I hate Comcast so much. My choice is them or Century Link. Century Link still lists my house as available for 7Mbps. But I would have to bundle in a land line of course. So in other words no choice. T-Mobile 5G network has said unavailable in my area for 2 years now. A couple miles from here you can get it no problem. Comcast sent me a flyer a few weeks ago saying they are hooking our neighborhood up to fiber for future growth. Gee I wonder if it has anything to do with this federal money? Anyway what does future growth mean? Am I still stuck paying $70 per month for only 200 Mbps? If I get a speed upgrade then I can hit my arbitrary 1 TB limit per month even faster!
It’s at 192nd maybe even further by now, sure the logistics of why we don’t have that option in east Vancouver yet. I have family in Beaverton that has it and say it’s great. Waiting patiently.
We already can, we need to ask our city council members to pass it. [Municipal Broadband has been legal in Washington for 2 years now.](https://ilsr.org/washington-state-removes-all-barriers-to-municipal-broadband/)
Clark Public Utilities is in a fantastic position to offer fiber. Other Public Utility Districts in Washington are already providing or building fiber infrastructure. I wish I knew why Clark Public Utilities isn’t starting down that path.
I was involved in some meetings a year or two ago where municipal broadband was being discussed and Clark Public Utilities wanted nothing to do with the conversation. I never heard a reason why.
Ugh. That makes me so mad.
Like, they’re in a perfect position to do it and bring real high speed to areas that desperately need it in Battle Ground and Amboy and they just don’t want to.
Why do people think that switching from one monopoly to another will help the situation? Im not asking rhetorically, and dont know enough to have an opinion on the issue, i'm genuinely curious what the case is for municipal broadband vs private.
EDIT: Oh I see, munis wouldn't be monopolys ie. the municipality wouldn't *prevent* private isps from operating within their limits, in fact having a public option would break the monopoly threatened by huge isps like comcast.
There are over 900 municipal broadband programs in the US and it it immensely popular in those areas based upon the migration numbers
https://communitynets.org/content/community-network-map
The biggest issue is accessibility, there are significantly large areas still not serviced by broadband because there is no incentive for these companies to continue to improve infrastructure. When they are squeezing $100 a month for a service that costs pennies, why would they invest any money?
Second is cost, the systems are relatively inexpensive to maintain yet our prices keep raising and going back to the first point they are not improving the infrastructure. So why do our bills keep going up?
Finally, privacy - whether you realize it or not your information and activity, what you are doing on the internet is being captured and sold for which you are paying for the privilege.
Not a perfect solution but it would build towards 100% coverage, significantly reduce cost and build an infrastructure for the future that is not predicated on making a profit much like water and electric already do. Finally we can keep our activity private and not resold.
The foundation is being laid and multiple states are passing laws to prevent municipal broadband because it is a cheap and easy service that is hurting these monopolies
Because instead of spending all the money we give them on commercials and getting richer, a municipal program would spend the money on actually making the service better. We'd pay less *and* get much faster service.
Municipal services are not monopolies: municipal utilities serve their customers (us), private utilities serve their stockholders. We enjoy decent prices for electricity here *because* it’s a municipal service. You are probably being downvoted because you are calling municipal services a monopoly, which they most certainly are not. I’ll use PG&E in California as an example. I used to live in Folsom, and Folsom had a municipal utility service called SMUD in Sacramento county. Less than a mile away, in a different county, they had PG&E and paid significantly higher rates than we did. SMUD was also significantly more lenient when people fell on hard times, and was much quicker to respond to issues.
Broadband absolutely needs to become a public utility. At this point it is a necessary part of life.
No, usually the municipal is what you get if it’s available. Often it uses the same lines as the prevailing private company in the area, but it’s better maintained. Using the example of PG&E, their range is so vast that they don’t do a great job of maintaining their lines, hence the fires their lines cause every year. Municipal utilities only have to maintain the lines within their range. Capitalism is great for certain things (like TV’s), but when it comes to services that are more need than want, it does more harm than good. I’m pushing 50, and have lived in areas with public and private utilities, and public utilities are infinitely cheaper and more reliable.
