Please, for the love of all that is good and holy, explore the idea of deploying in Boston proper.
The state refused to give Verizon tax breaks years ago, so they abandoned their plans to ever deploy FiOS within Boston city limits. Surrounding communities have it, but we don't -- only Comcast. Now, to be fair to Comcast, I've never had a service problem save for 1-2 days in the past 6 years. They were also very quick on IPv6 and 6-to-4, and they actually deliver the bandwidth I pay for. Yet I would gladly pay for yet more bandwidth.
Cambridge is all but stuck with Comcast and their ever rising rates for degrading service...meanwhile Arlington just north of the city/Cambridge is still serviced by Fios fiber.
I agree, the page raises more questions than it answers.
I imagine that's because they don't have the answers to those questions yet and are trying to gauge interest in different areas before working out the details, but these days we're trained to spot and ignore PR pieces, and when such crucial details are lacking I have a tough time not ignoring such stories entirely.
I'll be waiting to make a comparison until there are details published and an established user base who can supply feedback about the provider's customer support quality and can verify the numbers in their marketing material.
Even if the answers to each of those falls on the side you consider negative, it is still beneficial to customers in an area for a new ISP to enter the market.
I would like to say, having used Ting for a while. Its customer service was amazing. You called, someone picked up immediately. They worked for ting, and it was not outsourced. So they resolved my issue within 5 minutes and I got a email transcript within the hour detailing what happened. It was awesome. Plus Ting was cheap af, I would spend like 10$ a month for a smart phone. Its data service was extremely slow, which is why I left it... but still I have fond memories of Ting. :) Enough to want to post this review. I have many family member on Ting. It makes sense for older folks who don't really use their phone number, but still want data when they need it.
I was in the private beta for Ting GSM, and I loved every minute of it. I'm still on GSM with my main line, and we'll be moving my wife to Ting GSM once her CDMA phone finally kicks the bucket. I had tried Ting CDMA a few times since they first launched, and came back for good once I found out about the coming GSM service. Ting's customer support is simply unmatched, an anomaly among not just cellular companies but all tech companies I've ever dealt with.
Justen went above and beyond to help us beta testers resolve issues, and I feel like a part of the Ting family now even though I don't work there (though I'd love to if I lived further north!).
Been with you guys since 2012 - please don't ever change the way you do customer service. If you had fiber in the Mid-Atlantic region I'd have already signed up. Keep kicking ass!
P.S. I converted my family and I've got some converts at work now too. The customer service is key, plus whoever came up with that calculator to compare costs between Ting and the users' current provider needs a big fat bonus.
It all depends on the details and the market, but yes - like I said in another comment, we're really open and flexible about how we deliver our service and I could see a few different types of arrangements where we might end up doing exactly that.
Yeah, I'm a Ting customer for 7 months now, and honestly it's been a dream. I haven't had to interact with their support because everything has just worked, for less than half of Verizon's price.
It's basically just the hardware you connect it to thats the limiting factor with optical network. Which incidentally is also why actually getting optical fibers to everyone is so damn cool.
I see the service has launched in Charlottesville. As a Virginia Tech Hokie, it's hard to stomach that the Hoos are getting if first, but in all seriousness, I think this is a great thing.
That being said, there's a lot of information that seems to be missing. I'm not sure how excited to be about this until I see pricing.
I live in Charlottesville and I, as a student, don't know anyone who is dissatisfied with their ISP. This is mostly a college town, and I think the students are the ones who would benefit most from higher bandwidth. To me, they don't seem dissatisfied enough to switch.
That's intersting. I know in Blacksburg, if this was to come to town, people would switch en masse. Other than internet on campus, the quality is terrible.
I can recall fiber proposals from the late nineties in Blacksburg, back when bev.net was a big thing. The proposals to route fiber around the town died in process; I don't recall why, but it surely involved who would pay for it and who would profit.
Surprisingly, there actually IS fiber in Blacksburg. At one of the co-working spaces downtown, they got gigabit internet two years ago. But sadly it hasn't extended from there and the project itself barely got funded.
If you guys want to fuck up Comcast, head to the Twin Cities. We're one of their biggest markets, and there's a reason why we have a few fiber competitors here already making them sweat. One is CenturyLink. Another is a local ISP.
CenturyLink installed FTTH here a few days ago. When I called Comcast to cancel, it sounded like they intended to put up a fight until I mentioned the word "gigabit." Immediately took the wind out of the poor rep's sails.
Funny, CenturyLink launched Gigabit in Seattle - 50 miles north of me, yet had people door knocking to "tell me about it, since I've probably seen the trucks". So I looked online, just to see if it was stealth. Nope.
I called, because the database online sometimes sucks. Nope.
And then the rep was "but we do have 24mbps at your address", "No, thank you, I have 150mbps with Comcast", and the rep replied, "What do you really need that much for? I'm pretty sure you don't and are just overpaying."
