21 ms·

Voters overwhelmingly back community broadband in Chicago and Denver

639 points by danso 6y ago

pushcx 6y ago
I can't speak to Denver, but reposting from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25000078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25000078 - no, Chicago voters did not do this: Hi, Chicago voter here. The question wasn't about public utility, it was "Should the City of Chicago act to ensure that all the City's community areas have access to broadband Internet?" which can imply a number of contradictory policies, from Chicago setting up municipal broadband to Chicago giving tax incentives to the existing national broadband providers. Illinois limits ballots to three referendum questions, and questions chosen by higher-up political entities have precedence over smaller, more local ones. The three questions on the ballot for Chicago are chosen by the Cook County Board of Commissioners. (For these purposes, Cook County is equivalent to the city of Chicago plus a couple neighboring suburbs.) Background established and into personal opinion: The question is in fact deliberately vague. The Board's goal is not to ask three divisive questions getting at the heart of urgent political matters. It is to fill the ballot with three questions to preclude local, less connected authorities from putting inconvenient, compelling questions on the ballot. Here's a 2018 court case reaffirming that (Calumet City is in Cook County): https://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/daily-southtown/opini https://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/daily-southtown/opini... These questions are deliberately worthless and it's a waste of time to analyze them for policy guidance. If you're curious, the other two questions this cycle were: * In creating its City-wide plan for continued growth and sustainability, should the City of Chicago place equal focus on the goals of resiliency, equity, and diversity? * Should the State of Illinois restrict the sale or possession of firearms that have been defined as assault weapons or of magazines that can hold more than a certain number of rounds of ammunition?
- toddsiegel 6y ago
  > In Denver, 83.5 percent of the city’s electorate cast ballots in favor of question 2H, which asked if the city should be exempt from a 2005 law, backed by local telecom monopolies, restricting Colorado towns and cities from being able to build their own local broadband alternatives. > Colorado is one of nearly two-dozen states that have passed laws, usually directly written by regional telecom monopolies, that hamstring or prevent the creation of such networks. > But in Colorado’s case, the state’s 2005 law included language that allows local towns and cities to opt-out of the restriction if voters agree to do so. W.r.t. Denver, the headline overstates things a bit, but the contents of the article are accurate. https://www.denverpost.com/2020/10/08/denver-issue-2h-broadband-internet/ https://www.denverpost.com/2020/10/08/denver-issue-2h-broadb...
- C1sc0cat 6y ago
  Reading the words of the motion "Should the City of Chicago act to ensure that all the City's community areas have access to broadband Internet?" Says nothing about the local government running the service "community areas" so that means just libraries council buildings or does it mean FTC or FTP for all homes? You right that allowing the executive to cherry pick motions is not democratic. The one "in creating its City-wide plan for continued growth and sustainability, should the City of Chicago place equal focus on the goals of resiliency, equity, and diversity?" is arguably pious and also does not propose any action.
  - pgroves 6y ago
    When I read it on the ballot when I voted I immediately assumed it meant "libraries, etc", but now that you say that I'm worried "community areas" is bureaucrat-speak for "neighborhoods". Much different implications.
    - WillEngler 6y ago
      Yes, "community areas" is bureaucrat-speak for neighborhoods. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_areas_in_Chicago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_areas_in_Chicago) It's useful for city planners and the like because "neighborhoods" have fuzzy boundaries that people disagree on, but Chicago's community areas are well-defined.
      - mumblemumble 6y ago
        > "community areas" is bureaucrat-speak for neighborhoods. Not exactly. "Community areas", in Chicago, represent a relatively stable division of the city, with the map drawn up by the government, in order to support city planning and suchlike. Many of them are named for the most prominent neighborhood that falls within their borders, but that's not always the case. Neighborhoods are a popular division, and is socially constructed by people as a whole. The boundaries are amorphous and constantly shifting. At my last apartment, my own neighbors described our block as falling within about 3 different neighborhoods. (This never resulted in any argument, because everyone understands that the definition of neighborhood is fuzzy at best.) Even where you have a community area and a neighborhood that share the same name, they don't necessarily coincide all that well. For example, just about nobody who lives in the area would recognize the boundaries of "Lincoln Square" as being those of the Lincoln Square community area. To them "Lincoln Square" means the the Lincoln Square neighborhood, which, even by the most generous of standards, is still maybe 1/5 the size of the community area by land mass. Aldermanic wards are yet another thing, and their boundaries really don't have much to do with neighborhoods or community areas. For starters, there are officially 50 aldermanic wards and 77 community areas.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  I’m also a Chicago voter and I would be surprised if any city would reject the referendum as stated. “Do you want more free stuff or less free stuff?” It doesn’t discuss the downsides, especially the opportunity costs—Chicago is in a budget crisis which has been exacerbated by COVID and maybe that money could be better spent on those who have lost jobs or something, but none of that nuance is represented on the ballot. Note that I’m not actually opposed to this initiative per se, only remarking that the support probably has more to do with the presentation of the initiative than it’s merit.
  - boomboomsubban 6y ago
    Also not on the ballot was any discussion of how Chicago spends it's billions of dollars that led to this budget crisis, though I'm sure there are numerous programs both less profitable and less popular than this one.
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      There is only one notable cause of Chicago’s budget crisis, and that is deferring the expense of labor performed decades ago to today’s taxpayer via defined benefit pensions and retiree healthcare. Same with Illinois, and pretty much all the other governments out there. It’s the easiest way to promise low taxes today and shift expenses onto future generations who have no say. It almost works as long as people keep having 3+ kids and the tax base keeps growing. Not so much once population growth stalls and the tax base suffers income stagnation.
      - Shivetya 6y ago
        Illinois [0] is not alone but its far simpler to find good figures on how bad the state and various counties and cities are failing their employees and residents. There was hope of a Federal bailout of all pension funds, numerous covid19 bills tried to bury them into the dollars, but fortunately that may be off the table as the Congressional elections did not pan out as needed. Yyes, the expectation was the Feds would not use the Pension Benefit Guarantee System to salvage something but actually fund them with tax dollars. The PBGS should be the default solution but is not a friendly solution as benefits are generally brought back from silly levels. The issue with many public pension systems is that too many payouts are excessive. No pension system, notably no public, show being paying out six figure retirements in addition to health benefits. California had to use a law to cap theirs around 125k but that has faced numerous challenges and may see more in the future. They do deserve their retirement pay but it needs to be reasonable and equal across the board to best serve the public and employee interest. The lower paid employees are not well served and the managerial and certain others are over compensated in retirement. [0]https://www.illinoispolicy.org/reports/pension-apocalypse-covid-19-exposes-long-running-fragility-of-illinois-public-pensions/ https://www.illinoispolicy.org/reports/pension-apocalypse-co...
