I'm one of their customers. I often see that one green car parked down the road.
It's pretty good - their provided router is locked down to hell and they're on a cgnat, but not having to deal with Comcast's 1.2tb data cap is well worth it. Checking Comcast's site now, it seems that they now offer "unlimited" data. Interesting, that option wasn't there 6 months ago.
~100 customers seems too small for the amount of effort they have put in so far. They've been working along all the roads near me for about a year, and they're out there running fiber conduit every day. The houses out here are far apart. Hopefully, they can make it work.
gs17 · 6h ago
> Checking Comcast's site now, it seems that they now offer "unlimited" data. Interesting, that option wasn't there 6 months ago.
It's been there since they announced the data cap. I thought the unlimited bundled with leasing their higher end hardware came first, but the email from 2016 announcing that our plan was getting the cap mentions being able to pay for unlimited.
nkellenicki · 5h ago
You've always had the _option_ of paying extra for unlimited data, however its only in the past month or two that they've started offering unlimited data as standard (in select markets).
I’m sorry I still don’t get it. Could you explain that in different phrasing ?
A comcast customer always had the option to pay for unlimited data. I get that part. What is the 2nd part? “Started offering it as standard” means what?
amethyst · 4h ago
In markets where Comcast has actual real competition, they "include" the unlimited data (aka no cap) with no extra charge when you sign up for their gigabit plans.
dietr1ch · 3h ago
In the Bay Area Comcast offered (2017-2023 at least) internet with a default 1-1.2TiB/mo data cap that you can lift for the month for an extra 10-20usd (I don't recall, my roommate who played CoD was the one paying for this by himself on every month with huge updates).
There's barely any competition here. You can pretty much chose from Comcast Business or XFinity, which both are just Comcast because of a free market with free as in not in jail.
rcleveng · 2h ago
Really 10-20 more? When I asked, and I'm in the Bay Area, the unlimited plan was $5 a month more than it would cost if I leased their modem.
jacobgkau · 1h ago
How much more was it than if you weren't leasing their modem?
baby_souffle · 38m ago
It used to be 30/month for me. I was not renting their modem and got charged more for it.
If starlink ever gets more capacity, I'll probably switch. Right now I think the only way to get gigabit down on starlink is with four or five accounts and manually bonding the dishes together. As soon as that obstacle goes away, Comcast will have competition in my area and I intend take advantage of that.
wijwp · 3h ago
That's not true. I tried getting unlimited data like 7-8 years ago and they said I needed a business account to get it.
bayarearefugee · 2h ago
What ISPs offer and how much they offer it for tends to vary wildly region to region.
If you live in a region where they have no meaningful competition (which is still fairly common in a lot of places in the US) well bend over and lube up.
observationist · 1h ago
They'll vary wildly, as much as they think they can get away with, in the hopes that you will never use the service and pay them as much as possible for it, and they'll bury your mailbox with crap to try to wear you down into coming back.
They will happily let you pay for years, for services that no longer exist, no longer connected to any of their networks. They'll take you to court rather than pay anything back; they know they are receiving extra money, and there's a significant amount that comes in, but "oh, it's so confusing, and there are so many legacy systems, we can't possibly catch every mistake."
The money they shuffle back and forth between each other, daily, reeks of book cooking - you might have a stretch of 20 miles of trunk in which there are 20 separate owners - not concurrent riding separate fiber lines, but in sequence, each paying rent to or getting rent paid by the adjacent rider, even though only a single company actually services the entire span.
It's funny how construction companies and ISPs get these rackets going, and then when people come along like these PrimeOne guys and offer a reasonable rate on a decent product, it's somehow vastly disruptive and threatening.
They'll expand, and be encouraged and allowed to expand, and after 5 or 6 years, the big ISPs will start circling, and eventually buy them out, and they'll retire happy. AT&T or Lumen will own their network inside of 10 years, and they'll claim it's modernized and upgraded infrastructure. People with shitty oversold undermaintained cable internet will be left alone until the money stops.
