25 ms·

The number of cities with municipal broadband has jumped over 4x in two years

584 points by sharkweek 5y ago

blt 5y ago
> Conversely, the specter of governments operating broadband networks in competition with the private sector, or of state or local governments serving as both regulators and owners of competing broadband networks, could stifle investment or reduce private-sector access to capital. > Larry Irving, 2014 Oh, no! Reduce private-sector access to capital? How will society continue? Seriously though, there is plenty of money to be made in private sector manufacturing and installation of networking equipment. The point of public internet is to place the infrastructure planning and the mediation of access under control of a body that is interested in long-term societal benefit instead of short-term profit.
- linsomniac 5y ago
  In our area we had two choices: Copper cat-3 that was installed in 1971, or coax that was installed in the '80s. The first provider got billions of dollars of increased tariffs by promising to deliver fiber to the home by the year 2000. They had their chance to demonstrate they were interested in investing in the infrastructure. 3-4 months ago we got our municipal fiber connection, gigabit symmetric, no caps, and it's glorious! We can also get 10-gig, but that's $300/mo and I don't have the internal network to handle it.
  - legutierr 5y ago
    This sounds great. Where are you? It seems like a promising place to open a business.
    - linsomniac 5y ago
      Much of the Northern Front Range of Colorado has this sort of setup rolling or rolled out: Longmont, Loveland, Fort Collins. I'm in the latter. I'm one of the earlier deploys, but they plan to have the whole city deployed in the next year-ish. My office is expecting to be built out in around 4 months. Pricing for residential is: $59.95 (landed) for gigabit (symmetric, no caps), or $299.95/mo for 10-gig. This is Internet only, they also have phone and TV. For businesses, the pricing is different: 250M/500M/1G is $99.95/199.95/399.95. Pretty much directly competitive with Comcast Business pricing we've been paying, but with much, much more outbound bandwidth.
    - artificialLimbs 5y ago
      Bismarck AR and several surrounding communities have fiber through a Coop. They ran 12 strands to my wall. Plans only show 1Gb on their sales brochure. Maybe they don't have infra for 10G yet... I haven't bothered to ask. https://www.catc.net/services/internet https://www.catc.net/services/internet
  - aksss 5y ago
    This sounds exactly like the residential situation in my city, minus the happy ending.
  - judge2020 5y ago
    It'd be nice if there were a registry of cities/companies with a 2 or 10 gigabit residential fiber offering. Google has 2gbit but (for Atlanta) it's only at specific apartment communities: https://fiber.google.com/2gig/ https://fiber.google.com/2gig/ https://fiber.google.com/cities/atlanta/#:~:text=Find%20a,Fiber%20neighborhood https://fiber.google.com/cities/atlanta/#:~:text=Find%20a,Fi...
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  > Oh, no! Reduce private-sector access to capital? How will society continue? All that private sector access and 95% of people still have the same 3Mbps upload and slow latency as 20 years ago when cable broadband first came out in the US. Zero reason to not have fiber be delivered the same way as electric, gas, and water.
  - gruez 5y ago
    >Zero reason to not have fiber be delivered the same way as electric, gas, and water. ...provided by private companies? eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolidated_Edison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolidated_Edison, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Gas_and_Electric_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Gas_and_Electric_Compa..., or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Water_Works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Water_Works
    - HarryHirsch 5y ago
      Isn't Con.Ed. the one with the continuous transformer explosions because they cut maintenance to the bone? As far as I know in Berlin they are considering re-nationalizing the waterworks because the current owner fails to adequately maintain the infrastructure.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      Utilities have government oversight. I’m not sure why they even bother with the distinction, since pricing and whatnot has to go through government approval. In contrast to internet, where Comcast and their peers can do whatever they want whenever they want.
    - ashtonkem 5y ago
      If we can have Comcast provide service and regulate is aggressively as we do power companies, that seems like a great deal to me.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- ouid 5y ago
  I believe that the ISP monopolies are also interested in long term profit.
  - HarryHirsch 5y ago
    Sure, consequently they invest in lobbying instead of physical plant, it provides a better return on investment.
  - colejohnson66 5y ago
    But there’s a way to do that: invest in infrastructure. If everyone in town offers 50/10 and you build out fiber for 1000/1000, you’ll get customers from the other companies. But no one does that; they just don’t compete.
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      If Comcast then offered 150/10 at a discount if you bought cable TV services from them, they could still compete favorably against municipal broadband for many households.
- HarryHirsch 5y ago
  Conversely, the specter of governments operating water and sewage plants in competition with the private sector, or of state or local governments serving as both regulators and owners of competing water and sewage plants, could stifle investment or reduce private-sector access to capital. One shudders to think what Comcast Water and Sewage would be like.
  - cure 5y ago
    > One shudders to think what Comcast Water and Sewage would be like. It's funny, caps on Comcast Water and Sewage would be illegal in many states!
  - colejohnson66 5y ago
    Our records show that you’ve flushed your toilet more than 100 times this billing period. Each addition flush will incur an addition $10/flush fee. Thank you for choosing Comcast!
    - aksss 5y ago
      Or you can opt for throttled flushes.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    At least we could crap on them for a change.
- dv_dt 5y ago
  I would say under-investment by private holders of last-mile infrastructure holds back a lot of other business sectors as well as quality of life for people in those cities. This from a city dweller who watched the mega telecom extract profits while installed infrastructure decayed to unusable in my last neighborhood. I recall getting sent technicians telling me, well they don't have enough diagnostic units to actually figure out this problem, but I'll switch you to another pair and you can see if that works - call us back if it doesn't.
sjg007 5y ago
With permanent WFH municipal broadband is a major bonus. I live somewhere with fiber and it is glorious.
rohansingh 5y ago
If you are a software engineer, working on municipal broadband or starting a local ISP is a really intense way to expand your skills. For the past year, I've been volunteering at NYC Mesh (nycmesh.net), which is a non-profit that provides fixed wireless broadband in New York. I thought I knew a thing or two about networking — hell, I've even given a talk in the network track at LinuxCon in the past — but working on NYC Mesh really showed me the limits of that knowledge and has helped me learn a ton more.
- hpoe 5y ago
  I've always wanted to expand my networking skills and understanding. Any suggestions on how to get involved in something like this?
  - rglover 5y ago
    https://startyourownisp.com/ https://startyourownisp.com/
    - IgorPartola 5y ago
      Wow, that was straight and to the point breakdown of costs: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jjUYOQMuZ4cRyTv1M5X8HGtrKFiW96_gNlfG8BBzRN0/edit#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jjUYOQMuZ4cRyTv1M5X8... Honestly, this doesn't sound like a bad idea in my area. I can likely put the tower right on my own land and immediately cover a decently sized neighborhood.
      - narwally 5y ago
        It even has things like zip-ties and other miscellaneous items priced out. It's still a rough estimate for a minimal install, but I've undertaken DIY home improvement projects that were in this price range and my estimates weren't quite this detailed.
  - rohansingh 5y ago
    Sure, here's some ideas: 1. Join the NYC Mesh Slack (slack.nycmesh.net) even if you're not in NYC, just to see how it's run. 2. Read Brian Hall's post, "How to start a community network": https://www.nycmesh.net/blog/how/ https://www.nycmesh.net/blog/how/ 3. Read Graham Castleton's "Start Your Own WISP" guide: https://startyourownisp.com/ https://startyourownisp.com/ 4. Look around and find folks in your area with a similar interest. If you're in or near a city of any size, I bet there's somebody who's already started or is trying to start something.
minikites 5y ago
>Still, many people who have access to and use municipal broadband think rather highly of the service. In fact, in a 2019 report conducted by PCMag, the authors of the study found that many municipal broadband providers offer some of the fastest internet speeds in the country. Maybe we can finally start chipping away at 40+ years of conservative propaganda about how useless and ineffective government is. Government projects and services are not evil, wasteful, or inferior, that's propaganda talking.
- giantg2 5y ago
  "Government projects and services are not evil, wasteful, or inferior, that's propaganda talking." They can be. There just needs to be the proper balance of oversight. The lower down the government chain the projects are run, the more control the people have over them. For example, I wouldn't want federal or even state run internet, but municipal or even county internet would be easier to deal with since my voice would represent a larger share of the customers/votes and has a higher likelihood of being addressed. At the higher levels, one locality might have an issue but only represent 1% of the customers/vote, so you could end up with that minority being neglected.
  - minikites 5y ago
    >I wouldn't want federal or even state run internet How is Comcast or any other large ISP meaningfully different from this? At least you get a vote at the federal level, Comcast has zero reason to listen to you.
    - prophesi 5y ago
      I think that's the point. City > State > Federal > Telcom Monopolies in terms of your voice being heard.
      - sokoloff 5y ago
        I agree that City > State > Comcast. I think Comcast > Federal, though, in terms of service level and individual voice. (With Comcast, my voice is 20dB under the noise floor. With the feds, it’s 10dB lower than that.) Plus, if you get something wrong federally, it’s enormously difficult, expensive, time-consuming, and unlikely to get fixed. If one or a few states get something wrong, you have as easier time showing comparables and proving that a better way is possible.
avhception 5y ago
In Germany, there is a clear pattern: - a community (often, but not always, rural) pleads one of our big ISPs (almost always deutsche Telekom, since we gifted our tax-funded telephone network to them) to provide better service (or service at all) - dt. Telekom laughs in their faces and tells them to screw off - the community gets together and finances building a network of their own, sometimes even involving locals to dig the trenches for the fibers. They calculate with a sharp pencil and need customers to break even. - dt. Telekom notices this and quickly deploys their own network, steamrolling the new local ISP with their big marketing budget and brand name - the small local ISP goes bankrupt, city initiatives stop etc. And to add insult to injury, dt. Telekom then uses it's customers as leverage to bully content providers into crappy peering deals. They're also guzzling tax money by the millions in public-private partnerships all while screwing the public over.