- x87678r 6y ago
  Chicago will get a big slush fund to pay for some unspecified infrastructure down the road? What could go wrong.
- rayiner 6y ago
  And even if the referendum had included a call for the city to build broadband, there was no price tag listed. People love programs that are free and don’t involve trade-offs with things that cost money.
  - tzs 6y ago
    Most municipal broadband projects I've heard about have either ended up quite a bit cheaper/faster than the commercial broadband that was already in the area, or have been in smaller towns or rural areas where there wasn't any commercial broadband.
  - sumtechguy 6y ago
    I instinctively do not vote for things that show me the price tag and duration. Do XYZ for X years from a bond of Y paid at Z percentage rate for blah years to be financed from a increase in taxes of somenumber percent for X years. If that is not on there that is an open ended contract to waste everyone's time and money.
- danso 6y ago
  It's true that the Chicago referendum is non-binding, but worthwhile context is that Chicago this past June has already made moves to develop free high-speed internet for public school students [0]. The success of even this palliative referendum will, ostensibly, give them political cover to push for additional initiatives and referendums: > CHICAGO – Mayor Lori E. Lightfoot today announced the launch of ‘Chicago Connected,’ a groundbreaking program that will provide free high-speed internet service to approximately 100,000 Chicago Public Schools (CPS) students in their households. This first-of-its-kind program will be one of the largest and longest-term efforts in the nation to provide free, high-speed internet over the course of four years to dramatically increase internet accessibility for students and help build a permanent public support system for families in Chicago. [0] https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/mayor/press_room/press_releases/2020/june/CPSInternetAccess.html https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/mayor/press_room/press...
- snarf21 6y ago
  Interesting. That really stinks that Cook County can block. It seems like there needs to be a change where the 3 referendum with the most signatures is what is on the ballot.
- throwaway201103 6y ago
  In Chicago, it means that ISPs will need to pay off the aldermen to be the "preferred" provider of public broadband in each ward.
- robswc 6y ago
  I tend to avoid politics but I really can't believe such a question was asked to voters. With how vague that question is, its almost entirely useless. Like another poster said, it essentially could be boiled down to "do you want good thing or not?" I feel like something that vague has no business being "voted" on.
- flaque 6y ago
  These read like essay prompts
Fiveplus 6y ago
How's the internet service in Chicago these days? Is it AT&T? If not, who's running the show?
- l33r 6y ago
  It depends on where you live. In my condo, I pay $20 a month for gigabit fiber.
  - cure 6y ago
    Wow, that's very cheap. Is this symmetric gigabit? Usage caps? Who is providing it?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - OldHand2018 6y ago
      Internet in Chicago is unregulated; it's a completely open market. Many years ago, people got really tired of companies digging up roads, putting in utilities and then repaving the road, only to have some other company come in and dig up the road again a few weeks later. So the city now has an ordinance - if you are going to dig up the road, there has to be an advance public notice, and anyone can lay utilities once you are done but before you've repaved. And once you've repaved, there is some time limit before anyone is allowed to dig up the road again. This makes it pretty cheap to lay dark fiber that will someday get lit up, and now Chicago is reaping the benefits.
  - OldHand2018 6y ago
    That's a better deal than in my condo. Our condo board keeps getting offers from other providers, but is too lazy to look into them.
  - x87678r 6y ago
    Does the HOA run that? I'm curious.
fastball 6y ago
This is good. Vital infrastructure should be handled by government, and internet is obviously vital at this point. Municipalities build out the last mile, state governments connect municipalities, the federal government connects states (as with our highway system). Now if we could only do the same for high-speed rail!
coldpie 6y ago
I know many HN commenters have a strong anti-public-service bent, but consider this angle: if the government is providing your Internet service, then your service is protected by the constitution. The bar for restricting what you can access, and for what reasons your service can be cancelled, becomes much higher when it's governed by the constitution instead of the whims of a private media company with a massive conflict of interest.
- jtdev 6y ago
  How does the constitution come into play here? The government doesn’t really have a great track record for being worthy of blind trust.
  - mrkstu 6y ago
    They cannot drop you as a customer for what you 'say' digitally (or IRL.) You cannot be 'cancelled.' Not sure if that has happened previously on the individual level, vs the organizational/corporate level though. Technically, though, if they offer commercial service, the organizational/business orgs taking it up would be protected completely in any of their speech (other than things like child porn.)
    - rtkwe 6y ago
      How many people if any are actually losing internet access? The closest I've seen is people having their hosting providers drop them.
  - jballer 6y ago
    TL;DR because the Constitution was written to protect us from the government, there is a lower bar to sue and win under both federal law and constitutional challenges. For example, the Fourteenth Amendment protects against discrimination by States, not private actors: https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/amendment-14/section-1/state-action https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/amendment-14/... And note 1338 calls out that the federal laws prohibiting businesses from discriminating against individuals are instead rooted in Congress's broad latitude to regulate interstate commerce. And here's another similar reference: > As a general rule, the Constitution does not give power to the federal government to pass laws to protect people against private actions. For example, the Equal Protection Clause guarantees equal protection for all – it protects against discrimination. Under this protection, the federal government may pass laws to enforce this guarantee. However, while Congress may pass a law to regulate states or other public actors, it may not pass a law to regulate private citizens. Your police department cannot discriminate against you on account of your race. However, your neighbor in the house down the block can be as bigoted as he so desires. https://constitutionallawreporter.com/amendment-14-01/the-question-of-government-action/ https://constitutionallawreporter.com/amendment-14-01/the-qu...
corey_moncure 6y ago
A telecommunications monopoly is a strange thing. There are 725,000 people in Denver. If we naively assume that one sixth of them pay for an internet subscription at $100/mo each, that's $145,000,000 annually that the people could use to fund their own ISP. The people are held captive by a combination of forces that appear to have nothing to do with economics. If they could all communicate together they could easily fund their own alternative. Appallingly, the place that they are being held captive is a communications network!!
- geodel 6y ago
  True. If enough people put money they can even produce, Movies and TV shows and they no longer have to depend on big bad Hollywood studios for entertainment.
  - deeeeplearning 6y ago
    What does a comment like this achieve. We're talking about something thats about as essential as other utilities particularly during Covid. Go lick boots elsewhere.
- peapicker 6y ago