Starlink to phones is great, if it only didn't make ISPs so much money handling the base stations on the ground.
There's fiber all over the US just hanging there, unused, unmaintained, because merger after merger after merger left giant piles of assets under the ownership of companies like comcast and centurylink and at&t, who left infrastructure to rot, often built with public funding, and maintained their local monopolies and shitty service.
Whatever it is we're doing to regulate the industry at a federal level isn't working, but I imagine that's where a lot of the money goes.
WarOnPrivacy · 6h ago
> I'm one of their customers. It's pretty good - their provided router is locked down to hell and they're on a cgnat
This sounds like mine. I'm guessing yours doesn't support IPv6 because most fiber providers don't.
For the router, I already build firewalls so that. I pay $10/mo to escape their cgnat.
I've also alerted them to expect regular haranguing from me about deploying IPv6. Especially since bgp.he.net shows they have a /40 allocated to themselves; it doesn't seem to be used.
bigstrat2003 · 4h ago
For me, no IPv6 = no business. I don't think it's acceptable to build a network on IPv4 only at this point, it speaks to being willing to cut corners and not do things the right way just because it's easier.
kjellsbells · 24m ago
I worked in this space for a while, in the US. Outside of the major cities, Internet service falls off extremely quickly. Like, shockingly so: you can be as close as fifty miles from, say Philly or Flagstaff and have zero fiber, zero cell coverage, just nothing.
The people who attempt to fill these gaps are commonly rural telephone companies, electric cooperatives, tribal entities, or mom and pop shops where the owner grew up on a Ditch Witch and only knows as much IP networking as essential to light up the fiber and get the packets flowing upstream.
They are enormously resource constrained in ways you might not expect, too, eg operations can grind to a halt because everyone is out with a chainsaw after a storm, or because the Guy that Knew Stuff about their network died suddenly.
They are very, very unlikely to decide to run an IPv6 network just because. There's no upside that makes the juice worth the squeeze for them.
artooro · 2h ago
I wish I could say no IPv6 no business. There are only 2 ISPs here, one cable and one fiber. Neither have IPv6, the smaller ISP also does CGNAT because IPs are expensive.
I'm trying to convince them that they could save money with less powerful CGNAT hardware if they deploy dual stack.
ToucanLoucan · 2h ago
I agree in principal but if the only other option is Charter/Spectrum/Comcast, you bet I'm going with the "lazy" person's fiber.
I have spent most of my career under the thumb of fucking cable and I'd sooner slam a car door on my nuts than go back to paying so much money for such garbage service.
bcrl · 4h ago
I've had less than 0.5% of customers ask for IPv6 from my fibre ISP. It's not worth supporting as a result. The main reason is that any service that is not widely used will have gremlins that result in poor customer experience, and if it's always the same handful of customers hitting problems or finding quirks, there is a real risk of poor word of mouth incident reporting that can harm the business. At least if something goes wrong with IPv4, it's going to be noticed very quickly.
Some people will say monitoring is all that you need, but I do not agree. There are a million different little issues that can and do occur on physical networks in the real world, and there's no way monitoring will have a 99% chance of detecting all of them. When incidents like the partial Microsoft network outage that hit certain peering points occurred, I had to route around the damage by tweaking route filtering on the core routers to prefer a transit connection that worked over the lower cost peering point. It's that kind of oddball issue that active users catch and report which does not happen for barely used services like IPv6.
mrweasel · 4h ago
> I've had less than 0.5% of customers ask for IPv6 from my fibre ISP
How many ask for IPv4? I understand your situation, it's a lot of work, for something that many won't notice. It's just that saying there's no demand because your average consumer, who also doesn't know what IPv4 is, isn't asking for it, is the mentality that keeps IPv6 from being implemented.