- _jal 5y ago
  At least your monopoly responds to threats by providing the service they monopolize. In the US, step 4 becomes "pass a law banning muni efforts and lie about existing coverage", and local communities keep the same crappy, expensive service.
  - Wohlf 5y ago
    >At least your monopoly responds to threats by providing the service they monopolize. True but the grass isn't really greener, Germany lags behind the US in average broadband speeds, mean and median for both directions.
  - mjevans 5y ago
    It's been that way in WA State for like 20 years... and will hopefully soon end once the Governor signs into law one of the two passed bills recently discussed. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26803426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26803426 (The better but not perfect 1336) https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=1336&Initiative=false&Year=2021 https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=1336&Initiativ... (The grand standing and barely a bone to the consumer 5383) https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=5383&Year=2021&Initiative=false https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=5383&Year=2021...
fiftyfifty 5y ago
The city I live in voted for municipal broadband in 2017. Our local private internet provider Comcast fought it at every turn, Comcast spent millions fighting municipal broadband in a city with about 150,000 residents. We started rolling out our own broadband to residents in 2020. It took a couple of years for the city to hire and build up a department and lay the infrastructure to support it city wide and I finally got the service at the beginning of this year, and it has been awesome. We have gigabit internet up AND DOWN for $59.95/month. What really burns me is the private providers we have, Comcast and CenturyLink, have been here for decades and could have done exactly what our city has done: run fiber to every neighborhood and house. It would have been cheaper for them too, they already had the infrastructure in place. They chose not to make the investment and instead spent millions trying to prevent us from providing better service for ourselves. I hope everyone has the chance to get better/cheaper internet service for themselves and their community, so far it has worked out great for us.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  Capitalism is wildly inefficient for infrastructure, and it’s really frustrating how often we have to relearn this as a society. There’s a damn good reason why the city owns the pipes that bring water to and sewage from your house, and why the power lines are owned by a heavily regulated monopoly. The physical infrastructure to run internet to everyone’s homes should be owned by the state and responsive to the citizens it serves and not the shareholders who profit.
  - amelius 5y ago
    What makes cable companies different from, say, a duopoly in mobile phone operating systems?
    - ashtonkem 5y ago
      Land usage, mostly. Cell companies need space for towers and fiber to those antennas. It turns out that these don’t take up all that much space, so it’s trivially possible for multiple cell phone companies to setup towers covering the same customers. Cable companies however have to deal with the “last mile” problem, which is both massively more expensive than installing more centralized infrastructure, but also involves installing infrastructure on much more restricted areas.
orliesaurus 5y ago
I remember some other HN user who started their own Fiber ISP and did a "show HN" a couple of years back. It was super insightful how they started as a moonshot project for their own benefit and the one of their community. Forgot your username (and even searching I couldn't find the specific thread) but if for some reason you read this I hope you're still successful!
- sangnoir 5y ago
  Are you referring to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24952040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24952040 ?
  - dang 5y ago
    That one was Starting a Telephone Company in 2019, or How I Built Fiber to My Neighbors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24952040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24952040 - Oct 2020 (20 comments) There have also been: Start Your Own ISP - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20726906 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20726906 - Aug 2019 (95 comments) Launch HN: Necto (YC W18) – ISP Starter Kit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17067144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17067144 - May 2018 (78 comments) Start Your Own ISP - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16160394 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16160394 - Jan 2018 (193 comments) I feel like I remember more of these too...
INTPenis 5y ago
A little anecdote about municipal broadband in Sweden. Normally it's great and I love it. The ones I've seen have been run by the municipal real estate owner. They're the ones who build apartment buildings in a certain municipality but they're sometimes half privately owned. In my current hometown they branched off a separate private company to manage the broadband. Anyways, in a little town where I lived, a street of about 6-7 apartment buildings banded together and contacted Telia first about digging fiber to their buildings. Telia gave them a disgusting deal which would have restricted all the tenants to the Telia ISP. They've done this before even in bigger cities where they sign a deal with one real estate company so all their buildings only have Telia. My SO at the time actually worked for Telia but she was a clever girl because she realized you could go directly to the municipal broadband and have them dig the fiber. That way all the tenants could choose from any ISP in the country and not be restricted to just Telia. This even raises the desirability of the building for young people who favour Bahnhof as ISP for example.
- pottertheotter 5y ago
  A lot of the apartment complexes here on the U.S. have started doing these exclusivity deals with an ISP so you can only buy from one, even if more options exist in your market. The real estate owners make money off it.
  - thwerfhq3w9 5y ago
    At least in my experience being close to the multifamily industry, Google Fiber offers installing 1gig for free in the apartments but explicitly lays out that there are no provisions against installing another internet provider (besides something along the lines of 'you cant allow another ISP to install if they have an exclusivity agreement themselves'). Spectrum is the big culprit in this; while the one I was involved in didn't have an actual exclusivity agreement, they did have an exclusive advertising agreement where you couldn't mention competing ISPs to prospects or in marketing material.
- ap-andersson 5y ago
  I just want to add some more information about this. First of all, even if municipal broadband in different forms are very common here in Sweden, its not the only option. There are some areas of cities or certain estate owners that have deals with ISPs where they install the fiber and have exclusive right to sell broadband services. This can happen in cities with municipal broadband, so different areas of a city can have different providers. The most common form of municipal broadband here is that the company that manages the water and electricity in the city (a company owned by the city but are run to make a profit) also installs fiber cables (is a network operator). They are going to dig up streets anyway, right? I have never seen a fiber cable above ground in my life here. They manage the cables and install switches etc to get the signal from the customers home to a central location in the city where it can be handed over to the ISPs. The company is not an ISP and does not sell any services in the network, but they allow any ISP that want to sell services with their infrastructure to do so. More and more this is done by standardized APIs (since one ISP can sell services within many different fiber networks), but also more manually with web portals for smaller companies or for troubleshooting etc. The ISP usually pays the network operator for number of subscriptions and/or changes done (connections/disconnections etc). The ISP can then sell services to customers and compete with the others both on price but also on how good their support, bundles etc are. That means that in a medium sized city (for Sweden at least... ~150k residents in my hometowns municipality) there can be up to 20 different ISPs that you can choose between and compare in a portal. All with the same cables and one ethernet jack in the apartments (or a fiber box in houses). Any ISP can deliver the service within a few minutes. So while the municipality has a hand in the fiber market they are not a competitor to the private companies, they simply enable the ISPs to compete in an open market to the benefit to the customers. The same model is used for electricity aswell. One fee goes to the municipal company that manages the physical infrastrcuture and the electricity meters while the cost of the actual electricity used go to the private company you have a contract with. This is the Open Acces Network model and is very common here in Sweden. There are also open networks operated by private companies. For example both Telia (which is both a network operator and a big ISP, previously state owned now privateized) and Telenor (the same deal but from Norway) operate both open networks and "closed" networks (where they have a monopoly). There is also another, less common, model where the municipality has created a separate company that places physical fiber cables under the streets but does not offer an active network (dark fiber). This model is used by Stokab in Stockholm and was in part created to prevent too many distruptions by private companies constantly digging up the streets. Then all ISPs can rent fiber on equal terms. tl;dr: Fiber cables are in many places in Sweden handled like a utility and private ISPs can all use them to sell their services to customers on equal terms which create competition that is great for the end user.
xyst 5y ago
There's a municipal ISP in Chattanooga, TN that offers their residents gigabit internet at ~$68 per month. They even offer 10 gigabit internet (symmetrical) to the home. These offerings blow the major ISPs out of the water, and even in some cases are on par with Google Fiber (at a cheaper price). The way the system is now, most areas/communities are only served by a single ISP. In the past 5 years of moving in the city, I have only had the choice of selecting Spectrum.
- aksss 5y ago
  What are the financials behind this? I only ask because it’s pretty damned expensive to build a network and then do the O&M. $68/mo sounds like very old broadband prices that were subsidized by revenue from other channels (bundling). Does $68 get the city to a break even or is this running at a loss? Not criticizing, just curious how that pencils out - what true cost is.
  - wing-_-nuts 5y ago
    IIRC they ran fiber with the power lines in order to enable a smart grid. They realized they had so much spare bandwidth that they could sell internet service. Basically everyone with a power connection to EPB can get fiber internet? Brilliant move. I'm considering Chattanooga as a retirement location. Lots of outdoor recreation, no state taxes and I can supposedly get fiber internet anywhere I can get connected to the power grid? Sign me up!
    - NationalPark 5y ago