I didn't even bother beyond "I work from home. I need it. Thanks. Bye."
To be honest, I'd prefer to see them go to other markets.
I'm actually with Comcast, and they've been a dream. I've not even had to threaten with USI or CenturyLink yet, and my service is always at advertised speeds and I've not had any downtime.
While it would almost definitely expand the fiber build-out around here, and that would be great, there are plenty of places with a single broadband provider. I also imagine Ting would have better chances in a sparser market.
In the Netherlands x% of a community had to sign up before they would roll out the system (to make sure that the ISP could recoup their costs). Am wondering if they plan to implement a similar system.
On a sidenote: the largest telco dropped the price A LOT to compete with the FTTH provider but this pissed ppl off because they knew they had been ripped off for several years.
> In the Netherlands x% of a community had to sign up before they would roll out the system (to make sure that the ISP could recoup their costs).
In most U.S. cities, this is illegal.
In fact, Google got crucified when they did that originally for Fiber in Kansas City and a bunch of minority/low-income communities didn't make the list: http://www.wired.com/2012/09/google-fiber-digital-divide. Embarrassingly, the sign-up map was divided right along the road segregating black from white neighborhoods.
Even after Google lowered the sign-up requirements so more poor neighborhoods qualified, the sign-up rate for gigabit service was only 10% (and only another 5% for the free service). http://www.wsj.com/articles/google-fails-to-close-kansas-cit.... In most places, 30% is more like the target for what justifies build-out.
Can you explain why this is illegal in the US? It in the UK, there are a number of companies investing in rural fibre broadband for communities where 1. the area is not expected to receive FTTC from BT Openreach and 2. there is sufficient demand from the local residents (i.e. how many people have signed up).
In most U.S. cities, broadband providers need a franchise from the city to build systems, and a condition of that license is building in every neighborhood within the city, not just those with demonstrated interest.
Google simply will not build Fiber in places that aren't willing to waive that requirement. Conversely, other broadband providers would serve many places if cities were willing to waive those requirements.
Here in Baltimore, Verizon was ready to build FiOS, and in fact my building and a few others nearby has it because Verizon was able to do it without getting a city-wide franchise. Fiber deployment to the whole city fell through because Verizon wouldn't commit to wiring up the vast low-income areas of the city where people couldn't afford to subscribe anyway.
So because of historical discrimination it's common for government to require providers to serve everyone in a area instead of just the profitable areas (e.g. people that would buy $100 IP+TV packages instead of basic 5Mbps internet).
If there's anything that is class-warfare it's not adopting the very proven model of municipality networks. Of course government doing something good doesn't sit right with 'those who can afford'.
Chatanooga's system cost 5-8k per subscriber household for fiber and smart grid. It has resulted in little to none of the projected economic growth. And the revenue stream in no way makes up for the capital investment. The market values the NPV of a Comcast customer at only $2,500, and cable customers pay quite a bit more than $70 per month.
If you take this to the extreme, then Tesla should not be allowed to only sell very expensive cars... New technology often is adopted by the wealthy, the price goes down and then everyone can be served. The installation costs might go down over time by serving the ppl that are willing to pay so they can serve the others as well.
This regulation is counterproductive, the result is that no one gets fiber.
You're arguing that regulations against redlining would mean Tesla cannot just sell expensive cars.
Tesla does not discriminate based on your address. They discriminate based on income.
The problem with discrimination based on neighborhoods is that historically, it has not been income-based, despite claims by businesses that their only criteria was income[1].
The type of franchise that requires universal buildout (with a number of caveats) is a cable franchise, with the intention that everyone has access to TV services, not broadband. And the standards for new entrants into a cable franchise are generally less onerous (or provide time to get to universal coverage).
Do these guys actually lay down fiber? If so, isn't that crazy expensive, and how does that work since it seems there's a limited amount of conduit space that can be used in cities, towns, neighborhoods, etc.. In other words, not everybody and their brother can just lay down fiber.
Yeah, I expect we'll have a few more openings there. Right now we're hiring a City Manager for Westminster - details are here: http://www.tucows.com/careers/
laying the fiber is actually the cheap part, if you count the cost of securing Rights of Way (ROW). lawyers and politicians are far more expensive than skilled workers with heavy equipment.
The difference is that it's a company with a track record of providing awesome customer service in their mobile phone service, so the prospect of a fiber isp with fantastic customer service is exciting in this land of Comcast and Verizon.
Everything we're working on now runs on our own infrastructure or muni-infrastructure. Nothing white-label in the works, although I wouldn't count it out (we're an ISP, we like to provide service, we're pretty open about how we get it to your house).
How fast is crazy fast? Symmetric Gbit?
How much does it cost? Can you use your own router? Net neutrality?
This page really sucks. They should learn from fiber7[0] feature list and what to put on the website.
[0] https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=de&sl=de&tl=en&u=h...
(disclaimer: i'm a very happy fiber7 customer)