Today Holland BPW approved new rates for Holland City Fiber and they come with some pleasant surprises:

Pricing

There are two service tiers:

$45/month for 2 Gbps (2,000 Mbps)
$125/month for 10 Gbps (10,000 Mbps)

Update: BPW has clarified that these rates are still pending City Council approval and wouldn’t take effect until until March 1 at the earliest (for existing customers) and is subject to service availability.

In the millage campaign, we estimated $42 for 1 Gbps, so having the starting tier doubling the speed is a nice surprise.

Why 2 Gbps instead of 1 (or lower)? BPW is providing a simple offering while building for future growth. The core network will be 10 Gbps (and easily upgradable in the future). Even if customers can’t or don’t take advantage of 2 Gbps speeds, it gives nice headroom for future usage growth. Having only two plan tiers makes it simple for both BPW and customers.

For comparison, Comcast’s 1 Gbps (down, with much lower speeds up) plan is currently priced at $116/month.

Now, an astute reader will point out that this is $3/month higher than our placeholder during the millage campaign (~$42 and a potential range of $22–55). However, this increase will be offset by the City selecting a lower millage rate. The millage allows them to levy 1.5 mills, but they’ve decided to go with 1.2 mills. For the average Holland home, this just about evens out (see our millage calculator).

Equipment

Unlike other ISPs, there won’t be a charge for equipment (modem, etc.) or installation. Holland BPW will provide the equipment to connect, with built-in Wi-Fi for no charge as part of the service.

Optional Wi-Fi mesh routers will be available for $5/month to help extend Wi-Fi to other parts of a house.

Other Options

An Enhanced Service add-on for $150/month provides a static IP address and “a higher priority of response in case of service interruptions caused by equipment failure”. Additional IP addresses are available for $3/month.

No Caps, No Contracts

Finally, BPW confirmed that there are no data caps and no contracts. Sounds great to me!