Hopefully this piece gets a lot more views, because this is an issue that pretty much any rational technoligist should get involved with. Here in NC, our state legislature also caved to cableco and telecom pressure to make it nearly impossible for muni broadband to spread. That was after a single city's service succeeded so spectacularly that the incumbents had visions of Armageddon.
That's because they knew that even in this relatively center-right leaning state, people will know a good deal when they see it: so job 1 was to make sure they never do. So far their efforts at blocking competition have been successful. Except for a few very limited areas where Google Fiber was able to pry its way in, there has been no competition to the incumbents from muni or private parties.
At this point our best hope may be that changing demographics and the undeniable drift away from traditional programming will result in their financial collapse, finally allowing communities to serve themselves.
The other option is for people to get out and pressure their political reps to make muni or community broadband easier to deploy, maybe even run for office themselves and replace those who have sold out. Broadband access isn't as important as homelessness or healthcare, but it is important. Maybe it's a good place to start reversing the crappification of everything many here have lived through their whole lives.
I'm having trouble seeing a practical way forward:
1. small NC municipality had a town manager with the foresight to deploy municipal wifi and plan for fiber during that interim period when FCC declared it legal. Good service (symmetric, price adjusted for the actual signal you get), good support
2. that FCC ruling was overturned in the courts
3. municipality spun off the wifi into a little company. Still good service, good support
4. fiber got rolled out
5. municipality leased it to some company that somehow has worse ratings than comcast. That company took also took over operations of the little wifi company
So now what? Even if technologists in NC band together to overturn that state law, the municipality still has a 20-year lease with that company.
municipal "wifi" / last-mile point to multipoint wireless service in unlicensed bands is a technological dead end, and can't match the capacity of a wireline based DOCSIS3 cable operator, let alone a GPON or active ethernet based fiber plant.
the only thing that municipal run wireless services do is serve to sour people on the concept of municipal run network infrastructure, because almost inevitably they're flakier, slower, and less reliable than the existing terrestrial based for profit ISPs in the area.
show me a single municipal run wireless operator today that can match the speeds of a LTE/3gpp based MU-MIMO last mile with carrier aggregation.
> So now what? Even if technologists in NC band together to overturn that state law, the municipality still has a 20-year lease with that company.
A company wouldn't let a little thing like contract law stop them from doing what they want, as they did when they overturned the FCC the rule of law is made to be broken.
We could just change the law to make comcast and all isps owned by the government because the the law says so and comcast could do nothing about it. I know its not smart to advocate that we just change the law to steal stuff from others but this is what corporations, do they take wifi paid for by the public and change the law so that its owned by them, why don't we just do this to corporations?
I live in an area with great fiber internet service (gigabit synchronous unmetered) thanks to a rural electric co-op. It worked here because co-ops still have a fair bit of political power (in my state anyway).
One of the great advantages of a last mile rural electrical coop is that they already own/control the ROW (right of way), for the most part, wood utility poles, they have crews of linemen, bucket trucks, spool trailers, GIS people who know how to do aerial ROW planning, etc.
If you have the aerial ROW fully under your own ownership and control the $/km to do rural FTTH is vastly reduced.
There are a lot of efficiencies if this is done as a nonprofit at a municipal/county level entity, one random example, county run fiber PUD calls up the same-county sheriff's department and is like "oh yeah we're gonna need to block a lane and have some traffic flaggers at place X and Y and Z, and we need to shut down avenue C for a while", and everything goes very smoothly.
I just don't get why anyone would want their city to run an internet service? It seems like the most of awful thing that I could ever be forced to endure.
I'll give you a few easy examples: I moved from one house to another, the city owned electric company demanded a $200 deposit. Literally in the same area, same city owned electric. According to them I had a "history of non-payment". I asked about my original deposit, the employee told me I got it back. I asked when, he told me he could not tell me. I asked to speak to his supervisor, who also told me he could not tell me. He then proceeded to tell me to shut up about it. So far, I've payed $400 in deposits that I'll never see again.
The same city utility routinely sent me water bills that made no sense. I would get bills for <500 gallons of usage per month. Then suddenly a bill for 10x the usage amount, but all billed for water. Somehow I didn't use any sewer. Had a plumber confirm no leaks in the system. Later I would find out the meter readers simply falsify the readings in that area.
Somehow when I moved, they put trash service on my account. I'm not even in their service area for trash.
But the real icing is COVID! For years the city has operated a bulk trash collection at the curb and hazardous waste collection at a facility. When COVID started, they just suspended it. For health concerns. 2 years later they are still collecting fees while city council is holding meetings about the increase in illegal dumping of trash in the area.