  That is on the high side for a connection in Denver -- I think you are overestimating costs. I looked in a poorer neighborhood in Denver (700sq.ft. house), which is clearly close to fiber, and from Centurylink for $65/mo they can get 940Mbps, for $49/mo they can get 100Mbps. Looks like for $20/month, xfinity will do 25Mbps at the same address.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    Do all or even a meaningful majority of people in Denver have access to Centurylink fiber? Every city I’ve seen it in is usually restricted to small areas or newer developments.
    - peapicker 6y ago
brentsch 6y ago
One of the linked articles [1] describes the arguments in favor of pro-ISP restrictions as concerns that municipal broadband would either be a waste of taxpayer money or an "unfair" threat to private-sector ISPs: "'The general rhetoric behind these laws, from the incumbents, is that cities are too incompetent to run their own networks, so it's a risk to taxpayers,' Craig Settles, a broadband consultant who works with cities to create municipal networks told me. 'But then, the other side of it is that cities are so competent that they represent unfair competition.'" Is this a relatively accurate and complete characterization? [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/qkvn4x/the-21-laws-states-use-to-crush-broadband-competition https://www.vice.com/en/article/qkvn4x/the-21-laws-states-us...
- biggermike 6y ago
  Not as contradictory as the speaker is making it out to be. The organization can be poorly managed but still price out competition via a state subsidized business model that would be unsustainable for anyone else.
cashsterling 6y ago
Longmont, CO has municipal broadband and it is awesome. 50 USD per month for symmetric 1Gb service. Service uptime has been outstanding... much better than the service my work gets in Boulder, CO (Comcast).
- hesdeadjim 6y ago
  Meanwhile Boulder voters have approved community broadband six years ago and there has been essentially zero progress. For a Boulder resident I’m lucky actually, I have access to to 100mbit VDSL and Comcast. So at least I have two shitty choices.
  - oh_sigh 6y ago
    They're also trying to municipalize the electricity infrastructure here(boulder). It's been 10 years, we've spent $30M, and there's been absolutely zero progress on it.
- C1sc0cat 6y ago
  What's the contention like do you actually get 1Gb sustained or is that just the syc speed. BTW my BB plus phone is $30 a month in the UK VDSL via local loop unbundling.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    I have Centurylink 1Gbps fiber, and I get 1Gbps up and down sustained. The installer said that my neighborhood had a 10Gbps connection shared between 30 houses.
    - C1sc0cat 6y ago
      Just have to hope not all 30 take up the service :-)
      - fgonzag 6y ago
        Are you actually willing to pay for a service that doesn't oversubscribe? 10 Gbps for 30 houses seems reasonable, as not all of them will be using the service at full speed at any given time. If you wanted 30 Gbps for 30 houses, then you'd have to pay triple. For something that you wouldn't even notice because you were probably getting 1 Gbps when you actually needed it.
deklerk 6y ago
Denver voter here: wer'e very excited about this! Our neighbours in Longmonth and Fort Collins both have similar situations, and we're jealous over here. Excited for some competition to ISPs, and excited for our government to be, ya know, building things that help its peoples. =)
- fiftyfifty 6y ago
  Fort Collins just started rolling our broadband out and we voted on it three years ago. It's been a little bit of a boondoggle, behind schedule and over budget, like most of these kind of projects tend to be I guess. It's been just within the last quarter that Fort Collins is finally getting the number of paying customers into the thousands which should help the financials some. They pulled the fiber throughout my neighborhood a couple of months ago but then it seemed to stall. Occasionally I see a work truck doing something at one of the boxes, but we haven't heard anything as far as being able to get hooked up yet. Our cost is $59.95/month for gigabit up and down so there are many of us chomping at the bit. For anyone interested in the rollout of a municipal broadband program, the quarterly financial reports Fort Collins has been releasing during their rollout are kind of interesting: https://www.fcgov.com/connexion/quarterly-reports https://www.fcgov.com/connexion/quarterly-reports
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
gok 6y ago
Ugh Vice... I love that they use the image of people celebrating the presidential election to imply that people are dancing in the streets because of some vague ballot initiative about "ensuring access to broadband internet".
snowwrestler 6y ago
The small city where I live has been looking at community-owned fiber and I have enthusiastically supported it because right now it’s Comcast or nothing for broadband. But a couple weeks ago, a bunch of Verizon trucks were stringing new cables on the poles in my neighborhood. I asked if they were finally bringing FiOS to my neighborhood. They said no, FiOS is being sunset (!) and this new fiber is for 5G residential, which will replace it. They’ll eventually mount antennas on some of the poles and then provide an in-home 5G hardware appliance, analogous to the cable modem. They said speeds should be about the same as FiOS. All I want is broadband competition. If I can choose between Verizon and Comcast, that competition should help drive down costs, which is the main reason I want community broadband.
x87678r 6y ago
How about Chicago funding some of its underwater pension funds of its old community services, before creating a new community service?
austincheney 6y ago
Municipal broadband makes sense in many areas with shitty internet service. Where I live the growth is so absurd fast, possibly the second fastest among major US cities, that we can't get the city improve the highways between housing neighborhoods and freeways or keep up with other basic services. Everything is a struggle for the city to keep up with the growth. In this rarest of cases municipal broadband would probably be a nightmare. Fortunately I have 1gb up and down to the house from my local ISP at $70 per month.
tombert 6y ago
Maybe someone who understands FCC laws/regulations can help enlighten me on this point and clear up my understanding. My understanding is that the reason the network/over-the-air TV in the US (e.g. ABC, NBC, Fox) has relatively strict regulations about curse-words and sex-stuff and violence being shown is because there's a risk that a child could be watching, and the airwaves belong to everybody, meaning any kid could go purchase a TV and watch it. Cable channels like HBO and ShowTime and whatnot get around this because they require a paid membership to get into, and thus the responsibility for the kids watching it falls into the hands of the parents who signed up for the services, not the networks. Now, if my logic is correct, what's to stop something like this to leading to increased regulations? As of right now, in virtually any network I connect to, it's relatively easy for me to go to pornhub.com, and even if you ban outright porn sites, websites like YouTube and Netflix allow for much more cursing and violence than what the FCC currently allows on network television. I'm sure I'm misunderstanding something, and I'm not a lawyer, so maybe someone with more training on this kind of compliance can explain my problems. EDIT: Just to avoid downvotes that are unnecessary, I should make it clear, I don't support the FCC making these regulations, and think these tasks should fall onto the parents. I'm just saying what the current rationale is, or at least my understanding of it.
deleted 6y ago
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hashtagmarkup 6y ago
When police departments are requesting access to live video feeds from doorbell cams, what will stop them from requesting access to everything else if the city is directly providing the service?
- colinmhayes 6y ago
  encryption
- adamsea 6y ago
  Pretty sure police would be able to do this with private companies too. Certainly the big boys like the NSA (and maybe the FBI?) have. I think it’s more about what laws are in place to pro Ryder folks, whether it’s for a privately-run service or a government one.
- seventytwo 6y ago
  The constitution. You think private companies are bound by the same constraints the federal govt is??
  - hashtagmarkup 6y ago
