Chattanooga to offer 10 gigabit internet service starting today

Any idea how many people that covers? Looks like just a couple square miles of coverage (roughly eyebyalled). Is that mostly business or residential areas?

What's interesting about USI is that they are funding it all themselves, and growing their fiber installations at a rate that seems sustainable.

One of their founders posts fairly regularly on Reddit with updates on construction, and he's pretty open about how things are going.

Unfortunately for me I'm about two blocks away from being covered, so I'm hoping they expand my direction next summer.

Its still pretty limited in the rollout. http://www.scribblemaps.com/maps/view/fiberusi

It looks like if your rural phone company is good, you'll have faster, cheaper internet before the cities. Given the whole density thing, that's pretty sad.

somewhat off-topic but 10Gbps would be pretty hard to fully utilize for the normal user... mosts sites/servers probably won't even send you small files at this speed.

Was just about to say 'Meanwhile in Australia where I pay $79/month for 100GB of ~500kbps'. And I live in a relatively modern populated area, I shouldn't have to fight my neighbours for open ports!

Only fixed wireless where I am on the Sunshine Coast, QLD .. and unfortunately my building is not line of sight to the tower, so I don't have any options whatsoever. ~2mbps/200kbps on a good day, otherwise the backhaul is so saturated it is practically unusable. :-( I can get satellite apparently, but last I checked they hadn't worked out the physics to get terminal lag/latencies down to acceptable levels for that to be an actually viable alternative. At least where I am, the NBN is a joke even for those that do have it.

Going by this video I think you mean: "Meanwhile in 'straya"

Thank you. Download is $300/ month. What's the upload speed cost ?

Edit: website says upload and download. Amazing. Tempted to rent or buy a little office space in Chattanooga.

Hey Brian!

I remember stopping by the office back during the fireplug days and having a chat with Travis and the team! Happy to hear of the ambition progress in the press

You're doing God's work creating alternative scenes for tech companies outside of the Bay Area. Thank you.

I know the feeling. It's hard to believe that my old college town of Starkville, Mississippi has gigabit fiber to the home and I don't here in metro Denver. :/

Knoxville is still a frustrating state of affairs. Comcast has really set it's place in stone throughout most of the city, with city representatives declaring they are not interested in developing municipal options and that comcast is fine.

Even more aggravating are all the billboards listing "Get Ready Knoxville! Fiber is HERE" ... at a 2 year contract $300/mo price and $1000 setup. Gee thanks.

I was thinking about moving out there. Had no idea they had gigabit. Extra motivation. :)

I've got 1gig via hyperoptic in London.

Compared to the 80/20 VDSL I had before, browsing is pretty much the same. The difference between enabling and disabling adblock is far far greater than having 1gig.

Uploading files is generally a lot quicker.

However, most internet services can't handle it. I rarely get more than 1-2mbyte/sec to bitbucket or git for example, which is annoying since that can be painfully slow on large repos.

Even worse, hard drives struggle to keep up with high internet speeds. SSDs are fine, but considering how quickly you can fill even a large SSD you don't really want to be using them for giant file downloads which can take advantage of it.

Finally, WiFi really can't deliver 1gig or anything close to it. I often drop back to 2.4GHz WiFi in some areas of my apartment and that is by far the biggest drawback.

So really, you only get 1gig or anything close when you're on a very fast server or protocol, downloading to an SSD on ethernet.

On symmetric 1gbit/s FTTH here in Europe. It changed my life to the positive as I was able to finally cancel internet service from one of the old "rent collectors" such as a cable provider in my case.

Also, ping times are down, hence faster browsing, also upload speeds are way up.

The killer feature for me at least is the ability to use remote machines (and especially their storage) as if they were on my LAN. Unfortunately, as the sibling comment mentioned some things that should be better aren't because bumping up the local connection speed is not always sufficient as the remote machine's connection speed and the intermediate protocol overhead also makes a large difference. Additionally, I've been quite disappointed in the performance of some of our quite expensive enterprise level NAS appliances (topping out at ~200Mpbs or so).

Worse are cloud storage services, especially things like Dropbox / Box.com / github / iTunes downloads that have extensive throttling, especially on uploads, sometimes as low as 10-15Mbps. (these are super irritating because they feel like they should be fast but are clearly being traffic shaped to a perfect 10.0000Mbps).

There are some cases where you get much better speeds. OS downloads tend to be unthrottled, Bittorrent stuff and downloads from some CDNs can keep up. Steam is pretty good as well.

For work purposes where you can control the remote machines and protocols used, and have the ability to upgrade the remote storage systems to handle gigabit speeds, it makes a number of actions that used to take to long to bother with actually possible.

Examples: - Grab a packet capture of a busy network interface and pull it down locally for analysis in wireshark - Download, edit, re-upload large media files in raw/intermediate working formats - In some cases work directly off of mounted network drives rather than using local scratch storage - Really anything where you want to use thick local applications to edit serious amounts of data.

For a purely residential setting (where you might be dealing with wifi, spinning hard drives/thumb drives, and only have access to slow consumer level cloud storage services) there are probably diminishing returns after ~200Mbit. All that said, while the upload difference between 100Mbit and 1000Mbit might not be that great right now, the difference between 10Mbit and 100Mbit is pretty significant and sadly, at least in the places I've lived your options are often ~10Mbit or ~1000Mbit for upload without much in between.

If consumer level hardware and cloud services pick up the pace I expect 1000Mbit connections to be a lot more useful. Those developments might not happen if there aren't enough annoyed people with 1000Mbit connections watching a 10Mbit dripbox uploads and complaining.

If you were going to stream video or work remotely it would be a huge deal.

1 Gbps symmetrical FTTH here. I never need to prepare anything or think about bandwidth.

Want to boot a Linux distribution from a USB memory stick? Don’t wait 15 minutes for the download to finish, just wget to your USB memory stick directly.

Want to download that embedded toolkit? No more finding a different task until that multi-gigabytes download is done. Just start it, wait a couple of seconds, continue.

Going over to a friend’s house? No more asking what movie we might want to watch beforehand and copying it onto my laptop. Just mount my workstation via sshfs and play it.

When I used to live at my parent’s house, occasionally some family member would ask “who’s uploading something? I can barely browse the web”. This just doesn’t happen when you have more than enough bandwidth.

To me, it’s like a flatrate for bandwidth. You just never need to worry about it.

The hardware will get cheaper as more people will want it.