I'm glad it worked for him but he asks the right question: How can we get this to work for other people in Washington State? I live in Seattle and have fiber optic service from CenturyLink. The gigabit is nice, but CenturyLink is running my fiber drop over a "route of convenience that, if the next door property owner ever gets snippy, will turn into a battle of lawyers. Why? Because CL won't use the utility poles in front of my house because they don't want to coordinate with the transit agency.
The whole infrastructure argument is getting absurd. KPUD can't sell to end users because Washington law prohibits it. I have service but might not someday "just because." A city in Washington that owns its own utility agency could serve but has to do it by selling bonds that require 60% voter approval. Meanwhile, everybody is left wondering what next.
Who exactly wants those laws in your state? If the answer is "nobody", then get your neighbors together and fix the problem. And if there is somebody who wants those laws, at least you'll know who the problem is, and can start raising public awareness of who is needlessly keeping them from having better Internet.
It's a mix. Both of the incumbent providers push heavily to keep the restrictions on the books. In addition, there is a large contingent of voters who do not want the restrictions repealed because they are opposed to public operation and/or financing of a telecommunications system that can serve the general public.
Much like a lot of things, folks here are generally opposed unless or until it directly impacts them. There is a group in Seattle that is pushing for a ballot initiative with accompanying property tax levy to get the city to build an open-access last mile system. The areas of the city that already have good service, whether Comcast or CenturyLink fiber, poll at slightly under 50% support. Areas that are stuck with Wave Broadband or only CenturyLink DSL poll at well above 70%.
You originally said "CL won't use the utility poles in front of my house because they don't want to coordinate with the transit agency.". Given that those poles already exist, if CL was willing to pay for the work to string the new fiber on those poles, that shouldn't cost the city anything at all.
you don't even have to go that far to see it is all wrong.
for each people that is completely out of coverage, there are another 100,000 that is in a monopolistic coverage that probably had to pay for TV and other shenanigans on top of a ridiculous price just so they could get the service they wanted.
I have fiber optic in China rated at 20mbs but it's really spotty. Downloads can be really fast but latency can be terrible. I realize that browsing foreign sites is sharing bandwidth with a pool the size of China but sometimes even domestic sites time out. I think it's either being oversold or badly misconfigured by the ISP.
Every story about broadband attracts random, totally unrepresentative anecdotes that aren't interesting or informative. Such comments may even be harmful if they trigger various cognitive biases.
I'm sorry if my comment wasn't interesting or informative. I posted in the hopes that someone else with similar experience could offer advice. I know anecdotes are not of general interest but there's usually a long tail of comments that are useful to _someone_ and can be found by search engines.
And there are a dozen similar comments elsewhere in the threads, that contribute equally much (or little), that are not downvoted. I want to know what the difference is. Is it the mention of China?
I had a similar situation in Mexico where no provider gave me the bandwith I need it. The biggest provider (Telmex( refused to sign me up for a better plan because their infraestructure near my home wouldn't support it, at least they were honest.
I called my local cable company and contracted their 50 mbps plan. Had a lot of issues with the installation and never really received the complete service. They didn't had enough bandwith in the zone so very few times I received my contracted bandwith.
At the end I contacted a Telcom (EnlaceTPE) which specialize in providing fiber internet to companies. They did the entire fiber instalation to my home. I only had to commit to 3 years paying around 70 usd with a 200 mbps service. From the first call to installation took around 3 months, best decision made so far.
Curious, what's wages (low and medium) in USD for someone in your area? As an American reading anecdotes, I like to look at it in terms of cost relative to income instead of cost in isolation. Helps me get an idea of where the cost would start here and how much value that company delivers.
I really have no idea. I get paid very well but that is not representative of the common wages around here.
The service by itself is expensive, considering it's just Internet. The most common package for internet + phone, on the most popular provider, costs around 24 USD monthly. If you want cable add another 20 bucks.
According to some websites the median wages in Mexico per home at 2013 was around 740 USD monthly.
