EPB launches America’s first community-wide 25 gig internet service (opens in new tab)

10GBaseT is the wrong solution, period. As you've found out it runs hot (somehow I doubt all the fanless consumer trinkets are going to last very long). Not that Ubiquiti is a good example – even with their 1G kit they had issues with thermal management. Both the ER-X and ER-L ran hot enough to cook themselves (especially the early ones with the tiny SD cards). True to form my ER-Xs get flakey when it gets slightly warm. Fiber is the way forward and hopefully getting multi-gig connections to the home will start to bring the pricing on some of that kit down to reasonable levels.

FWIW I've also got Sonic's 10G offering and yeah it works well enough. Something is causing intermittent problems that I've not had with their ADSL or 1G fiber offerings – I'm starting to suspect the 1G TP-Link switch they tossed in. For now I just live with the periodic interruptions.

Edit: Certainly I'm not planning to upgrade any of my gear to 10G as I simply don't need the bandwidth and Sonic's offerings are really geared towards web browsing more than anything.

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.

10Gbps wont ever be consumer grade. There is nothing on the roadmap which suggest we could bring down the cost of 10Gbps Ethernet to say within 2x of 1Gbps Ethernet. 2.5/5Gbps have a much better chance, and it will require some market narrative to push for that. Such as WiFi 7 ( 802.11be ) getting 10Gbps wireless speed but stuck with only 1Gbps Port. It doesn't matter whether that is true in real world, but with enough Social Media push and marketing, we could push vendor to incorporate 2.5 and 5Gbps. Then we may have some chances of seeing 2.5/5Gbps replacing 1Gbps Ethernet.

> prosumer 10G switches are vastly more expensive per-port

They are, but they aren't out of reach - i recently bought 2 Zyxel managed switches with 3x 2.5/5/10G and one SFP+ ports alongside 8x 1G ports for 200€ each. That's not cheap, but it's not super expensive either, and most consumers can get away with unmanaged switches. The unmanaged version has 2x2.5 and 2xSFP+ and comes for 120€.

So we're getting there in terms of availability.

The kicker I've found when looking at proper enterprise networking gear (NOT anything from the Ubiquiti trash lineup) is most of the cost on top of an already high hardware cost is in software licensing for the router / switch itself. Did you different routers etc?

Fortunately, fiber cable runs are really cheap. Fortunately with sources like FS.com optics and transceivers also aren't too expensive.

>The industry has some work to do here.

I think that wired ISP bandwidth missed out on marketing/branding (which may also be intentional). The thing is that the average consumer is woefully misinformed. You don't even need to look that far. A comment downstream mistook gigabit with gigabyte. With cellular networks, everyone and their dog is clamoring for 5G. Wifi too now has numbers like wifi 6 and wifi 7. So my conclusion is that we need numbers but not units. Units confuse people.

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 you 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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

Chattanooga is actually almost in Georgia, and not too far from Atlanta.

But yeah, it just goes to show that with the right opportunity and motivation, you can really do some cool things in places you wouldn't expect. I used to work remotely for a company in Chattanooga, and I was always blown away by the internet speeds whenever I visited the HQ. I remember downloading a 300mb file in 10s, in 2015. The story behind how it all came to happen is quite cool too.

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.

It is cool, but I imagine it's expensive. Tried their site with a random address, and 10Gig is $300/month...their 1Gig is $68/month. 25Gb isn't yet listed.

Haha, I work remotely now in a rural unincorporated area near Knoxville, and we get AT&T fiber at 5 Gbps, with the local municipality rolling out 10 Gbps soon. When I was living in Redwood City, nothing like that was available at our address. I was astonished at the poor internet provider options in Silicon Valley.

Check with sonic, they cover a big chunk of silicon valley with symmetrical gig fiber.

> 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.

Whut? You don't have internet in Silicon freakin' Valley? Lol

What will you need that much bandwidth for... in the future.