    The constitution hasn't stopped them in the past from man-in-the-middling private corporation's network traffic to spy on private citizens. I don't think "community broadband" is the same as "federal broadband", if that's what you're asking.
adamc 6y ago
Does anyone have a good explanation of why internet service in much of America is so crappy? What are good ways to change that?
- seventytwo 6y ago
  Because it’s more cost-effective to lie to the population about their internet quality and hire lobbyists to manipulate politics than it is to actually upgrade the network.
Reason077 6y ago
> "Colorado is one of nearly two-dozen states that have passed laws, usually directly written by regional telecom monopolies, that hamstring or prevent the creation of such networks." From a European perspective, this just seems crazy. Regulations should be designed to promote competition, not restrict it. Incumbent networks already enjoy a huge advantage. Why would you want to entrench them even further by writing laws that make it difficult for startups and newcomers to compete?
- ajmadesc 6y ago
  Blatant corruption is why.
- robertlagrant 6y ago
  Yummy pork.
- seventytwo 6y ago
  B-b-but nothing bad ever happens in The Free Market (TM), so the problem is therefore somewhere else!
- pottertheotter 6y ago
  Because a lot of people here have been brainwashed to believe that government is bad and companies are good.
- rhino369 6y ago
  Their argument is that tax payer subsidized "competition" is not true competition. Municipalities can build a network using government money and then price it below what any competitor could deliver. Municipalities also get to regulate and tax their competitors. That's not necessarily a great argument against Municipal fiber. But I don't think municipal fiber can honestly be called promoting competition.
walrus01 6y ago
Saying "we want community broadband" is good. The pent up demand is clearly there. And there are a great many mediocre last mile near-monopoly ISPs which are, in my opinion, borderline abusive to their customer base. ISP perspective: There are physical limitations to how many discrete, independent facilities-based last mile carriers can be built in a city to individual residential premises. In many cities this ends up with being the local telco, and the local cable company running two parallel overlapping networks. For instance, in Seattle, Centurylink (former USWest/Qwest) running a GPON FTTH network, and Comcast or Wave running a hybrid fiber-coaxial DOCSIS3/DOCSIS3.1 cable last mile plant. This ends up with a defacto duopoly for many consumers. If you are in a less optimal situation you might have something like the terrible choice between 10Mbps ADSL2+ over degraded, long loop length copper POTS wiring, or 100-800Mbps service from Comcast, Charter, RCN or similar. In which case it's not really a choice at all, you effectively have a cable operator monopoly. Much like how it is impractical and impossible to have more than one last-mile electrical grid operator in a city, it's highly impractical, costly and expensive for more than 2 to 3 maximum facilities-based ISPs to run parallel competing overlapping networks serving end user premises. If a city is going to have a 3rd carrier run by the municipality, it needs to be an open access network that sells layer 2 transport to a myriad of independent ISPs. In this arrangement, the city and municipality builds a FTTH network, but only sells wholesale capacity to ISPs. The city is responsible for the OSI layer 1 outside plant cable, running the drop cable to each house and the termination box, and a basic GPON CPE. Individual ISPs can sell layer 3 (IP) services on top of that and provide the billing, customer support and value-added features like triple-play TV/phone etc. In this arrangement the city ISP runs what is effectively a layer 2 network only, and hands customer traffic in aggregate to an ISP at an NNI. I have to admit that I am much more skeptical of the concept of cities suddenly developing the deep, long term knowledge base and experience to run last mile access IP networks at a scale of hundreds of thousands of customers. I just can't see many cities successfully getting their own ASN, setting up infrastructure at major IX points, acquiring significant chunks of ARIN ipv4 and ipv6 space, and so forth. Not unless they really throw a lot of money at poaching network engineering talent away from ISPs. If you take a look at peeringdb and pick a random residential last mile broadband specialist ISP with 50-100Gbps+ of traffic, I've literally never seen in my life a city government with the on-staff skill set to successfully implement something like that. If you want to see how this has been done successfully on the municipality-as-wholesaler end, take a look at Grant and Douglas counties in WA state, which operate 1Gbps FTTH last mile networks much as I described in the above paragraphs. In those two cases, the local county government is also the electrical grid last mile operator. So they already have on staff crews of bucket trucks, pole placing equipment, all of the lineman-related stuff required. Not to mention the support infrastructure like HR/admin/accounting is shared between the county last mile fiber network, and the last mile electrical grid service. There's economies of scale in doing something like that as a combined effort.
dalbasal 6y ago
There's infinite nuance and meta game to referendums, but that aside... (1) Referendums seem able to produce highly decisive vote counts on otherwise controversial political issues. Interesting, in itself. (2) Issues that parties are at odds about aren't necessarily 50-50 issues. (3) Referendums can (sometimes) produce democratic legitimacy in ways that representative politics cannot. All interesting, in terms of enabling decision making. Referendums seem to be gaining a little momentum. I think one hidden advantage is the fact that referendums structurally enforce a separation of idea and execution.
lumberingjack 6y ago
Let me tell you a story about adelphia cable in 1999. The government paid them to install fiber optic networking in my rural neighborhood we were told we were near a backbone so we were going to be a test bed for extremely fast internet 99. 2001 rolls around these trucks are everywhere installing glass in the ground. 2003ish Adelphia cable goes through a legal battle with the larger cable companies they're accusing them of all kinds of stuff. Adelphia cable is bought out by Time Warner Cable the fiber optic network is never turned on even to this day every once in awhile I'm digging in a flower bed and I un Earth the glass wire that's been there for 20 years. Fastest internet available here is from former TWC which is now spectrum $80 30/10mbps.
grahamburger 6y ago
If you are interested in doing something like this I'd love to chat! I run a website about related topics[1]. I'm working now with a few different organizations on a kind of franchised ISP model. [1] https://startyourownisp.com https://startyourownisp.com
jariel 6y ago
"they’re fed up with monopolies like Comcast." Why do they feel a different monopoly will be better? There's no reason to believe that the local government owned monopoly will be more efficient or more effectively managed. It could be, but not necessarily. These 'grass is greener on the other side' type referendums are difficult if they don't really capture the issue. The 'root cause' is the single point of access and we could all feasibly use more intelligent laws there. They tried that 20 years ago with the concept of 'CLEC' and there were all sorts of laws put in place, it didn't work out very well. There may be other opportunities. For example, it may be possible to make the 'last mile' the responsibility of the city or county, to the point wherein they get the wiring to a proper exchange where there's compeitition. Then if people want fiber to the home, they can pay for it themselves kind of thing.
stjohnswarts 6y ago
They better be ready for the telcos and cable companies to come in and start litigating for years about "unfair competition"
HashThis 6y ago
ISP market is rigged. Free market competition would make citizens never interested in this, unless it was rigged. If Google w/Google Fiber can't enter markets, then nobody can. Customers are locked into contracts for no good reason, except breaking competition. Good prices only go to first time customers, in order to rent seek and rig prices as customers stay.

