Chattanooga’s public ISP now offers citywide residential 25 gigabit service | Hacker News Reader

Chattanooga’s public ISP now offers citywide residential 25 gigabit service

timesfreepress.com

49 pointsdormo11 comments

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

That's not exactly a price point that I call "residential internet" you can get 25G or even 100G or 400G literally everywhere as long as you have deep pockets. I'm not sure what's the news here.

Yah, but you’re talking apples and oranges.

Fiber “literally everywhere” usually requires a massive capital outlay. I’m not getting 25G fiber to my house in Taos, NM or Bend, OR without many tens of thousands of dollars in up front costs, and similar pricing monthly after the fact.

Providers will amortize the capex of a build over the life of the contract and also factor in other possible customers they may gain along the route or in the building (for multi-tenant buildings). You will "always" pay for some portion of the build, but, discounted and amortized across the life of a contract is pretty standard even with $0 upfront.

They will, unless you're asking them to do something completely out of their planned provisioning. Then it gets very expensive, very quickly, and you're expected to front that cost.

e.g. pricing out a run of fiber down 10 miles of dirt road in the middle of nowhere. PtP wireless ended up being a much better deal, even after having to arrange tower space.

Is there a comprehensive map of gigabit fibre offerings in America?

This gets close. Local cable plant is ever changing and sometimes records are inaccurate.

https://broadbandnow.com/report/fiber-optic-availability-map...

https://broadbandnow.com/research/data

It is pretty inaccurate in my experience. When I was house hunting, I learned to simply put each address in the ISP website.

Even now, I put my zip code in, and it says 940Mbps fiber available, with an asterisk that says it may not be available everywhere. Except I know in my zip code, 95% of the houses do not have fiber, only the developments built in the last decade or so.

And as a shortcut, any neighborhood with buried utilities developed between 1980 to ~2010 will likely not have fiber.

Even the ISP positively indicating service does not necessarily mean you have service; tech can roll out and say you need to spend tens of thousands of dollars to make it from the premises to the neighborhood node.

Highly inaccurate. Depends on "speeds up to ..." which means that you almost never actually see that speed. In fact, you probably never get within 10% of that speed.

What sort of network gear would you need to take advantage of a connection this fast?

Surely this is socialism!

We have 2 corporations that can provide a competitive market, and since free markets lead to the best (pareto optimum) outcomes, this should be illegal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com