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The Washington state legislature has voted to end limits on municipal broadband
- coliveira 6y agoThis is mostly a fight between Google/Netflix and traditional telecoms. Google wants to be able to connect everyone with subsidized resources from municipalities, telecoms want individuals to pay for the privilege.
- ed25519FUUU 6y agoI think most people don’t really care about the “why” and instead just want faster and more affordable broadband.
- 908B64B197 6y ago> with subsidized resources from municipalities Is it subsidized? Adding Fiber lazily when repaving roads and re-doing sewers is easier for a city. Their crew is already on the ground! And all they have to do is sell it at a price where the city doesn't lose money. No profit to squeeze. There's a lot more houses where decent internet is possible, if you accept that 0$ profit.
- coliveira 6y agoAll of this requires initial investment. Probably new loans that will have to be repaid. In the end Google will just get to use the infrastructure free and clean. It is the Uber of internet access.
- 908B64B197 6y ago> Probably new loans that will have to be repaid Cities can borrow at rock-bottom prices. Not only that, but municipal broadband will lead to higher property values, so it indirectly profits the city.
- judge2020 6y agoEven still, people buy houses without looking at internet options then are surprised post-close when all they can get is 25mbps satellite internet. Property values aren't materially affected by internet access.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoNot true. Citations are results of the first page of the below search. https://www.google.com/search?q=property+values+internet+access https://www.google.com/search?q=property+values+internet+acc...
- judge2020 6y agoYou're right, but that first result (in the google info card) is marketing material that links to another article about a study. The second article actually has scholarly sources for claims it makes: https://realtorparty.realtor/community-outreach/rural-outreach-initiative/news-resources/impact-of-broadband https://realtorparty.realtor/community-outreach/rural-outrea... Basically, it generally amounts to a very low change in property value, although studies are conflicting on whether having fast internet matters much, compared to having average internet: > disconnecting an average property from a high-speed first-generation broadband connection (offering Internet speed up to 8 Mbit/s) would depreciate its value by 2.8%. In contrast, upgrading such a property to a faster connection (offering speeds up to 24 Mbit/s) would increase its value by no more than 1%. > Our estimates suggest that there are declining returns to speed availability, with access to at least some type of Internet being more valuable than having only a very high-speed connection accessible. > Results show that single-family homes with access to a 25 Mbps broadband connection have a price that is about $5,977, or 3%, more than similar homes in neighborhoods with 1 Mbps. The rural premium is lower at $5,099
- 908B64B197 6y agoThe thing is: they don't have to increase that much for the investment to pay off.
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- woah 6y agoIt's a tiny, lightweight plastic cable. How can the municipal government handle transporting hundreds of gallons of water to and from your house every day using massive physical infrastructure, but a tiny lightweight cable suddenly needs huge loans?
- trhway 6y ago>subsidized resources from municipalities, telecoms want individuals to pay for the privilege. greatest municipal subsidy is monopoly, and thus telecoms in many places have it both ways - i.e. the monopoly (or almost one) to extract payments from individuals. In this case the Google/Netflix seems to be more preferable, and they really want high bandwidth for you vs. telecoms to whom upgrading network is pure expense to be avoided whenever possible.
- jcranmer 6y agoIf you've followed Ars Technica in the past, you would have learned that the major telecoms have begged for billions from the government to expand their infrastructure, pocketed the money, and failed to do any expansion whatsoever. And then raise prices on consumers despite delivering them no extra benefits whatsoever. There's a reason why the telecoms industry graces the bottom of consumer satisfaction lists.
- vkou 6y agoActually, I think it graces the bottom of those lists because interacting with telco customer support is like pulling teeth.
- russh 6y agoLet me tell you it is just as rough on the other end of the phone. "Yeah, I just got this email from somebody I don't know but it had an attachment I want to read. My anti-virus will not let me open it even after I disabled it. What is wrong with your email server? I even sent it to my laptop and Excel won't let me open it as well, what is wrong with your email server? Oh never mind it finally opened but it looks blank and now Outlook is acting weird, what is wrong with your email server?"
- coliveira 6y agoInteracting with Google-style companies is the same, the only difference is tat you just never have a human contact.
- vkou 6y agoAs a normie, I've never in my life had to interact with a tech company's CS. Shit either just works, or I give up and switch to a competitor. I have, however, wasted days of my life listening to elevator music interrupted by annoying, incredibly loud upsells, going through the same dumb, patronizing troubleshooting steps with customer support, multiple times for the same incident.