639 points by danso 6y ago

I can't speak to Denver, but reposting from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25000078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25000078 - no, Chicago voters did not do this: Hi, Chicago voter here. The question wasn't about public utility, it was "Should the City of Chicago act to ensure that all the City's community areas have access to broadband Internet?" which can imply a number of contradictory policies, from Chicago setting up municipal broadband to Chicago giving tax incentives to the existing national broadband providers. Illinois limits ballots to three referendum questions, and questions chosen by higher-up political entities have precedence over smaller, more local ones. The three questions on the ballot for Chicago are chosen by the Cook County Board of Commissioners. (For these purposes, Cook County is equivalent to the city of Chicago plus a couple neighboring suburbs.) Background established and into personal opinion: The question is in fact deliberately vague. The Board's goal is not to ask three divisive questions getting at the heart of urgent political matters. It is to fill the ballot with three questions to preclude local, less connected authorities from putting inconvenient, compelling questions on the ballot. Here's a 2018 court case reaffirming that (Calumet City is in Cook County): https://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/daily-southtown/opini https://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/daily-southtown/opini... These questions are deliberately worthless and it's a waste of time to analyze them for policy guidance. If you're curious, the other two questions this cycle were: * In creating its City-wide plan for continued growth and sustainability, should the City of Chicago place equal focus on the goals of resiliency, equity, and diversity? * Should the State of Illinois restrict the sale or possession of firearms that have been defined as assault weapons or of magazines that can hold more than a certain number of rounds of ammunition?

toddsiegel 6y ago
> In Denver, 83.5 percent of the city’s electorate cast ballots in favor of question 2H, which asked if the city should be exempt from a 2005 law, backed by local telecom monopolies, restricting Colorado towns and cities from being able to build their own local broadband alternatives. > Colorado is one of nearly two-dozen states that have passed laws, usually directly written by regional telecom monopolies, that hamstring or prevent the creation of such networks. > But in Colorado’s case, the state’s 2005 law included language that allows local towns and cities to opt-out of the restriction if voters agree to do so. W.r.t. Denver, the headline overstates things a bit, but the contents of the article are accurate. https://www.denverpost.com/2020/10/08/denver-issue-2h-broadband-internet/ https://www.denverpost.com/2020/10/08/denver-issue-2h-broadb...
C1sc0cat 6y ago
Reading the words of the motion "Should the City of Chicago act to ensure that all the City's community areas have access to broadband Internet?" Says nothing about the local government running the service "community areas" so that means just libraries council buildings or does it mean FTC or FTP for all homes? You right that allowing the executive to cherry pick motions is not democratic. The one "in creating its City-wide plan for continued growth and sustainability, should the City of Chicago place equal focus on the goals of resiliency, equity, and diversity?" is arguably pious and also does not propose any action.
- pgroves 6y ago
  When I read it on the ballot when I voted I immediately assumed it meant "libraries, etc", but now that you say that I'm worried "community areas" is bureaucrat-speak for "neighborhoods". Much different implications.
  - WillEngler 6y ago
    Yes, "community areas" is bureaucrat-speak for neighborhoods. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_areas_in_Chicago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_areas_in_Chicago) It's useful for city planners and the like because "neighborhoods" have fuzzy boundaries that people disagree on, but Chicago's community areas are well-defined.
    - mumblemumble 6y ago
      > "community areas" is bureaucrat-speak for neighborhoods. Not exactly. "Community areas", in Chicago, represent a relatively stable division of the city, with the map drawn up by the government, in order to support city planning and suchlike. Many of them are named for the most prominent neighborhood that falls within their borders, but that's not always the case. Neighborhoods are a popular division, and is socially constructed by people as a whole. The boundaries are amorphous and constantly shifting. At my last apartment, my own neighbors described our block as falling within about 3 different neighborhoods. (This never resulted in any argument, because everyone understands that the definition of neighborhood is fuzzy at best.) Even where you have a community area and a neighborhood that share the same name, they don't necessarily coincide all that well. For example, just about nobody who lives in the area would recognize the boundaries of "Lincoln Square" as being those of the Lincoln Square community area. To them "Lincoln Square" means the the Lincoln Square neighborhood, which, even by the most generous of standards, is still maybe 1/5 the size of the community area by land mass. Aldermanic wards are yet another thing, and their boundaries really don't have much to do with neighborhoods or community areas. For starters, there are officially 50 aldermanic wards and 77 community areas.
throwaway894345 6y ago
I’m also a Chicago voter and I would be surprised if any city would reject the referendum as stated. “Do you want more free stuff or less free stuff?” It doesn’t discuss the downsides, especially the opportunity costs—Chicago is in a budget crisis which has been exacerbated by COVID and maybe that money could be better spent on those who have lost jobs or something, but none of that nuance is represented on the ballot. Note that I’m not actually opposed to this initiative per se, only remarking that the support probably has more to do with the presentation of the initiative than it’s merit.
- boomboomsubban 6y ago
  Also not on the ballot was any discussion of how Chicago spends it's billions of dollars that led to this budget crisis, though I'm sure there are numerous programs both less profitable and less popular than this one.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    There is only one notable cause of Chicago’s budget crisis, and that is deferring the expense of labor performed decades ago to today’s taxpayer via defined benefit pensions and retiree healthcare. Same with Illinois, and pretty much all the other governments out there. It’s the easiest way to promise low taxes today and shift expenses onto future generations who have no say. It almost works as long as people keep having 3+ kids and the tax base keeps growing. Not so much once population growth stalls and the tax base suffers income stagnation.
    - Shivetya 6y ago
      Illinois [0] is not alone but its far simpler to find good figures on how bad the state and various counties and cities are failing their employees and residents. There was hope of a Federal bailout of all pension funds, numerous covid19 bills tried to bury them into the dollars, but fortunately that may be off the table as the Congressional elections did not pan out as needed. Yyes, the expectation was the Feds would not use the Pension Benefit Guarantee System to salvage something but actually fund them with tax dollars. The PBGS should be the default solution but is not a friendly solution as benefits are generally brought back from silly levels. The issue with many public pension systems is that too many payouts are excessive. No pension system, notably no public, show being paying out six figure retirements in addition to health benefits. California had to use a law to cap theirs around 125k but that has faced numerous challenges and may see more in the future. They do deserve their retirement pay but it needs to be reasonable and equal across the board to best serve the public and employee interest. The lower paid employees are not well served and the managerial and certain others are over compensated in retirement. [0]https://www.illinoispolicy.org/reports/pension-apocalypse-covid-19-exposes-long-running-fragility-of-illinois-public-pensions/ https://www.illinoispolicy.org/reports/pension-apocalypse-co...
x87678r 6y ago
Chicago will get a big slush fund to pay for some unspecified infrastructure down the road? What could go wrong.
rayiner 6y ago
And even if the referendum had included a call for the city to build broadband, there was no price tag listed. People love programs that are free and don’t involve trade-offs with things that cost money.
- tzs 6y ago
  Most municipal broadband projects I've heard about have either ended up quite a bit cheaper/faster than the commercial broadband that was already in the area, or have been in smaller towns or rural areas where there wasn't any commercial broadband.
- sumtechguy 6y ago
  I instinctively do not vote for things that show me the price tag and duration. Do XYZ for X years from a bond of Y paid at Z percentage rate for blah years to be financed from a increase in taxes of somenumber percent for X years. If that is not on there that is an open ended contract to waste everyone's time and money.
danso 6y ago
It's true that the Chicago referendum is non-binding, but worthwhile context is that Chicago this past June has already made moves to develop free high-speed internet for public school students [0]. The success of even this palliative referendum will, ostensibly, give them political cover to push for additional initiatives and referendums: > CHICAGO – Mayor Lori E. Lightfoot today announced the launch of ‘Chicago Connected,’ a groundbreaking program that will provide free high-speed internet service to approximately 100,000 Chicago Public Schools (CPS) students in their households. This first-of-its-kind program will be one of the largest and longest-term efforts in the nation to provide free, high-speed internet over the course of four years to dramatically increase internet accessibility for students and help build a permanent public support system for families in Chicago. [0] https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/mayor/press_room/press_releases/2020/june/CPSInternetAccess.html https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/mayor/press_room/press...
snarf21 6y ago
Interesting. That really stinks that Cook County can block. It seems like there needs to be a change where the 3 referendum with the most signatures is what is on the ballot.
throwaway201103 6y ago
In Chicago, it means that ISPs will need to pay off the aldermen to be the "preferred" provider of public broadband in each ward.
robswc 6y ago
I tend to avoid politics but I really can't believe such a question was asked to voters. With how vague that question is, its almost entirely useless. Like another poster said, it essentially could be boiled down to "do you want good thing or not?" I feel like something that vague has no business being "voted" on.
flaque 6y ago
These read like essay prompts

