[snielson]

Utopia provides an active ethernet connection to each subscriber with the specified bandwidth. This is superior to most fiber deployments, which are passive optical networks (GPON) where groups of 16-32 homes share a connection (usually 2.4 Gb down and 1.2 Gb up).

I live in Utah and actively worked to get fiber in my small city. Utopia requires cities to guarantee a take rate (40% if I recall correctly) and taxpayers must make up any deficiency. I've never heard of taxpayers actually doing that but it was enough to scare people from adopting Utopia in my city.

Ultimately what brought fiber to my city was covid. The monetary tsunami unleashed by the federal reserve and the government made it possible for a local private company to build a fiber network. I just got hooked up last week. It is great.

The other thing that happened is that the wireless companies offer high quality internet service. For a time I had both Comcast and T-Mobile home internet. I regularly got speeds of 1.2-1.4 Gb down on T-Mobile (100 Mbps up). Verizon also offers home internet but it was too unstable when I tried it.

All this is to say that I have three high quality Internet connections at my home (fiber, T-Mobile, and Comcast), one marginal connection (Verizon), and one garbage connection (Century Link; however, they have also been installing fiber in the area). Competition is great!

[WarOnPrivacy]

> Ultimately what brought fiber to my city was covid. The monetary tsunami unleashed by the federal reserve and the government made it possible for a local private company to build a fiber network.

Same. Federal broadband funds led to fiber deployment here. We went from one ISP to ~10.

We went from 40Mb up w/ 40ms latency for $119 to 1Gb up w/ 4ms latency for $49.

Over 20+ years, I've read dozens of articles about major ISPs receiving government money/incentives (billions in total) to improve consumer options.

This is the first time I've witnessed an internet company keep that promise. Predictably, it wasn't a major ISP.

[Hikikomori]

With active its just the last mile that is not shared, everything after that is shared. So it can suffer from the same oversubscription problem, just depends on how good the ISP is. But adding more capacity on those shared links is easier than fixing capacity issues on a PON deployment.

[tracker1]

Verizon home, where available, isn't too bad... it's definitely a good backup connection for WFH scenarios.

[snielson]

T-mobile business has a backup plan for $30/mo ($15/mo on a promo a month ago) that can be used for up to 7 days of internet per month. I signed up for it so I will still have internet if my fiber goes out (my router will automatically switch over in an outage).

[tracker1]

Yeah, Verizon is similar... I really need to setup the automatic failover on my router, I'd been unplugging one an plugging in the other for the couple times I've needed it.

Aside, really want to run a script to reboot the cable modem daily... it seems to build up a number of errors on a couple of the channels, but a reboot has it working fine again. It slows down a bit while it happens, and I only notice when streaming starts buffering a lot.