That's some decent speeds there although pricing seems a bit on the high side. Although to be fair the only 100 Mbps connection price I have to compare it to is from Japan where it was about 60-70 USD for 100 mpbs up/100 mbps down.
And, dang, 350 USD for 1 Gbps.
Regards,
SB
The 1 Gbps is really kinda just because they can thing. They've freely admitted that they have no idea how to realistically price a 1 Gbps connection.
Their pricing is generally competitive with other offerings in the states and they've been doubling bandwidth about every 6-9 months at the same price point. I know a couple people who have the 100 and 150 Mbps connections and its funny, most of the speedtest sites cannot sustain that level of bandwidth, they have to open 3-4 different speed tests to different sites to max out the link.
They've apparently already gotten several takers for the 1 Gbps connections though most of those are radiologists who are using them to do readings and consultings from home. Sure beats driving into the hospital at 3 in the morning to spend 15-25 minutes reading a scan.
Another thing of note is that they are doing almost no filtering of the content currently which is resulting in extremely low latencies (almost speed of light).
Apparently their network architecture is current 14 fiber loops are increasing radii each with a minimum of 10 Gbps with several sets of dark fiber in each loop for future capacity increases. Along each loop they have multiple concentrator points each of which supplies single link connections to the home. They don't physically split off a fiber pair to a home until the dwelling signs up for a connection though the connection/installation is free. They currently estimate that the cost per connection is ~$500 though it is going down over time. Usually takes them about a day to do the hookup. They benefit greatly from the majority (~90%) of the power lines being above ground. For smart meters at homes that aren't hooked up to fiber they rely on wireless for the data transport to concentrators/transponders on poles connected to dedicated fiber. All the to customer fiber is good up to at least 10 Gbps and only requires new hardware to be installed in the concentrators.
They also have the distinction of being the only video service provider to convert all the raw feeds into MP4-AVC. In addition, they also run a parallel feed of analog MPEG2 QAM along each customer fiber. This enables someone to get all the open channels directly without a setup box using any standard over the air compatible HD box/tv. All reports of the video picture quality have basically put it at the top of the charts (aka they are running 20+ Mbps MP4-AVC for each channel where as most people are running 10-15 Mbps MPEG2).
Also impressive is that they have up to 160K+ residential customers, a good number of which are fairly rural and haven't previously been able to get either DSL or cable.
Another interesting tidbit is that so far they've seen roughly equal upstream and downstream aggregate bandwidth.
I find it rather depressing that my parents living in generally rural area in Tennessee have better connectivity options than I do living in San Francisco or anywhere else in the bay area (you know, silicon valley, the heart of high tech)!