
Hate Your ISP? Maybe You Need Community Fiber - jswt001
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/07/hate-your-isp-maybe-you-need-community-fiber
======
retroafroman
I once lived in a city with a community run fiber network. It was pretty damn
amazing. They still have great rates for what you get:
[http://www.sfcn.org/sfcn/internet/](http://www.sfcn.org/sfcn/internet/)

I paid about how much the "Plus" plan cost, without TV, just for 3Mps
down/1Mps up in the next two places I lived. It really does spoil you when
you've had a proper ISP compared with the TWC/Comcast/Cox monopolies that run
in other locales.

Edit: and note, this was a tiny (less than 30k residents) at the time I had
it. Incredible value for the service. I'm sure there's lots of happy customers
there still.

~~~
olefoo
I think it's telling that they list the cost of a static IP on their home
page. My local provider doesn't even list it as a service; and if you find a
rep who can sell it to you it's a "business-only" service AND costs you around
60 USD per month.

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JunkDNA
I wonder if there is a way to adopt something analogous to a franchise model
here. It strikes me that only the communities that are really, really engaged
are going to be able to pull this off (which is true of most public works
projects). That being said, it would be great to not have every small town and
borough have to figure everything out for themselves. A franchise operator for
a fast food restaurant doesn't have to worry about where to buy burgers, the
brand of deep fryers, or even the optimal amount of time to fry the tater
tots. If there was a full on recipe for doing this that is proven to work, a
small number of citizens might be able to make it happen even in places where
the local government is ambivalent. A proper setup would include some national
branding to help with PR (I.e. Every article in every newspaper about
community broadband would use the same name for it). It would include
marketing materials for the public as well as briefing packs for local
officials, legal briefs for attorneys, etc... On the technical side it would
recommend specific hardware, suppliers, and designs.

The advantage to such an approach would be to harness economy of scale at a
national level, but allow local communities to drive the process and own the
network.

I'm not sure how you would structure it to avoid creating another monopoly in
the parent company of the franchises. But perhaps a nonprofit or a corporation
100% owned by the community franchisees would work.

~~~
ensignavenger
I am involved in a local community fiber project- DadeCountyFiber.org and I
have been thinking along similar lines. I think an association or coop model
may work best. I am actually considering a proposal to organize a Fraternal
Society that would operate with local chapters controlling the local networks,
and leveraging the resources of each other. The Fraternal Society would
provide education and social activities to members, and encourage the open
development and collaboration of the network.

Any thoughts or ideas are always welcome!

~~~
curun1r
The main need for community fiber is because we've proven that private
companies cannot be trusted with a broadband monopoly/duopoly and yet to allow
more companies to run lines would create chaos. For that reason, the community
needs to control the last mile. But the community doesn't need to be the ISP.
Without the barrier to entry that is running lines to residential customers,
many smaller ISPs will be able to compete with each other and you'll see the
market actually work the way that it's supposed to.

So run the fiber to people's houses and charge ISPs a fixed fee per customer
that covers the cost to maintain the network and, potentially, recovers a bit
of the initial expense of the network. But then let customers choose their ISP
based on speed and features. The worst thing you can do is replace the crap
fully-private system we have now with a slightly-less crappy government
monopoly.

~~~
ensignavenger
I tend to like the open access model you are proposing. I am very inclined to
operate the network on an open access model. However, depending on our funding
sources, we may be forced to be an ISP and phone company to get the funding.
Right now we are exploring the FCC's Rural Broadband Experiments. In theory,
we could have a partner service provider handle the phone service requirement,
but it may not be as easy to do in practice. Thanks for commenting. Even if we
do operate our own ISP/Phone Company, it is strongly likely the network will
be open access.

------
Laremere
I've thought the "open access" type model would work for a couple years now
and I'm glad to see it being discussed here. Community Fiber may work in pro-
active cities. However problems may reveal themselves in other cities when the
politicians make campaign budget promises and usage statistics make some
people angry they're paying for people who use more internet than they do. You
can't expect every mayor of every small town in the US to understand enough
about fiber equipment to make the right purchases for their local
infrastructure.

The fundamental problem is the cost of the last mile infrastructure is too
great to allow much competition. (Though existing companies have worked with
lawmakers to further cement their position.) Open access would allow companies
to compete with their service, knowledge, and connection to the internet at
large, while reducing the cost of gaining you as a customer to plugging you in
at the central hub.

At one point long ago our nation decided that broad communication networks
which included every household benefited the whole enough that shouldering the
upfront cost was far worth the rewards. We wired up every household with a
copper line and access to phone service. Now that the internet has surpassed
and commenced the phone we have forgotten the lessons of the past and are
struggling along with "good enough" copper instead of again shouldering the
cost and laying down fiber lines. It would cost a lot to reach rural areas and
connect every last household. However fiber is great in that you can upgrade
the equipment at the end to continue to increase speed, and in a country where
websites can assume all of their potential customers would have very fast
internet radical technological advancements could occur.