Today? You don't need 25gig. Even if you're in a house with all the latest technology and a half dozen users, you probably won't ever saturate that line unless everyone REALLY tried.

But tomorrow is a different story. Ethernet above 1gig is becoming more common in the consumer world. Not super popular, but its starting to take shape. Wifi 6E has a theoretical maximum of just shy of 10gig. Wifi 7 (not ratified) is looking to be around 40gig.

With work from home and, in general, the world going more digital - there is a lot more pushing around of files. Do you have an iPhone or Android? Everytime your phone is on the wifi its backing up your photos/videos (and other stuff). That alone can slow down most peoples internet connections. Does your computer do backups?

Also once your internet starts to hit about the 1gig mark, you can treat remote servers like we treat LAN today. Want to have a server but don't want to have it at home? That's ok when you've got 1+ gig internet. Of course, it'd be even nicer if that was even faster... in theory.

Doing multiple of those things at once. You're watching a movie while one kid is downloading a game and another is watching something else? I'm saying it lets your whole family never have to interact with one another.

All your network actions are processing 5-10x faster. A lot of the little things you do are instant at 1GB that added up at 100MB. Medium files are small, and small file transfers are barely noticeable. It changes the feeling of any UI that uses the network.

At 10GB, once you have hardware that supports it, the same thing is going to happen again. Your medium-sized files will feel instant.

On top of all that, you save time on large downloads, huge downloads become not inconvenient, and your whole household can pretty much do all that simultaneously.

Right now, 25gig would only be seriously considered for a business, though.

I think the peer reply about treating WAN like LAN is the best lens.

Imagine all of your family/friends were on a local wired connection together. What would you do with that? Usually I don't find myself wanting faster bandwidth to interact with big services (Netflix/etc), but with other people or my own remote resources.

I throw around a lot of large VM images, which is definitely outside the average person's uses, but stuff like sending backups to your friend with the huge NAS, Steam/Parsec 4K streaming from that other friend's GeForce 3090 machine, etc...

Steam games is the biggest benefit I saw. Modern games are in the tens to hundreds of GB now so gigabit internet is the difference between waiting 15 minutes and 1 hour.

When your microwave, fridge, oven, tv, toaster, dish washer, dryer, tea kettle, and stand mixer are all playing you 4K advertisements for a new TV show or a new pair of Adidas, you will be glad you have 12gbps left to browse the web (which will by then require another 2gbps for all of the javascript, images, and 4K video ads needed to render a blog)

I noticed the same years ago. I have ~250mbit FiOS. I could upgrade to 1 gigabit for another $20 per month, but I don't feel that my life would be $20 per month better. Websites and Youtube wouldn't download any faster. Due to latency, work won't get any faster. I buy and install new games maybe once per year, but is saving an hour once a year really worth the extra $240 for that year? I don't think so.

I'm the only one at my house. My brother might come over, but that's just one low-end phone on wifi, which feels like a rounding error on ~250mbit.

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. :-)

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.

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.

In the Windows world one would just get a 25Gb NIC and be good to go.

* and supporting network equipment/cabling of course

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

>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

thunderbolt to pcie enclosure with a connectx 25GbE card

It started out to build a smart power grid, and I can say it did that pretty well. The network was able to automatically re-routr power to decrease outages substantially during storms without requiring crews to fix it.

Most people I know converted pretty quickly to EPB from Comcast, but apartments and HOAs still make contracts for exclusive Comcast wiring, even brand new HOAs that are being built.

My understanding is Comcast significantly improved in the Chattanooga area to compete, but I never went back and will never move to an area where I have to use Comcast again.

The best part about EPB was that they will service any house within their service area - for no crazy cost. I think initial setup was sometimes either completely waived or less than $100, no matter the house.

Also, the billing is nice - when they say $70 - it's $70 - no extra taxes or fees on top of that like most telecoms and utilities do.

As for actual changes - the city failed to truly capitalize on having a gig network. We wasted millions of dollars on a city-wide wifi system that was never turned on, due to political reasons (thr decision maker saw poor performance and shut it down after $300 million was already wasted putting up routers across the city.