On the funnier side of things, we've also sometimes run into the opposite problem that we can't reproduce an issue, because it's only on IPv4 and 95% of the time everything we do is IPv6. But we're also not serving home users.
bcrl · 3h ago
Static IPv4 addresses are closer to around 5% of customers. Nobody asks for IPv4, but some customers bring their existing or own wireless routers along and occasionally choose devices that are not IPv6 capable. Maybe in another 10 years those devices will finally be fully removed from service. The worst stragglers right now are the old combo DSL modems that effectively have no modern replacements -- it's just not worth spending money to replace them when customers are going to migrate to fibre soon enough.
massysett · 35m ago
> I've had less than 0.5% of customers ask for IPv6 from my fibre ISP. It's not worth supporting as a result.
Big, evil, hated Comcast has full ipv6, and I doubt any of its customers asked for it either. Instead people complain they’re only getting a /60.
Sanzig · 4h ago
If you already have to do CGNAT, why not IPv6 as your core network with NAT64 at the border and 464XLAT on the CPE? It gives you best of both worlds.
bcrl · 4h ago
I'm not doing CGNAT. We were able to get enough IPv4 addresses directly from ARIN a few years ago after being on the waiting list for a couple of years. It's a pity that widespread fraud depleted that pool faster than it should have been.
CPE support for IPv6 has generally been garbage with it taking 15-20 years before the bare minimum was supported by mainstream router vendors. Even today there are still vendors that assume only IPv4 support. In my opinion the IETF really screwed up when they made IPv6 more complicated than just IPv4 with more address bits. The incumbent in my area generally uses PPPoE in their access network, but routers that supported PPPoE and prefix delegation basically didn't exist in 2010, and only started being available circa 2015 (in part due to the required bits not existing in OpenWRT and the hardware vendors' software development kits for their chipsets). Sure, we're 10 years further on now, but there remain a number of vendors that only support IPv4 for management of devices (cough Ubiquiti cough) in parts of their product line.
That said, there are features of IPv6 that are absolutely awesome for carriers. The next header feature that pretty much eliminates the need for MPLS in an IPv6 transport network is one such item that makes building transport networks so much cleaner when using IPv6 than IPv4. No more header insertion or rewriting, just update one field and fix up the delta on the checksum and CRC. They just aren't really applicable for smaller networks.
jerf · 5h ago
"I'm guessing yours doesn't support IPv6 because most fiber providers don't."
Yeah, what's up with that? I just got switched on to fiber and the CGNAT for IPv4 doesn't shock me much, but what's with the no IPv6 in 2025?
I know enough to deal with it, but what's the deal? Is there something systematic here?
ta8645 · 5h ago
Everybody can muddle along without IPv6, so it's easy to make it a very low priority. Especially for small shops that are struggling just to create a viable business. IPv6 needs something more to motivate it, a web destination or application that is only available on IPv6.
bigstrat2003 · 4h ago
We used to have freeipv6porn.com, lol. But I suspect that was a joke as much as anything else given how much porn you can get for free all over the Internet.
throw0101b · 52m ago
> IPv6 needs something more to motivate it, a web destination or application that is only available on IPv6.
How about not having to pay for (as) beefy CG-NAT hardware because people that go to Youtube, Netflix, MetaFace, TikTok, etc, can directly connect via IPv6.
ta8645 · 18m ago
Hadn't thought of that, but it might not be a huge savings unless you were to go ipv6 only. If you're still going to support ipv4 anyway, the hardware savings might not be too significant.
paleotrope · 5h ago
The eggs need some chickens first.
Sanzig · 4h ago
Surprised they aren't deploying NAT64/DNS64 with 464XLAT on the CPE. You get essentially the same setup as CGNAT for IPv4 services but your whole core network is native IPv6 so you only have one set of address space to manage and your customers will be able to directly connect to anything IPv6 related.
mananaysiempre · 3h ago
How would you as a customer tell if they were?
yjftsjthsd-h · 3h ago
Because you'd have native IPv6
nancyminusone · 5h ago
Thankfully, they are doing IPv6, although one day I had some weird issue where IPv6 was broken but if I disabled it ipv4 was still working. Could have been my fault, IPv6 is generally new to me (not much of a network person).
