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Comment by michaelhalligan | Hacker News Reader

I pay $2,500/month for full use of a 1gbps circuit at one of my datacenters. 10 years ago I would have paid about $250k/month for that sort of capacity (and another $100k for a router/firewall that could handle it).

Bandwidth has definitely gotten significantly cheaper, which of course doesn't solve the broadband problem. If you live in the suburbs, or on a farm, then you've chosen a lifestyle which is inherently wasteful & inefficient, too much so to facilitate rapid infrastructure upgrades. Move to a city if this matters to you. Here in SF I pay $33/month for a synchronous 100mbps ethernet connection.

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Who do you use for the 100mbps connection?

http://web-pass.com/ .. We actually found our apartment complex by calling up every building on their list of lit buildings and asking if they had any condos or apartments for rent. Turned out that there are at least 3 other geeks here I know!

My friend John has a similar offer in Seattle too, at http://condointernet.net/.

Yeah, that's what I figured. Unfortunately, I'm not willing to move for an internet connection.

(For those who are wondering, this is an extremely special case -- most home bandwidth in the bay area is in the <10Mbps range, asymmetric. The OP is using a service that's available at only a handful of SF apartment buildings.)

It's growing, quickly. Others are entering this space, their main obstacle (besides the cost of running fiber) is that so many buildings have signed exclusivity agreements with comcast which have questionable legality. The economics make it easier to do in a city.. pay $20k to run fiber to a building with 1100 units, sell 25% of those units at $35/month, you gross $120k/year from that building. You probably have another $10k-$12k in equipment costs per building as well, but this sort of a network is quite simple to run.

This sort of connectivity will never be feasible in the suburbs without massive government subsidies (something I had hoped our current administration would see the value in).

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