From what I understand, the equipment is built into the service charge. Although they leave it open legally to charge for equipment, I believe they are going to stay with this model.

I agree. But because of this situation and others concerning this "price for life" sales offer, they are trying to be more transparent in the fine print.

At the end of the day I truely believe Quantum and the Cable companies want to retain their customers. Making changes to offers that are not supposed to change or making the service non-competitive will only cause them to loose customers and that costs them money from lost revenues and retention offers.

While no one can be certain, we will see how it goes and time will tell how much integrity each company has.

QuantumFiber continues to offer a reliable service at a good price. What I particularly like is that they provide a dynamic IP address at an RJ-45 jack, of my choosing, that will accept any router. I don't need their equipment or equipment that they list as compatible. However, I will switch in a New York second if I find a better value. My loyalty becomes less reliable when I am lied to.

Agree, total customers is important and acquiring customers is expensive.
IF you’re an existing customer, lowering your price to compete with another deal is less than acquiring a new customer.

So, if you have a competitor for internet, call and threaten to cancel, they will lower your price.

getting mine installed today. 1Gb $80/mth for life

The offer I got yesterday at my address was 1G (940Mbps) for $35/month

I would never get lower than 1G speeds. I’m paying $39 a month for 1G speed. If I could get fiber 2G for $95 a month, I would jump on it.
Cable networks suck for pure bandwidth. I get 1G down but only 30-40Mb upload. When you get fiber, you get the same speed for uploads and downloads.
If somebody wants to backup a 4TB dive to the cloud and you had a 200Mb download speed and you probably get 10-20Mb upload speeds, it would take you months to backup your disk, plus anybody else in your house uploading or sending somebody a file, it would take hours or longer to do this. I take advantage of technology, plus I hate buffering or waiting for something to start, so the faster speeds help with this and fiber has an ultra low latency compared to copper networks.

I could see those who are working remote using this. Both my wife and I work remote a few days a week and that bandwidth would be nice if we are both on video calls at the same time.

For anyone that has a 4TB drive, is paying for more than 4TB of cloud storage, and wants to copy that 4TB drive to their storage, perhaps 1Gbps or 2Gbps makes sense. For those of us streaming Netflix at 4K while reading emails, commenting on ToTV, listening to Pandora, and monitoring our Ring camera, 200Mbps is more than adequate.

That said, if I was going to pay $35 regardless of whether I received 200Mbps or 1Gbps, I might just as well get the 1Gbps.

Video conference applications use little bandwidth. For example, I believe Skype is typically under 1 megabit per second per session. Pretty much any available nominal internet bandwidth in The Villages is more than you would need.

You want to know if anyone is getting those speeds, but don’t want to hear if you need those speeds. Unless you are up/down loading the library of Congress, you definitely don’t need those speeds. Nor will you get them, at the present time. We run 2 tv’s, 2 iPads, 2 iPhones and graphic artist daughter sending/receiving data intensive files all day long. Never had a slow down or hiccup. And we only subscribed to their 100 Mbps speed, which if you add up all the Mbps we are using per device, is FAR MORE CAPACITY than we could ever use. Considering a 4K tv signal may use 5 Mbps tops, all our devices may only use about 1/3 MAX of our 100 Mbps capacity. I will spend my money wisely. But that’s just me.

I did see the QuantumFiber $35 offer for nominal 1 gigabit per second. I currently pay $40 for 200 megabits per second and I doubt I would switch service levels. First of all, 200 megabits is already about 10x more than I can use. Secondly, the $35 price is for autopay through a checking account. We have QuantumFiber autopay through a credit card and I generally prefer not to give access to our checking account. Thirdly, based on past experience, I don't relish spending anytime on the phone with QuantumFiber, which I am sure would be necessary since I want to continue using my own wirelesss router. At some point, I will probably be forced into a higher service level but I will let sleeping dogs lie until then.

A 4K (aka 2160p) video stream will actually use more like 20 megabits per second. Regardless, you are like us in that we have much more nominal bandwidth then we can use. Before I retired, I ran software projects from home and would move around 50 gigabyte tarballs. Then, more bandwidth was always a convenience but now our usage is dominated by 1 or 2 streams of video at typically 5 megabits per second per stream (1080p).

Agreed.

The fine print for the 1Gbps offer states a $40 price with a $5 discount for autopay through a checking account. You might be able to save $5/month now with a simple change of your payment type.

But like you, until something comes up that forces me to make a change, I'm happy with what I currently have.

I helped a friend make this change yesterday, no need to call Quantum. Log into your account on the Quantum web site q.com.

At the top of the screen, click on Services. You should then see a box in the center of the screen with your current service. Also in that box is a button that says Change. Click that button.

The next screen will tell you what your location is eligable for. If you see the $35 offer you can click on it to start it immediately or at your next billing cycle. Whichever you select you will then need to put in your bank account information or you will pay $40 for 1Gbs. There are only selected areas here in the Villages that can get the offer.

This is much more secure than calling Quantum. Quantum offers a discount to direct bill via a bank account because they don't have to pay that fee to the credit card companies. But if you don't want to do this then stay with what you have.

In reading the fine print, this is not a promotion and is not supposed to change so I anticipate we should have this price for quite a while.

Hope this clears things up.