I get the impression that they are still learning to run an ISP, both technically and customer facingly. It's weird - I learned more about them from this article than from actually being living here with them.
yuvadam · 3h ago
since tailscale exists, why would you care about cgnat or even pay to escape it?
tjohns · 3h ago
I'm not the only person connecting to my machines.
Some applications want to open ports and don't have the server-side infrastructure to punch a hole through NAT. Especially P2P apps and some games.
Sometimes I want to run a small, low-traffic web server from home.
Sometimes I'm connecting to my network from a machine that I don't control and can't install Tailscale on.
imzadi · 1h ago
I'm on the other side of the country and was a Cox customer for over a decade until they decided to add a data cap to their plans. Fortunately, wyyred rolled into town right around the same time, offering fiber at higher speeds, no data caps, and half the cost. It was an easy decision. I also noticed that Cox is now advertising unlimited data for free. Too little too late.
justusthane · 4h ago
> their provided router is locked down to hell
From the article, it sounds like the "default" option is for the customer to supply their own router, which I appreciate:
> Prime-One provides a modem and the ONT, plus a Wi-Fi router if the customer prefers not to use their own router.
eurleif · 4h ago
Modem and ONT? I'm under the impression that there's nothing called a "modem" for fiber, and that the ONT serves a similar role. Am I confused?
Polizeiposaune · 4h ago
No, that's my understanding as well.
My fiber installer referred to the Adtran 632V ONT he installed as the "modem".
He installed two other junction boxes (one outside the house near/under where the fiber attaches to the wall of the house, one inside near the ONT) but they're just passive optical couplers allowing them to swap out fiber segments in the event of fiber damage without re-running the entire install.
lstamour · 4h ago
Can’t speak to this exact circumstance, but more generally: The ONT translates the SFP+ networking to fibre optic, but the modem is still somewhat necessary for logins if you use PPPoE as a wrapper for example. In telecom fibre optic, it often also assigns a particular vlan to internet packets and separate vlans for TV and phone. But I’m not an expert here, just explaining why I needed a modem function in my router as well as a media converter to house the ONT.
As far as I know, nobody uses separate boxes for the modem and router, that kind of thinking died when wifi became more widespread and included by default with ISP plans.
vel0city · 3h ago
I wouldn't really call that a "modem" though, it's not really doing modulation/demodulation work to convert between media types. The terminology I usually hear for the provider's box handling any final authentication and VLAN splitting is usually a "residential gateway", which can be configured to bridge to a client's equipment.
Definitely splitting hairs here though on terminology.
wmf · 3h ago
their provided router is locked down to hell and they're on a cgnat
So not actually better than Comcast, just bad in a different way.
babypuncher · 5h ago
Comcast similarly removed their 1.2TB cap in my neighborhood within months of us getting fiber. It's almost like the only reason for the cap was because they could get away with it when there wasn't any competition.
xedrac · 5h ago
Comcast is notorious for exploiting places that don't have any other real options. Just before Google Fiber was activated in my area, Comcast stepped up their game big time. The only problem is that they had spent years nickel and diming me for actual connection speeds that didn't even come close to their advertised rates, and their latency/jitter is garbage compared to fiber. Comcast clearly doesn't want to have to compete. In their defense, their connection was rarely down.
some-guy · 5h ago
When I lived in downtown Oakland CA, Comcast literally could not keep up price-wise with the competition. Their customer service jaw would drop when I told them our local fiber offered a flat fee cheaper than theirs for 10 gigabit symmetrical fiber. On top of that there was another local microwave wireless option that wasn't too terrible.
The only thing in the end their salespeople could do was offer TV bundles but still wasn't cost-competitive. Not sure what their offerings are now but it was such an easy decision to switch.
