What are your thoughts on fiber through the city?

After 16 years of living in my city, they will finally have city-wide fiber internet. I’m pretty stoked because the fastest internet I could possibly have is a WISP at 50gbps down and 10gbps up. Now I will finally have gigabit but it’s through the city, and I’m wondering if they will be more strict on illegal content download given a possible VPN leak. I know this is highly subjective but I want to understand all the possibilities what could happen.

56 comments

I am indifferent...while I agree that it should be, I think ISPs should be absorbed into the government and made as a service like power/water. I'm sick of the big 2 here raping everyone and acting like it's our fault that we got raped.
I refuse to get fiber until resellers are allowed to use the infrastructure that the citizens already paid for but is held by a monopoly.
- While I understand the sentiment, I kind of disagree with this. Cities implement fiber in different ways. Not all of them focus or care about residential service. In my city, they essentially set themselves up as a backhaul carrier. So when ISPs move into town rather than building out large infrastructure they connect into the city's and pay the city for interconnect. That money then goes to city services which is why we have so many parks and different programs.
  Usually resellers are allowed to use it. It might be prohibitively expensive for them, but there is availability. Again that depends on how the city has it set up, but typically you as a citizen are getting a return on that investment either way.
  
  So you get to pay for it with your taxes and then again when the ISPs hook up to it? Why not have the city be the isp? They would still get the money but there is more opportunity for regulation to prevent for profit price gouging and the money stays local. Only a portion of the money you give to isp goes back to the city now instead of all of it.
- Really harsh language there
- I refuse to get fiber until resellers are allowed to use the infrastructure that the citizens already paid for but is held by a monopoly
  No one cares.
  
  🍬
  
  About your comment? I agree...no one cares about your comment.
50gbps down and 10gbps up
LOL
- Big lol I meant mbps
- WiFi 7 really is the shit man
- I mean, I can get symmetrical 25gbit/s for 777 bucks a year IN Switzerland. No limits, big ipv6 subnet, great provider. Init7.
  
  Init7 rocks. Besides the 333 CHF initial setup fee all plans cost the same. 777 for 1/10/25Gbit/s.
  
  Or under 600 per year for 10gb/s with Wingo. Or used to be as they seemed to have jacked up the price and dropped to 1gb/s making Init7's a better option. Thankfully I'm grandfathered into the old 49/month for 10gb/s for life.
  
  Should I tell you about Romania? Well, better not.
- Most consumer routers will be nowhere close to 10Gbps... so yeah.
You probably meant 50mbps down and 10mbps up
- For real. If OP is complaining about 50Gbps down, it’s because they’re a time traveler from 2050 and their storage drives start at 5 exabytes.
  
  My ISP offers 25 Gbit/s up and down for 64.75 CHF per month. Currently I'm just too cheap to get hardware for it, so I'm on the 1 Gbit/s plan for the same price.
  So maybe a bit sooner than 2050.
I spent many years working building and maintaining fiber networks, and I can unequivocally tell you that the answer to this is maybe. Normally you can treat city fiber just as any other ISP. A lot of them have different rules and different thresholds on what they allow and what they do not allow. Fiber networks are extremely expensive to build. So while you definitely need to protect the multi-million dollar investment you've made, depending on how you've built it it can be a little tricky to police what everyone is doing.
What's interesting is just because you are not receiving notice of a DMCA infraction, that does not mean that your ISP has not received a notice. There is this idea that if you are not set up for it it is difficult to track out what account held what IP 30 days prior or 60 days prior. That is kind of a BS excuse, but I have been at companies that did not have logging because they did not want to have logging.
We did collect email notices and pass them around though weekly to see who could find the most absurd DMCA takedown. So I will say, if you were pirating some weird ass mommy fetish furry porn everyone in that call center knows it and is laughing about it.
- I used to work with the networks of a university, sometimes dealing with DMCA notices. I'm honestly surprised I didn't ever see anything super weird; it was only ever popular movies and TV shows.
  What I'm trying to say is, I'm surprised the creators of the furry porn cared enough about their intellectual property to send out DMCA notices.
All the possibilities are up to your vpn.
We had fiber at our previous house for about six years, and it was great. The prices were lower, the speeds were greater, there were no limits... It's kind of funny, because it was a college town of about 200K people in the middle of nothing else.
Now I'm up in the suburbs of Chicago where a single town can have a 200K population, but fiber is nowhere on the horizon. Instead we get terrible service that's constantly showing packet loss with slow transfer rates. We do still have unlimited, but with these transfer rates it doesn't really matter. :)
As far as monitoring traffic goes, I guess it depends on how you're doing things. If your DNS requests are still hitting your ISP or aren't encrypted, then yeah, they might know. I don't know if they'll care, but of course not all illegal content is treated the same.
So basically a non-answer to your question, along with me saying I liked having fiber.
- I have att fiber here on the nw side and it's pretty damn sweet. 1gbps up AND down. I just have to keep dodging bullets, tripping over dead bodies and putting up with a bunch of snowflake libs to have it.
  ETA the /s that I thought would be obvious
ive been making jokes about 'fiber to the desktop' since 1996. funny we still are not quite there are we. so close!
in my experience, the faster the pipe, the less inspection. its a cost thing.. when we were paying 500$/moonth for a 64k pipe (yeah thats right), you bet your ass we're going to sit on people doin illegal/hogging shit. every bit was expensive. when we updated to 1.54mbps t1 things got slightly more lax, but still, usage mattered, hence DPI, packet shaping and the like. when broadband came people just stopped paying attention.
- I've heard of people doing fiber to the desktop in their homelabs. Seems a little overkill, but it's the cool factor that counts!
  
