Grand County Internet Services
High Speed Internet Services in Grand County, Colorado

When you talk about high speed services many factors come into play. Price, speed and availability in a location are the most important. Often there are trade offs and some other factors to consider.

SPEED
Speed on the internet is a subjective thing. It can vary due to many factors. One of the most important is how many connections are on the local network. The local network is usualy a subdivision up to the next network router. For example if you are in a small town and there are 10 connections, and they are all doing normal web browsing, a 256K connection speed will give evevryone very good performance. If they are all downloading the latest windows update at the same time the performance will be as bad a dialup. If you have 100 people on a 1.5 Mbps the same applies, or 400 on a 4Mbps.

The second most important is the backbone to the internet. This is the total speed available to the point where your ISP connects to the main internet which you can assume as the speed blackhole. That blackhole can go very fast or very slow and there is no real control on it. Some days it can get from Califonia to New York very fast and other days it crawls. That performance is just dependent on what everyone in the USA is doing. The ISP's backbone is important. Grand County Internet Services currently has a backbone speed of 9Mbps over a Qwest circuit that can be upgraded to 45Mbps. We monitor this and when we see that the limit is being reached we order more speed.

DSL thru us comes across our backbone. If you order 256K, it will usually be over DSL circuits that will furnish you with speed up to 3Mbps. The total backbone is of all customers going to a central office is 3Mbps. It can be oversubscribed. If you have a 1.5Mbps DSL circuit and it is on an over subscribed DSL circuit your speed will be not a lot faster than anyone elses over that same circuit(including the 256Kbps guys. The top speed is the speed you will be able to burst to under ideal conditions. That is why as more people get added you see performance drop during busy hours. The same applies to wireless radios, cable and Satellite services.

For most cases, having a very high speed will not make a huge difference in your internet experience. That is because most web servers are not going to deliver their pages too you a whole lot faster if you have a link at 256Kbs or 4Mbps. Web pages come in small chunks and have to travel over the whole internet so the general speed of the internet makes the difference. If you are trying to transfer files, it makes a difference and that is why large downloads of software or uploads of mail may be faster. You ,the user, need to determine what speed versus price is important.

PRICE
The best way to compare prices is to look at a period of time over which a particular service is going to cost you. I like to look at costs at the end of fixed periods including all costs up to the end of that period from the start of service.

Note that I included dialup costs for comparison. As can be seen, DSL is the price winner where it is available, Wireless and Comcast are about even for the first 3 years and wireless is less after equipment costs come out the fourth year. Satellite and cell phone should be considered where other services are not available. Cell phone is also useful for people in the field or when travelling and is currently a good mobile solution.

Remember that pricing can fluctuate depending on promotions but trends can be seen. Satellite is probably a fixed cost and not a lot of variations are seen, DSL has been coming steadily down but except for promotions (which current users are never offered, it has probably gotten to a low point of between $25 per month with minimum frills, Verizon might have some play in pricing but I would not expect to see it below $50 per month. Cable seems to probably be stable and you will see promotions where they will bundle multiple services at lower total prices(new users only). They have spent a lot of money building their network and it will be some time before it starts to payoff. Wireless is the one that has the poissibility to come down over time. Since the equipment at each location currently has a very high price, that price is factored into 3 years of equipment service. It is expected Equipment prices will start to fall in the near future. At the end of 3 years, the ISP has paid it off and can then compete on connectivity costs alone. We currently figure $15 per month for connection costs and the rest is equipment. after 3 years of installed time I expect we can compete at a price of $25 to $30 per month.