Interesting. I decided to do a comparison using the percentage of monthly income for the Internet. I decided to use $30,000 a year per household to represent middle end of working class. I figure it's a fair class to use and pretty large. I used price of good Internet (50Mbps) in my area. So, here's the costs:
USA: 2.8% of household income; Mexico: 3.2% with your number
So, they're quite similar. For that, I get 50Mbps down and a fraction up for $70. You get 200Mbps down and how much up? Either way, you're getting a good deal as a percentage of income. If you're better than $740/mo, you're getting a really good deal. I'm envious. :)
Fibre techies - even residential FTTH - are pretty clued up. I was pleasantly surprised by the guy that activated my fibre...got a distinct feel of "he is one of us". Hidden benefit of a cutting edge tech I guess...you get real techies instead of people following a fkn script.
I thought it was specialization and cost-cutting. I know Comcast out here contracts their cabling to a company where the few managers make a decent amount of money while the technicians make little ranging from amateur to experienced in skill. Keeps them out of Comcast's HR approach and branding, too. Maybe some blame-shifting potential. Not sure all the reasons but plenty of possibilities come to mind.
Cost is probably the main one, though. This company has way less overhead and more flexibility than Comcast.
<quote>but state law forbids them from retailing directly to consumers, so as of yet they have no way to do this directly and no residential pricing model. So we had to be creative.</quote>
isn't having in writing the intent to go against the law (even if creatively) a very dumb thing to do?
but if you say how you plan to do something to evade the spirit of the law, that is pretty much a crime. people got their assets taken by the IRS by moving to another country and giving up citizenship when it was proved they did that with the intent to not pay taxes.
Because US tax law specifically says you're subject to it for up to 10 years after renouncing your US citizenship. That's not merely intent to violate the "spirit" of the law; that's violating the letter of the law.
Wait wait wait.. what!? How can it be illegal to say "I don't like paying your tax rate, so I'm leaving your country and move to another country with lower tax rates. Here is my citizenship."
well, IANAL, but it is. there is the famous story of the founder of one of the big french game studios. forgot which now now. but i'm confident you can search.
the gist is that he got his series A or B, on a french bank, frozen because the US IRS told them to, because he gave up his green card (not even a full citizenship yet!) to go back to his home france and start a company there.
I'm curious if the author ever looked into HamWan. [1]
They provide non-commercial internet access for hobbyists who have their amateur radio licenses (very easy to get) and buy some basic equipment. They cover a number of places in the Puget Sound region. The author would have to build a tower to get above the trees but I can't imagine that this would run more than $4-5k (on the high end).
I am not actually a user of HamWAN--I'm down in Tacoma and my line-of-sight is impeded by terrain and building a tower in my dense urban neighborhood isn't an option. Also, I have biz-class Comcast.
Deploying to rural is quite an uphill battle. But their model seems to be doing the job. Might be worth copying aspects in deployments like original post's.
Thanks for sharing the Vice article, it was great ... good to see some of these projects succeeding now that the capex has come down (a decade or so ago there was a long list of similar ventures that failed).
Yeah I enjoyed it too and it's quite hopeful. I like how the communities are essentially coming together to get themselves on the Internet's, Fast Lane.
This person should have been awarded mid five figures from Comcast. I wonder if any legal team looked into the possibility of suing them and/or the the municipality?
There can't be any meaningful competition between a private company and a government entity that can tax people to pay off its infrastructure bonds and take land by eminent domain.
I see this statement bandied about quite frequently. Would you like to substantiate the claim and/or provide examples of actual public harm where such faux competition exists?
It's actually self-evident in the claim. Tell any venture capitalist they'll be doing the same thing as the competition in a regulated market except the competition can get exempted from regulations or pull in tons of extra money in form of tax revenue. Who wants to take that risk in the U.S. system? I think you could say it's played out in the areas where utilities introduced cheap broadband. Articles on those usually major players are suffering over there compared to where they're competing with private companies like their own.
