An ISP run by the city of Salisbury in North Carolina, USA has announced that it is bringing speeds of up to 10GBps to local residents and businesses. The municipal service, Fibrant, was created five years ago after the city was unable to persuade private ISPs to upgrade its fibre network. Gigabit speeds have been available to Salisbury’s citizens and businesses since last year for $105 a month, while its 50MBps symmetrical service costs only $45 a month.
Though Fibrant is targeting its 10GBps package at businesses, it is “available in every premises in the city,” including residential houses, though it does not expect much interest from home internet users. The most prohibitive aspect of using 10GBps at home is the cost, with Fibrant expect to charge $400 a month for the service.
“We don’t want to oversell customers and have you paying for a 10Gbps service when you’re using 100Mbps,” Robert Van Geons, head of the county’s economic development commission, said.
“To be honest with you, we’re not anticipating residents taking 10Gbps service,” Kent Winrich, Fibrant Director of Broadband and Infrastructure, added. “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.”
Even if residents don’t use the 10GBps service, the network upgrades that Fibrant has implemented will benefit all of its users, insists Winrich. “You go to many cities at 9 o’clock at night and you see your bandwidth drop,” he 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.”
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