Tag Archive for: Gigabit

Comcast launching 2-gig broadband to trump Chattanooga’s municipal gigabit offering

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Comcast announced this morning that it will introduce 2 gigabit per second (Gbps) internet service to customers in Chattanooga, Tennessee, by the end of the year, the Chattanooga Times Free Press reported today.

Comcast said it will begin rolling out its Gigabit Pro service in June, and will serve about 200,000 of the area’s residents, whether they are currently Comcast customers or not, according to the report.

The service will challenge one of the most successful and well-known municipal broadband deployments in the country. The city of Chattanooga launched its fiber-optic internet service in 2008 under the city’s Electronic Power Board (EPB), eventually offering residents 1 Gbps internet speeds for $ 70 a month or 100 megabits per second (Mbps) for $ 58 per month. Before long, Chattanooga earned the nickname “Gig City,” and by 2013 those operating the EPB boasted that it had the “highest speeds in the Western hemisphere,” both on its website and in a CBS News profile.

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Network World Colin Neagle

How Connecticut set itself up to be the first gigabit state

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Connecticut needed this. Lately, the only noteworthy contribution my home state has made to the national news is Aaron Hernandez, an apparent psychopath who earned millions of dollars playing football while (allegedly) murdering anyone who looked at him the wrong way.

But it looks like the third smallest state in the country is on its way to becoming the first to offer ubiquitous 1-Gigabit internet to its residents. The website EfficientGov.com has a pretty comprehensive breakdown on the project: 46 municipalities that make up about half of the state’s population have agreed to endorse a plan for public/private partnerships to expand 1-Gig broadband internet access.

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Network World Colin Neagle

Gigabit cellular networks could happen with 24GHz spectrum, FCC says

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Even The Flash can’t deliver gigabit speed data networks.
JD Hancock

The Federal Communications Commission is starting to plan for cellular networks that can send users gigantic streams of data, but there are technical challenges to be solved and years of work ahead.

A Notice of Inquiry issued unanimously by the commission on Friday identifies frequencies of 24GHz and above as being able to provide gigabit or even 10Gbps speed. This would be a major change because today’s cellular networks use frequencies from 600MHz to 3GHz, with so-called “beachfront spectrum” under 1GHz being the most desirable because it can be used to deliver data over long distances. AT&T and Verizon Wireless control the most beachfront spectrum.

“It was long assumed that higher spectrum frequencies—like those above 24 GHz—could not support mobile services due to technological and practical limitations,” the FCC said in a press release. “New technologies are challenging that assumption and promise to facilitate next generation mobile service—what some call ‘5G’—with the potential to dramatically increase wireless broadband speeds.”

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