Fiveplus 6y ago

How's the internet service in Chicago these days? Is it AT&T? If not, who's running the show?

l33r 6y ago
It depends on where you live. In my condo, I pay $20 a month for gigabit fiber.
- cure 6y ago
  Wow, that's very cheap. Is this symmetric gigabit? Usage caps? Who is providing it?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - OldHand2018 6y ago
    Internet in Chicago is unregulated; it's a completely open market. Many years ago, people got really tired of companies digging up roads, putting in utilities and then repaving the road, only to have some other company come in and dig up the road again a few weeks later. So the city now has an ordinance - if you are going to dig up the road, there has to be an advance public notice, and anyone can lay utilities once you are done but before you've repaved. And once you've repaved, there is some time limit before anyone is allowed to dig up the road again. This makes it pretty cheap to lay dark fiber that will someday get lit up, and now Chicago is reaping the benefits.
- OldHand2018 6y ago
  That's a better deal than in my condo. Our condo board keeps getting offers from other providers, but is too lazy to look into them.
- x87678r 6y ago
  Does the HOA run that? I'm curious.

fastball 6y ago

This is good. Vital infrastructure should be handled by government, and internet is obviously vital at this point. Municipalities build out the last mile, state governments connect municipalities, the federal government connects states (as with our highway system). Now if we could only do the same for high-speed rail!

coldpie 6y ago

I know many HN commenters have a strong anti-public-service bent, but consider this angle: if the government is providing your Internet service, then your service is protected by the constitution. The bar for restricting what you can access, and for what reasons your service can be cancelled, becomes much higher when it's governed by the constitution instead of the whims of a private media company with a massive conflict of interest.

jtdev 6y ago
How does the constitution come into play here? The government doesn’t really have a great track record for being worthy of blind trust.
- mrkstu 6y ago
  They cannot drop you as a customer for what you 'say' digitally (or IRL.) You cannot be 'cancelled.' Not sure if that has happened previously on the individual level, vs the organizational/corporate level though. Technically, though, if they offer commercial service, the organizational/business orgs taking it up would be protected completely in any of their speech (other than things like child porn.)
  - rtkwe 6y ago
    How many people if any are actually losing internet access? The closest I've seen is people having their hosting providers drop them.
- jballer 6y ago
  TL;DR because the Constitution was written to protect us from the government, there is a lower bar to sue and win under both federal law and constitutional challenges. For example, the Fourteenth Amendment protects against discrimination by States, not private actors: https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/amendment-14/section-1/state-action https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/amendment-14/... And note 1338 calls out that the federal laws prohibiting businesses from discriminating against individuals are instead rooted in Congress's broad latitude to regulate interstate commerce. And here's another similar reference: > As a general rule, the Constitution does not give power to the federal government to pass laws to protect people against private actions. For example, the Equal Protection Clause guarantees equal protection for all – it protects against discrimination. Under this protection, the federal government may pass laws to enforce this guarantee. However, while Congress may pass a law to regulate states or other public actors, it may not pass a law to regulate private citizens. Your police department cannot discriminate against you on account of your race. However, your neighbor in the house down the block can be as bigoted as he so desires. https://constitutionallawreporter.com/amendment-14-01/the-question-of-government-action/ https://constitutionallawreporter.com/amendment-14-01/the-qu...

corey_moncure 6y ago

A telecommunications monopoly is a strange thing. There are 725,000 people in Denver. If we naively assume that one sixth of them pay for an internet subscription at $100/mo each, that's $145,000,000 annually that the people could use to fund their own ISP. The people are held captive by a combination of forces that appear to have nothing to do with economics. If they could all communicate together they could easily fund their own alternative. Appallingly, the place that they are being held captive is a communications network!!

geodel 6y ago
True. If enough people put money they can even produce, Movies and TV shows and they no longer have to depend on big bad Hollywood studios for entertainment.
- deeeeplearning 6y ago
  What does a comment like this achieve. We're talking about something thats about as essential as other utilities particularly during Covid. Go lick boots elsewhere.
peapicker 6y ago
That is on the high side for a connection in Denver -- I think you are overestimating costs. I looked in a poorer neighborhood in Denver (700sq.ft. house), which is clearly close to fiber, and from Centurylink for $65/mo they can get 940Mbps, for $49/mo they can get 100Mbps. Looks like for $20/month, xfinity will do 25Mbps at the same address.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  Do all or even a meaningful majority of people in Denver have access to Centurylink fiber? Every city I’ve seen it in is usually restricted to small areas or newer developments.
  - peapicker 6y ago

brentsch 6y ago

One of the linked articles [1] describes the arguments in favor of pro-ISP restrictions as concerns that municipal broadband would either be a waste of taxpayer money or an "unfair" threat to private-sector ISPs: "'The general rhetoric behind these laws, from the incumbents, is that cities are too incompetent to run their own networks, so it's a risk to taxpayers,' Craig Settles, a broadband consultant who works with cities to create municipal networks told me. 'But then, the other side of it is that cities are so competent that they represent unfair competition.'" Is this a relatively accurate and complete characterization? [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/qkvn4x/the-21-laws-states-use-to-crush-broadband-competition https://www.vice.com/en/article/qkvn4x/the-21-laws-states-us...