      Wouldn't it make more sense to retire in a place with higher taxes and more services, since your income will probably decline as you stop working and begin living off your savings?
      - wing-_-nuts 5y ago
        You could be right. I've never seen a good comparison of services offered in one place or another. One other consideration is that I'd probably be doing a roth conversion ladder of my 401k so I'd owe state taxes there, but yes, it would be a fraction of my current income.
subtlestorm 5y ago
Is there a way to search addresses / cities by Fiber connection ? Say I want to move to a city while holding a remote job, I would love to have a fiber connection and I found its really to search by address.
- iptrans 5y ago
  Alas, no such service exists. Even the FCC can’t get proper broadband coverage data by the zip code, not to mention by address.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    Redfin/Zillow/trulia/realtor.com should figure out now to scrape ISP websites and show what type of internet is available for a house. I had to manually put in addresses when I was searching for a home to make sure it had symmetric fiber.
    - iptrans 5y ago
      ISPs would more likely than not take exception to such scraping. Even if they weren’t reporting accurate data, which they don’t always do.
Hammershaft 5y ago
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/02/gop-plan-for-broadband-competition-would-ban-city-run-networks-across-us/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/02/gop-plan-for-bro... Remember that Republicans tried to ban municipal broadband federally only two months ago! Just an absurdly, transparently corrupt move.
- grecy 5y ago
  How anyone thinks corporate lobbying is good for anyone other than corrupt politicians and corporate giants is a mystery I will never understand.
  - parineum 5y ago
    Actual lobbying is such a small part of the money that goes to politicians that it's a red herring. The source of corruption is through PACs that support candidates without the candidates consent or guidance (either ostensibly or actually). You can either give a candidate a few thousand dollars directly or you can spend an unlimited amount of money telling people how great you think the candidate is. Only the former is lobbying.
    - grecy 5y ago
      I'm not really interested in discussing semantics, but rather the root issue. Money in Politics, especially when it's perfectly legal, is a massive, massive problem. It's literally impossible to get fair and impartial leaders who will make decisions in the interest of the common person when corporations are spending millions and millions. Right now a judge sitting on the highest court in the entire country is hearing a case involving a company who openly and directly paid to have her elected into that position. I don't care if that person is from the right or left (or middle), there is no universe where that is a good thing, or should be allowed. Having a Supreme Court Justice you paid preside over your court case sounds like a very perverted form of Justice under Democracy to me.
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      I'm inclined to treat "you got a million dollar ad buy on your behalf from Municipal Broadband Sucks PAC" as a form of lobbying, personally.
grouphugs 5y ago
and the nazis use it to hurt us, so we learn the lesson, never give technology to nazis
williesleg 5y ago
That's what I want more politicians snooping on my porn surfs
lizknope 5y ago
My city provides me clean water, treats my sewage, and picks up my trash. They seem to do a pretty good job at it, I would be fine if they provided Internet service too.
- bluGill 5y ago
  My city does that too - for $120/month. At that rate well and septic would be paid off in 10 years, and they typically last much longer with minimal maintenance. (the bill is itemized, so trash is about $12/month - same as what is was at my old rural house even though the trash pickup has a lot more density)
asiachick 5y ago
American's infrastructure is crumbling https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/americas-infrastructure-is-crumbling-what-should-be-prioritized https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/americas-infrastructure-is... Plenty of other article to reference on that. Why would we expect municipal broadband to be any different? Network tech jumps up speed every ~5yrs, unlike most other infrastructure that hasn't changed in decades. The current government sanctioned monopolies need to stop but I'm pretty confident that municipal broadband will being net negative in a few years as it kills commercial investment therefore leaving places that have it struggling to keep up with those that don't. See Korea, Japan, Singapore, etc... All have market based solutions. I expect in 5-10 yrs they'll be running terabit connections for VR or AR 3D video/telepresence and municipal broadband will be stuck only able to stream Netflix and take years to get the government to approve for upgrades.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  Also American's current broadband providers are shit.
  - asiachick 5y ago
    Correct, and so will municipal broadband be shit. The right solution is one that encouraged competition, not one that locks in monopolies which is both the current situation and the situation with municipal broadband.
GordonS 5y ago
This is a little OT since the article is about the US, but I'd really like to see how feasible it would be to build a community ISP for the town I live in in the UK (Scotland). FTTC has only recently reached my town, and availability is still patchy. Knowing BT, it will be another decade before the whole town has the option. And upload speeds are still rubbish, and it's expensive too - the fastest deal BT will provide is 900/100 (although they only guarantee 450 down), and it's £60/m (~$83), and you have to take a 2 year contract, and the price rises by 3.9% a year during the contract! There have been smaller, full-fibre ISPs popping up all over England, offering much better packages than BT as half the price. Anyone have any information about getting started with something like this? If it makes a difference, it's for a small, rural town, population 10-15k.
- martinald 5y ago
  Do you mean FTTP not FTTC? 900/100 isn't bad for £60/month imo. Do you actually need 900 down? I used to have 1000/1000 from hyperoptic in London but switched down to 150/150 as virtually nothing on the internet supports or needs higher speeds once you get bored of running speedtests for the fun of it. The only thing that can use it is large xbox game downloads, but even at 150 most are done in 10-20 minutes, and over wifi you struggle to push more than that throw a couple walls anyway. Other providers offer Openreach FTTH btw - not just BT.
  - GordonS 5y ago
    I meant FTTP; I've been on FTTC for several years, 80/20, for £26/m. I realise there are others selling Openreach products, but prices are similar or higher, and still I don't see any products with a high upload speed. I don't really need 900 down, but I've really like higher upload speeds. Regardless, I'd like me and others to have the option. Really, I'm just so sick of how slowly the UK's fibre rollout has been - glacial! It's really encouraging to see the various smaller English ISPs (like HyperOptic) building their own network and offering symmetric products at half the price of OpenReach, but I realise the economics are unlikely to make sense for small towns. I also realise that burying fibre without any existing ducting is going to be very expensive. Still, I'm interested to find out what would be involved, or if there are non-fibre options - not with the aim of profit, just providing more options for local people and businesses.
mooreds 5y ago
I'm so envious of other cities in our county with fast municipal broad band.
vladmk 5y ago
It should be criminal for those behemoths to restrict people of internet. As I’ve said in the past internet is too common to be monopolized by these companies if anything they should seek to enhance internet for all vs constricting it.
cronix 5y ago
After reading many comments, I wonder why more people aren't looking into Space X's Starlink. Broadband speeds, no wired infrastructure, portable, no caps and $100/mo. It seems to be about $30 more/mo than most here are paying, but their broadband is tied to a physical location and not easily movable. Soon it will be mobile, as in dish corrects itself in realtime while driving a motorhome [1], etc. You can take them out in the middle of nowhere, as long as you don't leave your region, like I did 2 weeks ago as a test in the Willamette National Forest in Oregon, 20 miles out on a logging road. Didn't even get 1 bar of cell service, but was watching movies on Netflix in 4k and even played a bit of COD. You can change your region with Starlink, but it takes a day or two as you have to call and tell them the "new address." It's all manual. They are working on a way to automate those requests via the web so they take minutes to change instead of hours or days, and when mobile comes out you probably won't need to do that either. [1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/04/dishy-mcflatface-to-become-fully-mobile-allowing-starlink-use-away-from-home/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/04/dishy... Laying fiber is expensive, and the more rural you go the more expensive it gets.
- afavour 5y ago
  Part of the reason people are very excited by municipal broadband is the ownership part. No giant corporate entity standing between you and your internet connection. The connection being mobile is nice but it's not something I require from my broadband connection, I already have a cellphone. And I live in an apartment building where installing a dish will be all but impossible. Don't get me wrong, Starlink is amazing tech and in rural areas it'll be a huge deal. But in reasonably sized towns and cities a wired, locally owned internet connection is also huge.
  - CountDrewku 5y ago
    You just have extremely slow ass local government/regulation to deal with instead...
    - HDMI_Cable 5y ago
      Which is better than an actively malicious oligopoly.
billytetrud 5y ago
Government run utilities like this look really good at the start. They naturalize existing infrastructure that was built privately and simply run it at lower cost. However they are really bad at investing in the future. 20 years down the line, municipal internet will likely be far worse quality and probably more expensive than private ISPs. Comcast and other Monopoly holders are evil, to be sure, but the answer is to take away their government granted Monopoly agreements, not to have state run internet services. Governments are not good at running companies. Business simply isn't the business of government. I fear these municipal internet operations are very short sighted. The problem is that they'll look like they're working well for years and years until the infrastructure becomes outdated.
- ravedave5 5y ago
  This exact thing is occurring with existing private providers read the other comments about poor support in people's cities. So yes it will probably happen with municipal too, but at least the citizens can do something about it.
  - billytetrud 5y ago
    The best solution is for states to ban local municipalities from enacting monopolies of any kind. Municipal ISPs are fine as long as private ISPs are allowed to compete.
    - nobody9999 5y ago
      >The best solution is for states to ban local municipalities from enacting monopolies of any kind. Municipal ISPs are fine as long as private ISPs are allowed to compete. An even better solution is for municipalities to own the last mile, then sell access to that last mile to private ISPs. This lowers barriers to entry, enables additional competition on price, bandwidth, service, etc. and provides a revenue stream to maintain, manage and upgrade the last mile infrastructure.