This is the same group that is going to provide me internet service? Pass.
So your city sucks, and has a monopoly on your utilities - that sucks. Comcast sucks and has a monopoly on tons of people's broadband. Even from your position, it must make sense that municipal broadband gives the possibility of improved services to tons of people who live in less sucky cities.
This is an unfortunately common, but incredibly naive and overly simplistic conception of what "private v. public" means in the context of utilities and similar services, and as someone who has worked in this area I wish I could do even more to dispel it.
We can do anecdata all day; my city owned electricity is great. But more to the point, the line between "public" and "private" in a lot of these cases is rather thin; given the heavy amount of outsourcing that occurs regardless.
The major difference is this, and only this: If you call the thing public, you get a better view and say of how the proverbial sausage is made. Due to a naive public this ends up cutting both ways. When it works well, you see it. When it doesn't work well, you still see it and other parties take advantage of it based on their own interests.
I assure you, you will find no non-anecdotal relationship between quality of service and public/private status.
That is correct. What makes utilities wildly different from e.g. hamburgers is the extent to which legal fictions must necessarily remove skin-in-the-game type problems that are glossed over. (e.g. what if I didn't WANT this wire in my land or over my house, my property?)
Thus why, generally, you want to lean toward public.
> I just don't get why anyone would want their city to run an internet service? It seems like the most of awful thing that I could ever be forced to endure.
I agree, but the "limited government" alternative in practice is monopoly telcos. What's the difference? Actual competition is not on offer from anyone.
I agree. The "limited government" advocates in the US are just hypocrites. They grant so much power to corporations that behemoths like the telcos can buy the government and write the laws granting themselves de facto monopolies — so it's not "limited government" any more.
There are subtle things that can be done. For instance, most utilities enjoy access to easements and right-of-ways across public and private property. A simple two bit tax per mile of rights on public land is chicken scratch to the utilities. They will, of course, just pass it on to their customers, and nobody will notice. Then, a few years later, bump it to four bits, then on and on. Eventually it will be like a gas tax. A big tax that amounts to a lot of revenue.
Naturally, utilities owned by the people--all the people--would be exempt from taxes for access to the people's land. Taxes paid by private telecoms could fund research into the viability and advisability of muni services. It will cost more and more money for the private companies to own the political landscape.
I think you are misunderstanding the problem. The underlying question is not how a government with good will can offer public broadband. The question is how public broadband can exist if the government is actively passing laws to block public broadband. Good ideas for how the government can fix this problem won't help.
People have to get involved in their community. They have to vote for people who will act in the people's interests and not Comcast's.
So much propaganda has been foisted upon people that they believe everything the government touches is shit and corporations should run everything. If you want to see change, you have to fight that nonsense.
I'm not talking about the government fixing the problem. And I don't think I misunderstand the problem.
The problem under discussion was the ability of special interests to control the government to block competition. I was illustrating just one subtle political maneuver. Special interests combat each other all the time. It is not inevitable that the same special interest will win every battle, especially when they don't even recognize subtle flanking maneuvers.
It is, of course, unfortunate for the poor farmer upon whose fields the battles are waged.
There's nothing wrong with municipal networks, or competition in general, but there should be a level playing field. Muni should not be subsidised by taxes, it should be paid for by users.
Increasing competition is a valid way to increase value while decreasing price, and markets with good compeditive options are the ones that fare best.
Unfortunately tax-supported ones, or ones which have other unfair advantages don't need to keep improving or maintaining good levels of service.
Plus,bear in mind there are competent and incompetent munis. Whatever scheme you adopt should work regardless. Having them compete on equal footing means that in some places Muni will win, in others cable might, and in others small local ISP might emerge.
In what bizarro world are you living where there is a competitive market for ISPs? 2 ISPs at best, via the municipality-granted local telecom and cable monopolies, is the norm for most of the US. Service does not improve because there is no competitive reason to improve it outside a tiny subset of markets. Services that require physical infrastructure over a wide area, such as power, water, and telecom service tend to result in natural monopolies as a rule.
The limited competition between consumer ISPs in the current landscape isn't providing value by any meaningful assessment. Internet service is functionally a commodity: so long as it's fast enough with consistent uptime it's functionally identical no matter who's providing it. As much as Comcast would like to believe otherwise, consumers largely aren't choosing them for their shitty Netflix knockoff or their free email inbox, they're choosing them because they're probably faster than AT&T DSL. In most markets they're "providing value" by deferring infrastructure upgrades and leveraging dark patterns to generate additional revenue (lol at the common scam-level prices for router rental) to increase profits for their shareholders. Commercial consumer ISPs do not have the best interests of residents in the service areas as a priority.
