Welcome to Mound, MN: home of the $249.99 DSL broadband plan | Hacker News Reader

Welcome to Mound, MN: home of the $249.99 DSL broadband plan

arstechnica.com

14 pointsglymor19 comments

I used to want my hometown to get the Google Fiber trial. Now i'm hoping that Mound, MN wins. :P

That Willy Wonka-style competition drove me up the wall.

The county I'm in turned down a chance to get 10x matching funds from the federal government and decided to buy a ticket in the Google lottery instead.

5... GIGS?

I probably sync that much back and forth in source code garbage and sample data sets between work and my house. Not to mention the fact that all of my video consumption is streaming now (Amazon or Netflix via Tivo).

That's... wow.

My friends make fun of me for paying $120/month for 6M Speakeasy broadband.

But guess who never gets letters saying that he's using too much bandwidth or to shut off his SSH server.

This is one of the reasons I left Verizon--I was in a rural area they were selling off to Frontier and I found out plenty of rumors about them. Plus, performance intermittently dropped for stupid reasons (rumors were, Verizon was taking out all the "good" equipment so they could keep it).

I just checked my Tomato router and so far this month (posting this on 4/15/10) I've used 8.99 GB. I hope Comcast's secret rate limit is < 20GB/month.

  Date     Download  Upload   Total
  2010-04  8.21 GB   0.78 GB  8.99 GB

The upper bound is 250GB/mo. Check your comcast.net account center, and they'll give you the details.

Thanks. I just checked and found the page showing my usage on comcast.net. It looks like getting the Netflix Wii disk has significantly bumped up my usage but its still way under the cap.

An offtopic questinn, where do you save your bandwidth data in your Tomato router? NVRAM? It is suggested "Frequent saving to NVRAM or JFFS2 is not recommended".

People are a little too worried about read/write cycles for flash. They hear "limited" and think it means "you can't update a bandwidth counter every so often", when in reality it means, "you will need new flash after 10 years of writing to it at its full bandwidth".

</rant>.

Mine was set to ram but I just pointed it at nvram. Anytime I try to do anything with jffs2 I get a generic error message. I tried using jffs2 to setup a hosts file but ended up just using the configuration textarea in the tomato admin to set the local addresses.

Out of curiosity what are costs of unlimited plans in USA and how hard is it to get those in more rural areas?

Just want to compare it to my current connection which is unlimited traffic, 460KBs down /~60KBs up for €19.99/month. (It also includes a landline which isn't in use - it's the only provider in my area and cheapest offer they have)

Edit: Wording

I live in a big city, in a neighborhood full of students. My three roommates and I pay a total of $60 a month for a residential connection with a soft cap of 250G per month. The cable company claims that it's rated for 12 megabits, but it's more like 3 or 4 in reality.

If you want an unlimited plan from my provider, you'll have to get a business connection. A friend of mine has that. He gets 50M down, 10M up with no cap for $100 per month.

I would read the article, but then I might feel guilty for ignoring arstechnica's ads.

ignore em all you want, just don't hide em ;)

If the ads load, you should feel no guilt. :)

If you ask the editor of Arstechnica, unless I'm absorbing the ads, subconsciously or consciously, I'm stealing.

No, no he doesn't. Ars gets paid when you load ads alongside a page. There's no metric that says "a person must notice and/or care about the ad for it to count".

You're more than welcome to email me if you want to talk more about it: kurt@arstechnica.com

TonkaToys used to be made in Mound! (Very important tidbit, I know...)

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