If you live in Bruce County, Ontario then locally-owned Bruce Telecom will likely be getting you fibre service in the next while. Ten points if you can find Chesley, Ontario without searching for it first; the 2000 residents have fibre (spelled that way in Canada, seems Cory is showing his roots there, eh?)
If you are one of the hundreds of thousands who live in Mississauga, Ontario (or pretty much anywhere in the GTA) you’re stuck with Rogers, Bell. Now, the locally owned hydro just pulled brand-spanking new power cables to every home in my neighbourhood. I asked at the info night if they would be pulling fibre at the same time; blank stare.
We have cable and get 200MBps (I think), and that costs about £60/mo, and to be honest, that’s fast enough. There’s very little that I can connect to that can actually saturate that connection, so any faster would be pointless until the upstream connections improve.
This is an awesome example of why healthy competition among businesses is a damned good thing for people, why businesses should not be allowed to grow so damned huge, and why Reagan is a piece of shit for what he did to allow monopolies to flourish.
Welcome to boingboing.
To keep reminding people that the company’s Kool-Aid is good for them. Flood the space with their message so the renters don’t pay attention to other messages.
I always thought that if they invested even a percentage of their lobbying and propagandizing budget into developing and implementing any forward-looking technology at all, they’d have cornered the market decades ago. They already have the infrastructure best suited to rolling it out!
The other day I read about some telco campaigning against a city’s plan to offer municipal broadband, and asking residents to vote against it.
It’s truly mind blowing how much power private companies have in the US. I have never ever seen something like this happening in Brazil - not that we don’t have large companies abusing their power, but damn…
Convincing people to vote against their best interests is an art form in this country that has been perfected over decades. You can’t do this kinda thing overnight.
I find it hugely ironic that it’s easier to get fiber to the home in the small central Illinois town of Gridley than it is in most of the Chicago area. As late as 1971, telephone service in Gridley was fully manual; you picked up your phone and asked Central to complete your call. Making a long-distance call to Gridley was an adventure in itself.
Now, the locally-owned telco offers fiber up to gigabit speed, at surprisingly reasonable rates. Meanwhile, in my neck of the woods, AT&T only offers fiber to the press release.
Sadly, there doesn’t have to be a conspiracy for Fiber to be a non-starter, there can simply be lack of demand. And sadly, Google, who was willing to (and did) lose a bucket of money, could not make Fiber financially viable.
I was both surprised and saddened by this, but it’s pretty hard to beat a large scale test. (Evidenced based policy doesn’t always go my way.)
Anecdotally, Bell Canada rolled Fibre onto my block. Probably cost them $20K at least. As far as I can tell, I’m the only subscriber (there may be one other) and they went door-to-door.
Apparently most people don’t consider Fibre worth $100/month - no conspiracy necessary. And demanding that everyone else pay for my Fibre (by having the costs spread to non-using customers) seems another example of the relatively rich being subsidized by the masses.
Oh, it’s better than that. In my home state, a small city (a town really) called Wilson got so tired of the company it contracted with failing to meet its contractual obligations that they started their own ISP. Wilson now has some of the best internet in the state.
What was the cable companies’ response? They lobbied hard and now it’s illegal for any municipality in the state to start providing municipal broadband.
Now that my introductory rate’s ended and my cable company has hiked prices once I’m paying $70/mo for what I was paying $45/mo for before (150 down, 15 up.) They certainly think that people will pay $100/mo for questionable copper.
We have a gig now, for half what Crapcast was charging us. Enough of my neighbors signed up for the gig service that we get “great” offers from said former ISP every week. They now wish to offer us 350 mbps for $70/month introductory rate. Yeah, no, that’s 40% more money for 66% less speed.
I didn’t want to sound like we reached the end of history and no more progress is necessary.
But, it is more like how all the extra speed has a smaller impact than the previous improvement.
I remember when I switched from a 56k modem to DSL, and it was fantastic, but it still could be better.
When I went to the uni, they had a great network, and I think for most of time I could not use it all because no one was offering content that matched it.
I think it was a 10 or 100M and I could only get a very high download rate for computer stuff (linux images and some software) that were hosted on other unis.
Now, I have a 20M connection and I can already download faster than I can consume, and apart from getting some video with a huge bitrate, I don’t see anything else that needs some much speed.
I think I would not switch to a higher speed if I had to pay even a cent more.
I serve out video on a media server for friends, and my house has 6 phones, and 3 separate tv users along with 5 computers. We have 50/50mbps fiber and it gets saturated quick when my brother starts livestreaming LoL to twitch, a friend is watching a movie on my server, and mom and dad want to watch the football game. There’s also passive usage, like our doorbell and security cameras which stream back to cloud storage. Then it becomes a problem when my bro’s wife needs to skype into work etc the list goes on. I wish I had 100mbps, I could easily find a way to use most of a gig.
I’m kinda with you here. I get 150/15 (like I mentioned upthread) for 70/mo but if they had like 50/15 for say $20/mo I’d probably take that. The point of fiber is that the people who need it can get it, but it also pushes down prices for copper.
blank stare.