PantaloonFlames · 4h ago
> is notorious for exploiting places that don't have any other real options.
Isn’t this standard competitive practice ? Charge what the market will bear.
I don’t know if I’d call that “exploitation”. If there’s one gas station 90 miles from every other gas station in the Nevada desert, they’re gonna charge more, aren’t they?
xedrac · 4h ago
Yes, it certainly is. But isn't it interesting that Comcast is almost universally hated? I used the word "exploit" simply because had they treated their customers better and focused on putting their best foot forward, I don't think they would have bled customers nearly as quickly.
Feature-wise it doesn't matter because you're still going to have to play the price haggling game. Other providers don't renegotiate every 6 months like they do. They have more in common with Waste Management than with a respectable ISP.
newZWhoDis · 1h ago
It was there 6 months ago, because when I moved and had to switch to comcast in 2021 I found out about the cap after ~5TB/mo
baby_souffle · 1h ago
I vaguely remember reading something about their consolidating plans and simplifying pricing slightly. Part of that was eliminating the data cap.
This article couldn't have passed through my inbox more than 6 weeks or so ago so it is a very recent change.
WarOnPrivacy · 6h ago
"Everything that we're doing is all underground."
This indicates that their local and state governments aren't (at this time) captured by the incumbent cable provider.
A captured state gov will pass laws to thwart new infra deployment, commonly written by ISP interests. A captured local gov will never approve deployment or slow-walk permitting in an attempt to bankrupt the upstart.
more explainers: New suburban fiber infrastructure means either trenching or pole hanging. The local gov issues permits for both but poles also require the cooperation of the pole owners. This last adds the PSC to the mix.
Recalcitrant pole owners are known to stall and kill infrastructure deployment - especially where going underground isn't an option. Some PSCs mandate that pole owners cooperate. Some PSCs abdicate that responsibility and are examples of regulatory capture.
rayiner · 4h ago
I’ve been hearing about “captured government” with respect to fiber deployment for two decades now and the folks on that soap box have made absolutely zero progress on improving deployment of fiber infrastructure in that time. Tilting at that windmill isn’t working, because for the most part that’s not the real problem.
Why isn’t the Bay Area a hot bed of fiber deployment? You think Comcast in Philly has more pull with Cupertino and Mountain View than Google and Apple? No! Internet in the Bay Area is shit for the same reason all the infrastructure in the Bay Area is shit. The government makes it slow and difficult to build anything.
Comcast installed fiber to my house back in 2018 or so. The permitting took months. And this was to run Comcast fiber on poles where Comcast already had their own cable lines. And my county is actually pretty efficient with permitting. It’s just that American municipalities absolutely hate it when anyone builds anything.
It's pretty good - their provided router is locked down to hell and they're on a cgnat, but not having to deal with Comcast's 1.2tb data cap is well worth it. Checking Comcast's site now, it seems that they now offer "unlimited" data. Interesting, that option wasn't there 6 months ago.
~100 customers seems too small for the amount of effort they have put in so far. They've been working along all the roads near me for about a year, and they're out there running fiber conduit every day. The houses out here are far apart. Hopefully, they can make it work.
It's been there since they announced the data cap. I thought the unlimited bundled with leasing their higher end hardware came first, but the email from 2016 announcing that our plan was getting the cap mentions being able to pay for unlimited.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/06/stung-by-custome...
A comcast customer always had the option to pay for unlimited data. I get that part. What is the 2nd part? “Started offering it as standard” means what?
There's barely any competition here. You can pretty much chose from Comcast Business or XFinity, which both are just Comcast because of a free market with free as in not in jail.
If starlink ever gets more capacity, I'll probably switch. Right now I think the only way to get gigabit down on starlink is with four or five accounts and manually bonding the dishes together. As soon as that obstacle goes away, Comcast will have competition in my area and I intend take advantage of that.