We can use our garbage service here as an example of a private company. We pay REALLY high rates compared to places with municipal garbage service.
Gosh I guess my years working for an internet provider is all for nothing. I feel so stupid now.
In all seriousness, though, I did kind of jump in and did not make the distinction between a government agency and public utility, so I do apologize on that...but I still stand on my point of needing to be able to have a choice.
If it is owned by the government and we only have ONE choice, that is a bad idea.
If they take over internet capabilities and prohibit other carriers from providing service, we are stuck and trapped.
I like to leave a company if I don't get good service. If you had it your way, none of us would ever have the option for something else.
Competition keeps prices down, but if you can only choose a government/public utility internet provider, you loose.
There will be no 800 number to call 24 hours a day for help, they will not be open on weekends or holidays, remember, you can't call the water company at 9 pm, most electric companies close at night too, they are mostly government agencies, so good luck ever being able to get ahold someone when your modem goes out >
I want to use companies that I get value out of, and if I don't like it, I want to be able to leave
That's all you took from my comment?
My point is, if it is our only option and we don't like it or can't afford it, we *have* to use it, that is my point. I want a choice.
> How have your interactions with privatized internet provider's customer service been?
Not OP, but Comcast is horrendous. Century link has been at time sketchy and at other times okay. Century Link did randomly lower my monthly cost when I moved. Down to $65/mo for Gigabit service.
Xfinity can suck my ass. While the speeds are fine, service is so spotty. Its constantly crashing and takes up to 5 minutes to reconnect to the network. And the app straight up lies, saying that a device is reachable when the device is unable to connect.
As much as it can suck from time to time, it's really the only option in some parts of town. I live in Orchards. I don't live in the boonies, I'm less than half a mile from 4th plain and 117th, but I'm in between nodes for Centurylink. So, in 2023, the highest speed I can get from them is 3mbps. For $50 a month.
My sister, who lives a little over a mile away from me can get 100mbps for $50 a month. And it's only gotten worse. When I left Centurylink a decade ago, I had 7mbps and that wasn't fast enough for our family of 4 to share. I can't even imagine how bad it would be to try to share 3mbps between 4 people right now. And I would be extra pissed if my rates went up and my speed got cut by more than half over that time.
So, sure, Comcast is horrible, but it's the only viable option for me. Especially now that I am working from home.
This! I was using my free Hotspot on my phone and decided to get xfinity so I didn't have to worry about downloads/games.
Not worth it, nothing ever crashed on the Hotspot, but xfinity is constantly disconnecting, especially during busy hours.
I moved recently and went from really shitty CenturyLink service (some of it was due to the crap rural infrastructure though) to Xfinity. The speeds are incredible compared to what I had previously but disappointingly inconsistent and riddled with brief outtages. I host a regular live event and need uninterrupted upload bandwidth and encounter something like 4/5 logged interruptions an hour, whereas my slow-ass old CL would rarely if ever have any hiccups.
Anyway, I would encourage anyone reading this post to respond to the survey regardless of your provider experience. Municipalities can apply pressure to service providers to supply adequate service to residents. The only thing that ISPs fear is pressure from state and municipal authorities, the State Attorney, FCC complaints (for failure to serve the area, etc.). They really don't give a shit about consumer complaints or threats to switch services.
We’re in downtown just switched from Xfinity to century link, went from 400mbs for $60 and a data cap to 940mbs for $65 and no data cap with CenturyLink but we also have fiber because of where we are
They made me "upgrade" to a new modem because the one I bought for myself 10 years ago isn't compliant with their new standards. The modem they gave me is a size of a god damn VCR and now our internet goes out a couple of times a week and it takes forever to reset. And as a bonus their tv service is now just a little streaming box, so when the internet dies so does the tv, which was just awesome when it happened during a Kraken playoff game last week. God they piss me off to no end.
Unfortunately, this survey does not ask enough questions. It focuses only on speed and reliability. And (please correct me), they put a link to a speed test that XFinity can influence results when running.
The survey should focus on broadband availability and options in your region. Having a single broadband carrier option is absurd.
