Bend Broadband Unveils 25 Mbps, 60 Mbps Tiers

The company says they're also unveiling a "Silver" tier with downstream speeds of 25 Mbps / 1.5 Mbps for $45 a month for six months -- if you bundle additional services. Users of the company's "Silver" tier of service will also get a nudge to 14 Mbps downstream at no additional charge.

Isn't 25 better than 14? If I was silver at 25 why would I want a nudge to 14 ?

"Bend, Oregon based BendBroadband isn't particularly well known, with just three reviews in our database".

I hope the customers they serve up there are treated better then the Comcast customers are down here where I live in Northern California....

I see from the article that they sadly seem to be confused if they are calling themselves "A fiberoptic internet provider" because replacing all the copper you want internally in your infrastructure may make you fiberoptic "ready" but unless you run that fiber to the customers door you certainly can't claim you are even close to "providing" fiber to the consumer...

Hopefully they don't go the way of most other major CableCo's... then they'll have to change their Corporate Name to "Bend Over Broadband" and their slogan can be "Where we really stick to our customers"..

I think they're bent on bending over their customers. 150GB cap is pretty crappy. I don't even know how many people live on 250GB. I like to sleep to streaming music and also play games, and that alone can easily hit a 250GB cap in a month. More speed just fills a cap faster.

You think 150Gb is bad?.........Try an astounding 5GB for $39.99 per month and a price of $6 per additional GB. The speed on this tier is 500kb down and 200up and you must sign a 1 year contract.

The provider (wireless) has a couple more tiers with the best one being $85.99 for 3mb down/750 up and a whopping 15GB monthly cap with $4 per additional GB.

»www.rabbitmeadows.com/ns ··· cts.html

Providers such as the one above are really giving it to their customers.

I'd take 150 GB's. It's nearly double what I get.

I have 15/2 cable, for which I pay around $55 a month, and I have to live with 80 GB cap.

It blows chunks. Streaming audio and video from the web really racks up the gigs fast...

I have 20/1.5 cable and have to live with 60gb/mo. theres always someone worse off than you.

"The bandwidth usage allowance for Platinum will be 150 GB per month".....caps= epic fail, hope they go under

But if they go under, who will they be bought out by? Heard of JetBroadband?

Woo ... Jet with 8Mbs!

I'm an Oregonian, despite living in NorCal, and a Comcast customer. I'm originally from Corvallis, but lived in Bend for a year -- and worked for an ISP there (BendNet, circa 1997).

Yes, chances are the customers there will be treated better than Comcast down here, but I'm doubting service will be reliable. Eastern Oregon is literally 3 hours away from the rest of civilisation (and that's assuming you take the usual route from west to east across Highway 20). All that's out there is absurdly hot weather during the summer, 20-below temperatures with 6 foot snow banks during the winter, otherwise rain with occasional sun (welcome to Oregon). Keep in mind Bend is more or less the "centre" of eastern Oregon, so all surrounding towns are reliant upon them for stuff like this.

The biggest 2 problems when I lived there, with regards to Internet access, were 1) unreliable connectivity, and 2) horribly congested (and limited numbers of) pipes.

With regards to connectivity: around 85% of the customer base had 33.6k or 56k dial-up, and it was flaky. Real, real flaky -- and it got worse throughout autumn and winter. I never bothered to use my dial-up connection to work; it was easier to just walk/bike 3-4 miles into work and use the LAN. The remaining customer base were elite customers who had DSL (IDSL), or businesses who had frame relay (usually 56k, very rarely anything larger). The reason for dial-up as a common customer choice was that it was inexpensive -- cost is a big focus in Bend, and in Oregon in general.

With regards to long-haul pipes: you'd have to understand the terrain to truly understand the problem. Plus, there were only two or 3 ISPs at the time, and everyone got their pipes (which were small at the time; usually a couple T1s, although the competing ISP actually had a T3, but no one was sure how they managed to afford it; I'm pretty sure they went out of business) through one or two tier 1 backbone providers -- no one else ran conduit out there, because it was too expensive to lay and no one was willing to pay for it (consumer or business). That may have changed in recent years, but probably not without a monopoly on who owns it. I'd be willing to bet Qwest (US West) is the big contender, given that they were responsible for all the copper from west to east.