      - billytetrud 5y ago
rektide 5y ago
just a reminder that the supreme court sided with Verizon, overturning the requirements that incumbent local exchange carriers (ilecs) offer unbundled loop elements for fiber. the fcc updated their rules in 2003. up till then, the 1996 telecommunications act was in effect, and fiber & telephony lines, even if owned by one company, could be leased at wholesale rates by competitors. so now, if someone wants to compete, they have to dig their own lines, or ongoingly & unregulatedly find a way to lease lines. verizon made this problem. they told the court, we need a monopoly on our infrastructure or we will not do this. 20 years latter & there has been a massive slow down in roll out, rates have been stagnant & high, & municipalities are left doing what the supreme court dismantled: creating competitve offerings. i feel like at some point this may need to be revisited. alas, the most likely way it'll get revisited is municipal isps disaggregating, becoming local providers, but allowing competitor exchanges to lease their local loop elements. muni fiber, but a number of different isps. which is what we ought to have had, but with less rules of the road & more string things together.
permo-w 5y ago
Headlines like this are annoying 4x or “rose/fell by x%” is meaningless if you don’t have prior knowledge of the figures yes it indicates some growth or decline, but why not use actual stats?
mirchiseth 5y ago
Has anyone documented the process on getting your city to adopt Municipal Wireless. Things like - Which department to approach - What kind of hurdles/prior agreements with big ISPs one would face and how to tackle those - Budget calculations and where it becomes self-sustaining
- iptrans 5y ago
  Muni wireless is generally a bad idea. It has been tried many times and failed. What you want is a municipally owner fiber network. What you really need to start a muni network is grassroots support. If the constituents want it it will be built.
  - jhayward 5y ago
    Muni wireless is still a potentially viable model in the “last 200 meters” type design. The equipment and frequencies needed are just barely starting to be available.
rosstex 5y ago
So, from 1 city to 4 cities? /s
IgorPartola 5y ago
I wish my city offered it. I just signed up with Frontier's fiber which like yay for that (though it was a process to get them to realize they have a connection on my street as their internal map was apparently out of date). But... 1. I wanted to use my own router instead of theirs. Turns out they send DHCP responses with VLAN 0 ethernet tags (which I guess is for 802.1p) which apparently a lot of DHCP clients don't understand at all. I tried OPNSense and Mikrotik ones and ended up having to apply a patch manually to dhclient that comes with OPNSense and recompiling it just to get an IPv4 address (https://github.com/opnsense/src/issues/114 https://github.com/opnsense/src/issues/114). 2. They don't provide native IPv6, they don't plan to provide native IPv6, they have a 6rd setup that is inaccessible by new customers, and to top it all off, from what I can tell they actively block 6in4/protocol 41 so I can't even use a third party tunnel. 3. Their tier 1 tech support at least knows what IPv6 is (the thing they tell people they don't support; they don't understand it beyond that). Their tier 2 support guy called me once but he clearly was simply relaying messages from an actual network engineer he was getting via text chat, so I got nowhere. Their tier 3 is their network engineers who have no time to talk to people like me since I never got a call I was promised from them and have no way to follow up except starting with the 800 number again (a literal multi-day process). At least with city broadband I know exactly who works on the project and can go talk to the network engineer who can unblock protocol 41/unfuck the DHCPv4. /rant
- Google234 5y ago
  I don’t think the city network engineer would want to deal with your problem to be honest. They have bigger things to worry about.
  - IgorPartola 5y ago
    The problem is that this isn’t just my problem: being able to use your own router is required by FCC rules and IPv6 access is something that should be standard at this point especially for new build outs. I am happy to help them solve both problems. The point is that a municipal broadband would have it be accountable, while a private corporation has fewer restrictions.
  - 5y ago
atlgator 5y ago
Chattanooga allegedly has 10GB municipal fiber.
- pottertheotter 5y ago
  There’s quite a few that do. Utopia, which covers several cities in Utah, has offered 10Gbps for 3 or 4 years.
fortran77 5y ago
Why would we want the Government to control our Internet?
divbzero 5y ago
I’m curious what percent of US population live in these 560 cities.
bogomipz 5y ago
Is there a link anywhere to the actual study this post references? I was surprised to read that there were over 100 cities in the U.S. offering municipal broadband as of 3 years ago and even more surprised to read there now would be 560 cities offering municipal broadband. I know there are at least 18 states that restrict cities from creating municipal broadband networks[1]. Does anyone know if there's a comprehensive list of municipal broadband offerings? This lists a lot of municipal broadband providers but it's nowhere near even the 100 quotes from 3 years ago: https://www.allconnect.com/blog/cities-with-cheap-high-speed-internet https://www.allconnect.com/blog/cities-with-cheap-high-speed... [1] https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadblocks/ https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc...
maxharris 5y ago
I moved to Tennessee recently, and we have municipal broadband from EPB. On the one hand, it's offered at a fair price ($68/month for a symmetric gigabit connection). On the other hand, they have been promising IPv6 support for years but have completely failed to deliver. Unfortunately the sales people are every bit as non-technical at EPB as they are anywhere else, and they don't seem to understand the issue at all. Does anyone else have the same experience, or is just EPB in particular that's bad on offering IPv6? Obviously, I still prefer EPB's service over that of Comcast, AT&T or Cox. I'm not complaining about municipal broadband in general. (I would like to see a NAT-free internet in my lifetime, that's all.)
- p1mrx 5y ago
  It would be nice if municipal fiber just provided a dumb "layer 2" pipe to some nearby PoP where you could shop around for an ISP who knows how the internet works. Basically the dialup model, but 10000X faster. Then municipalities wouldn't have to worry about stuff like IP addressing and DMCA notices. The main disadvantage is that packets to your neighbors need to hairpin through the PoP instead of staying local, but that's probably not a big deal for residential traffic.
  - iptrans 5y ago
    Light travels more than a 100 miles per millisecond, so as long as the POP is within a few hundred miles you are good. Tromboning local traffic isn’t much of an issue anyway since very little of your traffic is hyper local. Most of your traffic will be going to CDNs and other ISPs.
brutal_chaos_ 5y ago
Cynical me: oh, so now there are 4 municipal broadband ISPs? I'm sure it's more than that, of course. I am glad to see the numbers growing. I, for one, am damn tired of the "options" I have around me. >$50/mo for 50/5 Comcast or ~$40/mo for 1.5/0.5 with centrylink DSL. Its all garbage and we gave them billions to not do this...
Aa9C4xPz43Gg7k6 5y ago
s/broadband/fiber/
ripdog 5y ago
Municipal broadband really isn't the solution here. Sure, it's miles better than private infra, but we down here in NZ have a much better solution. (Not claiming we invented it, of course.) In 2011, Central government started a big infrastructure project to roll fibre out to ~80% of the population. (Called UFB - ultra fast broadband.) However instead of making this just be state owned, the money was paid as cheap loans with a competitive bid system. Companies bidding had to agree to a significant number of regulations, including a requirement to not act as an ISP and to offer wholesale access to the network for a set fee. They could also offer their own services above and beyond the regulated maximum. So to start an ISP in NZ, all you need is some national and international transit, and at least one server to do billing and core routing. As a result, we have dozens of major, actually good ISPs and many more niche ones. Most of them service the whole country - at least the UFB service area. I actually like my ISP. I have IPv6 and a static public IPv4. Peering is excellent and international bandwidth plentiful. Gigabit bandwidth with no usage call and no fair use policy (at least no policy regarding days usage). Municipal internet is great until you realize you just turned a monopoly into a duopoly. Without competition, what drive your new ISP to do better? If you're super lucky, the goodness of their hearts, I guess. Because you know the old incumbent will just match the new ISP and do not better. EDIT: Folks in other threads have pointed out how bad US government bodies have historically been at investing in infrastructure maintenance. I'd like to note that the NZ model neatly deals with those concerns too. The companies which build out the networks are made the owners presumably when the loans are paid off. These companies become very profitable even though they can't become ISPs themselves, and are thus heavily incentivized to invest their profits back into their networks to keep them working well and to come up with new products to sell. Already a NZ fibre company has deployed 10gbit fibre commercially, with no extra government support.
- erentz 5y ago
  The UFB program was a gift to the incumbent Telecom NZ. Their design was expensive and overwrought as you’d expect from a legacy telco. While it is nice that NZ has semi-decent fiber it’s still worse than my experience of FTTH overseas. Note that there is nothing inherent about muni fiber that prevents it providing the same unbundled layer 2 and dark fiber services. But in your example of Chorus they backhaul customers over layer 2 to your location for you. That’s how your example of one guy with a router works. He puts it in Auckland and everything is backhauled hundreds of miles to it. Munis do not operate backhaul networks, these aren’t state wide networks where a guy with his router can drop it in one pop in the biggest city and serve customers from across the state. This kind of design also becomes incredibly inefficient. The provider Chorus here is really doing most of the heavy lifting and doing it in the least efficient way possible. (Back hauling layer two to POPs hundreds of miles away.) Today all services live at layer 3 and are provided over the top. There’s a good case for just simplifying this and munis just providing the layer 3.
Black101 5y ago
Are those setup mostly as cooperatives? like some power companies
cwiggs 5y ago
If anyone in the Phoenix Metro area is looking to team up with someone to start a WISP let me know, I'd love to get this setup in PHX.
thehappypm 5y ago
This is just an anecdote, but I just moved to the suburbs from the city. My WiFi is so much better in the suburbs! In my apartment I had no choice but to run ethernet cables through the whole place because I couldn't get strong WiFi despite having a gigabit connection. Can't get much more than 100 Mbps down over WiFi with a clear line-of-sight and often much worse. My apartment would find dozens of wireless networks. When I moved to the suburbs, I immediately started researching how to get ethernet to my home office (upstairs from the router) but was stunned to be getting 300 Mbps+ download through WiFi, same router, through a wall, despite having slightly slower hard-wired download speeds. Interference from the other networks is my theory.