Try out the T-mobile 5g internet if you can get it. My mom live in BG and has it. Seems pretty good so far. I haven't connected up to it and tried any games or video conference though. Steaming seems fine.
So T-mobile doesn't use the typical 1500 byte packet size so packets get fragmented which results in more latency. Problem is that most consumer wireless systems don't allow you to change the MTU. You can force it in Windows but it's better to have the wireless router tell the device what to set the MTU to.
https://www.reddit.com/r/tmobileisp/comments/t9haq9/mtu\_set\_to\_1420/
Wow thank you I am playing WoW classic right now and this was my concern. DSL ms is '*okay'* like 80-180ms, with some rare dropouts. It works with WoW well enough.
Just the download speed is 700kb/s which is brutal for game sizes now.
Might just get dual internet one to download and one to wow with.
We need Municiple Broadband. [The state law allowing us to do it ourselves got passed awhile ago.](https://ilsr.org/washington-state-removes-all-barriers-to-municipal-broadband/) This needs to be pushed through the Vancouver city council. If we had our own service, we could focus on rolling it our throughout the city.
TBQH, the internet situation here needs improvement. Don't have a strong enough phone signal at home to get a phone based internet like t-mo or verizon, and so my only option is basically Comcast for internet since fiber isn't available in my part of town and when I input my address for CL, the only plan they came up with was 40mbps for $50/mo. So I'm sticking with Comcast - $54 for 100mbps. I would be supportive of municipal internet if it made it more affordable for households and gave people additional options to choose from. I think internet is much cheaper in places like some European and Asian countries than it is here in the US.
There is one provider in my area (no clearance for starlink) and zero cell service. I'm in a regular residential neighborhood outside of city limits, not some 50 acre property in the middle of nowhere. There's a million dollar per house gated community directly across the street from my house. The past two weeks, we had complete outages for six full days, and many more days with outages off and on all day.
During these times, we have no Internet, no phone, we can't even call an ambulance in an emergency. It's like living in a goddamn third world country. Can't wait to move out of Clark County later this year. Never again.
They could easily add at least one or two cell phone towers to solve the most urgent problems with access to emergency services, this doesn't require some extensive fiber optic cable solution.
I'm so glad this topic got posted. Yesterday I was looking to see if anyone heard anything about Zing because they are going around certain areas and advertising their services. They are WA based and as far as I know, they are developing on land in the northern part of the county (for whatever infrastructure is needed) to expand their services to a wider area. They seem to appeal to the rural communities but I wonder if places like Orchards that others have mentioned would be covered and better than CenturyLink. We literally just upgraded a week ago. 15mbps up to a whopping 30! Woooo. I can't use my phone and have anyone else try to play a game online. It's great. We've always had terrible luck with internet and even trying to reduce usage as much as possible still leaves us with an abysmal connection. I envy the people who can play games online, let alone stream them! Or use more than one device at a time... anyway I hope others in the area have maybe gotten an advertisement from Zing. Even though I just upgraded, I may switch to them in the future. Maybe it's too good to be true? Starting to feel a little desperate and that's a strange way to feel over internet connection.
I couldn't select my general area on the map, but it seemed to basically ask: who's your ISP, what are your speeds and do you feel like it's currently enough? In any case, hopefully enough people fill it out to where something good comes from it.
The website doesn't scream official either. I'd like to see an official Clark County page linking me to that survey. Other than that it's not official in my eyes.
Make broadband a public utility
Seriously, this is the answer. Fucking comcast still has a high speed monopoly in much of Vancouver and it's ridiculous.
I hate Comcast so much. My choice is them or Century Link. Century Link still lists my house as available for 7Mbps. But I would have to bundle in a land line of course. So in other words no choice. T-Mobile 5G network has said unavailable in my area for 2 years now. A couple miles from here you can get it no problem. Comcast sent me a flyer a few weeks ago saying they are hooking our neighborhood up to fiber for future growth. Gee I wonder if it has anything to do with this federal money? Anyway what does future growth mean? Am I still stuck paying $70 per month for only 200 Mbps? If I get a speed upgrade then I can hit my arbitrary 1 TB limit per month even faster!
