
Want 50Mbps Internet in your town? Threaten to roll out your own - theandym
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/10/want-50mbps-internet-in-your-town-threaten-to-roll-out-your-own.ars
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DanielBMarkham
Speaking as somebody on satellite, and not happy about it, there are two parts
to this problem.

Part one is connecting fiber to every house back to some centralized switching
station. This part can, and should, be financed and regulated by government in
much the same way power lines are.

Part two is what happens at the switching stations -- who controls the service
and bandwidth to the homes. This part should be as free and open as possible,
and each home should have at _least_ three available services competing for
its business.

We seem to lump all of these problems together when we talk about the problem
of internet connectivity. I don't know why. Maybe it's just easier that way.
But it obfuscates certain parts of the discussion.

For instance, in this story things got very interesting once two suppliers
were competing to connect fiber. Why? Because whoever connected the fiber
would run the service, ie, have the business. It shows that as things stand,
you physically have to be willing and able to take the fiber right into the
house to make the current monopolistic providers increase their service.

~~~
bjelkeman-again
Where I live we have it much like you describe it. I live in a suburb of
Stockholm, Sweden.

I paid for the connection to the house from the street (US$2k). The fibre in
the street is owned and operated by the municipality/local government. They
also own the local multi-gigabit ring and provide redundant connections to the
rest of the net.

Then we have four different ISPs offering IP on this fibre at reasonable
prices for "home use":

0.5 mbps @ $10/month, 10 mbps @ $23-28/month, 100 mbps @ $33-36/month. Un-
metered.

They also offer commercial contracts. I am paying under $100/month for 10
mbps. You can also get VOIP from the same operators and cable TV over the
fibre from four different operators.

I currently have 1x 10 mbps for the company, 1x 100 mpbs for everything else +
TV and VOIP. A bunch of fixed IP addresses and capacity to add several more
connections in the fibre modem.

I know this is not exactly a rural town, but having the local municipality
build the IP infrastructure and let companies sell their services on it has
been a great success. The local municipality also owns and operates the local
roads, water and sewage system, district heating, waste, as well as the local
electricity grid. I can choose who to buy IP and electricity from, but water,
district heating and sewage has only one supplier.

Works well for us.

~~~
mukyu
It works well until something goes wrong and each claim it is the other's
problem.

~~~
bjelkeman-again
For the four years I have had this setup I haven't had them blame each other.
Not that it has worked flawlessly mind you.

------
nuclear_eclipse
And as I found out first hand, if the only internet provider in town starts to
roll out bandwidth caps, just raise a ruckus until your senator drops
legislation on the table banning caps, and then watch your ISP become a sour
grape and refuse to roll out DOCSIS3 in retaliation...

Internet really needs to become a public utility operated by the city/state on
cost, rather than to line the pockets of greedy corporations...

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
I'm not an American, and I was wondering if you could help me to understand
this ...

    
    
      > Internet really needs to become a public utility
      > operated by the city/state on cost, rather than
      > to line the pockets of greedy corporations...
    

How is this not effectively Socialism? Isn't the system you currently have
simply Capitalism in action?

Under Capitalism, shouldn't people simply choose another supplier when your
ISP does stupid things?

~~~
lucumo
_> How is this not effectively Socialism?_

Does that make it bad?

 _> Isn't the system you currently have simply Capitalism in action?_

Does that make it good?

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
The perception, rightly or wrongly, in the rest of the world is that in the
USA people go "OMG !!! IT'S SOCIALISM !!!! AAARRRGGGGHHHHHHHH !!!!"

Nowhere else have I come across people who dismiss ideas by saying - Oh,
that's Socialism - and seem to think that that's enough.

Game Theory says that mixed strategies are almost always (in the technical
sense) the best, so the instant dismissal of ideas simply being they have a
flavor of socialism seems stupid, and yet it seems that it's the instant
reaction of many, many people in the USA.

I could be wrong, it might not be the case, and it's interesting to see that
the perception from outside the USA might be wrong.

~~~
frig
What you'll find if you get into more detailed discussion with public-utility
internet _before_ dropping the socialism bomb is that they're usually
advocating a hybrid model: municipality builds out the pipes and then isps
compete on actually providing internet service.

You're right about the loudmouths here, but it'd be a mistake to let your
sense of public sentiment be overly colored just by volume.

Calling something socialism here is a pretty good debate hack, like calling
someone racist or anti-semitic or whatnot; it's enough of a social taboo that
the so-accused will usually feel compelled to defend themselves against it,
thereby derailing the original course of discussion...this is a good strategy
for winning unrefereed debates.