584 points by sharkweek 5y ago

blt 5y ago

> Conversely, the specter of governments operating broadband networks in competition with the private sector, or of state or local governments serving as both regulators and owners of competing broadband networks, could stifle investment or reduce private-sector access to capital. > Larry Irving, 2014 Oh, no! Reduce private-sector access to capital? How will society continue? Seriously though, there is plenty of money to be made in private sector manufacturing and installation of networking equipment. The point of public internet is to place the infrastructure planning and the mediation of access under control of a body that is interested in long-term societal benefit instead of short-term profit.

linsomniac 5y ago
In our area we had two choices: Copper cat-3 that was installed in 1971, or coax that was installed in the '80s. The first provider got billions of dollars of increased tariffs by promising to deliver fiber to the home by the year 2000. They had their chance to demonstrate they were interested in investing in the infrastructure. 3-4 months ago we got our municipal fiber connection, gigabit symmetric, no caps, and it's glorious! We can also get 10-gig, but that's $300/mo and I don't have the internal network to handle it.
- legutierr 5y ago
  This sounds great. Where are you? It seems like a promising place to open a business.
  - linsomniac 5y ago
    Much of the Northern Front Range of Colorado has this sort of setup rolling or rolled out: Longmont, Loveland, Fort Collins. I'm in the latter. I'm one of the earlier deploys, but they plan to have the whole city deployed in the next year-ish. My office is expecting to be built out in around 4 months. Pricing for residential is: $59.95 (landed) for gigabit (symmetric, no caps), or $299.95/mo for 10-gig. This is Internet only, they also have phone and TV. For businesses, the pricing is different: 250M/500M/1G is $99.95/199.95/399.95. Pretty much directly competitive with Comcast Business pricing we've been paying, but with much, much more outbound bandwidth.
  - artificialLimbs 5y ago
    Bismarck AR and several surrounding communities have fiber through a Coop. They ran 12 strands to my wall. Plans only show 1Gb on their sales brochure. Maybe they don't have infra for 10G yet... I haven't bothered to ask. https://www.catc.net/services/internet https://www.catc.net/services/internet
- aksss 5y ago
  This sounds exactly like the residential situation in my city, minus the happy ending.
- judge2020 5y ago
  It'd be nice if there were a registry of cities/companies with a 2 or 10 gigabit residential fiber offering. Google has 2gbit but (for Atlanta) it's only at specific apartment communities: https://fiber.google.com/2gig/ https://fiber.google.com/2gig/ https://fiber.google.com/cities/atlanta/#:~:text=Find%20a,Fiber%20neighborhood https://fiber.google.com/cities/atlanta/#:~:text=Find%20a,Fi...
lotsofpulp 5y ago
> Oh, no! Reduce private-sector access to capital? How will society continue? All that private sector access and 95% of people still have the same 3Mbps upload and slow latency as 20 years ago when cable broadband first came out in the US. Zero reason to not have fiber be delivered the same way as electric, gas, and water.
- gruez 5y ago
  >Zero reason to not have fiber be delivered the same way as electric, gas, and water. ...provided by private companies? eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolidated_Edison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolidated_Edison, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Gas_and_Electric_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Gas_and_Electric_Compa..., or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Water_Works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Water_Works
  - HarryHirsch 5y ago
    Isn't Con.Ed. the one with the continuous transformer explosions because they cut maintenance to the bone? As far as I know in Berlin they are considering re-nationalizing the waterworks because the current owner fails to adequately maintain the infrastructure.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    Utilities have government oversight. I’m not sure why they even bother with the distinction, since pricing and whatnot has to go through government approval. In contrast to internet, where Comcast and their peers can do whatever they want whenever they want.
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    If we can have Comcast provide service and regulate is aggressively as we do power companies, that seems like a great deal to me.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
ouid 5y ago
I believe that the ISP monopolies are also interested in long term profit.
- HarryHirsch 5y ago
  Sure, consequently they invest in lobbying instead of physical plant, it provides a better return on investment.
- colejohnson66 5y ago
  But there’s a way to do that: invest in infrastructure. If everyone in town offers 50/10 and you build out fiber for 1000/1000, you’ll get customers from the other companies. But no one does that; they just don’t compete.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    If Comcast then offered 150/10 at a discount if you bought cable TV services from them, they could still compete favorably against municipal broadband for many households.
HarryHirsch 5y ago
Conversely, the specter of governments operating water and sewage plants in competition with the private sector, or of state or local governments serving as both regulators and owners of competing water and sewage plants, could stifle investment or reduce private-sector access to capital. One shudders to think what Comcast Water and Sewage would be like.
- cure 5y ago
  > One shudders to think what Comcast Water and Sewage would be like. It's funny, caps on Comcast Water and Sewage would be illegal in many states!
- colejohnson66 5y ago
  Our records show that you’ve flushed your toilet more than 100 times this billing period. Each addition flush will incur an addition $10/flush fee. Thank you for choosing Comcast!
  - aksss 5y ago
    Or you can opt for throttled flushes.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  At least we could crap on them for a change.
dv_dt 5y ago
I would say under-investment by private holders of last-mile infrastructure holds back a lot of other business sectors as well as quality of life for people in those cities. This from a city dweller who watched the mega telecom extract profits while installed infrastructure decayed to unusable in my last neighborhood. I recall getting sent technicians telling me, well they don't have enough diagnostic units to actually figure out this problem, but I'll switch you to another pair and you can see if that works - call us back if it doesn't.

sjg007 5y ago

With permanent WFH municipal broadband is a major bonus. I live somewhere with fiber and it is glorious.