The technological advancements will occur in the end. The biggest question is
whether or not the US will reap the rewards that it has been these last
several decades, or if another country will. There is no faster way to
irrelevance than doing nothing.

------
willyt
Where it only makes sense to build one of some piece of infrastructure, isn't
it really obvious that it should always be owned by the people? I suspect that
this applies to quite a few things: cable data networks, wireless data
networks (phone masts), electricity transmission grid, railway lines, roads,
etc.

Historically, national infrastructure seems to tend towards becoming a
monopoly anyway under private ownership. Further, when these are privately
owned, we seem to end up with a lumbering private company regulated by a
lumbering state bureaucracy which duplicates a large part of the accounts
department of the private company to keep them in check.

This means that we have the worst of both worlds; no real choice, patchy
service, high prices for the service and a whole load of hidden regulatory
costs which come out of our taxes.

Anecdotally, I've consulted for a state regulated privately owned monopoly
company, there is no way that private sector efficiency is driving these
places, the bureaucracy is intense. Example: A decision from the company on
whether it was acceptable to use a different, cheaper but better looking style
of suspended ceiling took 6 months and went all the way to the board of
directors of this multi billion pound company.

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mseebach
I'm especially enthusiastic about their endorsement of open access.

I'm generally skeptical of such things, but I can see the point in local
government (community != government, that's newspeak) taking a lead in running
fiber in much the same way they do electricity and plumbing, mostly because it
seems that fiber is sufficiently future proof - it seems plausible that
transmission technology on fiber can keep up with domestic applications
without having to rely on horrible stop-gap tech like ADSL.

But one thing is laying a cable, that's a largely neutral and objective
undertaking, another is running a good ISP - that's a completely different
beast. I strongly doubt a government run ISP is going to be great, especially
if something happens and it turns into a cost centre, or if it's "awarded" to
the highest bidder to run, or stuffed full of overpaid incompetents by way of
political nepotism. As with anything government run, when first things starts
going down that route, it's incredibly difficult to reverse.

------
INTPenis
This is exactly what we've been doing in Sweden the last 10 years, at least.

Local electrical companies usually offer a city wide fiber grid in small
towns. Sometimes housing companies that own a few apartment buildings have
their own fiber grid. And ontop of that there are communities in more rural
areas that come together and pay for the work to have fiber dug to their
houses.

But that's just fiber, they still need an ISP for internet service and there
we usually have at least a dozen different companies to choose from.

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batobey
"Community fiber" is working towards a practical implementation of ambient
connectivity that Bob Frankston's been talking up for years through IEEE and
elsewhere. Some of his essays lay some good groundwork for governance and
expansion. [http://frankston.com/Public/](http://frankston.com/Public/)

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jgrowl
I've been wanting to push for community fiber in my area, but I have no idea
where I would even begin. Are there any resources available for those of us
who want to get involved?

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mrks_hy
Just as an aside on one of the points they try to make (not about residential
internet access):

"Imagine the Director of Public Works using her smart phone to reschedule all
the sprinklers in the city with just a few clicks."

This makes me really uncomfortable. I think infrastructure needs to be
physically separated from the public networks. Everything else just asks for
somebody to cause mayhem, un- or intentionally.

~~~
sargun
So, would you propose a dedicated physical wire for every service?

You have to begin weighing the differences between physical vs. logical
separation in network design at a point. MSR did two really good studies on
network reliability, when they found that larger Aspen trees are significantly
more reliable than smaller ones. If you're to build a large tree for every
system, you're going to have a prohibitively expensive infrastructure.

In addition to this, the complexity of having multiple bespoke systems for
every time someone calls something special, and dedicated results in higher
system, and network administration cost. Because the scales of various
networks are going to be different, their implementation will probably vary
greatly as well, giving your engineers massive headaches. It's been shown that
engineers, and software result in the highest number of failures in production
systems.

Lastly, physical separation is no longer an easy excuse for security. At some
point, that separation, intentionally, or unintentionally is going to get
broken. It's best to begin operating from an idea that shared infrastructure
will be more resilient, cheaper, and easier-to-operate.

~~~
mseebach
> So, would you propose a dedicated physical wire for every service?

That's actually in a twisted sense what the article is advocating. Instead of
relying on commodity communications, they advocate the city putting in their
own infrastructure _so_ they can do things like this.

The article is generally good, but that section is strange. You unequivocally
do not need to run high speed internet to homes in order to move towards a
"smart city" \- wiring up those things they mention is orders of magnitude
cheaper than running fiber to every home (funny how surveillance cameras is a
suddenly a good thing, by the way).