The push I expected was smarter stoplights and traffic management, but that never happened. If anything it got worse.

I have been here for a while, in the earliest days of the gig there was a mini-rush of startups to Chatt. Low cost of living, relatively small/quiet city, access to basically all major southern cities (barring southern Florida) by either a quick flight or couple hour drive… makes sense that it just works out nicely.

I live about 20mi out from town, in a relatively rural area, and we still get excellent 1Gbps here. They wired as many drops as I asked for when we built here. It’s like a dream for a remote worker.

The city still has presence from some startups (I’m a bit out of the loop on who all is here), and I’ve known quite a few remote engineers who have lived in the area as well. Not sure how much this differs from an alternate universe where Comcast rules the land.

EPB is excellent all around. Service is incredibly consistent, it’s a bill I happily pay every month.

Had to move away for work -- but in my experience, the city has successfully reinvented itself and is now one of the most desirable places to live in the south.

Hello from the Southside!

> states pass laws to forbid municipal broadband

What happens if the municipality goes ahead with it anyway? Does the state sue everybody? Seize the network by force? Cut the cables?

If you are using so much bandwidth on a gigabit line that the buffers are actually used, I'd think you probably want a higher grade of service than home internet.

In short no, but ironically the last time I read about rural 10G fiber the one guy they interviewed was a radiologist who wanted to work from home lmao. In short, I don't think he was too worried about dropping $1k on a router etc. Granted, if I remember correctly I think the ISP actually loaned him some enterprise routing gear.

hahaha found it... ironically it's a vice article [0]

0 - https://www.vice.com/en/article/gv5m77/10-gbps-fiber-interne...

You still have to get transceivers for both ends of each and every connection which drives up the cost per port pretty dramatically.

Edit:

  Scantly driving up the cost per port.

Say what? You've just added $1,500 (28 ports * 2 per port * $27) to the cost of a 28 port switch… at the low end.

Now I've no experience with fiber, but anecdotally I've come across a few complaints that the Ubiquiti stuff is picky about the transceivers you use. So if you go with a single manufacturer, Ubiquiti wants about $900 for their 28 port switch, but SFP+ transceivers start at $38. Their direct attach cables are cheaper but a 5m cable will still run you about $40. Compare that to *BaseT where I can grab a 3m Cat6 cable for under $10.

For an ISP the cost difference probably matters much less as they will be making money off of each connection (and likely saving on cooling costs). For a home user (e.g. an EPB customer) that's still pricey. An ER-X w/ a single SFP port runs about $80, using that SFP port will cost you.

FTTH network uses PON to reduce expensive 1:1 wiring for each home (but YMMV). Simple fiber switch can't be used for PON.

I usually buy used enterprise gear, and have been in a similar situation: switch ports are (relatively) cheap, anything that needs an actual CPU to do routing is spendy.

I've gone to Mikrotik for routing 10Gb in the home now. Excuse the horrible part number: the CCR2004-16G-2S+PC has worked out great for me. They're a bit hard to find right now, but I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them over whatever Ubiquiti is trying to sell in the space. For multi-gig routing, the Mikrotik RB5009 has also been a great piece of hardware.

25Gb is really getting into a different class of hardware entirely. If I needed to route at that speed, I'd seriously consider a Supermicro + Opnsense build.

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.

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

/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.

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 :(

At this point it's not so much about normal usage as the outliers.

For instance work from home got more popular. Say you have to transfer disk images. It's a lot more pleasant to transfer a couple TB at 25 Gb. You probably won't need that every day, but when you do need it, it's very nice not to have to wait hours or days for it to get through.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

Internet is like ram. You can never have too much.

> how many people truly need it?

56kbps ought to be enough for anyone

I’d love to have 25 Gbps for residential - even if just for offsite backups.

Cool, so you can downgrade to a 25gb connection like EPB and save some money.

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.

Where on earth and why

What router do you use?