I do have a specific example, though. My background is high assurance security & systems. The government once used incentives + good criteria to get market to create quite a few products their pentesters couldn't break. Then, NSA started competing with private sector under a new initiative. Market went away with Boeing guy clear that was largely why. Only a few remain and stay stagnant because companies won't invest much further in them due to risk posed by both market demand and government decisions.
I see that you have proven the nonviability of FedEx, UPS and all other package carriers that compete with government postal services.
I also note that you have proven the nonexistence of private security companies, since they compete with the police and are much more restricted, by law, in what they can do.
And there can't be any private shuttle bus services, because there are municipal bus services.
I think you need to modify your claim.
All of these companies do reasonably well by competing with government-run services by offering things that the government isn't providing and is unlikely to provide because it unreasonably benefits a single user: on-demand pickups and guaranteed delivery times; full-time guards in a particular location; a bus that runs directly to your campus.
My above claim indicated that there was a lot of risk in competing directly with government and for about the same thing they're offering. It doesn't preclude that success is possible. Besides, most of the examples you give are poor because, as you said, the private firms weren't trying to offer the same thing.
For instance, much USPS expense comes from the fact that they have to ship cheap anywhere. The overlap between them and private sector is the closest you come to a valid example. Private security in most states doesn't have to do much past issue warnings and call the police, while police can take direction action. A bus that runs directly to your campus isn't a general purpose bus or serving most people. So, yeah, it's certainly easier to offer a service that does less than the government one for fewer people and be successful.
Back to the actual topic at hand: fiber infrastructure. Laying out fiber all over the place has a high cost with low amount of money coming in. That's for lowest tiers. The Tier 1's expend 8-9 digits maintaining backbones. So, if government started competing, you can bet the private market would suffer & re-consider new fiber investments. The only model making sense at that point would be offering value-added services on top of connectivity while doing private investments where government wouldn't go.
These days buying a house without internet is like buying one that has no running water or not functioning electricity. How can an area in the US not have any sort of internet coverage? When does the FCC step in and provide this basic utility to the tax payer?
More than a quarter of the US states — most of them very large — have population densities below 50 people per square mile. Even providing wireless internet to all those people is a staggeringly expensive undertaking.
I'm not saying people shouldn't have internet access. They absolutely should. But it's not something you can just should into existence, either.
I call BS. Finland has less than 48 people per square mile and universal cell and broadband service. By law the locally dominant service provider has to deliver a minimim of 1 Mbps to all inhabitants. In practise the delivered speed is a lot more and the minimim will be raisdd to 10 Mbps shortly. 3G is almost 100% and 4G covers most areas.
The population density excuse is just that, an excuse not to do cell and broadband service properly. As such broadband definitrly falls into the should category.
The U.S. has a larger percentage of people on fiber, and Finland has a much larger proportion of people on fixed wireless. The U.S. has way more people on cable, while Finland has way more people on DSL.
94% of the U.S. has access to at least 4 mbps broadband. 59% has access to at least 100 mbps, versus 50% for Finland. According to Akamai, average connection speeds are about the same for the two countries: https://www.akamai.com/us/en/multimedia/documents/report/aka....
I have no idea where you got the idea that people in Finland use fixed wireless. The OECD graph is few years old anyway. Here are the most recent statistics from three months ago:
The access methods by popularity are: xDSL, cable, Ethernet, FTTH and others, which might include some obscure fixed wireless operators using Wimax in the 3.5 Ghz band.
Furthermore, I'd say that the broadband situation in Finland is substantially different from the US, despite the very low popularion density of Finland.
In Finland everybody that wants broadband can get broadband. In fact everybody that wants it has it. 92% of Finns have an Internet connection, either fixed only (22%), mobile broadband only (i.e. 3G or 4G at 28%) or a combination of both (42%). Source: https://www.viestintavirasto.fi/en/aboutthesector/statistics...