If you live in a region where they have no meaningful competition (which is still fairly common in a lot of places in the US) well bend over and lube up.
They will happily let you pay for years, for services that no longer exist, no longer connected to any of their networks. They'll take you to court rather than pay anything back; they know they are receiving extra money, and there's a significant amount that comes in, but "oh, it's so confusing, and there are so many legacy systems, we can't possibly catch every mistake."
The money they shuffle back and forth between each other, daily, reeks of book cooking - you might have a stretch of 20 miles of trunk in which there are 20 separate owners - not concurrent riding separate fiber lines, but in sequence, each paying rent to or getting rent paid by the adjacent rider, even though only a single company actually services the entire span.
It's funny how construction companies and ISPs get these rackets going, and then when people come along like these PrimeOne guys and offer a reasonable rate on a decent product, it's somehow vastly disruptive and threatening.
They'll expand, and be encouraged and allowed to expand, and after 5 or 6 years, the big ISPs will start circling, and eventually buy them out, and they'll retire happy. AT&T or Lumen will own their network inside of 10 years, and they'll claim it's modernized and upgraded infrastructure. People with shitty oversold undermaintained cable internet will be left alone until the money stops.
Starlink to phones is great, if it only didn't make ISPs so much money handling the base stations on the ground.
There's fiber all over the US just hanging there, unused, unmaintained, because merger after merger after merger left giant piles of assets under the ownership of companies like comcast and centurylink and at&t, who left infrastructure to rot, often built with public funding, and maintained their local monopolies and shitty service.
Whatever it is we're doing to regulate the industry at a federal level isn't working, but I imagine that's where a lot of the money goes.
This sounds like mine. I'm guessing yours doesn't support IPv6 because most fiber providers don't.
For the router, I already build firewalls so that. I pay $10/mo to escape their cgnat.
I've also alerted them to expect regular haranguing from me about deploying IPv6. Especially since bgp.he.net shows they have a /40 allocated to themselves; it doesn't seem to be used.
The people who attempt to fill these gaps are commonly rural telephone companies, electric cooperatives, tribal entities, or mom and pop shops where the owner grew up on a Ditch Witch and only knows as much IP networking as essential to light up the fiber and get the packets flowing upstream.
They are enormously resource constrained in ways you might not expect, too, eg operations can grind to a halt because everyone is out with a chainsaw after a storm, or because the Guy that Knew Stuff about their network died suddenly.
They are very, very unlikely to decide to run an IPv6 network just because. There's no upside that makes the juice worth the squeeze for them.
I have spent most of my career under the thumb of fucking cable and I'd sooner slam a car door on my nuts than go back to paying so much money for such garbage service.
Some people will say monitoring is all that you need, but I do not agree. There are a million different little issues that can and do occur on physical networks in the real world, and there's no way monitoring will have a 99% chance of detecting all of them. When incidents like the partial Microsoft network outage that hit certain peering points occurred, I had to route around the damage by tweaking route filtering on the core routers to prefer a transit connection that worked over the lower cost peering point. It's that kind of oddball issue that active users catch and report which does not happen for barely used services like IPv6.
How many ask for IPv4? I understand your situation, it's a lot of work, for something that many won't notice. It's just that saying there's no demand because your average consumer, who also doesn't know what IPv4 is, isn't asking for it, is the mentality that keeps IPv6 from being implemented.
On the funnier side of things, we've also sometimes run into the opposite problem that we can't reproduce an issue, because it's only on IPv4 and 95% of the time everything we do is IPv6. But we're also not serving home users.
Big, evil, hated Comcast has full ipv6, and I doubt any of its customers asked for it either. Instead people complain they’re only getting a /60.