If nothing else, allowing municipalities to run fiber is in favor of far better competition than the status quo. I sincerely doubt that competence is a major concern with the simple practice of laying infrastructure in a trench (if it is, it doesn't bode well for your water and sewage systems, and that's probably a far more pressing concern), and that's the main barrier to entry for competition. /Running an ISP/, an entity that handles routing and uplink agreements with peers for its customers, is not profoundly heavy on infrastructure cost: you can start your own with leased access, a couple blokes in a shed, some routing and switching gear, and someone who can negotiate a transit contract or two. /Laying a shitton of last-mile fiber across public land/ is infrastructure intensive. The incumbent providers just happen to do both.
You could easily have a municipality provide only the fiber or have it provide both the physical infrastructure and run an ISP service atop it while leasing out line bandwidth to other ISPs. A single ISP can't really monopolize last-mile bandwidth--its usage is a function of the last mile users, not who offers service over it. Fundamentally though, choosing whether subsidize an entire ISP including infrastructure, subsidizing infrastructure alone and renting it, or subsidizing nothing should be the choice of citizens through their government. There's no god-given right that telecom companies have to that market, but they're often able to secure it by bribing a few state reps to listen to their stories about the SCARY PERILS OF MUNICIPAL INFRASTRUCTURE and THE GREAT THREAT TO THE TOTALLY REAL VIBRANT ISP COMPETIIVE LANDSCAPE and vote on something most constituents aren't aware of for a continued stream of campaign contributions.
I live in one of the most competitive areas of the US: there are three ISPs who will provide copper or fiber "gigabit" speeds to my house.
One doesn't offer IPv6. Two won't provide a static IP, and the other charges an extra $15/month for that. Two are highly assymetrical, and one of those won't even tell you before you subscribe what the upstream speed is. One of them wants to impose extra-cost fees above a datacap which my house has exceeded (by 10-30%) for 6 months of the last 12.
That's what competition with 3 commercial participants looks like. We need about 7 to get a functional market.
Cunningly the bizarro world I live in is not the US. So I can only tell you what works here - without using tax subsidies.
So let me be clear, because I think you somewhat misread my point. I am in favor of competition, be that Muni or collectives or whatever. My point is that the factors that make it hard for an isp to enter a market should be "made easier" - and I don't think you need tax subsidies to do that.
Could a Muni provide capital to say lay fibre, absolutely. Could they effectively create an income stream from leasing that fibre to ISPs, absolutely. Perhaps in some rural areas they may even provide a subsidy to consumers (regardless of isp) because of cost /density reasons.
So let me tell you about the bizarro world I do live in. Over here, while there are still regulations, it is possible with relatively little hassle to lay fibre. Literally under the road. For years we've seen trenches being dug next to roads.
The folk who lay the fibre are not the isp. The isps run on top of the fibre, and compete. I have about 20 to choose from - it's easy for a company to enter the space, and it's easy for large incumbents to play as well.
The one I chose went bust, I switched in 30 minutes. (I was offline for about 24 hours before customers collectively realised they were gone.) The fibre provider confirmed they had been turned off for outstanding bills, and at that point I switched to another isp.
Separating the physical wire from the service over that wire is the best play. I don't need a choice of wire, but as it happens in some neighborhoods there are 2 cables laid, by different providers (to the same neighbourhood).
Could munis lay fibre, or WiFi, or whatever infrastructure they like? Sure. And clearly they can use tax money to do that. Just don't grant any monopolies over that wire, and you foster competition. You don't need ongoing taxes to be an isp, you just maintain the infrastructure just like a road or water or whatever.
There should be(and maybe, probably, is?) be political action organization that provides case studies and background research materials to support community level action.
Give ammo to average folks to advocate for muni broadband in a manner that is simple and compelling.
This saddened me to learn before we moved out to NC. We're lucky enough to have the possibility of Ting coming in at some point but not until our development is done being built. It's a Spectrum monopoly until then. Hopefully these sorts of laws get overturned and the limiting providers via contracts/deals with the city or development gets made illegal.
Maybe some municipality can do muni healthcare but it is so unsexy/boring/hard that they end up saying "meh, we ain't gonna do it". Besides nothing get tech bros more excited like cheap unlimited broadband fulfilling the lurid dreams of 16K super ultra HD videos and AR/VR setups.