rohansingh 5y ago

If you are a software engineer, working on municipal broadband or starting a local ISP is a really intense way to expand your skills. For the past year, I've been volunteering at NYC Mesh (nycmesh.net), which is a non-profit that provides fixed wireless broadband in New York. I thought I knew a thing or two about networking — hell, I've even given a talk in the network track at LinuxCon in the past — but working on NYC Mesh really showed me the limits of that knowledge and has helped me learn a ton more.

hpoe 5y ago
I've always wanted to expand my networking skills and understanding. Any suggestions on how to get involved in something like this?
- rglover 5y ago
  https://startyourownisp.com/ https://startyourownisp.com/
  - IgorPartola 5y ago
    Wow, that was straight and to the point breakdown of costs: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jjUYOQMuZ4cRyTv1M5X8HGtrKFiW96_gNlfG8BBzRN0/edit#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jjUYOQMuZ4cRyTv1M5X8... Honestly, this doesn't sound like a bad idea in my area. I can likely put the tower right on my own land and immediately cover a decently sized neighborhood.
    - narwally 5y ago
      It even has things like zip-ties and other miscellaneous items priced out. It's still a rough estimate for a minimal install, but I've undertaken DIY home improvement projects that were in this price range and my estimates weren't quite this detailed.
- rohansingh 5y ago
  Sure, here's some ideas: 1. Join the NYC Mesh Slack (slack.nycmesh.net) even if you're not in NYC, just to see how it's run. 2. Read Brian Hall's post, "How to start a community network": https://www.nycmesh.net/blog/how/ https://www.nycmesh.net/blog/how/ 3. Read Graham Castleton's "Start Your Own WISP" guide: https://startyourownisp.com/ https://startyourownisp.com/ 4. Look around and find folks in your area with a similar interest. If you're in or near a city of any size, I bet there's somebody who's already started or is trying to start something.

minikites 5y ago

>Still, many people who have access to and use municipal broadband think rather highly of the service. In fact, in a 2019 report conducted by PCMag, the authors of the study found that many municipal broadband providers offer some of the fastest internet speeds in the country. Maybe we can finally start chipping away at 40+ years of conservative propaganda about how useless and ineffective government is. Government projects and services are not evil, wasteful, or inferior, that's propaganda talking.

giantg2 5y ago
"Government projects and services are not evil, wasteful, or inferior, that's propaganda talking." They can be. There just needs to be the proper balance of oversight. The lower down the government chain the projects are run, the more control the people have over them. For example, I wouldn't want federal or even state run internet, but municipal or even county internet would be easier to deal with since my voice would represent a larger share of the customers/votes and has a higher likelihood of being addressed. At the higher levels, one locality might have an issue but only represent 1% of the customers/vote, so you could end up with that minority being neglected.
- minikites 5y ago
  >I wouldn't want federal or even state run internet How is Comcast or any other large ISP meaningfully different from this? At least you get a vote at the federal level, Comcast has zero reason to listen to you.
  - prophesi 5y ago
    I think that's the point. City > State > Federal > Telcom Monopolies in terms of your voice being heard.
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      I agree that City > State > Comcast. I think Comcast > Federal, though, in terms of service level and individual voice. (With Comcast, my voice is 20dB under the noise floor. With the feds, it’s 10dB lower than that.) Plus, if you get something wrong federally, it’s enormously difficult, expensive, time-consuming, and unlikely to get fixed. If one or a few states get something wrong, you have as easier time showing comparables and proving that a better way is possible.

avhception 5y ago

In Germany, there is a clear pattern: - a community (often, but not always, rural) pleads one of our big ISPs (almost always deutsche Telekom, since we gifted our tax-funded telephone network to them) to provide better service (or service at all) - dt. Telekom laughs in their faces and tells them to screw off - the community gets together and finances building a network of their own, sometimes even involving locals to dig the trenches for the fibers. They calculate with a sharp pencil and need customers to break even. - dt. Telekom notices this and quickly deploys their own network, steamrolling the new local ISP with their big marketing budget and brand name - the small local ISP goes bankrupt, city initiatives stop etc. And to add insult to injury, dt. Telekom then uses it's customers as leverage to bully content providers into crappy peering deals. They're also guzzling tax money by the millions in public-private partnerships all while screwing the public over.

_jal 5y ago
At least your monopoly responds to threats by providing the service they monopolize. In the US, step 4 becomes "pass a law banning muni efforts and lie about existing coverage", and local communities keep the same crappy, expensive service.
- Wohlf 5y ago
  >At least your monopoly responds to threats by providing the service they monopolize. True but the grass isn't really greener, Germany lags behind the US in average broadband speeds, mean and median for both directions.
- mjevans 5y ago
  It's been that way in WA State for like 20 years... and will hopefully soon end once the Governor signs into law one of the two passed bills recently discussed. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26803426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26803426 (The better but not perfect 1336) https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=1336&Initiative=false&Year=2021 https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=1336&Initiativ... (The grand standing and barely a bone to the consumer 5383) https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=5383&Year=2021&Initiative=false https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=5383&Year=2021...

fiftyfifty 5y ago

The city I live in voted for municipal broadband in 2017. Our local private internet provider Comcast fought it at every turn, Comcast spent millions fighting municipal broadband in a city with about 150,000 residents. We started rolling out our own broadband to residents in 2020. It took a couple of years for the city to hire and build up a department and lay the infrastructure to support it city wide and I finally got the service at the beginning of this year, and it has been awesome. We have gigabit internet up AND DOWN for $59.95/month. What really burns me is the private providers we have, Comcast and CenturyLink, have been here for decades and could have done exactly what our city has done: run fiber to every neighborhood and house. It would have been cheaper for them too, they already had the infrastructure in place. They chose not to make the investment and instead spent millions trying to prevent us from providing better service for ourselves. I hope everyone has the chance to get better/cheaper internet service for themselves and their community, so far it has worked out great for us.

ashtonkem 5y ago
Capitalism is wildly inefficient for infrastructure, and it’s really frustrating how often we have to relearn this as a society. There’s a damn good reason why the city owns the pipes that bring water to and sewage from your house, and why the power lines are owned by a heavily regulated monopoly. The physical infrastructure to run internet to everyone’s homes should be owned by the state and responsive to the citizens it serves and not the shareholders who profit.
- amelius 5y ago
  What makes cable companies different from, say, a duopoly in mobile phone operating systems?
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    Land usage, mostly. Cell companies need space for towers and fiber to those antennas. It turns out that these don’t take up all that much space, so it’s trivially possible for multiple cell phone companies to setup towers covering the same customers. Cable companies however have to deal with the “last mile” problem, which is both massively more expensive than installing more centralized infrastructure, but also involves installing infrastructure on much more restricted areas.

orliesaurus 5y ago

I remember some other HN user who started their own Fiber ISP and did a "show HN" a couple of years back. It was super insightful how they started as a moonshot project for their own benefit and the one of their community. Forgot your username (and even searching I couldn't find the specific thread) but if for some reason you read this I hope you're still successful!

sangnoir 5y ago
Are you referring to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24952040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24952040 ?
- dang 5y ago
  That one was Starting a Telephone Company in 2019, or How I Built Fiber to My Neighbors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24952040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24952040 - Oct 2020 (20 comments) There have also been: Start Your Own ISP - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20726906 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20726906 - Aug 2019 (95 comments) Launch HN: Necto (YC W18) – ISP Starter Kit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17067144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17067144 - May 2018 (78 comments) Start Your Own ISP - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16160394 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16160394 - Jan 2018 (193 comments) I feel like I remember more of these too...

