In a world yearning for a gigabit Internet connection, what do you do if your legacy cable network cannot offer it? If you are Comcast, you seek a trademark for the term "True Gig." (More coverage from Ars Technica on this.)
Comcast's cable network may soon (testing in 2015?) be capable of offering a downstream gigabit but will not be able to come close to a gigabit in the upstream direction. Nonetheless, apparently it is planning to advertise its service as a "True Gig," likely in competition with Google in Provo since it plans to swap the Chattanooga territory to Charter as part of the Time Warner Cable merger plan. (Comcast is certainly not fleeing that market with its tail between its legs for having been spanked so badly by the city's municipal network).
Lest we forget, the Comcast network is shared among many users; its ability to actually deliver a gig is dependent on whether your neighbors are using their connections. So unlike a gigabit on a fiber network, the Comcast "True Gig" will likely be an inferior experience to a modern fiber network.
Google, of course, actually offers a gigabit in both directions. The same is true of Chattanooga and most municipal gigabit offers - symmetrical because who wants to wait hours to upload to the cloud if you can download in seconds?
And in case you forgot, the "True Gig" is coming from the same company that has taken credit for all fiber deployments announced in 2014 - on the thin premise that everything happening after Comcast announced its proposed takeover of Time Warner Cable was caused by the proposed takeover.
To recap... Comcast does not yet offer a gigabit service but has tried to take credit for most of the communities that either have a gig or could soon get it. They are technically incapable of offering an actual symmetrical gigabit. And to the extent they may offer a gigabit in only one direction, it will be shared among hundreds of homes and generally inferior to a downstream gig delivered by a fiber network. Yet, they will market their service as a "True Gig."
If there are indeed parallel universes, I would like to to request reassignment to one where a Comcast move like this is treated as it should be ... like the funniest joke in the world. However - that planet probably would have already died laughing at AT&T's Fiber-to-the-Press-Release antics or the hilarious claim by some coin-operated-research-outfits that the Comcast - Time Warner Cable takeover would be pro-consumer. OK - bad plan, I admit it. But seriously, I'm not allowed to cuss in these posts, so give me a break.
At a recent Martinsville City Council meeting, the council offered unanimous support for a phased expansion of the city’s Municipal Internet Network (MiNet). What exactly the expansion will look like, and how it will be funded, very much remain a work in progress. Despite having been first constructed in the 1990s, Martinsville’s MiNet only has about 376 customers in a city of nearly 14,000 residents. There’s roughly 20 users currently on a multi-month waiting list, eager to get access to affordable fiber at speeds up to a gigabit per second (Gbps).
Golden, Colorado has struck a new right-of-way agreement with Google Fiber that should expedite the competitive delivery of affordable fiber to the city of 20,000. The deal gives Google Fiber non-exclusive access to public right-of-way to build a commercial broadband network, though it delivers no guarantee of uniform access across the entire city.
The Idaho Broadband Advisory Board (BAB) has greenlit $120 million in broadband grants from the Idaho Capital Projects Fund (CPF) to fund 18 different broadband projects across Idaho, delivering affordable fiber access to 30,000 homes and businesses, many for the first time.
UTOPIA Fiber has completed its fourth major broadband deployment of 2023, with the finished construction of a $23.5 million citywide fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) build in Syracuse, Utah. The new fiber network passes 12,324 residential addresses, and has already reached a nearly 16% subscriber take rate in the city.
The Knoxville Utility Board (KUB) says it has completed the first phase of what will be the nation's largest municipal broadband deployment, bringing affordable fiber access to more than 50,000 premises in this city of 192,000 – many for the very first time. All told, the $702 million project aims to deliver affordable fiber to 210,000 households across KUB’s 688-square-mile service area, taking between seven and ten years to complete.
Blue River, Colorado is the latest Colorado municipality to explore building its own broadband network with an eye on affordable access. The town is part of a trend that’s only accelerated since the state eliminated industry-backed state level protections restricting community-owned broadband networks. Town leaders recently hired the consulting firm, NEO Connect, to explore the possibility of building a town-wide fiber network.