We’ve had gigabit municipal internet here in Chattanooga for 12 years now. It’s better than Comcast in every possible way—speed, price, reliability, customer service, install time, install windows, availability (within the state limited geographical area) etc…
There was a question on a local Facebook group the other day from a person who just moved here asking which ISP she should use.
The replies were nothing but pages and pages of EPB, EPB, EPB… (EPB is the name of the municipal power company and ISP). Along with glowing reviews about how better their customer service is than Comcast.
EPB is so much better, I’d have a really hard time moving somewhere else that didn’t have something similar.
Corporate ISPs sell whatever customer data they can get and meddle with traffic already, is there a way government can do worse than that? Not even Big Govt just municipal one...
I see little distinction in practice between "I trust my government" and "I trust my corporations", since the advocates for "limited government" in the US favor unlimited corporate power to the extent that corporations effectively own the government and can do what they want. The telco monopolies are exhibit A.
I'd assume that municipal broadband providers still have a privacy policy that would require a court order to turn over data to law enforcement. And that would be the exact same thing binding a corporate broadband provider.
what is it with Americans and the inability to trust or rely on their government? Serious question, why do you automatically assume that every level of government is out to get you?
It goes back to the American Civil War and the opposition of the slave states to the federal government limiting slavery.
You could argue that it goes back to the American Revolution and "no taxation without representation", but to a first order approximation the factions today who are most ideologically anti-government are the successors of the Confederacy.
Have you ever had an interaction with American police? You don't think the city police department will have a dedicated employee in that municipal ISP office that's checking which residents are connecting to TOR nodes?
I don't. I work in municipal government and if anything the firewall is greater here than it is the private sector because we know all the rules. We handle citizen data in all sort of ways and the police don't get automatic access to it just because we share a boss. There are plenty of good reasons to question who handles your data and how in government, but assuming that they are in league with the police is not one of them.
I'm sure it varies wildly by place. You've got places where the rules are taken very seriously and places where the police chief is the mayor and has access to all the national law enforcement DBs with basically no oversight.
Given that policing is rife with various legal and ethical abuses in service of consolidating power and exerting control, it's hard for me to believe that there aren't places where police have deep access to government data on citizens.
You don't think that information would leak if it was happening? There are no national security letters here, no FISA courts, all of this would come out in court.
Gossip alone says there's no way any of that stays secret.
The government has no profit motive to be siphoning your data as you browse (unlike a for-profit ISP), and the NSA isn't running local municipal broadband programs. (If they were, I guarantee you we'd see a lot more federal support for them.)
Asset seizure laws give them ample for-profit mechanisms, and you'd better believe that the municipal police department is going to ask the municipal ISP for a list of citizens connecting to TOR nodes for their no-knock probable-cause raids and seizure.
Which would generally mean they have MORE rules about how they treat your data, all ISPs sell stuff directly to the government that would traditionally need a warrant for.
I live in one of the few Canadian cities who were progressive enough to install city-managed fiber in most areas zoned for high-rise buildings. Actual internet service is provided by ISPs, but they deliberately excluded the large telcos.
Similar to the author, I also get 1Gbps symmetric, no outages, no data caps and I pay only $32 (Canadian) a month. The telcos charge four times as much for the same service (but less reliable) in the residential areas not covered by the city network.
Oh wow I had no idea Canada did municipal broadband and $32 a month is insanely cheap compared to what shaw/telus charge in the west. Which city do you live in and what's your city-managed ISP called? Would love to know more
The city-managed part of the service is called Bridgenet. Internet service is provided by Novus, Urbanfibre and a couple of other ISPs. Urbanfibre is the cheapest, and just as reliable as the others.
I live in Surrey and had no idea New West was doing this, it's like 15 minutes away. We need this idea to spread across Metro Vancouver, I'll definitely do more research into how it came about.
ps: this is a very good reason to move to new west!
People looking for a viable government based model to do municipal broadband can look at some of the counties in eastern WA.
In those counties, which are fortunate enough to also be their own last-mile electrical grid operators (so they already have bucket trucks, linemen, spool trailers, lashers, etc), the county builds and owns a dark fiber network. Various 3rd party ISPs can rent space on it. It works great.
The great advantage of being able to build a last mile and middle mile dark fiber plant with municipal money is the extremely long time scale of a typical municipal bond. And the low interest rate paid on it. As we have seen with fiber from the mid 1980s that's currently in use with 100GbE DWDM systems, modern singlemode fiber can have very long lifespans.
There's no reason to believe that a new-build last mile dark fiber network serving single family homes today, if architected correctly, can't be viable for 40-50 years.
