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.

1 - https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/1/8530403/chattanooga-comcas...

Since the city has started the fiber rollout, all of a sudden it's now feasible for ATT to offer fiber. Go municipal internet!!!!!!

https://www.kub.org/about/about-kub/kub-service-areas/centur...

Meanwhile I have traffic-shaped Comcast and no fiber in sight in Silicon Valley.

The downsides: the Cat5e cables inside my condo walls can't handle more than 1.0gbps; my desktop's network port also maxes out at 1.0gbps; the wifi router in my home can't do more than 600mbps even if standing right next to it.

But also, nothing I do needs this much bandwidth. I can download any steam game in the blink of an eye. I can watch streaming video at resolutions higher than my eyes can distinguish. Outside of a few high bandwidth edge cases, there's very little I need more than 100mbps for.

If you offered me 25gbps internet right now I wouldn't be able to tell the difference between it and what I have!

Someone tell me: what will I need that much bandwidth for?

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.

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?

I definitely couldn't take direct advantage of 25 gigabit/s service myself. But, I do enjoy the idea of it attracting certain types of businesses & people to an area and creating opportunities that might not be possible elsewhere.

Also, the fact that this sort of internet service is possible in an area gives me hope for the leadership.

It’s fantastic. Every once in a while someone will post in the local Facebook group asking which ISP they should go with. It turns into pages and pages of EPB!, EPB!, EPB!

Mixed with comments about how much better it is than Comcast. Not only is the service better and cheaper, customer service is much much better.

The obvious one is states pass laws to forbid municipal broadband. This should be illegal. I actually wonder if the Federal government could override this since this sort of thing usually falls within the purview of the FCC but I'm no lawyer. Comcat, AT&T and Verizon all lobby hard to make municipal broadband illegal, even when they won't connect homes they have a legal obligation to connect.

But imagine it is legal and you've started an ISP. Your problems have just begun.

How are you going to run cables (fiber or otherwise) to people's homes? Are you going to dig trenches? Well you need permits for that. You might dig up someone else's cables so existing providers get to delay that process.

Or are you going to string those cables up on poles? Well, who owns the poles? It might be an existing ISP. There might be laws that allows you to string cables on those poles. Maybe there isn't. Maybe you have to pay an exorbitant amount for the privilege. Maybe Comcast is the only one legally allowed to do cable work and they'll charge you a fortune for it and take forever (and probably screw it up).

Even if the utility poles are owned by the city or the county but that doesn't necessarily solve your problem either. You need permits to string up cables. You might have to file a permit application for each pole individually. Even when you get a permit, existing users may have to move their cables to make room. They may have 90 days to move it. If several need to move cables then may well take the maximum time in turn.

Either through trenches or poles you eventually have cables. Where do you run them to? As in, are you running short cables to substations and then trunk lines back to an exchange? Or are you running long cables back to an exchange directly? Each has its problems.

The long cables may make too thick bundles for poles or require more expensive trenching. The shorter cables may require a substation that the locals view as an eyesore. You'll need to acquire land for that and may face NIMBYist opposition.

What I learned through exposure to this was that building an ISP is hyperlocal and the incumbents are way better at it. For example, there may be a lot of limestone in the soil that may make trenching slow, difficult and expensive. You may want to use poles instead but that might not be an option so you're stuck with disposing of a lot of limestone.

Dicalimer: Xoogler and I worked on Google Fiber for a time.

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

Latency improves too! For me that was the biggest change I noticed. I’m sitting at 3ms! My friend send me a screenshot of 0.9ms.

Seems silly to offer someone 25 Gbps fiber service if it doesn’t also include a >= 25 Gbps home router.

In Australia we’re shamefully paying $1150 per month for our business symmetrical 10G SFP+ (shaped to 1/1G), but a 1G 1000/40 connection is only $100/mo.

2G Google Fiber has been an absolute game changer - from experience I can also say it's better than 2x bonded Verizon Fios fiber connections. By far, the coolest feature of G Fiber is the online portal to request a static IP. Really hope static IP capability is also an option with this 10G service!

A public internet service has been on their radar for about a decade now, and I proud to see they managed to get it working.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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 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.

Edit:

  Scantly driving up the cost per port.

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.

> 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

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.

Meanwhile my Dad has 500/500 AT&T Fiber, and he pays half what I pay for 930/35 Charter Spectrum cable :(

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.

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 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.

56kbps ought to be enough for anyone