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Yep. The way the telecos were talking 5 or 6 years ago the whole country was going to have fiber by now. Instead were are still poking along using ancient grids intended to carry ultra low bandwidth things like Faxs and voice in the case of DSL or intended to carry low definition TV signal in the case of cable.
Basically we have a duopoly made up of two different, obsolete technologies with no incentive for either incumbent to upgrade.

ScifiterX wrote:

Read the article again Bat, TDS only started discussing plans for fiber in the area after the lawsuit was filed.

Beyond that history has shown many Telcos discuss "future plans" for years before acting on them in any form.  A lot of the time by the time they do act it's on a far lesser scope than what was promised.

Ahem.

Just as the city prepared to begin digging in May, TDS announced that it would wire Monticello for fiber and would do it by the end of the year... TDS has nine crews in town right now to build the 100-mile network; 20+ miles have already been laid. Meanwhile, the city has hardly been pleased with the entire process, and seems determined to pursue its original plan. While the main residential buildout is on hold during the court case, Monticello broke ground last week on a smaller fiber ring and an interconnection point for the network.

Found an error right of the bat, bat. (Earlier article link with above article)
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20 … ng-it.html

Of course that misses letter sent mere days earlier due to how long it take to do a write up at times.
http://www.monticellofiber.com/pdf/TDSL … 071708.pdf

Full details can be found here. (Sub pages contain crucial info too)
http://www.monticellofiber.com/

If you paid the price you are paying under condition that you would get fiber in X number of years, sure, breach of contract.

Apple said a lot of things about their computers getting faster that never panned out until ultimately they switched to Intel. That never meant they were in breach of contract. How long were people waiting for a speed bump in the G4?

From the ars article - I do think this may be a case where the city can and should do it, since it will bring business and thus revenue into the city, provided that there is good oversight to make sure the city really can afford it if and when things go wrong without hosing the tax payer.

But a 250GB cap on bandwidth is so ridiculously high that I know you can't find anyone exceeding that limit who isn't doing massive quantities of file sharing, essentially giving away stuff on the ISPs dime. That's just not defensible.

Indeed what we who oppose the BS policy isn't the level of the cap but the A.) there is one be despite the promise of unlimited internet B.) they pulled this crap to prevent having to upgrade their infrastructure like they promised C.) they are using this to lock customers into accepting a monopoly situation.

As far as caps go yes it is more reasonable than the others however that doesn't make it the right thing to do just a more palatable degree of predatory behavior.

Not ignored, just a point I don't think has much validity.

They are a private company, with a cap of 250GB/mo if it really is to prevent upgrading their infrastructure then it is less than 1% of their users that are causing a need for infrastructure upgrade (that the other 99% will have to pay for in their service bill)

I'm not a comcast customer, I'm a Charter customer, and I know Charter has been increasing service - the base throughput went up about a year ago (I believe it doubled) and I can buy even faster throughput if I want. These increases in service though make it possible for the bandwidth hogs to use even more bandwidth. Instead of sharing 400GB bia BitTorrent they could, say, share 1.2TB because the upload is so much better.

Jesus is Magic and can turn water into wine and stuff, but bandwidth has to be paid for.

Last edited by resedit (2008-09-23 6:55 am)

frankly wrote:

resedit wrote:

Not ignored, just a point I don't think has much validity.

You missed the point completely. What I meant is that you seem to be stuck fighting against a straw man because most people have not said that 250 GB is too low. They are arguing about the precedent that it sets, what we should expect in the future, how this might lead to a stagnation in the infrastructure, etc.

You keep arguing again and again that 250 GB is plenty. We just have no idea who you are arguing against. 

A company taking steps to make sure a very small minority of users who are almost certainly making warez available on their dime doesn't end up raising the cost for everyone else is somehow setting a precedent for stagnating infrastructure?

I don't get it.

That's a slippery slope if I ever saw one.

resedit wrote:

A company taking steps to make sure a very small minority of users who are almost certainly making warez available on their dime doesn't end up raising the cost for everyone else is somehow setting a precedent for stagnating infrastructure?

I don't get it.

That's a slippery slope if I ever saw one.

I know you don't get it. That was my point.

I'm not sure if you care but I'll try to explain what I meant. If a company sees the way to fix this type of problem is to add a fixed threshold instead of adding capacity then that actually is a slippery slope where they could do the same thing in the future. Add more users, which increases their revenue, and instead of adding capacity they lower the cap further. This means that all additional revenue becomes profits while existing customers would see their service degrade.

I know you don't see this but the fact that they did it now, without consulting their paying customers is a precedent.

Meanwhile, a competitor of NTT will offer 1 gigabit up- and download speeds via fiber optic starting October 1. For less than $60 per month.

giganews is more expensive than it use to be.
I use to pay $5.00 a month to them for unlimited - now it is $8.00 for the most basic (which is 2GB a month, more than I personally used - I didn't do very many binary downloads).

Maybe it was giganews wanting more money combined with dropping customer interest that resulted in the cancellation.

It looks like the 2GB a month is what comcast was offering, so for users who did not already use a different service - it will cost them $8.00 a month to keep using giganews - but maybe less:

While we have seen a decline in popularity of newsgroups as customers have chosen to get information from other sources, we know a small percentage of our customers continue to use newsgroups today. If you are interested in continuing to access newsgroups, Giganews is offering a special promotion for Comcast customers.

Prices do go up. Especially when an economy is in a downturn and things in general get more expensive.

Last edited by resedit (2008-10-07 3:37 pm)