In places where there is a duopoly from the incumbent local phone company (centurylink, frontier, verizon, AT&T, whatever) and a cable operator (comcast, charter/spectrum, altice, wave, etc) neither of the two incumbent operators has any interest in seeing a new entrant 3rd party network built. And I can expect that they will lobby hard against the concept of municipal broadband, claiming that their DOCSIS3 on coax last mile service (250 down x 16 Mbps up and 0.03% packet loss) is "good enough".
>DOCSIS3 on coax last mile service (250 down x 16 Mbps up and 0.03% packet loss)
I'm all for municipal broadband and sticking it to the incumbents, but DOCSIS3 is far better than you give it credit for. My current DOCSIS3 service from Comcast is 1200 down/45 up, and it's rock solid. And there are network architecture improvements on the roadmap that will allow that relatively paltry upload speed to rise significantly in the future.
In my area, the highest upload with comcast and DOCSIS3 is 15Mb/s, and only the gigabit plans. My 250Mb plan gets a wonderful 5Mb/s upload.its completely rediculous.
> Comcast spent $500,000 in a tiny city of less than 100,000 people. You can be sure, Comcast will do all this again in a heartbeat.
Well duh. Assuming five people per home, and a market penetration of 50% (probably higher when you’re the only game in town), that’s only $50/home. That’s less than half of what they’d be getting from a subscribed home per month.
I’m surprised they didn’t spend even more fighting this.
You're right, I had spectrum for 5 years and by the time I was leaving the country I was paying 80$ for unlimited 120+ mbps. I also found it very odd and frustrating that they don't allow cancellation in the website or over the support chat, you have to call them to get the service cancelled. I had to do that in roaming :), well it's not like there are choices of broadband vendors in US. Who are you gonna go to, if not these 2 companies
Closer to the $100 plus. I pay $170 for basic cable, and the lowest speed wi-fi.
This in in Marin County.
I gave up talikibg to customer service in "I can't speak your language very well, but my name is Steve. Can I put you down for VOIP, and free credit monitoring for and additional $40/mo."
When trying to lower your bill, go to the website. The foreign help don't have a clue to what you are trying to convey.
Selling your public goods and resources to monopoly and credulously believing it'll all work out somehow while counting your money is the most American thing there is, going back to the railroads.
Nah, it's way more murican to pretend that de facto monopolies established through regulatory capture and the legal bribery of campaign contributions are morally superior because although they own the government for all intents and purposes, they're ostensibly "private".
Railroads were very similar to broadband. "Competition" at the national level, but each local area was controlled by the first network to be established. Dont like your railroad/internet, well you're free to move to another city, where the exact same problem exists.
The government intervention was mostly to fix that existing problem.
The failure of coops really puts a difficult question to the function of capitalism. Afterall, if capitalism really was about the best good at the lowest cost, you'd expect coops to be unbeatable, expert labor joining together with no rent-seeking middle man. But instead we see that capital is the deciding factor in success. The only thing unique that capital brings is an abilitiy to scale. Scale enables efficiency and monopoly which IMO are not always mutually exclusive. But it should be a more serious question in economics just how much of either is most responsible for the ultimate rewards to capital.
The best defense is a good offense - start lobbying to break-up incumbent ISPs, and force them to share cables, ideally owned by an independent spinoff company. If they want to hurt municipal broadband, hurt them back.
the modern trend is for cable operators to amalagamate themselves together, if you look at the investment group that bought Wave/RCN/Grande and similar as an example.
Spun-out infrastructure is probably better than the current situation for many people, but it's not necessarily the best outcome - the UK has a setup a bit like this, with the access networks spun out into a wholesale company. It still took rivals digging up streets to lay fibre to move things along. Absent genuine competition, I am sceptical proper investment can be forced in a wholesale "spinoff" provider.
It also means ISPs are effectively limited to offering the same quality of customer service that the wholesale provider offers, because they need/choose to use the wholesale provider for technician work. That kind of thing can be quite problematic, at least judging by the kinds of complaints you read online.
Depending on the nature of the access network, it might also result in an outdated network seeing no further investment. The UK is only just getting a fibre roll-out going in earnest, and this has come from lots of government encouragement, as well as private new-entrant providers increasingly deciding to just lay their own fibre in. That, plus a reasonably widespread hybrid fibre coax (cable) network offering up to approx gigabit downstream services, providing widespread competition.
