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Comment by bilalq | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. I've been a CondoInternet customer for a while, and have had an incredibly positive experience. They even just announced a promotion on their gigabit plan for $80 a month with no contract.

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.

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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

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).

There are a lot of new apartments going up in Seattle. I can count five or six new buildings just off the top of my head.

It really depends on the neighborhood. Huge swaths of the city are zoned for single family homes only. This is something we need to change.

http://www.seattle.gov/dpd/Research/gis/webplots/smallzonema...

what's the latency like, since they use some amount of microwave wireless infrastructure?

$ ping google.com

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

If you're asking because you're wondering how bad the latency is, remember that microwave is the speed of light and the most direct route between two points. It'll be better than fiber, all other things being equal. It's possible the bandwidth isn't up to snuff, but latency shouldn't be a problem.

I'm guessing these microwave links are short enough to blast through poor atmospheric conditions that are very common in a place like Seattle. At greater distances from the provider packet loss (resulting latency problems) could be a legitimate concern.

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