Finally they got us turned on a RURAL HIGH SPEED FIBER OPTIC INTERNET

[powerboatr]

Congratulations!

In my little corner of rural Texas (Bastrop County, ~9-miles from Bastrop & ~20-miles from Austin) there's absolutely no sign of fiber of whatever technology in my future.

I've been here since 1985, I suppose the copper-wire is still running buried down my road but AFAIK no-one has been on it for many years, all my 'neighbors' are on cell-phones (with boosters) and cell or satellite for internet, etc.

Yep, we're a 'legal subdivision' since 1972 with county-maintained roads, lot sizes ranging from 2-250 acres. The county finally 'paved' (well, chip-coat) our road about 3 years ago.

Me, I'm 'making do' with cell aided by an elevated YAGI antenna and booster for phone / internet and OTA for TV.

Still, I wouldn't trade my remote near-the-end-of-a dead-end-road location for anything!

its on its way
DC has spent the money to get us all high speed for rural areas,
sort of like rural free delivery back in the day for mail

the 2 companies that did ours, have crews all over the state.
the guy that walked me through the process and some insight had a 22 f150 and it had already over 150k miles, he said is lucky to be home one day a week.

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[adt1982]

I'm on 1 gig down/50 megabytes up from the cable co at $69 a month.

Fiber company has been building out in town at 1 gig up/1 gig down for $69 a month.

 

[HammaMan]

$70 seems to be the sweet spot for avg home internet costs. For those retired, providers should be offering the 'obama money' discount if you're not making too much. This is what ATT offers here, speed is symmetrical. Most people don't even have the means to use more than 1Gb which I find amusing as there's probably customers of it that can't even use it.

 

[fordtruckman2003]

Thanks guys for reminding me Comcast pricing sucks.

 

[HammaMan]

Thanks guys for reminding me Comcast pricing sucks.

"At comcast, not only does our customer service suck, but so does our pricing"

Pretty sure I saw that in a commercial once.

 

[snapper9601]

That's just nuts for software costs. Curious how they balance such costs against GPON fiber deployments which have some very economical means of deployment without the need for amps and media converters. Happen to know the cost of one of the aerial media converters? I'd looked at utilizing pole attachments to deploy fiber but the POCO here really thinks their poles are made of gold. They also require "engineering" fees on empty poles with a completely open-ended contract on said service pricing. They've been sued more than once by the FCC for their nonsense fees including per-pole monthly charges. They keep going right back into money milking schemes taking advantage of their ROW monopoly.

No idea on the media converter cost. And what you said about balancing software costs against fiber deployments, both good questions. Last I heard and when I gave a shit about it, Comcast is deploying RPHY as one of their strategies. No proprietary CMTS. Use off the shelf hardware, but use in house software and code. RPHY is still DOCSIS, but it's 4.0 symmetrical. High RF output with no amplifiers. It still utilizes a lot of the old coax and passives. There is still a lot of life left in the "old crappy coax" due its aforementioned significant bandwidth. There is time and money savings by using technology such as RPHY in their arsenal as opposed to "just do FTTH and be done with it".

Why, you may ask?

Here, POCO's share pole ownership with Telco, called Joint Pole Ownership. It's typical for CableTV to rent space from Telco, who is the bottom owner/dweller of the pole (pun intended). So to your point, any additional load CableTV wants to add has to be engineered for each span and pole. For both weight and wind loading. By both the POCO AND Telco. Which the entity requesting to add additional cables, gets to pay all of the engineering costs to both pole owners before any work can start. I recall one single pole replacement for a freeway crossing we had cost $50k. And that was in maybe 2001. The Pole App process showed the engineering required that a bigger, taller, stronger pole was needed. It was $20k just for the giant wooden pole. We had no choice, we needed to build the fiber. The Pole App Process is a HUGE impediment to progress. Sometimes taking many months. Or longer. What choice is there? Oh, and don't forget each and every city you're doing work in has a different permit process for any underground work, road work permits, road restoration, safety signage, etc. In one of the 4 counties in my area, there are 9 different cities. Each with their own and completely different permit process AND fee structure. Imagine wanting to traverse 13 miles through that county to build fiber, needing pole engineering permits from POCO and Telco for each pole and span, and permits from each of 9 cities (insert small violin here).

That is all pretty densely populated, not rural like the OP's area. One size does not always fit all.

 

[HammaMan]

Indeed, coax has significant bandwidth, it just needs amps regularly. If the g00berment didn't lock out all of the spectrum in archaic chunks, it'd pretty easy to provide rural internet with the use of a spectrum allocation server. Even in CBRS they played some games. Unlock it all and let us little guys light it

 

[fordtruckman2003]

"At comcast, not only does our customer service suck, but so does our pricing"

Pretty sure I saw that in a commercial once.

Just had the annual $10 increase.

Fast speed and low latency. Not thrilled with the 1.2TB monthly cap being back, almost went over last month.

 

[HammaMan]

Just had the annual $10 increase.

Fast speed and low latency. Not thrilled with the 1.2TB monthly cap being back, almost went over last month.

Yeah, usage limits are a joke. On a connection that delivers 600Mbs, at full speed, 1.2TB is reached in 4hr 47 minutes.

 

[fordtruckman2003]

800 Mb down 20Mb up

The only good thing is speed has gone up many times in the last 18 years to go with the price creep.

 

[adt1982]

$70 seems to be the sweet spot for avg home internet costs. For those retired, providers should be offering the 'obama money' discount if you're not making too much. This is what ATT offers here, speed is symmetrical. Most people don't even have the means to use more than 1Gb which I find amusing as there's probably customers of it that can't even use it.

We don't really need 1 GB down, but I had to go with it in order to get 50 MB up, which is the fastest offered here. This plan is also price-locked.

 

[HammaMan]

We don't really need 1 GB down, but I had to go with it in order to get 50 MB up, which is the fastest offered here. This plan is also price-locked.

That's the issue with a lot of cable companies. Comcast's offerings for the most part are just bad. 35Mb up is the best. That ATT is symmetrical, 1Gb up and down. It's no contest against comcast's offerings and prices. The ATT $55 300 plan is 300 up and 300 down, 10x faster than comcast's plans at 3x the price.

 

[fordtruckman2003]

AT&T here is $55 for 50 Mb.

 

[adt1982]

That's the issue with a lot of cable companies. Comcast's offerings for the most part are just bad. 35Mb up is the best. That ATT is symmetrical, 1Gb up and down. It's no contest against comcast's offerings and prices. The ATT $55 300 plan is 300 up and 300 down, 10x faster than comcast's plans at 3x the price.

I switched over to this provider in August of 2020. We needed the upload speed to post videos, as we had students doing remote learning during Covid. My wife and I are both teachers. Fiber wasn't an option then. I'll probably switch over to the fiber come summer, as they'll have built out most of this side of town by then.

 

[snapper9601]

Comcast's offerings for the most part are just bad. 35Mb up is the best.

Not sure where you get that info from. I just tested mine.

This is on old school HFC plant with 3.1 CMTS.

"That ATT is symmetrical, 1Gb up and down. It's no contest against comcast's offerings and prices. The ATT $55 300 plan is 300 up and 300 down, 10x faster than comcast's plans at 3x the price.

AT&T's Gb symmetrical service is not available in all areas. Nor is the $55 300 up and 300 down plan.
I don't doubt 35Mb up could be the limit of the Comcast system in your area. The SE US is known as Classic Comcast. Way different than the West or other parts of the US.
Level of service availability is driven by several different things in the market area. Same as for any provider.

Again, interesting discussion.

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