I would definitely agree that opening up passive infrastructure (ducts and poles, etc.) would help, as it makes it cheaper for new entrants to rapidly deploy coverage. I think people need to be careful what they wish for though - if the only infrastructure available is outdated copper that can barely manage ADSL2 speeds - where will the investment come from to get to fibre?
If there's already a passive optical network deployed then this is less of an issue for now, but I think it's important to note that, at least in the UK market, the impact of competitive provision has been pivotal to getting fibre rolled out quicker. Without rivals raising investment and digging up roads to lay fibre in large cities, the incumbent "spun out" wholesale provider was calling VDSL "fibre to the cabinet" a "superfast fibre" connection. Once rivals did that, competitive pressures meant FTTP deployment followed.
> It still took rivals digging up streets to lay fibre to move things along.
No it didn't. The UK government had a very forward looking fibre internet rollout that started in the 80s. Thatcher canned it for ideological reasons.
> “In 1979 I presented my results,” he tells us, “and the conclusion was to forget about copper and get into fibre. So BT started a massive effort – that spanned in six years – involving thousands of people to both digitise the network and to put fibre everywhere. The country had more fibre per capita than any other nation.
> “In 1986, I managed to get fibre to the home cheaper than copper and we started a programme where we built factories for manufacturing the system. By 1990, we had two factories, one in Ipswich and one in Birmingham, where were manufacturing components for systems to roll out to the local loop”.
> At that time, the UK, Japan and the United States were leading the way in fibre optic technology and roll-out. Indeed, the first wide area fibre optic network was set up in Hastings, UK. But, in 1990, then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, decided that BT’s rapid and extensive rollout of fibre optic broadband was anti-competitive and held a monopoly on a technology and service that no other telecom company could do.
> “Unfortunately, the Thatcher government decided that it wanted the American cable companies providing the same service to increase competition. So the decision was made to close down the local loop roll out and in 1991 that roll out was stopped. The two factories that BT had built to build fibre related components were sold to Fujitsu and HP, the assets were stripped and the expertise was shipped out to South East Asia.
> “Our colleagues in Korea and Japan, who were working with quite closely at the time, stood back and looked at what happened to us in amazement. What was pivotal was that they carried on with their respective fibre rollouts. And, well, the rest is history as they say.
> “What is quite astonishing is that a very similar thing happened in the United States. The US, UK and Japan were leading the world. In the US, a judge was appointed by Congress to break up AT&T. And so AT&T became things like BellSouth and at that point, political decisions were made that crippled the roll out of optical fibre across the rest of the western world, because the rest of the countries just followed like sheep.
>> the impact of competitive provision has been pivotal to getting fibre rolled out quicker
Yeah i agree, although it does seem like someone there is now awake to the idea that they might not be the most efficient operation.
OpenReach installed fibre in my street’s existing underground network over the pandemic via a subcontractor then they subcontracted a company for the customer premises hookup. That latter company were way more efficient than i expected. At my property the previous owners cemented over the opening at the house end of the duct that runs from the BT pit out in the street, under my garden to my house. It meant the chap who was due to install my FTTP couldn’t run the fibre from the pit to my house. He phoned his colleagues in another van, they showed up 20 mins later and broke ground in my garden to intercept the duct then run a new sub-duct to my house then fed the fibre. The original chap in the meantime went and installed another house. These chaps put everything back as it was except i had a nice neat new fibre box at the front of the house from under the garden. Original chap came back another hour or two later and finished off the commissioning.
When the problem became apparent i was expecting weeks of delay with openreach, instead my install took 2.5 hours instead of 45 mins but all done same day.
It's also possible for the municipality to lay down empty pipes and lease the pipes to ISPs. The ISPs route the fibre through the pipes. So they don't have to dig again and again, and future entrants have space to grow.
There is a name for this: Structural separation. It should be a regulatory norm. What it does for consumers is to eliminate the barriers to entry for multiple retail competitors. Those competitors then make deals with upstream bandwidth providers who also have to compete.
I'm impressed that Longmont was able to pull this together. It seems like living in a small city like this might make it easier to coordinate common-sense measures like this. Comcast/Centurylink spent $500k in a city of <100k people to try and convince residents to give up on municipal broadband, but citizen activists were able to make it happen anyway.
Is there a way to find places to live that are populated by mostly sane people with some minimal brainpower and engagement in their community? My (wealthy and educated) city has voted several times against our own interests on this issue and many others.
>And when I returned my cable box to Comcast to cancel my service, the representative felt compelled to counsel me: “NextLight, huh? you know,” he said, leaning in, “if you miss even a single payment, they’ll raise your price?”
And then they'll still charge less than you? How is that even a threat?!
