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Communications The Internet

Municipal ISP Makes 10Gbps Available To All Residents 164

Posted by Soulskill from the all-the-cat-videos-you-can-eat dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Five years ago, the city of Salisbury, North Carolina began a project to roll out fiber across its territory. They decided to do so because the private ISPs in the area weren't willing to invest more in the local infrastructure. Now, Salisbury has announced that it's ready to make 10 Gbps internet available to all of the city's residents. While they don't expect many homeowners to have a use for the $400/month 10 Gbps plan, they expect to have some business customers. "This is really geared toward attracting businesses that need this type of bandwidth and have it anywhere they want in the city." Normal residents can get 50 Mbps upstream and downstream for $45/month. A similar service was rolled out for a rural section of Vermont in June. Hopefully these cities will serve as blueprints for other locations that aren't able to get a decent fiber system from private ISPs.
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Municipal ISP Makes 10Gbps Available To All Residents More

Municipal ISP Makes 10Gbps Available To All Residents

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  • They aren't being sued? (Score:3)

    by fustakrakich ( 1673220 ) on Thursday September 03, 2015 @11:52AM (#50451553) Journal

    I mean, isn't that the way it works? The companies that refuse to provide service sue for 'unfair competition' anyway? Then the nice judge shuts the whole operation down?

  • Why not buy up one 10Gbps line and sell 50Mbps lines for $30/mo while making a nice profit?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Himmy32 ( 650060 )
      Because there are a great deal more costs than the bandwidth. You know running cables and a operating an ISP. A 50Mbps symmetric fiber to the home line for that is great price.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by RingDev ( 879105 )

        A person on could though stick a bunch of UHF antennas on there house and resell white-space 1.5mbps connections to their country side neighbors.

        -Rick

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Because neighbor support is worse than user support.

      • Could anything be worse then scromcast support? Maybe if your idea of support has having someone wack your nuts with a stick.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by TWX ( 665546 )
      I've actually considered this; I'm in a neighborhood that might become a Google Fiber expansion area. Wouldn't be that difficult to run wireless point-to-point to connect neighbors.

      Probably won't, I'm more concerned about the liability if a neighbor does something illegal or otherwise legally challengable, but the idea appeals.

  • Nice! (Score:3)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Thursday September 03, 2015 @11:54AM (#50451567)

    How much for an anonymous seedbox?

  • EPB has said they'll be rolling out 10gb in the near future (within the next year). Given their 1GB prices, I expect they'll be far cheaper than $400 per month.

    I might get it just because. I've got their 1GB service and about the only times I peg it are if I'm downloading a torrent.

    • It would seem that to offer 10Gb at a reasonable contention rate $300/month is pretty the minimum to pay for your upstream bandwidth.

  • And the money flows as fast as the data. (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    They lost $ 12.5 Million last year. They owe the Water & Sewer Department $ 7.6 Million. They already offer 1 Gig service and have all of two customers. The reason they aren't getting sued is because it isn't worth Time Warner's trouble.

  • Start here... (Score:3)

    by JD-1027 ( 726234 ) on Thursday September 03, 2015 @12:19PM (#50451749)
    http://www.homes.com/for-sale/salisbury-nc [homes.com]

  • In my state this is outlawed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by NotDrWho ( 3543773 ) on Thursday September 03, 2015 @12:25PM (#50451791)

    Municipal broadband is outlawed in my state, and most others too. Ironically, even with Chattanooga, one of the most famous of the municipal broadband cities, the rest of Tennessee can't get it because it's been outlawed in the rest of the state.

  • It's all about the money, honey (Score:4, Informative)

    by Mycroft-X ( 11435 ) on Thursday September 03, 2015 @12:35PM (#50451863)

    In 2014 they generated $4.8 million in revenue and after expenses had $229,000 to show for it. Add in depreciation (a substantial expense for a capital intensive company), amortization, interest, and other expenses and they were taxpayer funded to the tune of $144,110. That's almost 1% of all property tax revenues.

    It will be interesting to see if they can be profitable as their services scale past 3,000 customers and service more of their 33,000 residents and even more businesses.

    • BTW, Source is the 2014 budget audit.
      http://www.salisburync.gov/Departments/FinancialServices/finance/Pages/default.aspx

    • In 2014 they generated $4.8 million in revenue and after expenses had $229,000 to show for it. Add in depreciation (a substantial expense for a capital intensive company), amortization, interest, and other expenses and they were taxpayer funded to the tune of $144,110. That's almost 1% of all property tax revenues.

      It will be interesting to see if they can be profitable as their services scale past 3,000 customers and service more of their 33,000 residents and even more businesses.