biggermike 6y ago
Not as contradictory as the speaker is making it out to be. The organization can be poorly managed but still price out competition via a state subsidized business model that would be unsustainable for anyone else.

cashsterling 6y ago

Longmont, CO has municipal broadband and it is awesome. 50 USD per month for symmetric 1Gb service. Service uptime has been outstanding... much better than the service my work gets in Boulder, CO (Comcast).

hesdeadjim 6y ago
Meanwhile Boulder voters have approved community broadband six years ago and there has been essentially zero progress. For a Boulder resident I’m lucky actually, I have access to to 100mbit VDSL and Comcast. So at least I have two shitty choices.
- oh_sigh 6y ago
  They're also trying to municipalize the electricity infrastructure here(boulder). It's been 10 years, we've spent $30M, and there's been absolutely zero progress on it.
C1sc0cat 6y ago
What's the contention like do you actually get 1Gb sustained or is that just the syc speed. BTW my BB plus phone is $30 a month in the UK VDSL via local loop unbundling.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  I have Centurylink 1Gbps fiber, and I get 1Gbps up and down sustained. The installer said that my neighborhood had a 10Gbps connection shared between 30 houses.
  - C1sc0cat 6y ago
    Just have to hope not all 30 take up the service :-)
    - fgonzag 6y ago
      Are you actually willing to pay for a service that doesn't oversubscribe? 10 Gbps for 30 houses seems reasonable, as not all of them will be using the service at full speed at any given time. If you wanted 30 Gbps for 30 houses, then you'd have to pay triple. For something that you wouldn't even notice because you were probably getting 1 Gbps when you actually needed it.

deklerk 6y ago

Denver voter here: wer'e very excited about this! Our neighbours in Longmonth and Fort Collins both have similar situations, and we're jealous over here. Excited for some competition to ISPs, and excited for our government to be, ya know, building things that help its peoples. =)

fiftyfifty 6y ago
Fort Collins just started rolling our broadband out and we voted on it three years ago. It's been a little bit of a boondoggle, behind schedule and over budget, like most of these kind of projects tend to be I guess. It's been just within the last quarter that Fort Collins is finally getting the number of paying customers into the thousands which should help the financials some. They pulled the fiber throughout my neighborhood a couple of months ago but then it seemed to stall. Occasionally I see a work truck doing something at one of the boxes, but we haven't heard anything as far as being able to get hooked up yet. Our cost is $59.95/month for gigabit up and down so there are many of us chomping at the bit. For anyone interested in the rollout of a municipal broadband program, the quarterly financial reports Fort Collins has been releasing during their rollout are kind of interesting: https://www.fcgov.com/connexion/quarterly-reports https://www.fcgov.com/connexion/quarterly-reports

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

gok 6y ago

Ugh Vice... I love that they use the image of people celebrating the presidential election to imply that people are dancing in the streets because of some vague ballot initiative about "ensuring access to broadband internet".

snowwrestler 6y ago

The small city where I live has been looking at community-owned fiber and I have enthusiastically supported it because right now it’s Comcast or nothing for broadband. But a couple weeks ago, a bunch of Verizon trucks were stringing new cables on the poles in my neighborhood. I asked if they were finally bringing FiOS to my neighborhood. They said no, FiOS is being sunset (!) and this new fiber is for 5G residential, which will replace it. They’ll eventually mount antennas on some of the poles and then provide an in-home 5G hardware appliance, analogous to the cable modem. They said speeds should be about the same as FiOS. All I want is broadband competition. If I can choose between Verizon and Comcast, that competition should help drive down costs, which is the main reason I want community broadband.

x87678r 6y ago

How about Chicago funding some of its underwater pension funds of its old community services, before creating a new community service?

austincheney 6y ago

Municipal broadband makes sense in many areas with shitty internet service. Where I live the growth is so absurd fast, possibly the second fastest among major US cities, that we can't get the city improve the highways between housing neighborhoods and freeways or keep up with other basic services. Everything is a struggle for the city to keep up with the growth. In this rarest of cases municipal broadband would probably be a nightmare. Fortunately I have 1gb up and down to the house from my local ISP at $70 per month.

tombert 6y ago

Maybe someone who understands FCC laws/regulations can help enlighten me on this point and clear up my understanding. My understanding is that the reason the network/over-the-air TV in the US (e.g. ABC, NBC, Fox) has relatively strict regulations about curse-words and sex-stuff and violence being shown is because there's a risk that a child could be watching, and the airwaves belong to everybody, meaning any kid could go purchase a TV and watch it. Cable channels like HBO and ShowTime and whatnot get around this because they require a paid membership to get into, and thus the responsibility for the kids watching it falls into the hands of the parents who signed up for the services, not the networks. Now, if my logic is correct, what's to stop something like this to leading to increased regulations? As of right now, in virtually any network I connect to, it's relatively easy for me to go to pornhub.com, and even if you ban outright porn sites, websites like YouTube and Netflix allow for much more cursing and violence than what the FCC currently allows on network television. I'm sure I'm misunderstanding something, and I'm not a lawyer, so maybe someone with more training on this kind of compliance can explain my problems. EDIT: Just to avoid downvotes that are unnecessary, I should make it clear, I don't support the FCC making these regulations, and think these tasks should fall onto the parents. I'm just saying what the current rationale is, or at least my understanding of it.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

hashtagmarkup 6y ago

When police departments are requesting access to live video feeds from doorbell cams, what will stop them from requesting access to everything else if the city is directly providing the service?

colinmhayes 6y ago
encryption
adamsea 6y ago
Pretty sure police would be able to do this with private companies too. Certainly the big boys like the NSA (and maybe the FBI?) have. I think it’s more about what laws are in place to pro Ryder folks, whether it’s for a privately-run service or a government one.
seventytwo 6y ago
The constitution. You think private companies are bound by the same constraints the federal govt is??
- hashtagmarkup 6y ago
  The constitution hasn't stopped them in the past from man-in-the-middling private corporation's network traffic to spy on private citizens. I don't think "community broadband" is the same as "federal broadband", if that's what you're asking.

adamc 6y ago

Does anyone have a good explanation of why internet service in much of America is so crappy? What are good ways to change that?

seventytwo 6y ago
Because it’s more cost-effective to lie to the population about their internet quality and hire lobbyists to manipulate politics than it is to actually upgrade the network.