Do you have to pay $40.00/month to use the streets to go to work? No.
Do you have to pay $40.00/month to use fiberoptics to work from home? Yes.
ISP's love this.
Internet is infrastructure. ISP companies get paid handsomely for a service that should an itemized line in our electric bill.
I do pay federal income taxes which of that 3% is for transportation. If I were to look at per month of my salary ~$40 goes to transportation. So yes, I broadly pay $40/month to use the streets.
I don't understand your point. If it was "an itemized line in our electric bill", you'd presumably still pay for it? You also pay lot more than $40 a month to finance the infrastructure surrounding you, even though that is not were most of the money goes to (mostly social / medical / military, not infra).
Why doesn’t the Bay Area have its own fiber internet service? Surely there’s enough talent and collective political influence here to get Comcast out of our own neighborhoods.
There's Sonic, but fiber rollout is expensive when you're not the incumbent. It doesn't help that AT&T rolled fiber out to parts of the Bay Area once Google announced their list of cities.
How many customers can a competitor get if they overbuild where AT&T has built fiber? Or where AT&T builds fiber in response.
Some small number of people understand that differences in peering and transit are a thing, but most of the population is going to be I already have fiber because AT&T was telling people VDSL is fiber.
It doesn't even cover the majority of SF, and SF is a small city. Same story with fiber everywhere. Google fiber also barely covered any territory in Atlanta, Austin, etc.
It's inspiring to see good municipal broadband in the US. I wish this was more common here in Canada. To me it make sense that a city owns and operate critical infrastructure such as this.
There are actually not many barriers to municipal broadband in Canada (yet). Your city just has to commit to it and execute on the plan. It is admittedly easier to do in small, dense cities than in cities with sprawling suburbs.
It's an expectations vs reality and software engineers having no experience in real-world construction or government.
What a bunch of bright-eyed internet posters think would happen: A small city somehow manages to hire a competent staff, paying under market value for talent, to expertly engineer and then construct, a brand new fiber network from scratch, that's done on-time, while buying the latest/greatest available cost effective solutions from multiple vendors, without any red tape or lawsuits, all while owning all of the infrastructure and finally providing services at amortized costs. Citizens could use the network to provide ah-hoc services to other residents and the city could use it to modernize their infrastructure and create connected cities that provide valuable information to their citizens.
What happens in reality: A small city thinks they can't do any of the above so they hire a "contractor". Which somehow we've gotten into law that that must be bid on... so Comcast bids under cost to protect it's monopoly. City hires Comcast as a "contractor" to "build" a "new" network. Comcast spends most of the money by providing executives with Vegas trips and catered meetings at the golf course. Once realizing they actually need to deliver something they "leverage their existing assets" to "save money" and force everyone onto their existing cable network that gets .25mbps upload and "500mpbs" download (for 1s at a time, then throttled to 2mbps, 3.5mbps on thursdays) (still counts as broadband) , all while telling Netflix and other content providers they have to "pay to play" to send content to customers... er citizens, to "cover costs". Then, they couldn't possibly let users use their own equipment like a standard router with ethernet handoff "because security reasons" so they need to charge a $45/mo rental fee to all suckers.... er citizens, for "their safety". The city catches wind of this and Comcast promises a Certification program for routers, and "project delays" delay this for multiple years before finally it's announced but it costs $20k to have a router "certified" for your safety... all while they leave the default firmware password of "Icanthearyouoverthesoundsofthecashregisterringing" on all the "secure routers". Oh and theirs a 1gb monthly data cap because thats all anyone would ever need, according to the Comcast CEO.
The small city where I live managed to do the first scenario just fine. They did bring in several small ISPs (large ones deliberately excluded) to provide the actual routing to the internet, but the infrastructure is city-managed, and the project was completed on time and within budget.
It helps that our electorate is very progressive, and are not always pushing the City to cut expenses at all costs.
I think the best solution is to break these companies up the way we did with Bell. No national telecom companies, franchises, shared ownership, shared revenue, or profits. Force each company to be a local provider. Outlaw contracts for more than 6months where infrastructure is already built.
Why would this work? Take what happened with Google Fiber. In KC where I live, as soon as Comcastic saw an approved "fiber hood", they blitzed the area, and I mean drenched the area, with door hangers, mailings, and other propoganda to sign up for services with 2-5 year contracts that were likely below cost. This prevented Google Fiber from recovering any investment quickly.
There's no way a hometown local provider could finance such shenanigans. Creating an ISP for a single neighborhood isn't terrible expensive if there's backhaul in place. Having a plethora of choices would be good for everyone.