INTPenis 5y ago

A little anecdote about municipal broadband in Sweden. Normally it's great and I love it. The ones I've seen have been run by the municipal real estate owner. They're the ones who build apartment buildings in a certain municipality but they're sometimes half privately owned. In my current hometown they branched off a separate private company to manage the broadband. Anyways, in a little town where I lived, a street of about 6-7 apartment buildings banded together and contacted Telia first about digging fiber to their buildings. Telia gave them a disgusting deal which would have restricted all the tenants to the Telia ISP. They've done this before even in bigger cities where they sign a deal with one real estate company so all their buildings only have Telia. My SO at the time actually worked for Telia but she was a clever girl because she realized you could go directly to the municipal broadband and have them dig the fiber. That way all the tenants could choose from any ISP in the country and not be restricted to just Telia. This even raises the desirability of the building for young people who favour Bahnhof as ISP for example.

pottertheotter 5y ago
A lot of the apartment complexes here on the U.S. have started doing these exclusivity deals with an ISP so you can only buy from one, even if more options exist in your market. The real estate owners make money off it.
- thwerfhq3w9 5y ago
  At least in my experience being close to the multifamily industry, Google Fiber offers installing 1gig for free in the apartments but explicitly lays out that there are no provisions against installing another internet provider (besides something along the lines of 'you cant allow another ISP to install if they have an exclusivity agreement themselves'). Spectrum is the big culprit in this; while the one I was involved in didn't have an actual exclusivity agreement, they did have an exclusive advertising agreement where you couldn't mention competing ISPs to prospects or in marketing material.
ap-andersson 5y ago
I just want to add some more information about this. First of all, even if municipal broadband in different forms are very common here in Sweden, its not the only option. There are some areas of cities or certain estate owners that have deals with ISPs where they install the fiber and have exclusive right to sell broadband services. This can happen in cities with municipal broadband, so different areas of a city can have different providers. The most common form of municipal broadband here is that the company that manages the water and electricity in the city (a company owned by the city but are run to make a profit) also installs fiber cables (is a network operator). They are going to dig up streets anyway, right? I have never seen a fiber cable above ground in my life here. They manage the cables and install switches etc to get the signal from the customers home to a central location in the city where it can be handed over to the ISPs. The company is not an ISP and does not sell any services in the network, but they allow any ISP that want to sell services with their infrastructure to do so. More and more this is done by standardized APIs (since one ISP can sell services within many different fiber networks), but also more manually with web portals for smaller companies or for troubleshooting etc. The ISP usually pays the network operator for number of subscriptions and/or changes done (connections/disconnections etc). The ISP can then sell services to customers and compete with the others both on price but also on how good their support, bundles etc are. That means that in a medium sized city (for Sweden at least... ~150k residents in my hometowns municipality) there can be up to 20 different ISPs that you can choose between and compare in a portal. All with the same cables and one ethernet jack in the apartments (or a fiber box in houses). Any ISP can deliver the service within a few minutes. So while the municipality has a hand in the fiber market they are not a competitor to the private companies, they simply enable the ISPs to compete in an open market to the benefit to the customers. The same model is used for electricity aswell. One fee goes to the municipal company that manages the physical infrastrcuture and the electricity meters while the cost of the actual electricity used go to the private company you have a contract with. This is the Open Acces Network model and is very common here in Sweden. There are also open networks operated by private companies. For example both Telia (which is both a network operator and a big ISP, previously state owned now privateized) and Telenor (the same deal but from Norway) operate both open networks and "closed" networks (where they have a monopoly). There is also another, less common, model where the municipality has created a separate company that places physical fiber cables under the streets but does not offer an active network (dark fiber). This model is used by Stokab in Stockholm and was in part created to prevent too many distruptions by private companies constantly digging up the streets. Then all ISPs can rent fiber on equal terms. tl;dr: Fiber cables are in many places in Sweden handled like a utility and private ISPs can all use them to sell their services to customers on equal terms which create competition that is great for the end user.

xyst 5y ago

There's a municipal ISP in Chattanooga, TN that offers their residents gigabit internet at ~$68 per month. They even offer 10 gigabit internet (symmetrical) to the home. These offerings blow the major ISPs out of the water, and even in some cases are on par with Google Fiber (at a cheaper price). The way the system is now, most areas/communities are only served by a single ISP. In the past 5 years of moving in the city, I have only had the choice of selecting Spectrum.

aksss 5y ago
What are the financials behind this? I only ask because it’s pretty damned expensive to build a network and then do the O&M. $68/mo sounds like very old broadband prices that were subsidized by revenue from other channels (bundling). Does $68 get the city to a break even or is this running at a loss? Not criticizing, just curious how that pencils out - what true cost is.
- wing-_-nuts 5y ago
  IIRC they ran fiber with the power lines in order to enable a smart grid. They realized they had so much spare bandwidth that they could sell internet service. Basically everyone with a power connection to EPB can get fiber internet? Brilliant move. I'm considering Chattanooga as a retirement location. Lots of outdoor recreation, no state taxes and I can supposedly get fiber internet anywhere I can get connected to the power grid? Sign me up!
  - NationalPark 5y ago
    Wouldn't it make more sense to retire in a place with higher taxes and more services, since your income will probably decline as you stop working and begin living off your savings?
    - wing-_-nuts 5y ago
      You could be right. I've never seen a good comparison of services offered in one place or another. One other consideration is that I'd probably be doing a roth conversion ladder of my 401k so I'd owe state taxes there, but yes, it would be a fraction of my current income.

subtlestorm 5y ago

Is there a way to search addresses / cities by Fiber connection ? Say I want to move to a city while holding a remote job, I would love to have a fiber connection and I found its really to search by address.

iptrans 5y ago
Alas, no such service exists. Even the FCC can’t get proper broadband coverage data by the zip code, not to mention by address.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  Redfin/Zillow/trulia/realtor.com should figure out now to scrape ISP websites and show what type of internet is available for a house. I had to manually put in addresses when I was searching for a home to make sure it had symmetric fiber.
  - iptrans 5y ago
    ISPs would more likely than not take exception to such scraping. Even if they weren’t reporting accurate data, which they don’t always do.

Hammershaft 5y ago

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/02/gop-plan-for-broadband-competition-would-ban-city-run-networks-across-us/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/02/gop-plan-for-bro... Remember that Republicans tried to ban municipal broadband federally only two months ago! Just an absurdly, transparently corrupt move.

grecy 5y ago
How anyone thinks corporate lobbying is good for anyone other than corrupt politicians and corporate giants is a mystery I will never understand.
- parineum 5y ago
  Actual lobbying is such a small part of the money that goes to politicians that it's a red herring. The source of corruption is through PACs that support candidates without the candidates consent or guidance (either ostensibly or actually). You can either give a candidate a few thousand dollars directly or you can spend an unlimited amount of money telling people how great you think the candidate is. Only the former is lobbying.
  - grecy 5y ago
    I'm not really interested in discussing semantics, but rather the root issue. Money in Politics, especially when it's perfectly legal, is a massive, massive problem. It's literally impossible to get fair and impartial leaders who will make decisions in the interest of the common person when corporations are spending millions and millions. Right now a judge sitting on the highest court in the entire country is hearing a case involving a company who openly and directly paid to have her elected into that position. I don't care if that person is from the right or left (or middle), there is no universe where that is a good thing, or should be allowed. Having a Supreme Court Justice you paid preside over your court case sounds like a very perverted form of Justice under Democracy to me.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    I'm inclined to treat "you got a million dollar ad buy on your behalf from Municipal Broadband Sucks PAC" as a form of lobbying, personally.

grouphugs 5y ago

and the nazis use it to hurt us, so we learn the lesson, never give technology to nazis

williesleg 5y ago

That's what I want more politicians snooping on my porn surfs

lizknope 5y ago

My city provides me clean water, treats my sewage, and picks up my trash. They seem to do a pretty good job at it, I would be fine if they provided Internet service too.

bluGill 5y ago
My city does that too - for $120/month. At that rate well and septic would be paid off in 10 years, and they typically last much longer with minimal maintenance. (the bill is itemized, so trash is about $12/month - same as what is was at my old rural house even though the trash pickup has a lot more density)

asiachick 5y ago

American's infrastructure is crumbling https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/americas-infrastructure-is-crumbling-what-should-be-prioritized https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/americas-infrastructure-is... Plenty of other article to reference on that. Why would we expect municipal broadband to be any different? Network tech jumps up speed every ~5yrs, unlike most other infrastructure that hasn't changed in decades. The current government sanctioned monopolies need to stop but I'm pretty confident that municipal broadband will being net negative in a few years as it kills commercial investment therefore leaving places that have it struggling to keep up with those that don't. See Korea, Japan, Singapore, etc... All have market based solutions. I expect in 5-10 yrs they'll be running terabit connections for VR or AR 3D video/telepresence and municipal broadband will be stuck only able to stream Netflix and take years to get the government to approve for upgrades.

pessimizer 5y ago
Also American's current broadband providers are shit.
- asiachick 5y ago
  Correct, and so will municipal broadband be shit. The right solution is one that encouraged competition, not one that locks in monopolies which is both the current situation and the situation with municipal broadband.