  seeeems like overkill, but i also remember optimizing my 40MB hard drive making jokes in IRC about someday having a 1GB hard drive! no way!
  
  There's no realistic scenario where the fiber for the street comes to your desktop. Some homelabs have fiber from the street to a switch/router, then more fiber from there to the desktop.
  
  My father just had the electricians pull in Cat 7 Ethernet at a friends place, but they used Cat 6 terminators. After that fiasco we were also discussing if it woulnd't have been simpler to have them pull fiber and use media converters plus a switch with some SFP+ and SFP slots.
You poor Americans :( In Europe I can get 1Gbps for around 25 Euro/month from a local (they only operate in my town) ISP. Each town has one or two of them. On top of that you have the big ones like Orange. I could choose from probably 10 different providers. New buildings just come with fiber preinstalled. Just plug in the router and enjoy.
- Maybe specify the country. I lived in France and didn't see any of that.
- You definitely don’t live in Germany
50gbps down and 10gbps up
holy shitballs...
- Holy forking shirtballs
Municipal fibre is the only good ISP I've ever had. Communities around Colorado are rolling it out. I pay like $70/mo for 1gb/s, consistently get 300-600mb/s download speeds, haven't had any downtime in a year, and zero piracy warnings using public trackers without a VPN.
- What's your upload speed like?
cries in Australian NBN
- We are going to build a national fiber network -> we built a mixed technology network -> people are not happy with the 30y old coaxial networks we bought and told them was fiber
I have a residential 25Gbit/s connection and although I only use 15 gbit of it for my server it is really a godsend for torrenting, hosting and running several relays and nodes for different networks.
Fiber internet multiplied my connection speeds by six for about the same price I was paying, and this is before wired connections. This is a hell yeah from me.
I had gig up / gig down fiber at a previous house.. it was amazing.. never went down always has bandwidth no matter what I was doing or who was streaming. I (used to) do a lot of uploading to users for media and I never had a hiccup.
Get it.. and get the fastest you can afford. You'll love it.
Also no they won't be paying attention anymore than a standard isp. Tho.. if you're.worried about it.. just get a decent VPN.
Good luck op! Consider me jealous
The best model in my opinion is if a municipality lays the fiber, then opens the infrastructure up for renting under FRAND terms to all ISPs. When I say infrastructure here, I mean both the fibers and the associated rack space on the other end of the fibers, including power and cooling.
Regarding the specific questions in your post body; I think you should be fine, because a smaller ISP is not as much of a target for intellectual property enforcement, and they probably won't have a big compliance team like the big ISPs can afford.
Am I mistaken, or did you want to say 50mbps and 10mbps? 50gbps seems way above what a wireless network can do.
For a vpn, your connection through wireless or fiber is exactly the same. The city only provides the fiber infrastructure. When you get Internet, it's through a provider which will use their equipments and main network (they link their network to the city infrastructure, using their devices. At least, it's how it works in France). Unless the provider is the city.
Tho I guess that providers do give data to the state so whatever the case, it would be the same thing.
- OP is clearly a tier 2 ISP who is reselling bandwidth
Well quite frankly with all the meat people consume, they'll certainly need help passing it. I recommend state provided salads.
How can your ISP do anything like that? How can they even circumvent VPNs? What country are you in? China?

56 comments