I live in New York City, in Manhattan, and I have a single option for high speed internet. This despite the city paying Verizon to wire everyone with Fiber.
Why do cities pay money without at least getting shares of the company they are subsidizing? They wouldn't even need publish shares, private shares of the local city branch could be more than enough.
The city sponsors a company and you expect it to have competition and its own services to be focused on consumers? Why would anyone go into that risk when profits can be made much easier, and how do you expect the non-sponsored companies to gather enough profit to build up their infra?
Sorry, I should have clarified. Verizon is not available at my apartment. I get Spectrum and Spectrum only. The city paid Verizon to ADD competition, Verizon took the money, and then they just… didn’t fulfill the contract.
But that's what I meant. You can't expect someone who gets paid for nothing to just go and increase their risk of failure infinitely by doing something. Not doing anything is much more profitable in their situation.
I'd never pay a telecom company before I got my services and used them. They always found a way to screw me over when I did (many years ago). Your city just got the classic treatment on a massive scale.
It's not like the situation is markedly better elsewhere in the country. Sponsor a company, get a single option. Don't sponsor a company, still get a single option.
In one scenario, the government signs an exclusive contract. In the other, the absurd levels of control over government exercised by "private" entities in the name of "free speech" (thanks Citizens United) ensure perpetual corruption and de facto private ownership of public resources.
All paths lead to monopoly. The only difference is the level of hypocrisy.
I feel like broadband is one of those things like sewer and water: it really doesn't make sense to privatize it and you're better off operating it like a municipal utility.
I have lived in Longmont for a good part of my life. There’s an important note here that Longmont’s fiber was basically bought at auction by a company that laid it and went bankrupt in the early 2000s. This significantly lowered the cost, which I understand has put other cities into bankruptcy.
Next light is really a fantastic service and better than comcast in every way. It’s just worth noting the economics are unique here.
There’s another municipal internet service provider in TN (chattanooga?) that offers all customers 1Gbps or 10Gbps service to your home or business. The 1 Gbps plan is comparable to Google Fiber and just a tad bit cheaper.
I have always envied them since I live in a state that has banned municipalities from creating their own ISP.
Even trying to convince a few people is a difficult task.
Seems like one step along the way for the government to criminalize personal VPN access and ban the websites they don't like. They could already do it but this way is so much easier.
Looks like you missed forum_ghosts point,
"in some sense, this is even better in the US, as First Amendment applies to governments, they shouldn't be able to censor your communications"
It is illegal for govnt to censor communication, it is not illegal for Comcast to do so.
Likewise, if govnt wanted to criminalize personal VPN access, they just pass a law. They don't need to own the infrastructure to do this.
However, if Comcast decides it doesn't like personal VPN, what are you going to do?
So, actually government-owned internet is the best protection against the harms you warn of.
> Seems like one step along the way for the government to criminalize personal VPN access and ban the websites they don't like. They could already do it but this way is so much easier.
You mean much harder, because when government (ISP) is blocking sites it's censorship, that is against constitution, while corporations can do whatever they want (especially if it is heavily "encouraged" by government), so your only action is to change ISP(good luck with that in land of the freedom). And even when there is a competing ISP in your area, odds are that it also was "encouraged" by government.
In theory sure but in reality merely 2 days ago I saw calls from both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for governments to adopt more internet censorship. I don't have confidence that the new crop of lawmakers are in sync with the constitution, particularly on the subject of free speech.
Ultimately this becomes reliant on the judiciary, which is also political.
I don't know how I feel about municipal electric utilities extending into areas like broadband, as is described here.
In most places, broadband is a fairly competitive market; and municipal utilities are significantly subsidized by the public purse: I'm pretty sure I'd be able to run a successful ISP if I didn't have to pay federal income tax and any debt I issued was also exempt from federal income tax, reducing my cost of capital.
That's because they knew that even in this relatively center-right leaning state, people will know a good deal when they see it: so job 1 was to make sure they never do. So far their efforts at blocking competition have been successful. Except for a few very limited areas where Google Fiber was able to pry its way in, there has been no competition to the incumbents from muni or private parties.
At this point our best hope may be that changing demographics and the undeniable drift away from traditional programming will result in their financial collapse, finally allowing communities to serve themselves.
The other option is for people to get out and pressure their political reps to make muni or community broadband easier to deploy, maybe even run for office themselves and replace those who have sold out. Broadband access isn't as important as homelessness or healthcare, but it is important. Maybe it's a good place to start reversing the crappification of everything many here have lived through their whole lives.