Condo Internet uses a combination of microwave and fiber to provide connectivity to the buildings that they service. They only target apartments/condos, since building the infrastructure to individual residences is not worth it.
So the definite haves of the city will continue to have amazing access to this world-changing network that we call the Internet and the rest of the city can go screw itself. The vast majority of Seattle's housing stock is in single-family and small multi-family dwellings. Holding up a couple of providers that cherry-pick the easiest ones does not make for a broadband plan, especially when a lot of those SFH-style dwellings are rented by people, either wholly or by the room, who couldn't afford the prices of the very expensive buildings served by CondoInternet or Cascade. Sure, those folks (who aren't all flat broke and destitute, just don't make a quarter-million per year) can suck it up and deal with Comcast and caps and horrible customer service so long as the condo-dwellers get 1Gbps service in addition to their unobstructed views of the Space Needle.
1. That's primarily a political choice: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7344438. One could argue that SFH residents are already telling everyone who wants to live in Seattle but can't afford to, to screw themselves.
2. It's much cheaper per unit to deploy fiber to apartments and condos than it is to single-family houses; it seems unlikely that most residents of such housing would want to pay the true cost of the rollout.
> it seems unlikely that most residents of such housing would want to pay the true cost of the rollout.
Great, I'd love to talk to a company that provides gigabit service in Seattle who will provide a gigabit link to my residence and charge me no more than $2,000 for the install. (Why $2,000? I dunno, out of thin air, I suppose.) "But that's not the true cost of the rollout?" Awesome, and the subscribers to CondoInternet didn't pay the massive up-front cost for their links, either.
Here's my main complaint: People hold up CondoInternet and say "look, look, Seattle has gigabit Internet, why are you still complaining?" That's not anywhere close to answering the underlying discussion. Even if everyone who wanted gigabit could afford to live in those places, they wouldn't physically hold all of the people. It's like the FCC saying that one person in a ZIP code has DSL so the entire area "has broadband."
The debate over SFH versus multifamily is a good one, and I'd love it to tilt in favor of multifamily. But ignoring 95% of a city's residents is not the way to go about getting better access. Hell, even Comcast manages to cover the majority of Seattle with 50Mbps speeds.
However, it is a pity that it's restricted to condos and large apartment complexes right now. It would be great if services like this were ubiquitous. Gigabit availability was a large factor in my decision of where to live.
PING google.com (173.194.33.165) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from sea09s18-in-f5.1e100.net (173.194.33.165): icmp_req=1 ttl=59 time=0.857 ms
64 bytes from sea09s18-in-f5.1e100.net (173.194.33.165): icmp_req=2 ttl=59 time=0.779 ms
64 bytes from sea09s18-in-f5.1e100.net (173.194.33.165): icmp_req=3 ttl=59 time=0.831 ms
One obvious solution is to relax zoning rules in Seattle; a lot more condos and apartment complexes would be built if it were legal to do so, and the benefits would extend far beyond fiber connections (see, for example, Matt Yglesias's The Rent Is Too Damn High or Edward Glaeser's The Triumph of the City for more).
http://www.seattle.gov/dpd/Research/gis/webplots/smallzonema...