[observer1101]

I fail to see how this model works unless it's being subsidized by some other source. Fiber is not cheap to purchase, deploy or to maintain as a medium, let alone all of the equipment that lights it, routers that will route it, and upstream network to offload the traffic. I see that the city will be leasing them the conduit, which will make deployment significantly cheaper, but didn't see any details on rates. If one person uses 500Mbps (half of their bandwidth) for 37 hours out of the month, and sonic.net has negotiated basement bottom prices for bandwidth alone at say $0.50/Mbps, that is still a $250 cost to them as a provider. Sure there's over-subscription models, but even if a small percentage of their users actually use the bandwidth, they would have to be losing money on this approach unless they traffic shape or cap speeds slower as a "shared" resource. Can someone please explain how the economics of a deal like this could lead to profit for the provider?

[toast0]

$0.50/Mbps probably isn't bargain basement: Hurricane Electric advertises $0.45/Mbps ($200 minimum).

Also, business pricing is $40/seat... there's going to be a good amount of profit there, I'd guess. It's also not easy to use even 500 Mbps, I would guess even heavy users would rarely sustain that much traffic (although there would certainly be some)

[jonknee]

Most people won't come close to using 500Mbps at any time, let alone for 37 hours. As long as they peer with Netflix, Google/YouTube, Facebook and a few others almost all meaningful traffic will be "free".

[scottlinux]

You can lease fiber. For instance Google leases fiber for their internal google-to-google network.