Overall backbone connectivity sucked as well. Packet loss somewhere between Portland and Bend? Repair times often quoted were 3-4 days, and worse during winter. During these times the few ISPs were left with screaming customers, and customers didn't have much choice -- it was one of 3 ISPs, and they all had the same general problems.

Most of these ISPs were run by the seat of their pants. What was referred to as a "POP" was a shack (literally!) or small office space located in the middle of no where (John Day, Prineville, etc.) with rats nest wiring bought at local Fred Meyer's or from garage sales. Used equipment being bought was very common. When any of these POPs went down, so did customer connectivity in that smaller region. Qwest (US West) was who provided the DS1 trunks for all the POTS lines going between Bend and the smaller POPs. Roadwork cuts weren't that common, but more so environmental damage to lines. Some were above ground, some were below -- but out there it doesn't really matter given the environment.

Bend is not a place to live if you want to be in the Oregon tech industry. Try Portland, Beaverton, Hillsboro, or across the bridge in Vancouver (Washington).

I hope some Eastern Oregonians can chime in here with details as to whether or not things have improved since the late 90s, because my impression is that they hadn't -- at least not, say, compared to here.

There is fiber connectivity in Bend now...

»www.lsnetworks.net/map.htm

BTW, you wouldn't recognise Bend these days. Things have changed massively.

Bend Broadband also appears to have connectivity from 360 Networks, Qwest and Level3. Not the worst mix I've seen...

Better stuff than LS (which is run over leased BPA fiber). Qwest, 360, L3, ELW and others now term here over multiple fiber builds.

Just because Spencer didn't know how to run an ISP in Bend with BendNet (and his telco closet in his house fill with cat an cat ppe) doesn't mean that others didn't understand enterprise engineering!

By that logic then Verizon FIOS doesn't qualify either, since they really only run fiber up to the edge of my house and the service is carried through the house by copper. Let's take to the streets and protest!!!

"Edge of my house", "Customers door" Semantic wordplay meaning the same thing....meh.

Verizon runs more Fiber to a customer's home then any other fiber provider.... the rest all use copper for the "last mile"..

Any other national fiber provider is what you mean...right?

There are plenty of regional/local providers who have seen the light and realized that their copper infrastructure can't handle next-gen speeds. So they've rolled out fiber. Coax-based operators tend to sit back a bit more on this, but some of them have also switched to FTTH for new installs.

Exactly -- the smaller carriers are leading the way, technologically. We know what a real fiber-to-the-home connection looks like, right?

OMG! That CAN'T be a residential Fiber connection can it?

I live near the poster and I've not heard of any company offering that speed!!!

Yikes that's fast!

I stand corrected: »www.paxio.net/ResidentialData

Damn!!

Too bad it's only available in a very limited area

Semantics is kind of the point of your original post, no? "Fiber optic network", right?

Technically speaking, Verizon is providing you pure fiber service-- right up to the demarc where your LAN peers with their network via copper.

Granted, the demarc is a copper hand-off, so you don't have any other choice.

Damn.. Wish I had speeds like that.

"new dog logo the company says is intended to convey reliability and loyalty"

Hmm, all I can think of is them peeing on the rug.

Maybe the Logo should be running into a wall with the word "CAP" imbedded in it or perhaps running with a '$' sack in its mouth.

Playing devil's advocate here:

1. Their tiers are very inexpensive for the services they provide. Try finding 60 Mbps internet for $90/month anywhere else. You can't, though Cox's 50/5 comes close. Even non-promotional rates aren't that bad; 14/1.5 isn't too bad at $55 unbundled.
2. 100GB is a fairly decent cap. 150GB is a fairly decent cap. Would be nice to have a higher one, but most folks actually *won't* use more than 100GB and even less will use over 150GB>
3. They have a $41.90 triple play.
4. Want more data transfer? All biz tiers are 150GB, with the 60 Mbps tier at 500GB (enough for pretty much everyone).
5. All advertised broadband packages have 1 Mbps or 1.5 Mbps uploads, mostly 1.5 Mbps.

That said...

1. They put caps on biz tiers?!?
2. I'l bet the biz tiers are really expensive. Anyone want to find out?
3. 2 Mbps up on a 60 Mbit down connection? C'mon!

Or humping the ottoman, which could be a metaphor for what the customer gets with per-GB caps.

(pardon my rudeness)

to me, would stand for
"Bend Rover and accept our caps!"

exactly what they wanted for TWC in the USA

Don't they mean Bendover Broadband?