- walrus01 6y ago> This is mostly a fight between Google/Netflix google/netflix really doesn't care how the residential customers' IP traffic, in aggregate, gets to the nearest major city's IX point. They're equally happy to peer with things like centurylink's GPON network. Gigantic content sources will peer and offer caching appliances (netflix) to any ISP with a sufficient volume of downstream eyeball traffic. You're trying to write it as if google/netflix and similar have some nefarious plan to interfere in various cities' last mile fiber networks, which is not the case at all.
- arsome 6y agoWonder if there's more of a co-op approach that could be used to avoid municipal broadband being sold off when it's politically expedient to do so at some random point in the future.
- pbourke 6y agoWonderful! This bill has been submitted for several legislative sessions now, and it’s great to see it finally pass. I am really looking forward to getting fiber from our county PUD and finally ditching Comcast.
- renewiltord 6y agoMuni broadband is a terrible idea on its own. You essentially lock in the present SOTA as nearly all future state since few munis will upgrade and almost all will, instead, add blockers to competing better services. Munis also have poor expertise in comparison to private ISPs. However, even given all this it is obvious why muni broadband is a good idea. Currently, even low-disruption cheap services like Sonic's microtrenching are blocked in municipalities where wealthier people (who already have broadband) and their children (who performatively hate "capitalism" or "the wealthy" - defined by adding another 9 to whatever percentile they're currently in) oppose private ISPs adding service to everyone. This means that the best way to connect the rest of America is to offer some means that satisfies the political angle of 'socialism'. This will be good for the Googles and Netflixes and bad for private ISPs unless munis decide to outsource the actual rollout and operation to them. So, on the whole, I'm pro-muni-broadband and I hope we will find some way to combat the ossification that will result from this. EDIT: I can't respond to you guys because I'm rate-limited but if you want to have a convo, email in profile.
- walrus01 6y ago> Muni broadband is a terrible idea. Tell that to the people on gigabit GPON in Grant, Douglas, Chelan, Benton and other counties in WA state right now. The county PUD electrical grid operator builds the fiber and splitters, and sells L2 transport services to independent ISPs. The ISPs do the layer 3 IP part, customer support, billing, etc. It works great. Do you know why those counties built their last mile fiber networks? Because the incumbent telco (centurylink or frontier, for the most part) and cable (comcast or charter) private entities in the same service territory were showing no signs of building anything better than 20 Mbps down x 2.5 Mbps up.
- nine_k 6y agoDon't private ISPs behave this way because competition with them was outright banned? I remember most cable companies agreed to do all the heavy digging and cabling only in exchange for being exclusive service providers in the area. So the ISPs may formally be private, but market forces are absent, with predictable consequences. A municipal network breaks this monopoly, adds competition, so, it's good.
- hyperrail 6y agoEven without these changes, Washington state's utilities and governments have already been able to sell Internet service, but mostly only on a wholesale basis - they can advertise, but only to direct you to third-party reseller ISPs. In rural central Washington, several county electric utility government districts already offer gigabit to the home through their resellers (Chelan, Douglas, Grant among them). From my understanding, that infrastructure and the cheap hydro power attracted Microsoft to build multiple cloud data centers in Quincy, Grant County.
- mtnGoat 6y agoFor many years the county wide intranets were faster than any connection they had to the internet. Some of the business around town had crazy fast speeds between sites but the internet was still slow. I think once the DCs moved in, that all changed.
- nostromo 6y agoI’m sure Seattle will try to do this, even though I wish they wouldn’t. Seattle’s utility companies, owned by the city, are poorly managed and keep having budget shortfalls despite charging very high rates for services. Electricity costs, for example, are growing at several multiples of inflation. Despite having more access to fresh water than just about any US city not on the Great Lakes, our water and sewage rates are higher than desert cities like Vegas and LA. Who knows where all the money goes? I know one individual personally that was paid a six-figure salary by the electric utility to study how the utility grid was systemically racist. Best I can tell he wrote some emails and made a few presentations and that’s about it. We also have one of the most expensive sewage treatment plants on Earth, which has a museum and wedding / event space for some reason. We spent more on that than Dubai spent on the Burj Khalifa. Maybe that’s why there’s a budget shortfall.
