[HN Gopher] EPB Launches America's First Community-Wide 25 Gig I... ___________________________________________________________________ EPB Launches America's First Community-Wide 25 Gig Internet Service Author : Scottopherson Score : 111 points Date : 2022-08-24 20:47 UTC (2 hours ago) (HTM) web link (epb.com) (TXT) w3m dump (epb.com) | btrautsc wrote: | the most amazing part about EPB is they have absolutely | phenomenal customer service. it really is surprising. | Youden wrote: | So weird hearing about how amazing this speed is for a | _convention center_ when I have 25Gbps at home and mainly just | use it to download movies and anime from Usenet. | tannedNerd wrote: | Good for you? The majority of the world is on a fraction of | that, much less the US. It just became easy to get 2 Gbps in | some parts of the USA while others you max out at 25 Mbps down | and 2 Mbps up. This is very much good news to everyone else. | [deleted] | dmonitor wrote: | Where on earth and why | vineyardmike wrote: | Literally this announcement is saying where. It's not just | the convention center, it's the whole service region, the | convention center is just _first_. | jagrsw wrote: | Probably Switzerland - init7 has it in its offer: | https://www.init7.net/en/internet/fiber7/ | | The price is the same as for 1Gbps and 10Gbps (~60USD/month) | - though the initial setup price differs: ~300USD for 25Gb/s | vs <100USD for 1Gbps | | The actual speed within network is indeed 25Gb/s to some | fellow users running speedtest.net servers. Inside | Switzerland it's maybe ~15Gb/s to some well connected servers | in the area of Zurich, and ~10Gb/s across EU. Tested with | speedtest.net and iperf. | r00fus wrote: | Wow this reads like an announcement from a different timeline | (like the one that was promised when fiber was promoted in the | early 2000s). 25Gb/s symmetric? In the middle of Tennessee? | | Meanwhile I have traffic-shaped Comcast and no fiber in sight in | Silicon Valley. | hhh wrote: | I have WK&T and have symmetrical gigabit w/ 24/7 chat support | in a town with a population of 300 in TN. Spectacular service, | but I did sit on a waiting list and pay $1000 for installation. | My bill has gone down over time (WK&T is a co-op.) | | I have only ever had issues for a period of 2 months during | peak times when my traffic was being routed through another ISP | that I would always get ~0.2% packet loss from. WK&T helped me | identify some routes that were unaffected to set up a tunnel to | work around it for the few times I was affected. | ejb999 wrote: | its weird, I live in a tiny little town with about 400 | households and I now have access to 1G symmetrical fiber for | about $80/month - but we (the town) had to pay for the fiber | build out with increases taxes and user fees...well worth it in | my case. I would have been OK with only Comcast as previously | it was just 3Mb Verizon DSL for almost my entire WFH career | (20+ years). | reillyse wrote: | A cynical person might say that large telecoms company aren't | interested in monopolizing your market and so you are free. | I'm astounded by how bad/expensive my internet is in massive | cities that should be easy to connect. I live in an apartment | in LA and have very few options. I lived in a loft in | downtown before (5 years ago) and the building only allowed | DSL. I have a business connection in Portland and pay around | 100/month for 15Mb. | squeaky-clean wrote: | I'm in Brooklyn by prospect park and only have 1 ISP choice | for my apartment. And it's coax based, so every plan caps | at 20Mbs upload. It's that or satellite internet. I miss | having fiber. | atwebb wrote: | This has been going on for a while, comments like this and the | recent Tennessean article/debacle are a bit eye opening to the | naivety of technology and accomplishments outside of major | hubs. | 8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: | Let me tell you the story of CA attempting to build high | speed rail.. | lotsofpulp wrote: | Why would a story about building high speed rail be | relevant to installing fiber adjacent to existing | utilities? | KerrAvon wrote: | "real estate is expensive and NIMBYs don't want it"... the | end. | | (Also the story of why Hyperloop is pointless. technology | isn't the problem that needs solving! Fast rapid transit | tech has existed since the 1980's and it's not the cost | issue.) | yieldcrv wrote: | > Meanwhile I have traffic-shaped Comcast and no fiber in sight | in Silicon Valley. | | Isn't the SF bay area more of a geography issue than an | incumbent monopoly issue? I'm sure its a mixture of both, but | also a geography issue. | KerrAvon wrote: | No, what would geography have to do with it? Fiber can be run | on poles or underground throughout the Bay Area -- it's an | incumbent monopoly issue. | hedora wrote: | It's a five minute bike ride on flat land from Google HQ | (mostly along utility right of way) to housing with < 6mbit | DSL. | | Drive 10-20 miles, and you'll be in areas where AT&T decided | to sell the lines to a bankrupt telco. Looking at the lines | in those areas is entertaining. The telephone poles were | installed by some ancient secret society named "GTE", and now | have 20 degree bows. When lines loosen up and block traffic, | the usually just tie them up on to some nearby tree branch. | | If you look really carefully, you'll occasionally see fiber | points of presence dangling precariously from this mess of | caution tape and guy-wire. | | It's not all bad news: I know of communities outside of telco | right of way that managed to tap into one of those. | | Last time I heard they were debating between 1 gig symmetric | to each home or paying a couple hundred bucks (one time) per | house to get something comparable to what you'd expect in | Tennessee. | | It's definitely a problem with incumbent monopolies. | a2tech wrote: | My parents in (poor) rural Michigan will soon have county wide | fiber internet provided by the local electrical co-op. I'm sure | the support will be semi-local and so will the technicians. So | you'll actually get people that at least pretend to give a shit | about your problems all for a better price than whats available | in the city from Comcast. | | And yes, they and ATT lobbied extensively to block communities | from building out their own ISPs because they didn't want to | compete. Michigan has a law in place where a municipality can't | build out a service if at least 3 companies are willing to bid | on running 'high speed' internet service in a town. | xeromal wrote: | Yeah, seems some rural communities are getting fiber faster. My | house in northern GA far from Atlanta has symmetrical(?) fiber. | It gets 1000 up and 1000 down. | prophesi wrote: | Meanwhile I'm in the heart of a city and stuck with unreliable, | overpriced, and low speed cable/dsl from Spectrum because I'm | pretty sure my landlord is taking part of their payola scheme. I | used to live in Chattanooga which makes me extra bitter about it. | efficax wrote: | wild, i don't have any devices that can max that out even over | ethernet | robmccoll wrote: | I don't think I have enough aggregate online disk bandwidth at | home to store things are that speed, much less do I have it | networked to do so. Wow. | ajg36 wrote: | Has anyone tried this service in real life and tested the actual | bandwidth? | mmaunder wrote: | Cool, but try to get 25Gbps on your mac. It's tough. We have our | own 10 gig symmetrical fiber backbone connection and wanted | 25Gbps on a mac in our film production facility. Thunderbolt | maxes out at 40Gbps so you're already close to the max data | transfer rate for a peripheral. We had to use ATTO's hardware | which is bulky, a pain to configure on a macbook (you need to | bond two interfaces) and honestly most of the time it's just | easier to stay on Wifi and deal with 400Mbps throughput. | | Not sure about windows, but USB-C maxes out at 10 Gbps IIRC, so | I'd love to hear what folks in that realm are doing. | KerrAvon wrote: | Please, Br'er Fiber, don't throw me in the 25 Gbps patch. | Anything but that. | | Seriously, I would be happy to take up the challenge if someone | is willing to provide such service. | | More seriously, that bandwidth probably doesn't go to a single | computer -- those of us with multiple people in the household | working or playing from home can do more & better things | simultaneously. | Havoc wrote: | >USB-C maxes out at 10 Gbps | | Lower. I've got a 5gbps usb-c adapter...ends up being more like | 3.5. And like 4x the price of a 2.5 dongle | BolexNOLA wrote: | Yeah frankly I just hardline for 1Gbps and anything over | like...I don't know, 1TB? I just ship a drive. Anything beyond | 1 or 2 requires too much effort to make work for me. | | It helps that I'm an in-house video producer at a tech company | and not working at a post house/on major sets anymore haha | p1necone wrote: | How big do you think the carrier pigeon needs to be for an | HDD? Carrier Albatross? Can they even be trained? | nippoo wrote: | The main current use case for this isn't people syncing their | Dropboxes very fast, it's businesses and groups of users who | can now all reliably each get gigabit+ speeds rather rather | than slowing down when multiple people share a connection... | blakes wrote: | In the Windows world one would just get a 25Gb NIC and be good | to go. | | * and supporting network equipment/cabling of course | ejb999 wrote: | I don't really see the point - impressed that they offered it, | but how many people truly need it? | | I have 1G symmetric FTTH internet, the bottleneck is still the | services I want to access at the other end - really makes no | difference how much faster the pipe is, if the service you are | using can't keep up. | | Will some people benefit?? sure - a handful of power users doing | massive uploads and downloads for commercial purposes... but the | typical Netflix watcher or telecommuter really isn't going to | benefit at all from from anything faster than about 100MBs | up/down right now. | | Like I said, I have 1G fiber connection, you know how long it | takes me to watch a two hour Netflix movie at 1G speed? Two | hours. You know how long that would take me on a 50Mbs | connection? 