Fast broadband (100 Mbps or faster) is actively promoted and developed by the government. All permanent recidences shall be within a mile of an Internet backbone access point where service is available at 100 Mbps or more. This means local residents, co-ops or ISPs will easily be able to hook up anybody at 100 Mbps or more. Since a mile is the maximum distance average loop lenghts will be much shorter. Source: http://www.lvm.fi/pressreleases/4425644/broadband-for-all-20...
Funds are actually made available to provide broadband access to not-spots. The last 5% of a population is always hard to reach with fixed broadband, but subsidies are provided to hook up areas which aren't commercially viable otherwise. Source: same as above.
3G/4G mobile broadband is cheap, unlimited and uncapped with three facilities based operators and a handfull of MVNOs on top of that. 4G is actually faster and cheaper than a xDSL connection. Mobile broadband is thus actually a viable fixed broadband substitute.
If your point is, "Finland does broadband better than America," then well done you. It can join the club with just about every other first-world nation on the planet.
Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for anything that looks vaguely like a solution to that problem, and not merely gloating about it.
EDIT: I'm sorry for the tone, but I see no value in pointing out flaws and failings without offering solutions to them. It's plenty easy in today's world to hate on the US. Most of it is probably even deserved. But it doesn't make anything better, so I don't see what it contributes to the discussion, beyond an opportunity for smugness.
No worries, mate. I'm not that thin skinned. As to solutions, I've already pointed out the USF in a sibling comment, but using that would actually require the political will to, you know, actually do something to solve the problem.
EDIT: my actual reply to rayiner wasn't made to gloat, but to point out the substantial differences as a counterpoint to the statement that the US and Finland are statistically similar. It also contained the core problem, the lack of a properly constructed regulatory regime, which also points out the obvious thing to fix i.e. the solution required.
However if political activism isn't your thing then the only other solution is to build your own network.
If you look past the rhetoric at the actual statistics, I think it's pretty clear that at the median, the internet situation is about the same between the two countries.
Now, within the bottom 15-20% I'm fully willing to bet Internet access and speed is worse in the U.S. than in Finland, but so is pretty much everything else. We have higher income inequality and more systematic poverty. The U.S. has about 20% of children in poverty versus less than 5% for Finland. Nothing really unique to internet service.
I think we agree upon Finland being substantially different with regards to universal broadband access. Only looking at the median (which is pretty useless for assessing universal service) the US might come off better.
Broadband statistics for the US are of notorious bad quality, so any findings are to be taken with a grain of salt. The FCC statistics are useless and unless the NTIA statistics have been published in full and vetted then I'm inclined to put them into the category of wishful thinking.
The World bank data is also not comparable since it uses both narrowband and broadband access to tabulate Internet access. 92% of Finns have a broadband internet connection (see previous post for primary source). How many Americans have the same is an unknown quantity based on the data.
The key point is that Finland is inclusive with regards to broadband access while the US is exclusive.
Finland has an area of 130k mi². The US has an area of 3.7 million mi². As such, it would cost an order of magnitude more, and then some, to provide equivalent service, just based on raw numbers. When you actually look at population density maps of the US, however, and realize just how sparsely populated most of the area between the West Coast and the Mississippi River is, the picture is probably much worse.
Look, I'm not disagreeing with you that broadband access should be a universal thing. I emphatically agree that it should, which I'd have hoped one might have inferred from my comment, given, you know, that I said exactly that. But should, by itself, won't make a damned thing happen. Someone still has to pay for it, and I don't see the entrenched mobile (or wired) carriers in the flyover parts of the US jumping up and down with checkbooks in hand.
The US, whether for cynical, bureaucratic, pragmatic, or other reasons, doesn't have a legal regime mandating that kind of coverage. I wish to hell it did. But calling BS on reality, as time-honored of an internet tradition as that may be, is a pretty lousy place from which to start changing it...
I was calling BS on the statement that it would be a staggeringly expensive undertaking to provide universal broadband access in the US. It is not, and this is the most important part, expensive on a per subscriber basis which is the only measure that matters. Sure, it would require a total capital outlay which would be large, but that's not the real issue.