- walrus01 6y agoI can think of a lot of places in WA that need this more urgently than within the city limits of Seattle, however... Seattle itself is fairly well covered by a combination of centurylink, wave and comcast, depending on the exact location. Big chunks of single family detached housing in Seattle where the centurylink copper cables were >90% aerial have now been overbuilt with gigabit class GPON. In addition to the gigabit MDU/apartment services on offer from wave and competitors.
- FireBeyond 6y agoOlympia. State Capital. You have Comcast. And Centurylink will give you up to 8mbps in many places. Oof.
- divbzero 6y agoWhat doesn’t work in one place can work in others. As another comment describes [1] several Washington counties along the Columbia River Valley have gigabit fiber built out by public utility districts. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26828097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26828097
- samstave 6y agoThe question is the individual counties or city... I wanted to implement muni broad band in Alameda, but they said they wouldn’t allow it as they gave a contract to only allow Comcast or att.. However common came along and gave awesome wifi... don’t know if they are still operating? Too bad about the ubiquity leak, as it would be awesome if their radio tech could get some long haul signals bouncing around remoter parts as well.
- foundart 6y agocommon was acquired by monkeybrains.net in the last few months
- breput 6y agoComcast and friends are going to deliver 10 Gigabit symmetric Internet for $122/month or less? This is already the reality of municipal broadband in a small college town in the middle of nowhere Iowa. https://www.cfu.net/tv-internet/shop-plans/internet https://www.cfu.net/tv-internet/shop-plans/internet
- pxeboot 6y agoIt is amazing how rural internet can be great in one area and non-existent in another. There are islands in Alaska with gigabit service now, yet I know somebody who lives ~3 miles from a state capitol who can't get more than 3mbit DSL.
- rataata_jr 6y agoTime to move to Alaska then.
- _robbywashere 6y agoSo you have this as a very example of bad government policy against the best interest of the people. How is it a surprise that there’s a housing crisis, that they scape goat Amazon for?
- mjevans 6y agoI am QUITE ready for real competition in this market. 100 USD a month for Internet? OK, that's not so bad. 1 gbit down, it's not as good as other places (Edit: for price) but thats... 35 mbit up? That's really the maximum offered; how will I ever use online backup services? 1.2 TB (I think Byte?) cap for data, IRRESPECTIVE OF PLAN SPEED, and a 50 USD per month charge for lifting that? Highway robbery.
- JKCalhoun 6y agoSorry, I just woke up from a long sleep. When did $100 USD become "not so bad"?
- balls187 6y agoWhen Seattle area software engineering salaries range from $98-170k
- pas 6y agoBut the 100/month is 1200/year, and the 100K-170K is before taxes, right? How much is that after taxes? Is there sales tax on that 100/month? Internet access seems to be a significant part of that disposable income?
- balls187 6y agoEven at a marginal rate of 40%, that $60k-102k a year. At 1200/year, that's 2-1.2% of aftertax income. Also this is for gigabit home internet, which could be considered a premium service.
- pas 6y agoHere (Hungary) Telekom (the subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom) offers 2G/1G for ~30 USD / month. Interestingly the median pay (after taxes) here is ~710 USD / month (8520 / year).
- hackermeows 6y agoI’m sure this has its negatives . I lived in Seattle and have experienced the issues with the current system first hand , when moving I looked at houses in historically redlined parts of the city , some of the houses I looked at had abysmal options for internet 7mbps was the max I was getting . There’s only two companies that provide service Centurylink and Comcast , I tired calling and visiting offices of both companies to find out if there was any chance I could get better speeds in the future , there was none , each company said these areas were under the area of the other and refused to install upgrades . I’ve also moved around a lot in the city , each place had different broadband prices from Comcast , if there were other competing services you could get 1000 mbps for 70-100 $ but if there are no other competitors in the building you are in you are paying the same 70-100 for 45 mbps speeds . These companies have stopped innovating completely and are only doing rent-seeking . Any change is better than the status quo .
- gorgoiler 6y agoJust lay the fibre please, then open up the ISP market. I don’t want my ISP run by the people responsible for fixing roads, but I’m happy to let these road-diggers install the cable conduits. It really is their political and moral responsibility to do so. The roads belong to the taxpayer: we’ve paid for them and yet they are failing to provide us the glass fibre we so desperately want.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jcgoette 6y agoRelevant Planet Money https://www.npr.org/2020/05/29/865908114/small-america-vs-big-internet https://www.npr.org/2020/05/29/865908114/small-america-vs-bi...