Reason077 6y ago

> "Colorado is one of nearly two-dozen states that have passed laws, usually directly written by regional telecom monopolies, that hamstring or prevent the creation of such networks." From a European perspective, this just seems crazy. Regulations should be designed to promote competition, not restrict it. Incumbent networks already enjoy a huge advantage. Why would you want to entrench them even further by writing laws that make it difficult for startups and newcomers to compete?

ajmadesc 6y ago
Blatant corruption is why.
robertlagrant 6y ago
Yummy pork.
seventytwo 6y ago
B-b-but nothing bad ever happens in The Free Market (TM), so the problem is therefore somewhere else!
pottertheotter 6y ago
Because a lot of people here have been brainwashed to believe that government is bad and companies are good.
rhino369 6y ago
Their argument is that tax payer subsidized "competition" is not true competition. Municipalities can build a network using government money and then price it below what any competitor could deliver. Municipalities also get to regulate and tax their competitors. That's not necessarily a great argument against Municipal fiber. But I don't think municipal fiber can honestly be called promoting competition.

walrus01 6y ago

Saying "we want community broadband" is good. The pent up demand is clearly there. And there are a great many mediocre last mile near-monopoly ISPs which are, in my opinion, borderline abusive to their customer base. ISP perspective: There are physical limitations to how many discrete, independent facilities-based last mile carriers can be built in a city to individual residential premises. In many cities this ends up with being the local telco, and the local cable company running two parallel overlapping networks. For instance, in Seattle, Centurylink (former USWest/Qwest) running a GPON FTTH network, and Comcast or Wave running a hybrid fiber-coaxial DOCSIS3/DOCSIS3.1 cable last mile plant. This ends up with a defacto duopoly for many consumers. If you are in a less optimal situation you might have something like the terrible choice between 10Mbps ADSL2+ over degraded, long loop length copper POTS wiring, or 100-800Mbps service from Comcast, Charter, RCN or similar. In which case it's not really a choice at all, you effectively have a cable operator monopoly. Much like how it is impractical and impossible to have more than one last-mile electrical grid operator in a city, it's highly impractical, costly and expensive for more than 2 to 3 maximum facilities-based ISPs to run parallel competing overlapping networks serving end user premises. If a city is going to have a 3rd carrier run by the municipality, it needs to be an open access network that sells layer 2 transport to a myriad of independent ISPs. In this arrangement, the city and municipality builds a FTTH network, but only sells wholesale capacity to ISPs. The city is responsible for the OSI layer 1 outside plant cable, running the drop cable to each house and the termination box, and a basic GPON CPE. Individual ISPs can sell layer 3 (IP) services on top of that and provide the billing, customer support and value-added features like triple-play TV/phone etc. In this arrangement the city ISP runs what is effectively a layer 2 network only, and hands customer traffic in aggregate to an ISP at an NNI. I have to admit that I am much more skeptical of the concept of cities suddenly developing the deep, long term knowledge base and experience to run last mile access IP networks at a scale of hundreds of thousands of customers. I just can't see many cities successfully getting their own ASN, setting up infrastructure at major IX points, acquiring significant chunks of ARIN ipv4 and ipv6 space, and so forth. Not unless they really throw a lot of money at poaching network engineering talent away from ISPs. If you take a look at peeringdb and pick a random residential last mile broadband specialist ISP with 50-100Gbps+ of traffic, I've literally never seen in my life a city government with the on-staff skill set to successfully implement something like that. If you want to see how this has been done successfully on the municipality-as-wholesaler end, take a look at Grant and Douglas counties in WA state, which operate 1Gbps FTTH last mile networks much as I described in the above paragraphs. In those two cases, the local county government is also the electrical grid last mile operator. So they already have on staff crews of bucket trucks, pole placing equipment, all of the lineman-related stuff required. Not to mention the support infrastructure like HR/admin/accounting is shared between the county last mile fiber network, and the last mile electrical grid service. There's economies of scale in doing something like that as a combined effort.

dalbasal 6y ago

There's infinite nuance and meta game to referendums, but that aside... (1) Referendums seem able to produce highly decisive vote counts on otherwise controversial political issues. Interesting, in itself. (2) Issues that parties are at odds about aren't necessarily 50-50 issues. (3) Referendums can (sometimes) produce democratic legitimacy in ways that representative politics cannot. All interesting, in terms of enabling decision making. Referendums seem to be gaining a little momentum. I think one hidden advantage is the fact that referendums structurally enforce a separation of idea and execution.

lumberingjack 6y ago

Let me tell you a story about adelphia cable in 1999. The government paid them to install fiber optic networking in my rural neighborhood we were told we were near a backbone so we were going to be a test bed for extremely fast internet 99. 2001 rolls around these trucks are everywhere installing glass in the ground. 2003ish Adelphia cable goes through a legal battle with the larger cable companies they're accusing them of all kinds of stuff. Adelphia cable is bought out by Time Warner Cable the fiber optic network is never turned on even to this day every once in awhile I'm digging in a flower bed and I un Earth the glass wire that's been there for 20 years. Fastest internet available here is from former TWC which is now spectrum $80 30/10mbps.

grahamburger 6y ago

If you are interested in doing something like this I'd love to chat! I run a website about related topics[1]. I'm working now with a few different organizations on a kind of franchised ISP model. [1] https://startyourownisp.com https://startyourownisp.com

jariel 6y ago

"they’re fed up with monopolies like Comcast." Why do they feel a different monopoly will be better? There's no reason to believe that the local government owned monopoly will be more efficient or more effectively managed. It could be, but not necessarily. These 'grass is greener on the other side' type referendums are difficult if they don't really capture the issue. The 'root cause' is the single point of access and we could all feasibly use more intelligent laws there. They tried that 20 years ago with the concept of 'CLEC' and there were all sorts of laws put in place, it didn't work out very well. There may be other opportunities. For example, it may be possible to make the 'last mile' the responsibility of the city or county, to the point wherein they get the wiring to a proper exchange where there's compeitition. Then if people want fiber to the home, they can pay for it themselves kind of thing.

stjohnswarts 6y ago

They better be ready for the telcos and cable companies to come in and start litigating for years about "unfair competition"

HashThis 6y ago

ISP market is rigged. Free market competition would make citizens never interested in this, unless it was rigged. If Google w/Google Fiber can't enter markets, then nobody can. Customers are locked into contracts for no good reason, except breaking competition. Good prices only go to first time customers, in order to rent seek and rig prices as customers stay.