A municipal Internet service provider in Salisbury, North Carolina, announced today that it is making 10Gbps service available throughout the city, to both businesses and residents.
The city-run Fibrant, which has deployed fiber throughout Salisbury, was created five years ago after city officials were unable to persuade private ISPs to upgrade their infrastructure. Gigabit download and upload speeds have been available to residents since last year for $105 a month, while customers can pay as little as $45 a month for 50Mbps symmetrical service. TV and phone service is available, too.
Fibrant officials don’t actually expect much, if any demand from residents for the 10Gbps download and upload service. The big speed upgrade is mainly targeted at businesses, but the announcement said 10Gbps service is now "available to every premises in the city," including all homes.
While business pricing varies based on the deployment, residents would pay about $400 a month for 10Ggbps service. Someone running a business from their home might want more bandwidth than a typical person, but there definitely won't be a hard sell to residents, local officials said.
“We don't want to oversell customers and have you paying for a 10Gbps service when you're using 100Mbps,” said Robert Van Geons, head of the county’s economic development commission, which is partnering with Fibrant.
"To be honest with you, we're not anticipating residents taking 10Gbps service," Fibrant Director of Broadband and Infrastructure Kent Winrich told Ars. “The reason for 10 gig is economic development... This is really geared toward attracting businesses that need this type of bandwidth and have it anywhere they want in the city.”
Network upgrades related to the 10Gbps project should boost connection reliability for residents, even if they don't opt for ultra-high speed service, he said.
“You go to many cities at 9 o’clock at night and you see your bandwidth drop,” Winrich said. “We've got so much headroom now that at 9 o’clock when everyone's hitting Netflix, it'll come right through and we won't have any choke points.”
The first 10Gbps customer is Catawba College, which wants the bandwidth for computer labs and other school buildings. High-definition videoconferencing figures into the college’s heavy bandwidth plans.
Fibrant and one of its main technology vendors, Calix, claimed in their announcement today that Salisbury is now “America’s first 10 gigabit city.” 10Gbps service to businesses isn’t unusual, but Fibrant believes it is unique in making it available to any home or business in the whole city.
(UPDATE: After this story posted, we were pointed to Vermont Telephone (VTel), which in June said it is offering 10Gbps to every home in its rural Vermont service area, for $400 a month. We wrote about VTel's gigabit service back in July 2013.)
Initially, Fibrant says it is supporting 10Gbps using point-to-point Ethernet technology, but will start shifting to Calix equipment using the NG-PON2 (next generation passive optical network) standard next year. That’s the same standard Verizon is testing for future deployments of 10Gbps to 80Gbps.
Between Fibrant’s enterprise-level Cisco routers and robust Internet transit agreements, the ISP has “plenty more [bandwidth] if we need it,” Winrich said.
North Carolina trying to stop muni broadband expansion
Fibrant decided to build its network before the North Carolina legislature voted in 2011 to limit the rights of cities to offer broadband. North Carolina’s anti-municipal broadband law is now the subject of a court fight, with the Federal Communications Commission arguing that it should be invalidated. If the FCC wins, municipal providers could expand Internet service to surrounding cities and towns.
Fibrant has 3,300 home and business customers, including about 25 percent of households. Since Fibrant already deployed fiber throughout the city, getting to 10Gbps required mostly back-end upgrades. But the optical network terminals (ONTs) at customers' homes support only up to 1Gbps, so if a customer wants 10Gbps, Fibrant would have to install a new ONT at the home.
“It's a one-day installation of new hardware,” Van Geons told Ars. “It's less time than it would take installing if you were a new customer of ours.”
Salisbury residents can also buy Internet service from Time Warner Cable or AT&T. But city officials concluded years ago that they would need to build their own network to make sure residents and businesses could get the fastest broadband speeds.
“We knew to be competitive we needed faster Internet," Winrich said. "We went to the incumbents [in 2009] and asked them if they had any plans to make a faster network and they said, ‘no,’ We went back to them and said, ‘well, if we pay you will you do it?’ They said, ‘no.’ We had to end up building our own because the incumbents had no plans on increasing the speeds of the network.”
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