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> NOT even close to rural In Washington you can sometimes do better in certain rural counties thanks to municipal fiber networks maintained by the local PUD. H

> NOT even close to rural In Washington you can sometimes do better in certain rural counties thanks to municipal fiber networks maintained by the local PUD. However, the rules surrounding them appeared complicated last time I checked and last mile infrastructure varies wildly by location.

mjevans 6y ago
They are, and IIRC they prevent real PUDs, what you're referring to is probably a private co-operative not technically a PUD. I believe sources have attributed the laws to incumbent providers (Think Comcast, USWest and either GTE or Verizon at the time, and whomever those properties have been resold / bought out by since then).
- toast0 6y ago
  My county (Kitsap) seems to have a municipal PUD. From what I can tell, the rules prevent them from providing retail service; but if they service your building, you can pick from a list of ISPs that provide service. There's some sort of fallback option, where if there's no retail ISPs, the PUD can provide retail service; but I suspect it's pretty easy to provide retail service to any customer on the network once you're an ISP on the network. Maybe if you didn't want to drive all over the county to get on premises. What would be really nice (in my opinion) is if there was a way to share installation costs without organizing. I've got an installation quote where it's about $30k to build to my pole (and then $20k more to get from my pole to my building, because I have underground utilities from the pole and a long driveway). If I organize a bunch of neighbors along the route, we can share costs on that $30k; but if I just install for me, everyone else along the route can use it at no cost to them. It would be nice if I could pay the $30k now, and get some of that rebated later if other people use the line in some near term future. Although, probably the neighbors would just wait it out; Comcast serves most of them (but not me), and CenturyLink gets me 80/10 mbps on bonded VDSL2, so I imagine most of them can get pretty similar too.

mjevans 6y ago

They are, and IIRC they prevent real PUDs, what you're referring to is probably a private co-operative not technically a PUD. I believe sources have attributed the laws to incumbent providers (Think Comcast, USWest and either GTE or Verizon at the time, and whomever those properties have been resold / bought out by since then).

toast0 6y ago
My county (Kitsap) seems to have a municipal PUD. From what I can tell, the rules prevent them from providing retail service; but if they service your building, you can pick from a list of ISPs that provide service. There's some sort of fallback option, where if there's no retail ISPs, the PUD can provide retail service; but I suspect it's pretty easy to provide retail service to any customer on the network once you're an ISP on the network. Maybe if you didn't want to drive all over the county to get on premises. What would be really nice (in my opinion) is if there was a way to share installation costs without organizing. I've got an installation quote where it's about $30k to build to my pole (and then $20k more to get from my pole to my building, because I have underground utilities from the pole and a long driveway). If I organize a bunch of neighbors along the route, we can share costs on that $30k; but if I just install for me, everyone else along the route can use it at no cost to them. It would be nice if I could pay the $30k now, and get some of that rebated later if other people use the line in some near term future. Although, probably the neighbors would just wait it out; Comcast serves most of them (but not me), and CenturyLink gets me 80/10 mbps on bonded VDSL2, so I imagine most of them can get pretty similar too.