------
gaoshan
I live in a small village (2,000 people) and would love to implement something
like this but the costs, as mentioned in articles about communities that have
done it, seem prohibitive in the extreme (many millions of dollars). The
article talks about underserved rural communities but how in the world do such
places afford this (aside from the wealthiest locales, anyway)?

~~~
stephen_g
The main thing is economy of scale.

Fibre that has rolled out in Australia by the Government owned NBN Co averaged
around $2300 per premises (for the access nework - you'd need to add on a bit
for the transit backhaul and interconnection point with providers). We have a
ridiculously high cost of labour too so I'm sure it can be done cheaper. So
while it would cost millions, it's actually not that much when you spread it
out across enough people. 2000 subscribers would probably be enough to get
around that ballpark if most people were up for it.

------
vicpara
Community fiber optics is the way to go. In Bucharest, in 2000, when fiber was
really expensive a small community, like a block of apartments, would get much
better quality service by sharing a business type of connection than buying
for each apartment a "home/personal" service. The initial cost is that someone
needs to step up, build the infrastructure and start the sharing service. In
Western countries this might be a little bit more difficult than it was in
Bucharest in 2000 because of the regulation regarding wires, cable tunnels
etc. However it is not impossible and the benefits of such a service in the
community exceeds the initial pain of setting up the service.

In Bucharest, experience showed that once a community connected to internet
via a dedicated fiber service, self maintained, the neighbouring blocks and
adjacent residential areas start to press for connecting to the same service.
Soon a network serving 30 families, grew to 100 then 500 or even more. A
single connection became 4 load balancing the load. You had a problem with
your connectivity? Just pick up the phone and call a guy 10 houses away from
yours.

I may not be very accurate about the prices in 2000 but the first connection
we had in our block was a 350 euro/ month + 150 set up fee for a 100Mbs
bandwidth with no traffic limit. In my block 27 families out of 36 decided to
join the network and the initial set up of the fiber + local ethernet
infrastructure cost was split among residents. No filtering, no connection
throttling, no interference. We were paying 15 euro per month to cover some
maintenance cost and future failures of cables and routers. These 100 Mbps are
not much they were 100 Mbps were steady. The thing is that when we upgraded
our link to a 500 euro/month we got 250 Mbps. So bandwidth and cost don't
scale linearly. The more people in your network the better the service.

Maintaining a large network can be a pain. However, if you give incentives to
the sys admin, and the does a good job by deploying a network with little
quarks, he can actually have a passive income without much of a hassle.
Networks with more than 2000 families generally had a team of 1-3 sys admins
taking care of the network full time.

We also had the traditional cable companies offering a package of TV + phone +
internet based on coaxial cable. Their offering was so inferior to the
"neighbourhood network". The large companies ended up by stepping up their
game and offering similar quality services. They were actually struggling to
keep up the pace. The local networks, created around 2004-2005 a backbone
network which allowed every "neighbourhood network" to connect to the other
networks via high speed 10Gbps fiber cables. This became later the ANISP a
national association. Yes, the small networks were in the end bought by large
companies but at least the standard was set high enough so that it cannot be
rolled back.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Romania](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Romania)

~~~
chrj
How would these Internet "coop's" deal with the tech support? I would worry
that regular users would constantly have all sorts of problems with spyware,
viruses, cheap APs/routers and broken network configurations.

~~~
vicpara
There are indeed a lot of problems with individual users. Small networks as
such were generally maintained by sysadmins like teenagers/students/grads
which sometime fix these config problems for a small amount of money. Plus,
good tech guys were always requested by neighbours to fix problems as such,
change a HDD, change a cable or a faulty plug.

It is indeed a local community type of network. Plus, in every family there is
a teenager willing to step into network configurations. Teenagers, students
and young professionals were those that made these networks so popular because
they were demanding high quality connection and they were tech savvy. People
like them are generally willing to do the hard work of learning something
about setting a network IP to a router or AP. Setting a DHCP server in your
network was something that released a lot of pressure in my network. Mac
addresses were also used quite often to block unauthorised devices from
accessing the network. You had to call your sysadmin and send / spell over the
phone your mac address.

When everything was at very beginning, during storms a lot of equipments
connecting two blocks were getting burned, UTP cat 5 cables broken and
required fixing. People who started this kind of networks were to become
country's first big generation of top notch dev ops who faced networks growing
from 3 users connected by a BNC cable to thousands of users distributed all
over a large neighbourhood.

------
xhrpost
> "People love to complain about the speed of their Internet access and with
> good reason."

I'm sorry, but no, in my experience, they don't. I can't think off hand of any
non-tech person in my area complain about their Internet speed. People pay
$42/mo here for 9/2Meg and because it will play Netflix and get them on
Facebook, it's good enough. I'm not arguing against a fiber upgrade, I'd love
to see it, but in the end, non-techy people don't seem to see much advantage.
You're not going to build a community network unless the community is engaged.
How other non American countries have done it I don't know, how you get that
level of engagement in the most individualized culture in the world is beyond
me. Sadly, I feel the only way this would really happen in most of urban
America would be to beat the incumbents on price. Which sounds possible, but
not by much, especially with the fact that if you don't offer bundled cable-
vision, people then have to break their other provider's bundle and pay more
for cable elsewhere so the difference is even less. I hate to be pessimistic
about it (I think gig everywhere could have huge economic advantages), but
this is a major hurdle. People often hate their providers, but it's often due
to price or customer service, not speed.