The US has roughly twice the population density of Finland. Thus it would be roughly half as expensive per subscriber to wire up the US compared to Finland. The key takeaway here is that Finland has shown that it can be done and has been done.
As to whether it should be a should thing or not, it most definitely should be. The regulatory framework already exists for it, it's called the Universal Service Fund. The only thing lacking is that it is not being used for broadband. That needs to change, but as you said there isn't a legal regime mandating that...
In closing, population density isn't the real issue. Otherwise we would not be lamenting that you can't get broadband in California.
The thing with population density is that it's an average. Averages are notoriously useless for this sort of thing.
For example, the average density of the universe is 3-6 atoms per cubic meter. And that includes things like mountains, people, and stars.
When you're talking about provisioning broadband access, you have to provision for the worst case (or close enough that the differences are insigificant), not the average. Otherwise, you're looking at half the population being under- or unserved.
When you build networks you always work with averages. How many subscribers per mile on average, how many Mbps of IP transit per subscriber on average. Averages are useful and used to determine feasibility, cost and profitability. Population density is a useful average to estimate things with, including network buildout costs.
If you want a better estimator we can use linear density. The US has 321 million people and 4 million miles of roads. Finland has 5.5 million people and 282 thousand miles of roads.
US: 80 people per mile
Finland: 20 people per mile
By this estimate average cost for a network that covers all roads, and thus all permanent residences and businesses, would be significantly cheaper in the US than in Finland.
I worked for the telco that has the largest operating area of any in the world (far Northern Canada).. with unbelievably low population densities, and it was mandated we provide a minimum of 5Mbps to all people living there, and 4G.. we were slapping up 4G towers in isolated, fly-in only "communities" with 50 people.
There are plenty of parts of the US that doesn't have any sort of wired internet access. It's a big country with lots of people living in rural areas. The best my dad can get is a satellite connection that is metered. He can get a phone line, electricity, and water - but not internet. 10GB per month doesn't go very far...
IIRC, when he was buying the house, the Cable Company said that they could install internet, but when it came down to actually doing the install they decided that they weren't going to do it.
We really know how to paint ourselves into corners don't we. Here we have a slew of people who want broadband and companies willing and able to provide it. So what prey tell is the problem? Laws.
Just curious, but what does she need that bandwidth for? I am expecting the usual replies of running a server, having better upstream capabilities, and the very typical 'techies gonna have bandwidth', but I would love to hear some weird unexpected ways to use bandwidth like that.
The author started out with no broadband at all: http://www.loomcom.com/blog/2015/02/22/its-comcastic-or-i-ac... If you're going to have to pay to run some kind of Internet to your house, I guess you might as well get fiber. The bandwidth is probably a free bonus.
Imagine that you decide to get a security camera system for some reason. Maybe you have a valuable collection of something or you have a small business with lots of easily moved/sold equipment. You can easy buy or assemble a DVR system with up to a few dozen cameras from a number of sources.
These systems can be very valuable in ways you may not expect. My parent's recently captured video of a car accident in front of their house. This video greatly benefited a long-time neighbor and friend.
Anyway you get a system that has good video coverage of your building's doors and windows and can record say a few days worth of video. You're golden, right? Unfortunately you are vulnerable in a fundamental way. An intruder can find the video recorder box and destroy it. I personally know individuals this has happened to. So you come home from a long week and find your building broken into and the video lost. What can you do about this?
Simple... find a neighbor/AWS/colo box/etc and stream the video there too. It records a few TB of data and provides a backup in case of theft or destruction. This differs from typical backup situations of home users because of the bandwith involved.
Because ideally you would stream the video directly from the cams. If you have 10 cams producing 2 mbps, thats 20mbps. That's a lot of upload for the typical home connection, but for a symmetrical gigabit connection it's a drop in the bucket.
This is just one example. Having the bandwidth available makes so many things easy that were previously very difficult.
Modern games are huge and SSDs are small. Buy all your games on steam. When you want to play a game just tell steam to get it and it downloads at 50+ megabytes / second. Play your 20GB game in less than 7 minutes. When you're done just delete it.
