Holy Cow! Just signed up for gigabit service in Chattanooga, TN

What's the data cap?

I was on a plane with a guy from Chattanooga recently, said the speed was unbelievable. And now offering 10G. Rediculous.

Great for the money, but no practical use for it. Not yet anyway.

Your downloads will be limited by the server you are downloading from.

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Great for the money, but no practical use for it.

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hahaha. I pay 55$ a month for ATT UVerse in New Orleans and I get about 22 mb/s.

We're pretty close. And by pretty close I'm mean, Jesus Christ.

With that said, is EVERYONE in New Orleans, LA limited to just ATT Uverse and Cox?

Or those truly my only choices? How's that not a monopoly for a geographic location? Hate cable companies.

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Yeah, I don't know why people can't imagine a use case different from their own. Just one torrent can saturate gigabit.

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Few people are torrenting all day at 1gig, and only the more popular torrents are going to get enough peers to saturate that pipe but yeah if you are really into software and movie theft then you will notice the difference with 1gig.

Another use case is if you're synchronizing lots of data backups from your home to the cloud. You will notice a difference with 1gig depending on how much new data you have to backup. (think movies and pics)

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Or, maybe you've cut the cord and your family of 5 are all streaming video at prime time and you don't want heavy browsing or downloading to cause buffering (nor do you want the streaming to impact your browsing).

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You can easily do all this with a 100meg connection. Theoretically you should be able to do this with a 50meg connection, but YMMV.

A lot of people don't realize that it only takes around 6.7mbps bandwidth to stream HD video from Netflix. 4k can be accomplished with 25mbps. I think the point is that few people would notice the difference between a 200mbps connection and a 1gbps connection.

In 5 years we will definitely be tapping into that bandwidth though so I hope everyone gets fiber. As far as 10gig goes for residential use? It'll be a while.

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The thing about the timetable on this is that it depends on the supply of gig and 10gig+ service.

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well with the failure rate of municipal gigabit services, i'm skeptical

chatanooga is the exception. the vast majority have turned into money pits that are bleeding the respective municipalities dry

even Chatanooga has issues

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Once the interest on the taxpayer-funded stimulus handout is paid and costs associated with a government bond to help fund the project are calculated, the final tally for EPB’s fiber optic infrastructure is estimated to top $550 million.

Federal taxpayers are on the hook for the $112 million stimulus grant, plus an estimated $46 million in interest. EPB’s electric customers are footing the bill for more than $390 million in bond payments to help cover construction costs related to the fiber network.

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But the bet hasn’t paid off: Few new companies have been lured to the city by the faster Internet and, according to publicly available records, only 11 commercial customers used the service as of January of this year.

Chattanooga shouldn’t expect things to get better in terms of its ability to draw high-tech companies to town because of its gig-speed Internet. Businesses now have many more choices. Twenty-four U.S. cities now offer gigabit Internet, according to PC magazine.

“There’s nothing that makes Chattanooga‘s gigabit Internet stand out from other places that also offer a gig,” Mr. Greene said. “The only difference is the ridiculous amount Chattanooga’s Gig project cost taxpayers.”

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and that's the shining example (which had 20%+ subsidized by federal money) of muni-internet

i am being sure to support suddenlink, who is offering a free upgrade to Gig speed for its current 75MB service (which is like $60)

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A lot of people don't realize that it only takes around 6.7mbps bandwidth to stream HD video from Netflix. 4k can be accomplished with 25mbps.

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And it seems a lot of people don't realize that those bit rates are the result of highly compressed streams, which are the result of the average household having relatively low bandwidth. Surely, we want to eventually (if not very soon) see our fancy new 4K TVs (or hell, even our 1080p TVs) truly shine with high-bitrate, low-artifact streaming media, rather than cling onto physical media as our only way to get the highest fidelity (compressed 4K streams really aren't distinguishable from 1080p blu-ray). Personally, I want a reason to buy a big-arse 4K TV on which I won't spend 80-90% of my time watching 720p/1080i broadcast or even a compressed netflix stream.

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In 5 years we will definitely be tapping into that bandwidth though so I hope everyone gets fiber. As far as 10gig goes for residential use? It'll be a while.

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Yep, but personally I don't see why it shouldn't be sooner than that. As Kork said, when we get it, we will be damn sure to find ways to use it. The possibilities already exist; it's just that the benefits can't realized without the infrastructure, which can't exist without demand. And I agree about 10gig being ahead of its time in consumer space, since even the top consumer routers can't quite deliver 1gbps WAN to LAN, but we don't want to discourage its existence and fall into the trap of complacency of "adequate" bandwidth for what we do now... Unless we're OK with the way most of the big ISPs are treating us now.

We want the idea of an uncapped internet faucet to be move from novelty status to something more commonplace. The key here is bandwidth, not speed. IoT is the future. I'm actually lagging behind in that regard. Ask CAD how many internet-connected devices are in his house.

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i don't think you understand what capitalism and competition are

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I certainly do. I also understand how the internet in its current form breaks the expectations that capitalism relies on. That's the part that you don't get. Capitalism can't work if all the roads are private and their owners are allowed to control all the traffic.

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what other private entity offers gigabyte data in LA for under $80/month? that's an honest question

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Here's a question for you: what are you going to do when you try to actually use that gigabit service to its potential? The only real reason to have it is to stream a lot of hd video, as discussed in this thread. I don't know exactly what suddenlink's cap is, but I would imagine it's a few hundred gigs or so. Enough for about 100 hours of video if you don't do much else online. For a single person, that might not be a problem. For a family, 100 hours of video is nothing, so you're basically forced to bundle tv and suddenlink has driven you out of the streaming video market. Just because you fell for what sounded like a good deal, but it turns out to be far from worth it.