4 ms·

They didn't want to wire up Baltimore. They wanted to cherry pick the affluent neighborhoods, and screw the rest.

• rayiner 10y ago
  They wanted to wire up Baltimore in the same way as any company that wants to sell a product: to customers it can turn a profit from. In a place like Baltimore, Fiber is simply not viable if providers must wire up the vast swaths of the city that can't afford to pay for service. Google refused to do it too, and Baltimore has had no takers on its fiber proposals. More generally, forcing companies to cross-subsidize from richer areas to poorer areas is destroying fiber rollout nationwide. It's a tax on fiber subscribers, and like any tax it discourages the thing being taxed. It's effectively a ban on the only sort of business model that could create competition with incumbents: deploying gradually to the areas offering the greatest return first. There is a reason why Google won't bring fiber to cities that impose build out requirements, and why it got rid of the free tier in Kansas City. The math simply doesn't work.
  • st3v3r 10y ago
    It is not a ban on anything. It is making sure that poor neighborhoods don't get left behind again. Things like this are not things that should be left up to the free market, otherwise you end up with rich neighborhoods having lots of service, and middle and poor neighborhoods having next to nothing.
    • chimeracoder 10y ago
      > Things like this are not things that should be left up to the free market, otherwise you end up with rich neighborhoods having lots of service, and middle and poor neighborhoods having next to nothing. To clarify, the alternative isn't really a free market approach either (since Verizon was seeking a de facto exclusive, monopoly status). There is a free market approach to solving the problem you describe as well, but what Verizon seeking was almost the opposite of that.
      • rayiner 10y ago
        Verizon was not seeking either a de jure or a de facto exclusive monopoly. Comcast already serves the whole city. Indeed, they did wire up a number of buildings downtown. Because the city wouldn't give Verizon a television licenses, those buildings invariably offer Comcast alongside FiOS.
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    • rayiner 10y ago
      > Things like this are not things that should be left up to the free market Municipalities incorrectly assume they have a choice whether to leave things up to the market. In reality, the market operates whether they like it or not, and simply adds the cost of serving unprofitable customers to the "cost" side of the equation when deciding whether to build service in an area. That's why even Google won't build in cities that impose build-out requirements. Cities think they can wire up impoverished neighborhoods "for free" when in reality all they're really doing is creating a large tax on fiber deployment,[1] and using the proceeds to serve lower-income neighborhoods. But when you tax something, you decrease demand for it (which is why we tax cigarettes). Taxing fiber is incompatible with the idea that you want to encourage fiber deployment. [1] It's also a tax that's quite regressive. A middle class family with fiber pays the same amount of "tax" to subsidize fiber for low-income areas as a rich family. It'd be better to just increase the city income tax and pay for fiber directly.