Gigabit fibre internet for under €48 per month using shared infrastructure

Impetus

Utah has a single fibre network serving consumer and business subscribers, offering a large choice of individual alternative service providers to offer a competitive service. Residential service is up to 1 GB/sec and business up to 10 GB/sec.

There is no point having multiple connections running into each premises - no more than it would be logical to have several competing streets serving a building right up to the front door - each street having to be paved and lit and cleaned, not to mention the added complexity involved in reading a map of an area.

The prices charged by each competing company are shown [USD 65 = EUR 47.50]

at: http://www.utopianet.org/pricelist/

Residential customer info: http://www.utopianet.org/residential-utopia/

Business customer info: http://www.utopianet.org/business-utopia/

Fibre has the lowest maintenance cost, a long shelf life (big investments are needed in copper every few years to upgrade the technology / speed - which is like throwing money into a bottomless pit (or several of them to be precise). The same pipe delivers internet, phone, TV/radio, home security, video conferencing, whatever is required. Having multiple competing operators selling what is basically the same platform greatly reduces the cost per building serviced by an open network, because the common costs (initial investment and operational) and spread over a larger number of customers.

Under the Utopianet plan, you can pay a single capital sum to have the network installed at your home - €2000 (about the price of a half-decent TV). Alternatively one can pay about €220 upfront and €22 per month for 10 years to finance your share of the system. There are other options too. A house on the re-sale market with fully paid for cable connection would easily add €2000 to the value of the house.

Installation videos: http://www.youtube.com/utahfiber

BeerWolf

Nit picking, €2000 for a half decent TV - wat?

Impetus

BeerWolf wrote: »

Nit picking, €2000 for a half decent TV - wat?

If you look at shops selling TV on mainland Europe, a smallish 4K TV is about €5,000 and the bigger ones go to up €25k+. OLED TVs are close to 10k.

http://www.samsung.com/ie/consumer/tv-audio-video/television/oled-tv/KE55S9CSTXXU

http://www.samsung.com/ie/consumer/tv-audio-video/television/uhd-tv/UE65F9000STXXU

While I don't like the curvy screened OLEDs myself, 4K with a proper TV feed produces awesome pictures.

Would you save 2k and have no toilets or plumbing in your house? The concept basically allows the user to take ownership of the plumbing, and shop around from a pool of many providers of broadband, TV, phone and other services. The customer calls the shots for a change.

7upfree

Impetus wrote: »

€2000 (about the price of a half-decent TV)

Lol!:D

Impetus

At the end of the day, it is a financing decision for each subscriber to a shared fibre network - pay €2000 up front or €22 a month for 10 years + a down payment of €300, or use some other financing option. You still end up buying the fibre access - rather than having to rent it infinitum (as one does now with UPC and eircom).

I must admit I don’t watch much TV, and haven’t spent €2k on a single TV - because the content I mostly watch - CNBC, Bloomberg suffers from a low bitrate picture (in Europe). CNBC has HD in the US. While I do watch some 1080i HD stuff from the continent, it is not 4k, so the existing HD set is adequate. When a serious quantity of 4K content becomes available - it will probably be on demand over the internet like netflix.ie or twit.tv. Netflix has been trialling 4k in the US. The existing infrastructure (especially cable) wouldn't be able to cope with large scale use of high bitrate video on demand.

I’d still prefer some means of getting the fibre technology and ideally some path to ownership - rather than paying a rent to use same forever and a day. As it stands, there are two providers in most jurisdictions - (eg in IRL eircom and UPC) and everything has to go over one or the other of these pipes - a bi- nopoly. Eircom’s VDSL2+ typically delivers 40 MB/sec down because of the real world distance the copper loop has to travel between the street box and the house - even if the box is across the street. UPC hype high-ish speeds (up to 200 Mbits/sec) - but the reality is you are sharing the cable with dozens of other customers and this brings the real world speed way down. The limiting factor with modern computers - particularly those with SSDs and high speed graphic cards is the speed of the internet connection. In business, it is limiting the usefulness of cloud applications due to screen fill delays etc, especially when employees need access to data while on the telephone.

Most American telecommunications charges are about double the European price (eg mobile phones, internet access, cable TV) and typically offer half the quality - eg mobile data services in San Francisco and New York crawl in most locations. So the prices shown in the utopianet.org website are probably well in excess of what one would have to pay the service provider. After all they would have no “last mile” to worry about in a shared fibre system.