      Not sure if you're stating that this a bad thing, a good thing, or just some interesting numbers. 1% of property tax revenue going towards really good Internet connections sounds to me like a great use of a small amount of tax revenue. Even eliminating that need for tax money wouldn't be too hard; raising the price by $5/month still makes it a good value, and that would be assuming that their expenses are linear with the number of subscribers.

      • 1% of all property taxes going to subsidize internet service for a handful (3,000 accounts) of businesses and residents seems like a lot. Salisbury is not a booming metropolis, that's a lot of people who probably can't even afford a $45 a month internet package paying higher taxes and utility rates to keep those prices down. Meanwhile they are paying $15/mo for a 2Mb connection with Time Warner Cable because their local government can't offer them anything less than that $45 package.

        • Also, I saw this news story. Maybe the local paper is in the bag for TWC, AT&T, and the other competitors (GASP! In the telecom industry?) but they certainly make some seemingly fact-based points that are more solid than the usual misdirection.

          http://rowanfreepress.com/2014/08/14/why-fibrant-will-continue-to-fail-and-fail-badly-why-salisbury-needs-to-find-a-way-to-unload-fibrant-to-survive/

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by sjames ( 1099 )

            Single gmail account for contact (no phone), dns is wordpress.com, all bylines read either AP or RFP staff, etc etc. Looks more like an avid blogger.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Tom ( 822 )

      If 144k are split by 33k residents, that's less than $5 per resident per year. A tiny price to pay for having the best Internet in the state and all surrounding states.

      4.6 mio. in expenses, again divided by residents, is less than $140. That's a little more than $10 a month. Frankly speaking, at such prices they should just run the whole thing on taxes, provide Internet for free to every house, and save all the overhead of billing and subscription management.

    • Okay, so they 'lost' $144k in 2014. The service is isn't even years old, and it takes a few years to start making a profit on this stuff. Per the article, they have 3.3k users, and 25% penetration in homes in their allowed service area. They made $4.4M from subscribers, or $1,342 each, or an average of $112/month.

      That would work out to 108 more customers to break even, assuming zero marginal cost. Going by operating expenses of $2.96M, that's $897 of cost per customer, per year. Leaving marginal revenu

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by jabuzz ( 182671 )

      Assuming they have laid single mode fibre, then the deprecation can be over such a long time period that it is basically negligible. If you ran single mode fibre 20 years ago you could still use it tomorrow for 100Gbps with off the shelf components. It will be part of the upcoming 400Gbps Ethernet standard, and there are systems that will let you get 1Tbps over the very same fibre though these are specialist systems at the moment.

      You could probably reasonably deprecate the fibre which is the main capital co

  • Should they only be in the layer-2 business? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by swb ( 14022 ) on Thursday September 03, 2015 @12:49PM (#50451965)

    While I mostly think this is great, I wonder if they should be in the "business" of supplying actual layer-3 connectivity or whether they should just be maintaining the fiber plant and selling access to it to other companies willing to provide actual IP connectivity?

    Maybe a purely internal municipal ISP makes sense for supplying IP connectivity to municipal offices, schools or other parts of the government.

    The part that makes me kind of leery is the fact that the government is the ISP and this creates a certain conflict. Does the fact that the municipality runs it mean that the police have greater access to monitor the network or some increased motivation to use municipal control to go after "evildoers"?

    It's not hard to see how this could also morph into the kind of local political control that those in power use to stay in power.

  • Public utilities. All it accomplishes is letting some cronies skim off the top. Is the myth of capitalist efficiency really so attractive that we'll keep ignoring the 97% profit margin isps have?

    • Yeah, like Seattle City Light, which sells green power cheaper than the privately owned utility across the lake.

      Damn those public utilities! We want to pay even more for dirty coal electricity!

    • Re:I'll never understand why we privatize (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Thursday September 03, 2015 @02:18PM (#50452697)
      Because cable companies (which became cable ISPs) weren't originally something you could call a public utility. When they started, nobody knew what was the best way to rig up houses, or allocate bandwidth. When they started offering Internet service, that increased the complexity because now each home needed to be able to transmit data back to the cable company. These were all complex problems with a plethora of possible solutions. The "myth of capitalist efficiency" is precisely what filtered out the bad solutions over three decades, leaving only the efficient ones.

      If cable had been made a public utility from the onset, we'd probably still be stuck with analog broadcasts and a few dozen channels. Just like government-imposed GSM would've been stuck with approx 50 kbps data speeds if the U.S. hadn't allowed CDMA to compete against it. (Orthogonal multiplexing like CDMA and OFDMA are what allows the high speed data rates. With the original GSM TDMA spec, each phone would take up part of the data bandwidth even if it didn't use it. On the other hand, CDMA distributed bandwidth according to how much each phone was using. Eventually, nearly every GSM phone ended up using wideband CDMA for data. That's why they can talk and use data at the same time - they had a TDMA radio for voice, and a CDMA radio for data. CDMA phones only had one radio for both. That's right, CDMA won the GSM vs CDMA war.)