~~~
tatterdemalion
It has been my experience that "non-tech people" do complain about their
internet speed because the major ISPs actually don't provide good enough
service for them to play Netflix and get on Facebook as consistently as they
want.

More importantly, what "non-tech people" don't realize is what they will want
in the future. In 2008, they didn't know they would want to stream Netflix
over the internet. I don't think there's a big chicken and egg problem with
faster internet; people will want faster internet when they start using
services that the current infrastructure doesn't support well. It has happened
before and it will keep happening.

~~~
xhrpost
I was really hoping to see someone have a different experience than me, so
thank you ;). Not sure why the difference though, perhaps we have the speed
around here but just not a decent price. I've heard more non-tech people
complain about the data caps actually, especially families with children who
watch kids shows on Netflix.

------
ajmurmann
My community might get Google Fiber soon. I still am pretty excited about
that, but the more I read about community fiber, the more torn I feel.

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lifeisstillgood
I may be missing something but is the suggestion that local municipalities dig
their last mile and run their own fiber?

That's ... Not likely to succeed surely? I assume the actual dig out is a
specialised job, with no private hire market, the back haul ... To where and
to whom? Do most towns know where their nearest telehouse/interconnect is? The
support tasks are difficult - and scale pretty well, but not if you have no
scale.

Ultimately this sounds like "hey let's build a public ally owned nationwide
fiber network!" Why not start at that point?

~~~
_delirium
A common approach is to incorporate a municipally owned subsidiary that hires
the appropriate expertise. That's how the electric and plumbing networks were
built in many towns, for example. A number have since been sold off (turned
into privatized utility companies), but some are still city-owned. Other
cities have gone for a pooled model, where the each city owns their utilities,
but rather than administer them directly, pays into a nonprofit organization
that provides the service/maintenance, thereby gaining some economy of scale
(e.g. [http://www.ncpublicpower.com](http://www.ncpublicpower.com)).

~~~
techsupporter
That's what some of us in Seattle are pressuring the city to do. Seattle City
Light is a power company owned by the city and is already doing extensive work
for the smart meter rehab. The idea is, while SCL is out digging around, lay
last mile fiber.

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lawrencegs
Do we have something like this in SF Bay Area?

~~~
bgentry
Actually the article includes a link to a study on Community Fiber which
included San Francisco:
[http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2439429](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2439429)

I haven't read it, but maybe this means there is an SF neighborhood that's
rolled this out or at least was studied?

~~~
lawrencegs
I just skim through it, pretty good reading to understand where we are now.
Main key-points:

\- fiber has been rolling out for library, public housing, schools and public
Wi-FI. But not on community / businesses.

\- SF has the infrastructure, it just needs to build "the last mile" to
connect with the houses / buildings

\- there has been effort for community-fiber since 2011, but as of 2014, the
city is still not in favor of this kind of development.

------
drawkbox
The sad thing is it is taking local community governments to compete with
broadband 'providers'. You know you need some competition when local
governments are the tip of innovation and your biggest competition. I hope
many more communities and Google Fiber wake up the slumbering cable companies
and telcos.

------
ensignavenger
I am currently involved in a community project to build fiber in our rural
Missouri county- DadeCountyFiber.org

We are hoping to participate in the FCC's Rural Broadband Experiments for the
Connect America Fund.

Any ideas or feedback are most welcome!

------
flyrain
Definitely hate TWC, but no other option.

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WaxProlix
No shit?

------
Xorlev
Wheeler is still a dingo.

------
underdown
I'd love to have fiber dropped to my home but this article glosses over the
privacy implications of having a government entity have direct access to
everything you do online.

~~~
Millennium
Indeed. Taxpayer-funded broadband has its allure, but the risks of something
going very wrong with private data are much higher, in terms of what is at
stake if not in terms of odds of a breach.

~~~
ceejayoz
The solution here is SSL everywhere, at all times. We should be just as
concerned about Time Warner and Comcast having access to our private browsing.

It'd be nice to have an intermediate step between HTTP and CA-validated HTTPS.
Yes, my ISP could theoretically MITM me, but it'd at least allow websites to
prevent casual snooping.