2 hours. You know how long that would take me on a | 25Gb connection? 2 hours. | | That said, if I could buy a 25 Gb connection at a reasonable | price I would. | digitallyfree wrote: | There are places like Switzerland where you actually can get a | 25Gbps residental connection for a reasonable price. The actual | cost lies in your backend infrastructure and the skills you | need to use it (it's all enterprise equipment at that level). | Everything from the routing to the switching to the servers | that you're likely running on that connection can get real | expensive. | exq wrote: | 20 years ago you'd have said the same thing about dsl to | broadband, and if everyone had that same mentality, Netflix | would still be mailing dvds and not offering 4k streaming. | Innovation is good. | laurencerowe wrote: | I think the difference is that 20 years Gbit ethernet was | becoming standard issue on desktops while even 10Gbit | ethernet is still pretty rare outside of the data centre and | switch uplinks today. | | 25Gbit internet will be great for schools, libraries, and | offices with multiple users but it's going to be a while | before it becomes relevant for individual homes. | bitbckt wrote: | 10/40Gb hasn't been the standard in data centers in a | number of years. My house is entirely 10Gb (save for | wireless), in part because older enterprise gear at those | speeds is so cheap. | | 25/50 and 100/400 have supplanted 10/40 in the data center, | and 800Gb is here now. | geerlingguy wrote: | That's the maximum, right? I would imagine they have plans from | sub-gigabit up to 25G. I know I'd absolutely love the option of | 10G for a reasonable price (thousand(s)?). Heck, I'd be | overjoyed to get symmetrical 100 Mbps, and I'd gladly pay a few | hundred for it. | | Meanwhile my Dad has 500/500 AT&T Fiber, and he pays half what | I pay for 930/35 Charter Spectrum cable :( | bitbckt wrote: | I have 10Gb symmetrical to the home in the Bay Area for | ~$40/mo. Thousands? Really? | thfuran wrote: | Thousands? Why not more like $40/mo, like several cities in | Europe where 10G is already offered? | alexdumitru wrote: | Thousands? In Romania you can get 10G for just a bit over | $10. 1G is $8 and 500M is $6. | CyberDildonics wrote: | This same ISP offered 10 gigabit for $400 seven years ago. | moistoreos wrote: | /remindme in 10 years | | In all seriousness, YES! File sizes are not getting smaller. If | the bottleneck of data transference were my hardware, then we | would live in a data utopia. | | Imagine the size of files for the last 20 years and you could | probably do a relatively close comparison for the next 20. I | would say they have future-proofed their system for a long | while. | | I would also say that with the addition of IoT, there is going | to be a LOT more casual traffic across the wire in people's | homes/businesses. | ejb999 wrote: | I don't disagree - in 10 years this will be different and so | will my opinion - things we don't even know about will become | common everyday necessities and may require those kind of | speeds...but right now, I don't see it. | themacguffinman wrote: | There's kind of a chicken & egg dynamic here. People won't | experiment with futuristic high-bandwidth applications | before they have high bandwidth. | lloeki wrote: | > Imagine the size of files for the last 20 years and you | could probably do a relatively close comparison for the next | 20. | | Is it? A some point usefulness plateaus. | | I mean taking the streaming example, we can easily stream | several 4K HDR streams within a 1G pipe, and 4K is basically | retina-class unless you plan to project in a cinema, so | anything above is virtually useless (just like the move to | 24bit/192kHz is for listening). | | The only way I can see this use case growing in size in any | semi-useful way is by reducing compression ratio to eliminate | artifacts. | | Similarly picture size increase but I don't see people start | sharing gigapixel pictures. | | Maybe this could be an enabler of truly privacy respecting | home self-hosting. Own your data, own your services. Maybe | distributed storage like ipfs could benefit from that as | well. | | But size, I can only see us using more of it because we | basically now have the ability to be inefficient, not because | it's useful. | | But hey, 20 years is basically impossible to project into | with any reliability. | netr0ute wrote: | > how many people truly need it? | | 56kbps ought to be enough for anyone | yakkityyak wrote: | Internet is like ram. You can never have too much. | [deleted] | shepherdjerred wrote: | > I don't really see the point - impressed that they offered | it, but how many people truly need it? | | Can you imagine the types of applications this would enable if | everyone had a 25gbps connection? | | An Xbox could have a 200GB