus R610 with something that'll do 2.5gbps, but no plans for that anytime soon.

So the Dell could have 10gig fairly easily. Maybe I'll mirror some OpenStreetMap data or mirror media for work to cut down on our AWS costs... That could be done at 1gbps though as well.

Partly, I just want the geek cred of 10gig, partly I want to support the city fiber network through paying more for a bigger plan. Maybe I'll offer my family offsite backup, but that also probably won't need 10gig.

Evidlo• 3 years ago

Why do asymmetric plans exist in the first place anyway? I assume connections between autonomous systems are symmetric full-duplex, so doesn't these mean ISPs have the same amount of uplink bandwidth to divide between customers as downlink?

ExoticPearTree3• 3 years ago

Because GPON is asymmetric and that is the cheapest way of deploying fiber optic for residential use.

If you want symmetric, then you need a lot of "active" equipment and that drives the costs up.

detaro4• 3 years ago

A few points:

a) Most non-fiber connection technologies have limited bandwidth to split between upload and download. If you are offering connections over those, offering a symmetric speed means you are offering a lower max speed (years and years ago, in the single-MBit days, there was a regional German ISP that let you switch your ratio - was very popular with developers and designers at the time, who could reset their connection to be high-upload before sending large files)

b) Only a subset of users cares about high upload speeds (To a degree it's a self-fulfilling prophecy: people are so used to it that most don't even know why they'd want good upstream because they never had the opportunity to do something that would benefit)

c) Some that really want them can be made to pay a lot extra (e.g. for "business class" service, especially if combined with things like static IPs for hosting)

d) some high-bandwidth uses are more likely to cause work for the ISP: people hosting servers (complaints about content etc, attracting attacks), file sharing (rightsholder complaints). Similarly, a customer machine turning into a DDoS traffic source has worse impact if it has high bandwidth

gavaw3• 3 years ago

Because technologies like GPON or HFC were designed with asymmetry in place because most users download much, much more than they upload. In the case of HFC the asymmetry can be particularly egregious.

detourdog• 3 years ago

Before cables modems everything was symmetric. Cable modems were bandwidth constrained and they decided to offer more download then upload. One could also argue that the phone companies as network companies and wanted to make connections and cable companies just wanted to provide content. Offering symmetric bandwidth could be seen as competition by cable companies becuase anyone can publish. Finally the phone companies started to offer asymmetric bandwidth when DSL was introduced. One could subscribe to asymmetric DSL or symmetric DSL.

linsomniac4• 3 years ago

One component of it can be the exchange and transit deals that the ISPs make. "Peering" is generally made under the terms of "sending as much as you receive", so in that way it can be beneficial to limit your outbound, if you are trying to slip into available inbound bandwidth to pair with some business-class outbound-heavy.

But, there are also lots of other business and technology reasons as others go into here.

DubiousPusher3• 3 years ago

It's weird but there used to be a lot of private roads. I hope one day we'll see private internet infrastructure as just as weird.

charcircuit• 3 years ago

Private roads aren't weird most people use them every day as that is how most people reach homes or businesses they wish to visit.

DubiousPusher3• 3 years ago

You know what I mean.

bombcar• 3 years ago

We have a local quasi-municipal phone/Internet provider and they're about twice as much as 500/500 fiber that just got laid, and I'm getting hard pressed to stay with them even though I like the idea.

Maybe I should call and ask if I can keep my current service at the fiber prices.

japanuspus• 3 years ago

In Denmark we now have an infrastructure / network-provider split on fibre, so that one company provides the physical infrastructure and then there is an open marked for network providers to provide services over that fibre.

Physical last-mile infrastructure is owned and operated by utility companies (privately operated non-profits), typically together with electricity or water, but in some areas by specialized fibre utility companies.

This setup requires a mature technology, but it has been very effective in driving consumer costs down.

argulane• 3 years ago

In Estonia we are trying to do similar thing with infra/isp split. Coverage is limited but already those places can get 1Gbit internet 3X cheaper than others.

ExoticPearTree3• 3 years ago

Yes, this is one of best ways to do fiber. The fiber provider digs all the trenches and runs fiber to every building/house in the city and then you as an end-user can contract the internet service from whichever provider you want.

The costs are minimal and in my neck of the woods I pay about $10 for 1Gbps (actual rates being about 950mbps down and about 800mbps up).

gkanai• 3 years ago

Japan does this for fiber too. You pay an annual fee for the fiber itself and a separate fee for the ISP to provide the bits. Provides a lot of competition for the ISP-portion and Japan's had gigabit FTTH earlier than most (it helps that Japan's geography is such that most people are in major cities.)

Colorado repealed law limiting municipal internet

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