The Need for Speed: UTOPIA's First 100Mbps Residential Customer Hooked Up in Layton

Despite the hefty $147/mo price tag, someone in Layton has some serious bragging rights by becoming the first residential customer on UTOPIA to pick up 100Mbps service courtesey of FuzeCore. Nobody else in Utah offers those kinds of speeds in the home and UTOPIA plans to up the ante even further with planned 1Gbps service to residences (though I shudder to think how much it will cost). Can competitors Qwest and Comcast catch up? Survey says “not bloody likely”.

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14 Responses to The Need for Speed: UTOPIA's First 100Mbps Residential Customer Hooked Up in Layton

  1. Paul says:

    While a 100 Mbps connection might be a vanity piece for some who can afford it, it is much more for those who truly want to be able to work from home and need large amounts of bandwidth. A friend of mine in Brigham City, who is an engineer and recently connected to UTOPIA, does a lot of work from home. He told me that he had become very frustrated with his dsl connection with increasing delays causing a very poor telework experience. He now has a symmetrical 10Mbps connection and raved about how productive he has become. He tells me he can get more work done from home now than he can from his office.

  2. JM says:

    Seems unlikely that they can catch up, but can anyone tell me if the Comcast salesman who says they just finished laying fiber in Sugar House is
    (a) telling the truth
    (b) stretching the truth
    (c) confused
    (d) lying

    I can’t find any news stories about it, so I was wondering…

  3. Jesse says:

    Comcast has fiber the same way a Pop-Tart has fruit. He’s probably trying to pull the same trick that all of the cable companies do: confusing FTTN/HFC networks like their with FTTH networks like UTOPIA, iProvo, and FIOS. The problem is that most consumers don’t know or understand the difference.

  4. Capt. Video says:

    The UTOPIA press release claiming to be the first and fastest is mis-leading at best and downright inaccurate at worst. The below being from Jim Ballard’s list.
    ——————-
    “UTOPIA claims North America’s fastest
    residential Internet connection – “the
    first symmetrical, non-shared 100 Mbps
    fiberoptic Internet connection in the
    United States”

    (Wilson, NC, has been offering a tier
    of symmetrical, unshared 100 Mbps
    since last summer. Lafayette, LA,
    has since February 2009 offered
    symmetrical, unshared 100 Mbps to
    all subscribers without extra charge
    for intra-city communications.”
    —————-

    Note that this speed is offered to ALL customers without additional charge in Lafayette, LA on their muni system.

  5. Jesse says:

    It would be easier to have patience with the inaccuracies if it weren’t the first time. Whoever is writing the press releases needs to fact-check their enthusiasm.

  6. Capt. Video says:

    Yes, they should be very proud of offering that speed and not need to incorrectly claim to be the first or only one doing so.

    Just providing connections at that speed are something to be very proud of.

  7. hy777 says:

    Great speeds. I can hardly wait till I get such a speed for gaming.

  8. Stench says:

    You dont need 100meg for gaming…… gaming is all about latency (which is substantially reduced with UTOPIA’s network!). You’ll be PLENTY fine with a 15 meg fiber connection for gaming purposes – unless you need to host a 1,000+ person LAN party?

    Also, I had 100meg hooked up here (on UTOPIA) 2 years ago – though only for brief testing for a few days 😉 Doesnt that count as one of the first 100 meg users? =P

    All of UTOPIA’s connected homes get a 100meg fiber dropped into their home, their data port is just rate limited to 15 meg / 50 meg etc…. so its not hard to bump that to 100 meg, though most of the ISPs can support that much bandwidth for very many users, it would also degrade if you had TV service – especially if you were using HD, you’d see a few meg drop since the TV vlan has priority over the data vlan (to preserve TV quality).

  9. Stench says:

    That should say “most of the ISPs *can’t* support that much bandwidth for very many users.

  10. Robert says:

    These claims are all pretty meaningless since there is no such thing as “non-shared”. All Internet users use a shared path at some point. Unless your ISP maintains a pipe to the Internet that always has 100MB available for any user, you will never see 100MB speeds to the Internet. What does it matter if the last five miles is 100MB if there is never more than 15MB available to you on the upstream path from your ISP? Very few if any ISPs will provide this kind of bandwidth to their residential users. For “non-shared” 100MB delivery it would require a 10 GB Interent connection for every 100 users. A full city like Lafayette would need several terrabytes of pipe to the world. It’s not going to happen anytime soon and it’s not ever going to be free.

  11. Jesse says:

    I think we all understand this distinction when a connection is not sold as “dedicated”. I’d much rather have my bandwidth shared at the ISP than at the neighborhood level.

    And yes, no ISP could stay in business if they provided dedicated bandwidth at the current UTOPIA prices. Odds are, though, that most users will not all try and max out their connections at the same time. Unless it’s peak time or a lot of users are seeding last night’s episode of 24 on bitTorrent, you’re likely to get 100Mbps from your ISP even if the server on the other end might not necessarily provide the same.

    Knowing that I have a dedicated 100Mbps connection to a 10Gbps backbone that runs directly to my ISP is a warm-and-fuzzy feeling. At least then you know your connection problems can’t be blamed on your neighbor’s teenage son.

  12. Capt. Video says:

    There is little doubt that networks like UTOPIA are able to (and typically do) deliver outstanding bandwidth and low latency.

    I think the way the internet is being used is changing and that will cause a problem for all users.

    I myself have pointed to how I love my Roku box and Netflix movie library of 13,000+ movies available for streaming. Watching these movies (or any streaming video on line) is not at all like typical web surfing. The old web surfing would bring someone a web page and then their connection bandwidth would be available to be shared with other customers of the ISP or others on the same node…but when you are streaming video this is not the case. You are drawing a fairly constant, somewhat high bit rate for an hour plus.

    Networks like UTOPIA are better positioned to handle this traffic than cable….but it will be hard (and costly) for all.

    As more and more users get video via the internet and not by traditional means it will stress and even break some networks and increase costs for ISP…and eventually their customers.

  13. I was a bit confused by this announcement, too, seeing as XMission has been providing 100 Mbps service to both residential and business customers for years now. I believe they instead meant to publicize the first customer on a new residential pricing tier.

    But its not the first time UTOPIA has completely taken us for granted, and clearly won’t be the last.

    Robert, your numbers are correct in theory, but not in practice. In fact, all of our thousands of UTOPIA subscribers together have never drawn a full GIG at the same time, although we are vastly more than prepared for them to do so (we publicize our real time and archived stats here: http://stats.xmission.com/routers/public/). I believe the other residential providers lease network space from a local house that should be similarly armed with overhead.

  14. Darren Kopp says:

    ah man, they have me beat. i’m running 50/50 right now.

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