CPE support for IPv6 has generally been garbage with it taking 15-20 years before the bare minimum was supported by mainstream router vendors. Even today there are still vendors that assume only IPv4 support. In my opinion the IETF really screwed up when they made IPv6 more complicated than just IPv4 with more address bits. The incumbent in my area generally uses PPPoE in their access network, but routers that supported PPPoE and prefix delegation basically didn't exist in 2010, and only started being available circa 2015 (in part due to the required bits not existing in OpenWRT and the hardware vendors' software development kits for their chipsets). Sure, we're 10 years further on now, but there remain a number of vendors that only support IPv4 for management of devices (cough Ubiquiti cough) in parts of their product line.
That said, there are features of IPv6 that are absolutely awesome for carriers. The next header feature that pretty much eliminates the need for MPLS in an IPv6 transport network is one such item that makes building transport networks so much cleaner when using IPv6 than IPv4. No more header insertion or rewriting, just update one field and fix up the delta on the checksum and CRC. They just aren't really applicable for smaller networks.
Yeah, what's up with that? I just got switched on to fiber and the CGNAT for IPv4 doesn't shock me much, but what's with the no IPv6 in 2025?
I know enough to deal with it, but what's the deal? Is there something systematic here?
How about not having to pay for (as) beefy CG-NAT hardware because people that go to Youtube, Netflix, MetaFace, TikTok, etc, can directly connect via IPv6.
I get the impression that they are still learning to run an ISP, both technically and customer facingly. It's weird - I learned more about them from this article than from actually being living here with them.
Some applications want to open ports and don't have the server-side infrastructure to punch a hole through NAT. Especially P2P apps and some games.
Sometimes I want to run a small, low-traffic web server from home.
Sometimes I'm connecting to my network from a machine that I don't control and can't install Tailscale on.
From the article, it sounds like the "default" option is for the customer to supply their own router, which I appreciate:
> Prime-One provides a modem and the ONT, plus a Wi-Fi router if the customer prefers not to use their own router.
My fiber installer referred to the Adtran 632V ONT he installed as the "modem".
He installed two other junction boxes (one outside the house near/under where the fiber attaches to the wall of the house, one inside near the ONT) but they're just passive optical couplers allowing them to swap out fiber segments in the event of fiber damage without re-running the entire install.
As far as I know, nobody uses separate boxes for the modem and router, that kind of thinking died when wifi became more widespread and included by default with ISP plans.
Definitely splitting hairs here though on terminology.
So not actually better than Comcast, just bad in a different way.
The only thing in the end their salespeople could do was offer TV bundles but still wasn't cost-competitive. Not sure what their offerings are now but it was such an easy decision to switch.
Isn’t this standard competitive practice ? Charge what the market will bear.
I don’t know if I’d call that “exploitation”. If there’s one gas station 90 miles from every other gas station in the Nevada desert, they’re gonna charge more, aren’t they?
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/06/stung-by-custome...
This article couldn't have passed through my inbox more than 6 weeks or so ago so it is a very recent change.
This indicates that their local and state governments aren't (at this time) captured by the incumbent cable provider.
A captured state gov will pass laws to thwart new infra deployment, commonly written by ISP interests. A captured local gov will never approve deployment or slow-walk permitting in an attempt to bankrupt the upstart.
more explainers: New suburban fiber infrastructure means either trenching or pole hanging. The local gov issues permits for both but poles also require the cooperation of the pole owners. This last adds the PSC to the mix.
Recalcitrant pole owners are known to stall and kill infrastructure deployment - especially where going underground isn't an option. Some PSCs mandate that pole owners cooperate. Some PSCs abdicate that responsibility and are examples of regulatory capture.
Why isn’t the Bay Area a hot bed of fiber deployment? You think Comcast in Philly has more pull with Cupertino and Mountain View than Google and Apple? No! Internet in the Bay Area is shit for the same reason all the infrastructure in the Bay Area is shit. The government makes it slow and difficult to build anything.
Comcast installed fiber to my house back in 2018 or so. The permitting took months. And this was to run Comcast fiber on poles where Comcast already had their own cable lines. And my county is actually pretty efficient with permitting. It’s just that American municipalities absolutely hate it when anyone builds anything.