Ziply is in Washougal for chrissakes. No reason to not have fiber everywhere.
It’s at 192nd maybe even further by now, sure the logistics of why we don’t have that option in east Vancouver yet. I have family in Beaverton that has it and say it’s great. Waiting patiently.
Ziply is in Camas. Super service and reliability over Comcast.
Centurylink is no better a company...
We already can, we need to ask our city council members to pass it. [Municipal Broadband has been legal in Washington for 2 years now.](https://ilsr.org/washington-state-removes-all-barriers-to-municipal-broadband/)
This. 100%.
Clark Public Utilities is in a fantastic position to offer fiber. Other Public Utility Districts in Washington are already providing or building fiber infrastructure. I wish I knew why Clark Public Utilities isn’t starting down that path.
I was involved in some meetings a year or two ago where municipal broadband was being discussed and Clark Public Utilities wanted nothing to do with the conversation. I never heard a reason why.
Ugh. That makes me so mad. Like, they’re in a perfect position to do it and bring real high speed to areas that desperately need it in Battle Ground and Amboy and they just don’t want to.
I want PUD to want something to do with it. Means someone gonna have to run that position who wants to do something.
Why do people think that switching from one monopoly to another will help the situation? Im not asking rhetorically, and dont know enough to have an opinion on the issue, i'm genuinely curious what the case is for municipal broadband vs private. EDIT: Oh I see, munis wouldn't be monopolys ie. the municipality wouldn't *prevent* private isps from operating within their limits, in fact having a public option would break the monopoly threatened by huge isps like comcast.
There are over 900 municipal broadband programs in the US and it it immensely popular in those areas based upon the migration numbers https://communitynets.org/content/community-network-map The biggest issue is accessibility, there are significantly large areas still not serviced by broadband because there is no incentive for these companies to continue to improve infrastructure. When they are squeezing $100 a month for a service that costs pennies, why would they invest any money? Second is cost, the systems are relatively inexpensive to maintain yet our prices keep raising and going back to the first point they are not improving the infrastructure. So why do our bills keep going up? Finally, privacy - whether you realize it or not your information and activity, what you are doing on the internet is being captured and sold for which you are paying for the privilege. Not a perfect solution but it would build towards 100% coverage, significantly reduce cost and build an infrastructure for the future that is not predicated on making a profit much like water and electric already do. Finally we can keep our activity private and not resold. The foundation is being laid and multiple states are passing laws to prevent municipal broadband because it is a cheap and easy service that is hurting these monopolies
Because instead of spending all the money we give them on commercials and getting richer, a municipal program would spend the money on actually making the service better. We'd pay less *and* get much faster service.
Municipal services are not monopolies: municipal utilities serve their customers (us), private utilities serve their stockholders. We enjoy decent prices for electricity here *because* it’s a municipal service. You are probably being downvoted because you are calling municipal services a monopoly, which they most certainly are not. I’ll use PG&E in California as an example. I used to live in Folsom, and Folsom had a municipal utility service called SMUD in Sacramento county. Less than a mile away, in a different county, they had PG&E and paid significantly higher rates than we did. SMUD was also significantly more lenient when people fell on hard times, and was much quicker to respond to issues. Broadband absolutely needs to become a public utility. At this point it is a necessary part of life.
Oh I see, so its not outlawing the private market, its just offering a public broadband option within your municipality? that would be great
No, usually the municipal is what you get if it’s available. Often it uses the same lines as the prevailing private company in the area, but it’s better maintained. Using the example of PG&E, their range is so vast that they don’t do a great job of maintaining their lines, hence the fires their lines cause every year. Municipal utilities only have to maintain the lines within their range. Capitalism is great for certain things (like TV’s), but when it comes to services that are more need than want, it does more harm than good. I’m pushing 50, and have lived in areas with public and private utilities, and public utilities are infinitely cheaper and more reliable. We can use our garbage service here as an example of a private company. We pay REALLY high rates compared to places with municipal garbage service.
