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Fiber through the Cable company |
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Written by milbrath
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Thursday, 17 August 2006 |
"We recently learned that a local cable company(charter) is selling fiber services in our area. They have all the basics covered SLA, guaranteed bandwidth, monitoring.... and the pricing is good $125 per MB + build out cost versus a whopping $1250 per T1 that we pay now(sucks being 110 miles from the POP). I'll have to backhaul it from another nearby city but that also gets me a new POP at the same time. I know several people on here use DSL for their trunk, anyone using a cable provider and if so are you satisfied. The local sales woman and engineer are coming tommorrow, I'm really hoping for some cheap and reliable bandwidth here."
superdog:
I have chatted with my local cable CO(Comcast), and they were also willing to sell me bandwidth at a fairly decent price, I just didn't take them up on it yet.
milbrath:
I had comcast residential HSI cable service for about a year while I was in grad school. It was flawless. Charter residential service on the other hand is not that great. The only reason I am considering it is because the local State University recently moved to a fiber connection with them. It is my hope that the fiber connection through them will be reliable as I see no reason why a nearby State University(10 miles away) would sign up with an unreliable primary connection.
They are currently figuring out the build out cost to get fiber to a water tower in a nearby city. After I have that I'll post more. And if I do get it, I'll post about it a few months down the road.
sbrown:
Our schools use Charter for fiber back to the local Internet Exchange - seems to be flawless - good pricing as well...
milbrath:
Yes their sales engineer is supposed to get back to me towards the end of the week. Hopefully we can say good bye to $1250 T1's. Hard as hell to make money when you can get DSL for $35+tax,and we pretty much have to price accordingly. 1/2 of the county is covered by frontier who puts in DSLAMS everywhere! According to the local techs there is more than one with under 5 people on it. The bottom half of the county is belsouth territory, thats where we are going next. Thankfully they don't seem to leave city limits. I wish the telco's had to pay what we do for bandwidth. I pretty much hate them with a passion. Hopefully soon I can say goodbye to them, well atleast my wallet can.
Charter will initially provide me with 4 class C's, or however many I want. I asked for 4 class C's. Still waiting on build out cost & final pricing.
cmaenginsb:
The only negative will be that the line will have some level of oversubscription on it. So I would probably count on getting maybe 80% of what you could with a T-1. Considering the pricing difference that would be more than acceptable.
milbrath:
They have guaranteed me an SLA. Not sure what the acceptable percentage is yet. I will assume 85%, will know more when everything finalizes. I will still be extremely pleased with 80% at $125 per Mb. The two current T1's we have seem to max out at 2.6Mb bonded of course. So $2500 for 2.6mb - vs- $1250+ buildout for 8.5mb, I'll take it. Plan to start out with only 6mb though, for a monthly bill of $750 +buildout. Hate to spend money when it's not needed. According to charter they can provision additional speed overnight.
keefe007:
I think you're going to find that the build-out costs are much higher than you think. I quoted in Charter fiber here in Wisconsin and it was quite expensive. It may be different in your market though. My facility is roughly 1 block from the fiber ring and Charter quoted: $986 for 3M, $1275 for 4M, $1544 for 5M, $2654 for 10M, with $2500 install and 5 year contract. It is still a pretty good deal, although the reviews around here have been mixed about the service.
milbrath:
I'm somewhat fearful of that too. I have been told the price per mb is $125 per mb, not sure what kind of taxes go on the fiber link. The location in question is just down the street from a fiber node according the sales engineer. They said I'd know by the end of the week. I'm hoping to get something cheap enough to cancel our AT&T contract. It's got nearly a year left and the cancellation fee is quite high.
Original thread location |
Equipment and Network Configuration