Tag Archive for: Fiber

Inside the bold plan to bring gigabit fiber to Detroit

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When discussing the ongoing revitalization efforts in Detroit, it’s hard to miss the name Dan Gilbert. The founder of Quicken Loans, owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, and a Detroit native himself, Gilbert’s investment firms have funded dozens of tech startups in the city and turned its defunct old buildings into shiny new workspaces that look like Silicon Valley transplants.

Until last year, what Detroit lacked in this daunting task to become a tech hub was access to affordable, high-speed broadband, the kind that Google Fiber was famously bringing to other cities around the country. So, rather than pray for Google to arrive or incumbent Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to spontaneously change their pricing and services, Gilbert invested in two Quicken Loans employees who were crazy enough to suggest building a fiber network themselves.

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Network World Colin Neagle

Minneapolis residents to get 10-gigabit fiber, for $400 per month

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While most parts of the US have to make do with Internet speeds of less than 100Mbps—in many cases much less than 100Mbps—some residents of Minneapolis will soon have access to a ludicrously fast fiber-to-the-home speed tier: 10 gigabits per second.

The service is offered by US Internet, the company that already provides “a couple thousand” Minneapolis residents with 1Gbps service for $ 65 per month. The 10Gbps service will be available immediately to existing customers willing to pay the $ 400-per-month fee, though US Internet expects the number of customers who take them up on the deal to be relatively small. All together, US Internet has “a little over 10,000” fiber-to-the-home customers at different speed tiers, all located on the west side of Interstate 35W.

This summer, the company plans to widen its service area to the east side of I-35W, which will encroach further into incumbent Comcast’s territory. According to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Comcast offers 50Mbps service for $ 77 and 25Mbps service for $ 65 in that area; US Internet by contrast prices its 100Mbps service tier—the company’s most popular—at just $ 45 per month. The gigabit plan at $ 65 gives customers about 40 times the bandwidth of Comcast’s 25Mbps plan for the same price.

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Ars Technica » Technology Lab

How Google Fiber is disrupting the broadband deployment model

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Google’s groundbreaking Fiber program, which offers 1 gigabit-per-second broadband for just $ 70 per month, has thrived because it takes a different approach to deployment that incumbent ISPs have been reluctant to embrace. Fiber’s success, however, has already caused other ISPs to change their approach to broadband deployment, according to a recent Wall Street Journal report. Eventually, this shakeup in broadband services could create an entirely new form of competition in the broadband market.

Federal policies on the availability of wire and radio services created in the 1930s, and updated for cable TV in the 1960s, required service providers to cover entire geographical regions indiscriminately. The idea was to ensure that no part of a city went without access to the communications services that would soon become essential for both businesses and consumers. This led to the longstanding regional monopolies that many cable and internet service providers still hold (and under which many customers still suffer) to this day.

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Network World Colin Neagle