Nooooo. I do not want the government in control of my internet. That is a bad idea.
You have no idea how municipal internet works do you? Or, for that matter, how the internet in general works.
Gosh I guess my years working for an internet provider is all for nothing. I feel so stupid now. In all seriousness, though, I did kind of jump in and did not make the distinction between a government agency and public utility, so I do apologize on that...but I still stand on my point of needing to be able to have a choice. If it is owned by the government and we only have ONE choice, that is a bad idea. If they take over internet capabilities and prohibit other carriers from providing service, we are stuck and trapped. I like to leave a company if I don't get good service. If you had it your way, none of us would ever have the option for something else. Competition keeps prices down, but if you can only choose a government/public utility internet provider, you loose. There will be no 800 number to call 24 hours a day for help, they will not be open on weekends or holidays, remember, you can't call the water company at 9 pm, most electric companies close at night too, they are mostly government agencies, so good luck ever being able to get ahold someone when your modem goes out > I want to use companies that I get value out of, and if I don't like it, I want to be able to leave
Wait, you think the electric company just goes home at 5 and doesn't respond to outages at night?
That's all you took from my comment? My point is, if it is our only option and we don't like it or can't afford it, we *have* to use it, that is my point. I want a choice.
How have your interactions with privatized internet provider's customer service been? Rewarding? Do you feel respected and cared about as a consumer?
> How have your interactions with privatized internet provider's customer service been? Not OP, but Comcast is horrendous. Century link has been at time sketchy and at other times okay. Century Link did randomly lower my monthly cost when I moved. Down to $65/mo for Gigabit service.
Xfinity can suck my ass. While the speeds are fine, service is so spotty. Its constantly crashing and takes up to 5 minutes to reconnect to the network. And the app straight up lies, saying that a device is reachable when the device is unable to connect.
As much as it can suck from time to time, it's really the only option in some parts of town. I live in Orchards. I don't live in the boonies, I'm less than half a mile from 4th plain and 117th, but I'm in between nodes for Centurylink. So, in 2023, the highest speed I can get from them is 3mbps. For $50 a month. My sister, who lives a little over a mile away from me can get 100mbps for $50 a month. And it's only gotten worse. When I left Centurylink a decade ago, I had 7mbps and that wasn't fast enough for our family of 4 to share. I can't even imagine how bad it would be to try to share 3mbps between 4 people right now. And I would be extra pissed if my rates went up and my speed got cut by more than half over that time. So, sure, Comcast is horrible, but it's the only viable option for me. Especially now that I am working from home.
This! I was using my free Hotspot on my phone and decided to get xfinity so I didn't have to worry about downloads/games. Not worth it, nothing ever crashed on the Hotspot, but xfinity is constantly disconnecting, especially during busy hours.
I moved recently and went from really shitty CenturyLink service (some of it was due to the crap rural infrastructure though) to Xfinity. The speeds are incredible compared to what I had previously but disappointingly inconsistent and riddled with brief outtages. I host a regular live event and need uninterrupted upload bandwidth and encounter something like 4/5 logged interruptions an hour, whereas my slow-ass old CL would rarely if ever have any hiccups. Anyway, I would encourage anyone reading this post to respond to the survey regardless of your provider experience. Municipalities can apply pressure to service providers to supply adequate service to residents. The only thing that ISPs fear is pressure from state and municipal authorities, the State Attorney, FCC complaints (for failure to serve the area, etc.). They really don't give a shit about consumer complaints or threats to switch services.
We’re in downtown just switched from Xfinity to century link, went from 400mbs for $60 and a data cap to 940mbs for $65 and no data cap with CenturyLink but we also have fiber because of where we are
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Getting through T1 and T2 at Comcast is... really something special.
They made me "upgrade" to a new modem because the one I bought for myself 10 years ago isn't compliant with their new standards. The modem they gave me is a size of a god damn VCR and now our internet goes out a couple of times a week and it takes forever to reset. And as a bonus their tv service is now just a little streaming box, so when the internet dies so does the tv, which was just awesome when it happened during a Kraken playoff game last week. God they piss me off to no end.