~~~
jrockway
Really? I just laugh when I hear someone talk about Socialism in the US. We
have been Socialist for years. Ever drive a car on the road? Did you buy the
road? Did you pay a company for a subscription to the road network?

No, it's all paid for by the government. That, my friend, is Socialism. And
it's a good thing.

(Actually, it's a bad thing; if people had to pay the full cost of using the
road network, it would be a lot easier to get people to take public
transportation. But I am just saying it's clear that Americans have nothing
against Free Stuff From The Government, even if that Free Stuff is paid for
with tax dollars.)

~~~
Gormo
Actually, most of us do pay for access to the roads, in the form of vehicle
registrations, driver's licenses, and tolls. On average, I pay about $600-$700
every year just to drive on the public roads.

The fact that the roads are owned by state and local governments does not
inherently make them socialist.

------
rened
So, before everyone goes off on how it's only big business that's preventing
great, high-speed internet, there are municipalities in this country that do
run their own cable company.

<http://www.shrewsbury-ma.gov/egov/docs/1231423976788.htm>

That's a perfect example. Town owned and operated and it offers service up to
10Mbps for $50. More expensive and slower than the internet offered in many
surrounding places. Oh, and they have a monthly data transfer cap that makes
Comcast look good. At $40, you only get 75GB of transfer.

I think it's wonderful if municipalities want to try and roll their own
competitors to commercial cable/phone/internet companies. However, it isn't
all roses. It's expensive to build and operate and you need to get enough
capacity to the internet to serve everyone's speeds.

The threat might have been better than actually building it.

~~~
idm
The bandwidth cap sucks, but compared to DSL, that's a great deal for 10MBps.
In Cambridge, MA we were paying Speakeasy more than that for 1.5MBps.

<rant topic="speakeasy">

It turned out to be terrible, but our contract locked us in for a year... and
we moved to a new town in 10 months.

Free markets are great, contracts are fine, but in our situation, we simply
didn't have any competitive options to choose from. Also, the assumption of
"perfect knowledge of the marketplace" was violated because we didn't know how
severely non-premium the service would be.

Speakeasy happens to be the worst ISP I have dealt with -- ever. Their support
were competent, but customer service was terrible. They had a system-wide
outage during the US Inauguration ceremony. Their prices, as I already
mentioned, were very high, but we agreed to the contract under the assumption
that we were paying for premium service.

In contrast, I can't say enough good about sonic.net, which is a California
Bay Area ISP. I'm currently very satisfied with Teksavvy, who are an Ontario
ISP.

Speakeasy, though... Avoid them. It's the free market in action. If you're in
MA, and specifically in the Boston area, be aware...

</rant>

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jimbokun
Add telecommunications companies to universities, hospitals, mercenaries
(Halliburton) and banks as private institutions that receive government money
and/or monopoly protection in order to avoid both market competition and
public oversight. I continue to think that this is the central problem with
the U.S. system at this moment in history.

------
DTrejo
It would ideal if the government bundled fiber and power lines together and
restructured both grids at once. Two birds with one stone. However, this is
probably unlikely.

------
DavidMcLaughlin
I have to laugh at the idea that 20Mbps is slow. I just got upgraded to 16Mbps
(from 2Mbps) and still can't believe I can download a full HD movie in 30
minutes.

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
Well, that's better than my "10Mbps" connection that only delivers about 2Mbps
at any given time...

~~~
warfangle
Heh. I have, at nominal, 16Mbps. During peak times, though, it drops like a
rock below that to even being intermittent - Google Talk and AIM will drop
every couple of minutes. Our cable node is seriously overloaded, and
Cablevision isn't doing a damn thing about it. Over the summer everything was
pretty reliable, but then a bunch of new students moved into the 'hook and it
plummeted. I can get 16Mbps - if I'm lucky - at 4am, and sometimes 8Mbps
throughout the day. But from 7 to midnight or so, it's impossible to even
browse the web.

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sixbit
50Mbps is a bit on the slow side these days, we have 120Mbps over coax here...

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quellhorst
I now have 50Mbps, it was easier to move to a town that had it already.

