We just moved from a very rural area to a large city and am surprised at all the food delivery/rent-a-bike-or-scooter/ride-share/car-share/random delivery/etc. apps and services that are available. What do you find you get the most use of and most value for money?
A bit of a brag, but my city provides gigabit fiber internet service for around $50/month. Due to cable-sponsored state laws, they are not able to provide service outside of the city limits despite many areas not serviced at all by cable or dsl. We had actually voted to use city tax money to start expanding fiber service into those areas and were shut down, resulting in quite a lot of upset rural residents.
What city is this? This sucks for rural residents but also good to promote denser city living
Longmont Colorado, US. There was a time not long ago when we had the second fastest residential internet in the world, and we really inspired a lot of other places to get moving on their own similar services. What’s really crazy is that we spent a decade fighting the State (aka the politicians who were getting kickbacks to block this). We actually paid to get the trunk line here in the late 90’s but were blocked from using it.
We finally got the laws changed so we could move forward and the cable company convinced a majority of voters “don’t you know how expensive it will be to get a trunk line run to your city? You really don’t want to have to pay for THAT!” Yes, the same trunk line we already had available for the previous decade. You can bet everyone got to buzzing about how voters were directly lied to, but it took another two years before we could put it up for a vote again.
And just to show how desperate Comcast (our local cable company) was to make our project a failure that they could promote, they literally had reps standing in our local Walmart, telling everyone how terrible an idea this was going to be, it couldn’t possibly be more reliable than their service, and people should sign up for a three-year contract with Comcast to make sure they would miss out on the initial sign-up bonus rates for our fiber service. For comparison, after the city finished running the fiber to everyone’s homes there was a huge storm that took out services in a bunch of neighborhoods. The reddit discussion was talking about how people with our city fiber were back online in a few hours. Cable and DSL customers were waiting over two WEEKS for repairs.
Yes, I do like to brag about how great our service is, and how badly Comcast sucks.
Thanks for sharing. That is grim. In Australia we had a good plan to connect the country with fibre optics. Then the right wing government stepped in and crippled it every step of the way. So now we ended up with a half assed setup that’s not nearly what we set out to achieve after billions of dollars spent anyway.
They’re now going back and upgrading it at a cost of even more dollars to get it to where it should’ve been ten years ago.