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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 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

56 comments