Minneapolis residents to get 10-gigabit fiber, for $400 per month

While most parts of the US have to make do with Internet speeds of less than 100Mbps—in many cases much less than 100Mbps—some residents of Minneapolis will soon have access to a ludicrously fast fiber-to-the-home speed tier: 10 gigabits per second.

The service is offered by US Internet, the company that already provides "a couple thousand" Minneapolis residents with 1Gbps service for $65 per month. The 10Gbps service will be available immediately to existing customers willing to pay the $400-per-month fee, though US Internet expects the number of customers who take them up on the deal to be relatively small. All together, US Internet has "a little over 10,000" fiber-to-the-home customers at different speed tiers, all located on the west side of Interstate 35W.

This summer, the company plans to widen its service area to the east side of I-35W, which will encroach further into incumbent Comcast’s territory. According to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Comcast offers 50Mbps service for $77 and 25Mbps service for $65 in that area; US Internet by contrast prices its 100Mbps service tier—the company’s most popular—at just $45 per month. The gigabit plan at $65 gives customers about 40 times the bandwidth of Comcast’s 25Mbps plan for the same price.

The most difficult part about 10Gbps home Internet service—aside from paying for it—is actually using it effectively. As Ars business editor Cyrus Farivar found out in late 2012 with his experience with Google Fiber, even a single gigabit connection provides a hell of a lot of speed; 10Gbps is far faster than the SATA bus speed used by modern computers’ hard drives and SSDs (which max out at a burst transfer rate of 6Gbps under ideal conditions). 10Gbps connections are more often seen linking together servers in data centers rather than home Internet users; from a perspective of pure throughput, 10Gbps is more than enough to support dozens of extraordinarily high-bandwidth networked computing tasks.

The potential value, though, isn’t in being able to support sustained multigigabit Web throughput for single home users—indeed, there’s essentially nothing on the World Wide Web that needs ten gigabits of throughput. Rather, the promise of effectively unlimited bandwidth gives creative users the ability to use computers in ways that "normal" Internet speeds prohibit—particularly sharing video and other multimedia content. Massively increasing the speeds at the end-points of the Internet and removing the bottlenecks to large-scale sharing of video and other files lets users do more creative things with their data, including potentially running their own servers.

Minneapolis residents who want to become US Internet customers might run into one more difficulty in signing up for service: they’ll probably have to explain to Comcast why they’re leaving.