It is proof that municipal internet can be awesome and is probably the way most municipalities should go over time.
For those who don't know, Longmont Colorado's Nextlight internet service provides symmetric 1Gb/sec speed for 50 USD per month and they don't spy on your traffic.
It is the most reliable residential internet service I have had to date and is more reliable than the commercial internet at my places of work in Boulder.
I don’t brag on Chattanooga, TN often, but when I do, it’s always about the municipal symmetric gig fiber—CHA/EPB was the first to do it in the US, it’s always been cheap, it’s more reliable than anything else anywhere I’ve been, no data caps or throttling, held off a Comcast lawsuit trying to stop them (so Comcast went to the state to legislate away meaningful competition), and (afaik) there’s no spying on you.
I was lucky enough to build a bunch of the software used consumer-side to enable signing up for and managing fiber internet/tv/phone service, was brought in to establish and run their first internal software team, and built even more cool software to make tech support real-time, improve the lives of CSRs, and more. And they’re now getting into quantum computing. Truly a great group of people trying to take care of their city, and every time I run into anyone, I’m still impressed by what they’re doing.
Moved here 4 years ago and the difference between them and comcast is insane.
On one of the Chattanooga FB groups someone will occasionally ask which ISP they should use, and there will inevitably be 10+ pages of people writing EPB, EPB, EPB!
It's $70 per month. The $50 rate is for only for customers who joined years ago. If you move to Longmont and sign up as a new customer you'll be paying $70.
The pricing isn't super cheap, but it's very fair and the service quality is good. No data caps, symmetrical speed, good reliability. No IPv6 support though. They also recently started offering 2.5 and 10 gbps for $150/250.
For comparison ATT does it for $80/m (and they support IPv6). It's not really the price that's particularly special part of these services, it's getting the fiber made available in the area. 5 gbps symmetric is $185 which is quite competitive with those prices as well.
Though I'd pay an extra $20/month to just not have to deal with ATT anyways, all else being equal.
Plug your own router? Sure, put the BGW320 into passthrough mode and 3rd party NAT works fine. You get the public IP on your device and there is no double-NAT. The broken bit is, regardless where you NAT, you still run into the 8,192 session table limit of the device anyways. The only way around that is via unofficial means (which is part of the $20 to just not deal with ATT. The hardware could damn well do passthrough without that limitation). At least that's something you can workaround to a true fix though as opposed to no IPv6, where your best bet is tunnel somewhere.
You grab your own 10G-PON ONT box like the Azores WAG-D20 which lets you set the MAC and ONT values to the same as the ATT one. Works pretty good, only complaint I have is there aren't any "ONT on a stick" (i.e. SFP+ module ONTs) that let you do that last part so it's still a box with a separate power supply adapter.
I live somewhere with good competition between private companies and can get "up to" 10 Gb/s symmetric for $70/month. Realistically it's more like 5-7 Gb/s but I'm not complaining.
So you can get good results with municipal. Or in dense areas private works fine if there's competition.
Another longmonster here. Totally agree that NextLight is awesome. However, as someone that runs a nonprofit in town, I wish that business/nonprofit pricing was more reasonable.