hard drive. Want to play a different | game? Just wait a few seconds, we'll download the latest 150GB | Call of Duty. | lotsofpulp wrote: | More important is high quality high upload bandwidth not | hidden behind CGNAT. We could actually move away from having | to depend on Microsoft/Apple/Google/Amazon servers to host | and deliver personal content. | Shank wrote: | > I have 1G symmetric FTTH internet, the bottleneck is still | the services I want to access at the other end - really makes | no difference how much faster the pipe is, if the service you | are using can't keep up. | | I can definitely hit this with one Steam download. If any more | users want to download games, they can easily compete for 1G. | | Netflix and other services have relatively low bitrate streams | too. If I could get higher quality / higher bitrate streams, | I'd prefer that over what most streaming services offer too. | | I think it's easy to think things are good enough without | looking too deep into the details. You're used to 1G. But a lot | of people are used to a lot more and a lot less. | ejb999 wrote: | >>You're used to 1G. But a lot of people are used to a lot | more and a lot less. | | Trust me, I am not used to it (at least not yet)- I have only | had it for 5+ months - I have been WFH for more than 25 years | and only had access to 3Mbs DSL before this. | oyashirochama wrote: | Ive hit 5gbps at my dorm room, I had upto 10gbps only issue | it was shared with the entire base and at the time only had | 2 10gbps trunks out of the ISP. They later upgraded to 2 | 40gbps from NTT. | xxpor wrote: | 60 mbit 4k (same as bluray) would be sick | mciancia wrote: | Well, if cost of hardware on ISP side is fairly similar for 1G, | 10G and 25Gbps, then why not offer also the fastest option just | because you can? | | > if the service you are using can't keep up. | | Thats standard chicken and egg problem, why provide faster | servers when ISPs are offering 1Gbps at most | | IMO internet speed could be like electricity/power - like most | people don't care how much power they can get from the grid, in | the future we will have the same when it comes to the internet | - it will almost always be fast enough for everything | nothis wrote: | The way I see it is that by raising the bar like this, you're | making more realistic speeds for average users a) more | stable/common and b) less expensive. | digdugdirk wrote: | Chattanooga Tennessee, for those curious but not curious enough | to read the article. | | I'm intrigued by the city's push for this community co-op high | speed internet - does anyone here have any experience with how | the city has changed before/after the "gig-city" push? And did | pandemic work from home change/accelerate things at all? | vlan0 wrote: | This is just getting stupid. It's more marketing than anything | else. It feels like the megahertz wars of the 90s. Your | connection is SO MUCH more than just your local PHY rate. Let's | start raising the bar. Show me you've optimized to reduce | bufferbloat. Show me you care about RTT and not simply the | cheapest pipe. | | I'm also not sure they have the capacity to deliver true 25Gb to | for many folks simultaneously. | | https://www.peeringdb.com/net/7007 | https://bgp.he.net/AS26827#_asinfo | dweekly wrote: | I think things like this are great because they will finally | start to create pressure to commodify >1gbps networking in the | home. The industry has some work to do here. | | I've been on Sonic 10G for almost a year now and LOVE it, but | it's definitely been a sore spot to get things set up to expect | those kinds of speeds - prosumer 10G switches are vastly more | expensive per-port, wired consumer devices don't typically | support 10GbaseT/SFP+, 2.5G/5G switches aren't broadly available | and commodified (e.g. UniFi has limited offerings here) and | WiFi6E is still mid-rollout (almost no client devices currently | in market yet) meaning that clients can't reasonably expect | >1gbps of goodput, even with a good link from a modern device to | a modern AP. Then there's flakiness: when things get hot in my | garage, my 10G switch just stops working. My Thunderbolt- | to-10GbaseT adapter for my MacBook runs very hot. Lots of sharp | edges here. | | The more consumers are buying 10G equipment for their 10G home | links, the faster prices will come down and reliability will come | up - not just for 10G but also for 2.5G/5G equipment. Hats off to | EPB for paving the way for 25G and keeping vendors diligent in | mapping out the next generation of their equipment. | TylerE wrote: | I wonder how much of a push this will really be? | | For the vast majority of people even vanilla gigabit is of | limited benefit... that's on the edge of what a consumer SSD is | writing at. | mikeyouse wrote: | Right - the popular sentiment on my smallish town Facebook | group is people dropping their 300mbps cable since Spectrum | is an awful company to deal with in favor of cell-based | (T-mobile or Verizon) home service. 