      Once you've arrived at what seems to be the optimal solution, then you can think about turning it into a public utility. That's what happened with electricity - AC and DC networks were allowed to compete, until it became economically obvious that long distance AC transmission was better. Then it got turned into a public utility. But it'd be remiss to think you could get to where we are today without the private capitalism stage - it's what allowed us to find the optimal solution in the first place. (And in fact the current state of electricity as a public utility is impeding efforts to explore if long-distance DC transmission might in fact be better with the modern high-efficiency DC converters that weren't available during the original AC vs DC war.)

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by flink ( 18449 )

        Because cable companies (which became cable ISPs) weren't originally something you could call a public utility. When they started, nobody knew what was the best way to rig up houses, or allocate bandwidth. When they started offering Internet service, that increased the complexity because now each home needed to be able to transmit data back to the cable company. These were all complex problems with a plethora of possible solutions. The "myth of capitalist efficiency" is precisely what filtered out the bad s

  • Yes, but... (Score:3)

    by Fire_Wraith ( 1460385 ) on Thursday September 03, 2015 @12:53PM (#50451993)
    What about the Gulags that residents of Salisbury were shipped off to, and the political commissars patrolling the streets? Didn't these people pay any attention to the warnings from the telecommunications companies about what would happen if the government was allowed to institute socialist internet? ..what do you mean none of that happened? Well, what about the crippling taxes to pay for it, while fatcat government bureaucrats refuse to answer the phones, harass people, change their customer account names to things like "Asshole", refuse to let them cancel service, and generally make their customers' lives a living hell? ...what do you mean, that was Comcast?

  • Even more interesting... (Score:3)

    by MitchDev ( 2526834 ) on Thursday September 03, 2015 @12:55PM (#50452005)

    Wait a year or two and see what happens to the Cable and Satellite providers in the area.

    That's what I want to see

  • Also the Solution to the Last Mile Problem? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 03, 2015 @01:14PM (#50452155)

    Salisbury's solution to this problem is on the right track but it's not the correct solution. If companies sue for unfair competition, they'll win. Governments should not be ISPs or content providers.

    The correct solution to this, which is also the correct solution for the last mile problem, is for the city government to own and maintain the infrastructure that exists in public rights of way, and create a new utility just like most cities have for their water and sewer systems. Then, run all the fiber to a "connection point" where any number of private providers can bring their content and any house or building may connect through the public fiber utility. Of course, any number of ISPs, telephone companies, and other content providers may bring their stuff to the city's connection point, and thus our capitalist free enterprise system is allowed to function unimpeded by the government. End consumers can freely choose between providers, and that will be the end of the bullshit shoveled by Comcast, Time Warner, Wave Cable, et al.

    I really don't understand why governments don't jump at the chance to do this. A brand new public utility is a WHOLE NEW INCOME STREAM, where the government gets to send out bills and collect money. All the have to do is hire a contractor to maintain the infrastructure, buy insurance to protect from natural disasters, and then collect money from everyone FOREVER.

    For the record, I'm a conservative, and I'm very much pro capitalism and against excessive government. However, unlike the anarchists and other extremists to the right of me, I recognize that we need government to provide certain basic minimum functions for the public good. So before I get accused of being a pro-government communist, I humbly submit that providing utilities to all the city's homes and businesses is one of those necessary functions.

    Capitalism will keep all the private providers in check. There's no way Comcast and it's ilk would behave the way they do if they had to compete for your business. If the voters become unhappy with the prices they're charged by the fiber utility, it's their responsibility to vote the bums out and elect representatives who will change maintenance contractors, change insurance companies, and do whatever else is necessary to keep prices low. Therefore, on both public and private fronts, all the power lies in the hands of the people. It's exactly that kind of individual empowerment that conservatives stand for.

    With so much money hanging in the balance and knowing the government has no actual work to perform, why doesn't every municipal government jump on the bandwagon and solve the last mile problem once and for all? ...and use the same solution to provide service to towns like Salisbury?

    • Capitalism will keep all the private providers in check. There's no way Comcast and it's ilk would behave the way they do if they had to compete for your business.

      Bullshit. Just one look at how those same telecom companies have raped consumers with shitty cell phone plans, locked in hardware, insane overage and roaming charges is enough to prove that capitalism does not keep providers in check. Only strong regulation by the government that you feel should be limited has ever done anything to slow down any of it.

    • You answered your own question when you indicated you are a conservative. Conservatives have been trying to shrink government and you propose expanding it. What did you think would happen. Conservatives want small government and big business. Your solution flies in the face of that.

    • Salisbury's solution to this problem is on the right track but it's not the correct solution. If companies sue for unfair competition, they'll win. Governments should not be ISPs or content providers.

