The local PUD (Public Utility District) has been laying down fiber optic lines all over my town, and in different areas of the county, for the last few years. The PUD owns the lines, and they make them available to all of the local ISPs. Anybody in town can get this kind of connection, if the PUD has gotten to their neighborhood. My roommate and I have a package deal through one of the ISPs: fiber optic Internet and telephone for $49.95/month.
The fiber optics were instrumental in getting Yahoo! to locate a server farm here, where earthquakes and other natural disasters are rare (central Washington), yet still still reasonably close to the big city (Seattle). There’s been a big push to do things to attract the technology sector to our area, which has been a low-wage agricultural community since forever, to create better-paying jobs.
Don’t be jealous! Besides, with my 466 MHz computer, I’m probably still not seeing the full benefit of the connection 
[QUOTE=carnivorousplant]
Sixty-two posts?
So, you just been lurking a lot, or what?
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Those are just the ones that went through. If we had an “attempted posts” counter, it’d probably be up in the thousands.
[QUOTE=Patty O’Furniture]
Those are just the ones that went through. If we had an “attempted posts” counter, it’d probably be up in the thousands.
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I’ll give you points for that, be it comedy or tragedy.
[QUOTE=gigi]
I can usually get through just fine, except very occasionally in afternoon (around now, I get a couple of errors). Otherwise, no problems.
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It shouldn’t ever be a problem. I like the site, but this is by far the worst performing site of any I go to, bar none.
[QUOTE=Phase42]
I’ve got probably the fastest home Internet connection you can get (6-Gigabit fiber optic, still so rare that I always have to check “other” on surveys that ask what type of connection I have), but the SDMB still gives me trouble.
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And your ISP is …?
[QUOTE=Duckster]
And your ISP is …?
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Northwest Internet
I can’t find anything there (or on the PUD site) about “6 gigabit” speed, but a few months after we signed up, we got something in the mail saying we’d been upgraded to 6 gigabits (unless I read it wrong). I think we started out at 3 or 4 Gb. The site also says 10GB monthly data transfer, but there have been months when I’ve gone well over that (yay Usenet!) without penalty or extra fees.
[QUOTE=Phase42]
Northwest Internet
I can’t find anything there (or on the PUD site) about “6 gigabit” speed, but a few months after we signed up, we got something in the mail saying we’d been upgraded to 6 gigabits (unless I read it wrong). I think we started out at 3 or 4 Gb. The site also says 10GB monthly data transfer, but there have been months when I’ve gone well over that (yay Usenet!) without penalty or extra fees.
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Wait? you have a 6 gigabit connection with a 10 gigabyte cap? Which means you can use your connection at it’s full capacity for oh… 13 seconds before you reach the cap? That sounds supremely useless.
Fuckit, I’m still jealous.
Well, like I said, I may have misread something. But I can still download a 20 megabyte file in about a minute (depending on the server from which I’m downloading, of course) 