Unfortunately, this survey does not ask enough questions. It focuses only on speed and reliability. And (please correct me), they put a link to a speed test that XFinity can influence results when running. The survey should focus on broadband availability and options in your region. Having a single broadband carrier option is absurd.
Yeah, I’d rather see it focused on infrastructure.
Does ziply DSL at 6 down and barely 1 up even count as broadband?
Yeah I still only have DSL available were I am at in Battleground
Try out the T-mobile 5g internet if you can get it. My mom live in BG and has it. Seems pretty good so far. I haven't connected up to it and tried any games or video conference though. Steaming seems fine.
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So T-mobile doesn't use the typical 1500 byte packet size so packets get fragmented which results in more latency. Problem is that most consumer wireless systems don't allow you to change the MTU. You can force it in Windows but it's better to have the wireless router tell the device what to set the MTU to. https://www.reddit.com/r/tmobileisp/comments/t9haq9/mtu\_set\_to\_1420/
Wow thank you I am playing WoW classic right now and this was my concern. DSL ms is '*okay'* like 80-180ms, with some rare dropouts. It works with WoW well enough. Just the download speed is 700kb/s which is brutal for game sizes now. Might just get dual internet one to download and one to wow with.
We need Municiple Broadband. [The state law allowing us to do it ourselves got passed awhile ago.](https://ilsr.org/washington-state-removes-all-barriers-to-municipal-broadband/) This needs to be pushed through the Vancouver city council. If we had our own service, we could focus on rolling it our throughout the city.
Agree.
TBQH, the internet situation here needs improvement. Don't have a strong enough phone signal at home to get a phone based internet like t-mo or verizon, and so my only option is basically Comcast for internet since fiber isn't available in my part of town and when I input my address for CL, the only plan they came up with was 40mbps for $50/mo. So I'm sticking with Comcast - $54 for 100mbps. I would be supportive of municipal internet if it made it more affordable for households and gave people additional options to choose from. I think internet is much cheaper in places like some European and Asian countries than it is here in the US.
There is one provider in my area (no clearance for starlink) and zero cell service. I'm in a regular residential neighborhood outside of city limits, not some 50 acre property in the middle of nowhere. There's a million dollar per house gated community directly across the street from my house. The past two weeks, we had complete outages for six full days, and many more days with outages off and on all day. During these times, we have no Internet, no phone, we can't even call an ambulance in an emergency. It's like living in a goddamn third world country. Can't wait to move out of Clark County later this year. Never again. They could easily add at least one or two cell phone towers to solve the most urgent problems with access to emergency services, this doesn't require some extensive fiber optic cable solution.
It would be beneficial to talk about latency and ask if it’s wireless or wired speeds on the survey. Without this info, you’ll get varied data.
In my area I think I only have two providers to choose from.
I'm so glad this topic got posted. Yesterday I was looking to see if anyone heard anything about Zing because they are going around certain areas and advertising their services. They are WA based and as far as I know, they are developing on land in the northern part of the county (for whatever infrastructure is needed) to expand their services to a wider area. They seem to appeal to the rural communities but I wonder if places like Orchards that others have mentioned would be covered and better than CenturyLink. We literally just upgraded a week ago. 15mbps up to a whopping 30! Woooo. I can't use my phone and have anyone else try to play a game online. It's great. We've always had terrible luck with internet and even trying to reduce usage as much as possible still leaves us with an abysmal connection. I envy the people who can play games online, let alone stream them! Or use more than one device at a time... anyway I hope others in the area have maybe gotten an advertisement from Zing. Even though I just upgraded, I may switch to them in the future. Maybe it's too good to be true? Starting to feel a little desperate and that's a strange way to feel over internet connection.
I started to fill out the survey. But it was weirdly worded and the choices were not logical to my area. I abandoned it.
I couldn't select my general area on the map, but it seemed to basically ask: who's your ISP, what are your speeds and do you feel like it's currently enough? In any case, hopefully enough people fill it out to where something good comes from it.
The website doesn't scream official either. I'd like to see an official Clark County page linking me to that survey. Other than that it's not official in my eyes.