      On the other hand, if businesses are so unwilling to provide decent service, the local community standing up a local ISP through the government is a logical choice, though yes, I'd prefer if they formed a cooperative or something. Maybe they can 'spin off' the ISP services in a few more years. But consider that the government is also providing the water & sewer services - somebody else posted the city's audit/budget page, and water/sewer is literally the next page up. They also run a bus system.

      In sh

      • Well said. If there's one thing I find illogical and annoying it's crying that someone picked the ball up when the solution is not to drop the goddam thing in the first place.

        Or to put it another way, if they aren't pissing it's no foul to drag them off the pot.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Zak3056 ( 69287 )

        As for unbundling layer 2 & 3 service*, most areas don't do that - I get ALL my phone service, including long distance, from the local phone company. I don't rent the pipes then pay to have water delivered from a different company, nor with the electric company. I view it as an efficiency thing - is the added competition over layer 3 providers going to improve provision of service more than the efficiency of the local cooperative providing everything? Personally, my thought is that the latter will be more efficient.

        The phone service thing is your choice. Unbundled long distance has been a thing in the US for decades, so just because you choose to use the ILEC doesn't make it a good example of something "most areas don't do." With regard to water, I don't know anywhere that offers infrastructure + service provider, so score one for you--but for electricity, the state of Texas DOES do things thing way. We're opening a new office in Houston, and we had nine different companies bid to offer us electrical service, all w

        • Hmmm, The federal government just paid to install water lines in my rural area. The pipe ends (actually starts a quarter mile from my house where the well field is). We have a reliable and shallow water table so this wasn't needed. They had to up grade the electrical service down my road to provide three phase power to the pumps so at least my power is much more reliable.

          In the twenty first century I would think high speed internet would be considered just as necessary as clean water. Every home that is g

  • hands in pockets (Score:4, Funny)

    by Tom ( 822 ) on Thursday September 03, 2015 @01:49PM (#50452411) Homepage Journal

    locations that aren't able to get a decent fiber system from private ISPs.

    What? Invisible hand of the free market not working? How strange, we were all told that capitalism solves every problem, through magic.

    Apparently it's better at turning trees into toilet paper (see article above) than infrastructure. Which, btw., is also falling apart in the US.

    • How strange, we were all told that capitalism solves every problem, through magic.

      Don't believe everything you read on the Internet. I've never seen anyone saying this, but then, I don't wander the Internet looking for ways to castigate capitalism.

      Apparently it's better at turning trees into toilet paper (see article above) than infrastructure. Which, btw., is also falling apart in the US.

      You mean all those bridges and highways that are operated by greedy capitalistic monolithic multinational corporations? All the sewer and water lines run by monopolistic megalomaniacal corporate CEOs?

      You might be interested to know that those signs along the road that say "This road adopted by MacDonalds' employees" doesn't mean MacDonalds a

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Tom ( 822 )

        You mean all those bridges and highways that are operated by greedy capitalistic monolithic multinational corporations?

        Basically, yes. Except that the corporation is called the US government, and it has changed its business purpose from providing liberty and the basic services necessary for the pursuit of happiness to the people, into being a corporate welfare institution.

        Claiming that publicly funded and maintained infrastructure failures are caused by capitalism is a bit of a stretch.

        Really? Look beyond the fassade, maybe. You don't see a problem with billions being spent on saving the financial industry, that were better needed to support the infrastructure?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by amiga3D ( 567632 )

      Only a fool thinks that capitalism will solve every problem. We need government regulations. Conversely, only a fool thinks that socialism will solve every problem. We need private companies. There is a balance that needs to be found but unfortunately we have two parties full of extremists. The far right and left cause far more problems than they solve.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Tom ( 822 )

        I'm with you there 100%.

        Except that:

        Only a fool thinks that capitalism will solve every problem.

        We have a lot of fool in high places, it seems.

  • No mention on if the 10Gbps plan is capped.

    Also business plan pricing is not public information and I feel that's dishonest.

  • I'm not joking. I've been on the business side of buying high-availability internet access and some businesses will assume that such a low price means they can expect lots of downtime and/or extended periods of reduced performance. While the price of three nines has gone down from "my day", it hasn't gone down that much and I would be wary of a service provider who undercut the competition by such a significant amount.

    • $400/month is for residential 10 gig service, which surely won't come with a three-nines SLA or any HA promises. From the article,

      While business pricing varies based on the deployment, residents would pay about $400 a month for 10Ggbps service.

      I can't find anything on their site about business rates (or even a residential 10 gig rate, yet).

  • another approach is to build a fibre infrastructure that providers can lease on a per-premise basis. then they all have use of the same network (no basis for those "road rage" lawsuits) and the city still gets the advantage of being a place with speed. "per-premise" means one home can have one internet provider while their neighbor has another.

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