90%+ of people in most | areas don't need internet any faster than Netflix requires, | and nobody is running ethernet so WiFi speeds are going to be | the limiting factor in internet speed for most everyone else. | TylerE wrote: | I went from ~250Mbit to Gigabit recently. I don't notice it | on my wireless clients at all, but it is really nice on my | main PC, which is tied directly into the router via a good | 'ole cable. I've seen actual downloads speeds flirting with | 100MB/sec, which is really nice when downloading some of | these massive 50GB+ games. | icedchai wrote: | You may be off a bit. A gigabit is only around 125 megabytes | a second. A low end consumer SSD is closer to a 550 megabytes | second, or ~4 gigabits. A high-end NVMe SSD will get you 3 or | 4 gigabytes a second. 30 to 40x a gigabit! | robocat wrote: | > A high-end NVMe SSD will get you 3 or 4 gigabytes a | second | | The Samsung PCIe 4.0 990 PRO just released: sequential read | 7.45GB/s and write 6.9GB/s -- | https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/samsung- | announces-99... | TylerE wrote: | Under ideal circumstances, yes. When say, torrenting, or | anything else with non-ideal file access patterns real | world speeds are not going to be nearly that high, | especially on a consumer-grade drive. | hoistbypetard wrote: | The way the site is reacting to this hug, I'd expect it'd be | better off hosted from a beefy laptop on a 25 Gig residential | connection. | bandwidth wrote: | Okay so all we need now is a few IoT toasters to send 25G of DDoS | traffic right? | elfatizer wrote: | When we bought a house, the best one ended up being literally a | couple miles outside of EPB's service area and I had to switch to | Comcast. I see their billboard every time I drive home, just to | rub salt in the wound. | Xeoncross wrote: | I love how so many companies offer work-from-home now as you | can literally work from anywhere in the world as long as it's | only in a major city with a high bandwidth connection. | ghaff wrote: | That is really not true. For most people modest speed | connections are fine for working. Starlink certainly be | sufficient in general. | hedora wrote: | Check out this map, which doesn't seem to include starlink. | Click "min price" (to make the 25+ MBPS filter appear), then | click "25+ MBPS". You'll see that rural houses are likely to | have access to better Internet than ones in Silicon Valley. | | To really light the map up, click "fixed wireless". I've had | mixed luck with such ISPs, but they generally offer | affordable plans that have better uplink bandwidth and ping | latency than comcast. | | https://broadbandnow.com/national-broadband-map | mikestew wrote: | You have different parameters than I, because "the best one" | has 25Gbps to the home, and not Comcast for an internet | provider. :-) | | I know what you're saying, though. I suppose it's _possible_ to | have higher priorities than bandwidth. Personally, I 'd still | have to give serious thought to how much I want $FEATURE if it | means having to do business with Comcast (or Comcast aside, | give up 25Gbps). Backyard for the kids? They can go play in the | park. :-) | kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote: | And here I am looking at properties that even Starlink would | have trouble providing service to... | vlan0 wrote: | Running away to the mountains to escape it all? Need | company? | runako wrote: | No wonder Comcast has been very active in lobbying to prevent | other utilities from providing Internet[1]. | | 1 - https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/1/8530403/chattanooga- | comcas... | mindslight wrote: | The problem with municipal Internet is the town will build it | out once, and then never upgrade the technology while it slowly | becomes obsolete </s>. | | Seriously though, municipal fiber is fantastic. I've been an | observer to friends having conversations about Internet | provider woes, while I just sit there shaking my head. I've | only got 1Gb but I rarely care about the bandwidth, consistent | <15ms ping to close data centers, there's no data quotas, no | yearly fuckery where they dick around with the price and you | have to wait on hold to threaten to cancel and commit to a | longer term, and I haven't noticed any downtime in years. It | just works. | yborg wrote: | The OP story is literally the municipal provider delivering | 25x faster service over 12 years. The "never upgrade the | technology" provider is usually going to be monopoly Comcast, | because they know your other option is a can and string. | mindslight wrote: | Sarcasm. It's a useful skill that fosters self awareness | and builds your memetic defenses. And I even included a tag | to help train your detector. | midnitewarrior wrote: | Why? I work a tech job and I 50gb connection is more than I need, | it's more than most need. | yborg wrote: | Cool, so you can downgrade to a 25gb connection like EPB and | save some money. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-08-24 23:00 UTC)