There is no reason why games couldn't be designed for this use case and be playble immediately, downloading in the background.
Transit bandwidth for a tier 2 ISP costs under $500 x 1 Gbs / month. Considering usage patterns and that the bandwidth is shared across users its a negligible cost from what I understand. I work for an ISP and from what I can tell all the money goes to employing people and the left over goes to infrastructure.
The biggest advantage of fiber is often latency/jitter.
I had 4ms ping flat and 0% packet loss to local LA Quake Live servers when I had FiOS in LA. Almost LAN-like play.
Cable internet is always has much higher ping, more jitter, and more packet loss.
Supposedly I can get gigabit internet from AT&T here in Cupertino but they cap at 1 TB and I'm not excited about paying $110/mo for the equivalent of a ~3 Mbps sustained connection.
I honestly have no idea. I have a 50/50 fiber connection now and even with multiple people watching HD video streams, torrents and other files I don't believe I come close to saturating it.
FiOS keeps upgrading it every year or so (it started as a 15/5 I couldn't saturate), so that's nice. At least I'm basically in "first world" territory even if I live in the U.S.
I suppose when 4k video becomes more common I'll feel it, but I don't even have anything that can display 4k right now and Verizon will probably just upgrade it to 75/75 or 100/100 by that point.
One nice benefit, I have a plex server I can access remotely and it works well outside of my network. But I'd live with just my netflix account if I had to "rough it".
> I have a 50/50 fiber connection now and even with multiple people watching HD video streams, torrents and other files I don't believe I come close to saturating it.
Unless you've throttled your torrents, or you're connected to a really slow swarm, you have almost certainly saturated your download. I have -er- 100/10 or 100/15 service from Comcast. If I'm downloading anything >= 100MB, and a member of the household is going to start a new Netflix stream, I need to pause the download, or else the stream will be degraded for a long time.
Also, unless you're using a decent router, it's very possible that your router can't route and/or NAT at 50mbit or faster. I know that Apple Airports can and Ubiquiti EdgeRouters[0] can. I would also expect that an ISP-provided router would route fast enough.
[0] If you're in the market for a new router and are somewhat network savvy, or are comfortable with running OpenWRT on your router, I strongly recommend the Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite. It routes and firewalls at ~1Gbit/sec (when offloading is enabled) and costs right around $100. Check out the Newegg reviews that aren't "It's slower than I expected" or "It's totally broken" for an idea of what you'll be getting in to. I've had mine for nearly a year and -other than the eventually dodgy external power supply[1] it shipped with- it has been rock solid.
[1] The unit I got had been sitting in a box in a warehouse in Florida for ~two years before it arrived on my doorstep. The failing power supply presented as infrequent spontaneous reboots with nothing unusual in syslog, which became more and more frequent until the power supply just stopped providing power entirely. Replaced it with a wall wart that I had on hand and have had no trouble since.
Nope, no attempt at bandwidth controls from my end. My wife is watching some kind of HD stream from her home country, I'm watching netflix or youtube and web surfing, and have 3 torrents pulling down from archive.org right now at around 1-2Mb/s.
I'm sure there's some kind of fallback to SD from Netflix, their webpage claims I need 5Mb/s to get 720p, and 25Mb/s for "Ultra HD" (whatever that is and I'm pretty sure I'm not getting that for old episodes of Firefly) leaving me with somewhere between 25-45Mb/s. I'm pretty sure my wife isn't gobbling all that up with whatever it is she's watching. Web browsing is much lighter.
So all told, worst case I'm looking at
- 6Mb/s torrents
- 5Mb/s Netflix
- let's say 5Mb/s for my wife's video
- some fraction of 1Mb/s for our collective web surfing
Maybe 17-20Mb/s?
Amazingly, with all that going on, if I go do a speed test, it still showed me around 40/50 so I'm definitely under that.
