Tag Archives: EPB Chattanooga

The Gigabit App Challenge

A discussion I was having recently made me remember the gigabit challenge held by the City of Chattanooga in 2012. Advertised as the Gig Tank challenge, the City offered a prize for anybody who could develop an application that required gigabit speeds. The City held this challenge as a way to promote the idea that the City’s fiber network offered gigabit speeds to the public. At the time, the City’s EPB was one of a handful of ISPs, along with Google and a few other municipal networks and small ISPs that offered residential gigabit. The gig challenge had a second goal of attracting young tech entrepreneurs to the City.

The winner of the $100,000 Gig Tank prize was Banyan, a tech start-up from Tampa that showed how gigabit speeds could enable science researchers to work at home with large data sets. It’s been thirteen years since the challenge, and large data is still the only realistic way to take full advantage of the gigabit connections being purchased by millions of homes.

Over that time, we have developed many commercial and industrial applications that use gigabit and faster speeds in data centers, factories, and banks. But we’ve never found a killer app for homes that use even a reasonable fraction of a gigabit.

About the fastest application that uses a constant 100 Mbps+ of bandwidth is 8K video. Millions of TVs have been sold that include the 8K capability, but programming is still not widely available online except for some minor programming on YouTube and similar sites. It’s never become popular because a viewer needs a huge TV to see the difference between 8K and 4K video.

Immersive online gaming can also consume up to 100 Mbps of bandwidth, but most games use far less, from 25 Mbps to 50 Mbps. Game companies constantly strive to find ways to improve visualization while reducing bandwidth needs.

Even after the thirteen years since the challenge, there are not a whole lot of ways to use gigabit speeds other than sending large data files. I recall that the first two customers who bought gigabit speeds from the municipal utility in Lafayette, Louisiana, were doctors who wanted to view MRI scans and related large files without having to run into the office.

With the proliferation of people who work from home, there are a lot of people who routinely send and receive big data files. Content providers send non-compressed video files to be edited. Engineers, researchers, and scientists routinely work with giant files.

ISPs will tell you that if they find a resident using gigabit speeds routinely, the odds are high the customer is operating a server at home. This could be an ecommerce site, but more likely is related to pornography or pirate video sharing. I’ve been contacted by ISPs many time over the years asking what to do about such customers. (Simple answer, treat them like a large data user, and most won’t pay the higher rates. Those that do can be a great customer).

I’m sure that industry folks are as flabbergasted as I am why people are buying home speeds faster than one gigabit. A lot of ISPs tell me they are getting respectable penetration rates for two, three, or five gigabit home products.

If you asked me in 2012 if there would be gigabit applications by 2025, I’m positive I would have said yes. But in the ensuing years, we’ve developed compression codices that allow the transmission of huge amounts of data without needed huge amounts of bandwidth.

With that said, I still want my home holodeck. Maybe in the next thirteen years?

Consumers Love Independent ISPs

For the second time in three years the municipally owned and operated ISP in Chattanooga got the highest ranking in the annual Consumer Reports survey about ISPs. They were the only ISP in the survey that received a positive ranking for value. This is a testament to the fact that consumers love independent ISPs compared to the big ISPs like Comcast, Charter, AT&T and Verizon.

Chattanooga’s EPB makes it into the ranking due to their size, but there are numerous other small ISPs offering an alternative to the big companies. There are about 150 other municipal ISPs around the country providing residential ISP service and many more serving their local business communities. There are numerous cooperatives that provide broadband – many of these are historically telecom cooperatives with the ranks recently growing as electric cooperatives become ISPs. There are hundreds of independent telephone companies serving smaller markets. There is also a growing industry of small commercial ISPs who are building fiber or rural wireless networks.

As somebody who works with small ISPs every day it’s not hard to understand why consumers love them.

  • Real customer service. People dread having to call the big ISPs. They know when they call that the person that answers the phone will be reading from a script and that every call turns into a sales pitch. It’s the negative customer service experience that drives consumers to rank big ISPs at the bottom among all other corporations. Small ISPs tend to have genuine, non-scripted service reps that can accurately answer questions and instantly resolve issues.
  • Transparent pricing. Most big ISPs have raised rates significantly in recent years by the introduction of hidden fees and charges. People find it annoying when they see broadband advertised in their market as costing $49.99 when they know they are paying far more than that. Smaller ISPs mostly bill what they advertise and don’t disguise their actual prices. I’m sure that’s one of the reasons that consumers in Chattanooga feel like they are getting a value for their payment.
  • No negotiations on prices. Big ISPs make customers call every few years and negotiate for lower prices. It’s obvious why they do this because there are many customers who won’t run the gauntlet and end up paying high prices just to avoid making that call. The big ISPs probably think that customers feel like they got a bargain after each negotiation – but customers almost universally hate the process. The ISP triple play and cellular service are the only two common commodities that put consumers through such a dreadful process. Most small ISPs charge their published prices and consumers love the simplicity and honesty.
  • Quality networks. The big ISPs clearly take short cuts on maintenance, and it shows. Big ISPs have more frequent network outages – my broadband connection from Charter goes out for short periods at least a dozen times a week. Small ISPs work hard to have quality networks. Small ISPs do the needed routine maintenance and spend money to create redundancy to limit and shorten outages.
  • Responsive repair times. The big ISPs, particularly in smaller markets can take seemingly forever to fix problems. Most of us now are reliant on broadband in our daily routine and nobody wants to wait a few days to see a repair technician. Most of my small ISP clients won’t end a work day until open customer problems are resolved.
  • Fast resolution of problems. Big ISPs are not good at dealing with things like billing disputes. If a customer can’t resolve something on a first call with a big ISP they have to start all over from the beginning the next time they call. Small ISPs tend to resolve issues quickly and efficiently.
  • Privacy. The big ISPs are all harvesting data from customers to use for advertising and to monetize in general. ISPs, by definition can see most of what we do online. Small ISPs don’t track customers and are not collecting or selling their data.
  • Small ISPs are local. Their staff lives and works in the area and they know where a customer lives when they call. It’s common when calling a big ISP to be talking to somebody in another state or country who has no idea about the local network. Small ISPs keep profits in the community and generally are a big part of local civic life. Big ISPs might swoop in occasionally and give a big check to a local charity, but then disappear again for many years.
  • Big ISPs are really the Devil. Not really, but when I see how people rank the big ISPs – below banks, insurance companies, airlines and even the IRS – I might be onto something!