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.