I didn't intend to imply that the EdgeRouters run OpenWRT. I guess that wasn't clear. :(
'Tis true that the forked version of Vyatta (Vyatta 6?) that the EdgeRouters use is rather different than OpenWRT, but if one has figured out how to work with OpenWRT's UCI configuration system, one can figure out how to work with Vyatta's configuration system, too. And, both OpenWRT and Vyatta run on top of Linux, so -if needed- one has a Linux system that one can configure directly.
We have a 3.0/0.5 DSL connection which can support 1 high quality or 2 medium to low quality Netflix streams. Web browsing is tolerable when everyone is online, but the second the uplink bandwidth is saturated (0.5Mbit/s) everything else grinds to a halt. I think you'd notice it too if your connection weren't symmetric. That is, your connection was 50/5 or 50/10.
We were on-track to get a 50/50 fiber connection (the service supports up to 1000/1000) - however the ISP hasn't yet started to build the network out to our village - a year later than they said it would be available. In contrast, our neighboring villages all have their service, but there is a risk they will pull out since the build cost is 3x what they forecast (narrow country roads where the only option is to dig up the road, rather than run cable under verges or sidewalks).
FWIW, the build cost is a measly £600,000 - or $929,670, which in my estimate works out at between £600 and £1200 per resident.
I've been around the UK and Ireland so I know what you mean about the roads and the difficulty of running infrastructure around them.
I remember back when we had DSL we could saturate it, even with just some casual youtubing.
Funny thing is, we never asked for or paid for symmetric connections, our phone company just did it one day as part of a system upgrade and sent everybody new routers. And they've done at least one bandwidth upgrade since then.
I grew up pretty rural so I can definitely sympathize with your pain. The first world will arrive soon!
FYI, based on my past experience, for avg urban customer the total acquisition cost for a cable ISP on DOCSIS 2/3.0 was about $750 -- small delta vs your new build cost.
Virgin Media is the only UK-based ISP that uses cable (DOCSIS). All others use VDSL2 where available, ADSL2 or just plain old ADSL (g.DMT) if you're sufficiently rural.
The trouble is that Virgin Media have much cut out for them if they want to match the availability of VDSL in the UK. Therefore, I can imagine they will be targeting large towns on the commuter belt long before they consider more rural villages.
I have a 35/35 connection that I regularly saturate, and unfortunately it's the best available. (Frontier offers better service elsewhere, but not here.) I don't saturate it 24 hours a day, but when I use it, I use all of it. For the download bandwidth, between videos, large packages, and source code, the limiting factor is almost always on my end. And for upload, I use it with VPN, with regular backups, with git, with scp, and with rsync. I would love to have a gigabit connection to see if that connection would still be the limiting factor, and I suspect it still would be sometimes.
I have 50/20 with a family. Two laptops and Netflix going on the Media Center PC plus my work easily causes degraded service on certain appliances in peak times.
It looks like Netflix is claiming 4k at 25Mb/s (at their standard degraded quality). So we'll need more bandwidth in the future, but I don't even have anything in my house that can display 4k anyways so I'm not too concerned.
That's asking the wrong question, in my book. The right question is something along the lines of "if companies know there are many people with that much bandwidth, what new products and services would they be selling us?"
I think we'd see more "private cloud" usage; put a secure box in your house with all your data you want to access elsewhere, give photo/video links or hashes or decryption keys or whatever to your family and friends, etc.
Looking to the broadband wonderland in South Korea of Japan w/Gig service for $25 provides some insight into the sevices/uses of that sort of broadband -- based on my experience it fundamentally changes your computing practices.
I routinely download coredumps from crashed devices and servers to analyze them locally or upload them to other partners. Some of these are full dumps, so have fun moving 256GB on a daily basis with a slow connection.
The whole infrastructure argument is getting absurd. KPUD can't sell to end users because Washington law prohibits it. I have service but might not someday "just because." A city in Washington that owns its own utility agency could serve but has to do it by selling bonds that require 60% voter approval. Meanwhile, everybody is left wondering what next.