Or rather Bendoveragain

if they are employing DOCSIS 3.0. This was supposed to solve the "congestion" issue. When are ISPs going to learn that low caps are BAD for business. One of these days Google and MS and other compaines are going to fuck these guys up over these caps.

When you have lousy/no laternatives (1.5 Mbps up > 896k up minus overhead) you can psh caps all you want.

Additionally, service might risk congestion at the headend/network end if people had wide-open connections. Maybe Bend Broadband only has 100 Mbps each to its three carriers...

It seems that as speed increases over time here in the lovely USA, ISPs will simply, over time, lower caps. It's only a matter of time before we see 1 gigabit down/100 megabits up with a 100 megabyte cap

By that time, the Google homepage will be well over 50MB in size.. Bing...forget about it!

Nah, by that time Google will have figured out how to use ultra image compression to make their homepage 500 bytes. Bing will be around 1MB for their search page though

Seriously though, caps will go up, not down. However more and more providers will implement caps in all likelihood, and the caps won't go up quickly enough to keep up with demand.

»Re: What's the worst broadband package out there?Stop bitching about caps...

Oh ya, running at 60mbps (their fastest), it'd take you almost 6 hours to burn up your cap.

docsis 3 and byte caps are like oil & water
when will the major cable carriers get this through that thick part of the anatomy....

FWIW, I've had Bend Broadband service for ~5 years now and been quite happy with them. They have excellent customer service and reliability, and the rates are quite reasonable. They're also very involved in the community. They are also one of the more progressive ISPs out there. They are constantly modernizing and upgrading. Which allows Central Oregonians to feel not quite as "backwoods" as we otherwise might.

As for the bandwidth caps, yeah, they are controversial, here and elsewhere, but the reality is that they are rarely an issue for all but the most extreme 'net users. To give you one data point, my wife and I both run businesses out of our home office (I'm a software developer, she a custom travel planner), so we're on the web a LOT, and we also download movies a couple times a week. But we rarely go over 30-50GB/month. That said, I do no other tech professionals here that have issues related to offsite backups, or 24x7 stock feeds... that sort of thing. On the plus side, however, it's a heck of a lot easier to get constructive criticism to the executives at the comment who make these sorts of policies than at other companies. So even though this is an issue, I'd venture to say that many BBB customers feel like any complaints they may have will be heard.

ah you guys are still luckier than me.. i still got 512/64($46.6/month) with a fixed 4GB down/4GB up Quota .. and each 1GB extra costs 10$ and the pings are always 400ms+ ... and the prices/quota/speeds haven't changed since 3years the so called "ADSL" service started here in Lebanon(Middle east country. not the "Lebanon" in the states lol)

I'm a BendBroadBand customer and I will be switching to another provider shortly. I'm already at 93.6 of the 100 gig cap (only 3/4 of the way through the month). I like to watch a lot of streaming video and download large files. I repair other people's computers as well, which requires large downloads (OpenOffice, WebBrowsers, Drivers, Linux Distro's, etc). Not to mention all the Flash crap these days.

The weird thing about it is that we can watch "On Demand" video through the (almost) required cable service all day & night, everyday and not incur any additional fees....

Either way, their customer service is light-years ahead of Qwest (our former provider, and we'll *never* use again). Once this six month deal is up, time to try ClearWire.

Sounds like a business to me.

Well, I do it for free 99% of the time. I do free computer service for local people who can't afford it in my spare time. A usage cap limits my ability to offer this service for free. The fact is that I'm a geek. I like to download all sorts of stuff; that's one of the reasons I wanted broadband service in the first place.

Even without exploitation of the service through "illegal" downloading that most of these ISP's claim is the sole purpose for the restriction, it isn't hard to bust a typical usage limit. For example, I could use a P2P/Bittorrent client to download and seed a legitimate GNU/Linux disc (0.5-4.7Gig), that alone could eat up all of my allotted usage (uploads count against the limit too), rather quickly if I opted for a high-bandwidth plan. Or, if I subscribed to some online video service, I would feel like I couldn't use it to its full potential (do you think it's a coincidence that the vast majority of these capped ISP's are cable companies who would not benefit from your using of another service for video?)

Anyway, even without the computer repairs, serious use of broadband service doesn't coexist nicely with a usage limit. The cap is really unnecessary (refer to my previous comment about "video on demand" downloading for example).