GordonS 5y ago

This is a little OT since the article is about the US, but I'd really like to see how feasible it would be to build a community ISP for the town I live in in the UK (Scotland). FTTC has only recently reached my town, and availability is still patchy. Knowing BT, it will be another decade before the whole town has the option. And upload speeds are still rubbish, and it's expensive too - the fastest deal BT will provide is 900/100 (although they only guarantee 450 down), and it's £60/m (~$83), and you have to take a 2 year contract, and the price rises by 3.9% a year during the contract! There have been smaller, full-fibre ISPs popping up all over England, offering much better packages than BT as half the price. Anyone have any information about getting started with something like this? If it makes a difference, it's for a small, rural town, population 10-15k.

martinald 5y ago
Do you mean FTTP not FTTC? 900/100 isn't bad for £60/month imo. Do you actually need 900 down? I used to have 1000/1000 from hyperoptic in London but switched down to 150/150 as virtually nothing on the internet supports or needs higher speeds once you get bored of running speedtests for the fun of it. The only thing that can use it is large xbox game downloads, but even at 150 most are done in 10-20 minutes, and over wifi you struggle to push more than that throw a couple walls anyway. Other providers offer Openreach FTTH btw - not just BT.
- GordonS 5y ago
  I meant FTTP; I've been on FTTC for several years, 80/20, for £26/m. I realise there are others selling Openreach products, but prices are similar or higher, and still I don't see any products with a high upload speed. I don't really need 900 down, but I've really like higher upload speeds. Regardless, I'd like me and others to have the option. Really, I'm just so sick of how slowly the UK's fibre rollout has been - glacial! It's really encouraging to see the various smaller English ISPs (like HyperOptic) building their own network and offering symmetric products at half the price of OpenReach, but I realise the economics are unlikely to make sense for small towns. I also realise that burying fibre without any existing ducting is going to be very expensive. Still, I'm interested to find out what would be involved, or if there are non-fibre options - not with the aim of profit, just providing more options for local people and businesses.

mooreds 5y ago

I'm so envious of other cities in our county with fast municipal broad band.

vladmk 5y ago

It should be criminal for those behemoths to restrict people of internet. As I’ve said in the past internet is too common to be monopolized by these companies if anything they should seek to enhance internet for all vs constricting it.

cronix 5y ago

After reading many comments, I wonder why more people aren't looking into Space X's Starlink. Broadband speeds, no wired infrastructure, portable, no caps and $100/mo. It seems to be about $30 more/mo than most here are paying, but their broadband is tied to a physical location and not easily movable. Soon it will be mobile, as in dish corrects itself in realtime while driving a motorhome [1], etc. You can take them out in the middle of nowhere, as long as you don't leave your region, like I did 2 weeks ago as a test in the Willamette National Forest in Oregon, 20 miles out on a logging road. Didn't even get 1 bar of cell service, but was watching movies on Netflix in 4k and even played a bit of COD. You can change your region with Starlink, but it takes a day or two as you have to call and tell them the "new address." It's all manual. They are working on a way to automate those requests via the web so they take minutes to change instead of hours or days, and when mobile comes out you probably won't need to do that either. [1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/04/dishy-mcflatface-to-become-fully-mobile-allowing-starlink-use-away-from-home/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/04/dishy... Laying fiber is expensive, and the more rural you go the more expensive it gets.

afavour 5y ago
Part of the reason people are very excited by municipal broadband is the ownership part. No giant corporate entity standing between you and your internet connection. The connection being mobile is nice but it's not something I require from my broadband connection, I already have a cellphone. And I live in an apartment building where installing a dish will be all but impossible. Don't get me wrong, Starlink is amazing tech and in rural areas it'll be a huge deal. But in reasonably sized towns and cities a wired, locally owned internet connection is also huge.
- CountDrewku 5y ago
  You just have extremely slow ass local government/regulation to deal with instead...
  - HDMI_Cable 5y ago
    Which is better than an actively malicious oligopoly.

billytetrud 5y ago

Government run utilities like this look really good at the start. They naturalize existing infrastructure that was built privately and simply run it at lower cost. However they are really bad at investing in the future. 20 years down the line, municipal internet will likely be far worse quality and probably more expensive than private ISPs. Comcast and other Monopoly holders are evil, to be sure, but the answer is to take away their government granted Monopoly agreements, not to have state run internet services. Governments are not good at running companies. Business simply isn't the business of government. I fear these municipal internet operations are very short sighted. The problem is that they'll look like they're working well for years and years until the infrastructure becomes outdated.

ravedave5 5y ago
This exact thing is occurring with existing private providers read the other comments about poor support in people's cities. So yes it will probably happen with municipal too, but at least the citizens can do something about it.
- billytetrud 5y ago
  The best solution is for states to ban local municipalities from enacting monopolies of any kind. Municipal ISPs are fine as long as private ISPs are allowed to compete.
  - nobody9999 5y ago
    >The best solution is for states to ban local municipalities from enacting monopolies of any kind. Municipal ISPs are fine as long as private ISPs are allowed to compete. An even better solution is for municipalities to own the last mile, then sell access to that last mile to private ISPs. This lowers barriers to entry, enables additional competition on price, bandwidth, service, etc. and provides a revenue stream to maintain, manage and upgrade the last mile infrastructure.
    - billytetrud 5y ago

rektide 5y ago

just a reminder that the supreme court sided with Verizon, overturning the requirements that incumbent local exchange carriers (ilecs) offer unbundled loop elements for fiber. the fcc updated their rules in 2003. up till then, the 1996 telecommunications act was in effect, and fiber & telephony lines, even if owned by one company, could be leased at wholesale rates by competitors. so now, if someone wants to compete, they have to dig their own lines, or ongoingly & unregulatedly find a way to lease lines. verizon made this problem. they told the court, we need a monopoly on our infrastructure or we will not do this. 20 years latter & there has been a massive slow down in roll out, rates have been stagnant & high, & municipalities are left doing what the supreme court dismantled: creating competitve offerings. i feel like at some point this may need to be revisited. alas, the most likely way it'll get revisited is municipal isps disaggregating, becoming local providers, but allowing competitor exchanges to lease their local loop elements. muni fiber, but a number of different isps. which is what we ought to have had, but with less rules of the road & more string things together.

permo-w 5y ago

Headlines like this are annoying 4x or “rose/fell by x%” is meaningless if you don’t have prior knowledge of the figures yes it indicates some growth or decline, but why not use actual stats?

mirchiseth 5y ago

Has anyone documented the process on getting your city to adopt Municipal Wireless. Things like - Which department to approach - What kind of hurdles/prior agreements with big ISPs one would face and how to tackle those - Budget calculations and where it becomes self-sustaining

iptrans 5y ago
Muni wireless is generally a bad idea. It has been tried many times and failed. What you want is a municipally owner fiber network. What you really need to start a muni network is grassroots support. If the constituents want it it will be built.
- jhayward 5y ago
  Muni wireless is still a potentially viable model in the “last 200 meters” type design. The equipment and frequencies needed are just barely starting to be available.

rosstex 5y ago

So, from 1 city to 4 cities? /s

IgorPartola 5y ago

I wish my city offered it. I just signed up with Frontier's fiber which like yay for that (though it was a process to get them to realize they have a connection on my street as their internal map was apparently out of date). But... 1. I wanted to use my own router instead of theirs. Turns out they send DHCP responses with VLAN 0 ethernet tags (which I guess is for 802.1p) which apparently a lot of DHCP clients don't understand at all. I tried OPNSense and Mikrotik ones and ended up having to apply a patch manually to dhclient that comes with OPNSense and recompiling it just to get an IPv4 address (https://github.com/opnsense/src/issues/114 https://github.com/opnsense/src/issues/114). 2. They don't provide native IPv6, they don't plan to provide native IPv6, they have a 6rd setup that is inaccessible by new customers, and to top it all off, from what I can tell they actively block 6in4/protocol 41 so I can't even use a third party tunnel. 3. Their tier 1 tech support at least knows what IPv6 is (the thing they tell people they don't support; they don't understand it beyond that). Their tier 2 support guy called me once but he clearly was simply relaying messages from an actual network engineer he was getting via text chat, so I got nowhere. Their tier 3 is their network engineers who have no time to talk to people like me since I never got a call I was promised from them and have no way to follow up except starting with the 800 number again (a literal multi-day process). At least with city broadband I know exactly who works on the project and can go talk to the network engineer who can unblock protocol 41/unfuck the DHCPv4. /rant

Google234 5y ago
I don’t think the city network engineer would want to deal with your problem to be honest. They have bigger things to worry about.
- IgorPartola 5y ago
  The problem is that this isn’t just my problem: being able to use your own router is required by FCC rules and IPv6 access is something that should be standard at this point especially for new build outs. I am happy to help them solve both problems. The point is that a municipal broadband would have it be accountable, while a private corporation has fewer restrictions.
- 5y ago

atlgator 5y ago

Chattanooga allegedly has 10GB municipal fiber.

pottertheotter 5y ago
There’s quite a few that do. Utopia, which covers several cities in Utah, has offered 10Gbps for 3 or 4 years.

fortran77 5y ago

Why would we want the Government to control our Internet?

divbzero 5y ago

I’m curious what percent of US population live in these 560 cities.

bogomipz 5y ago

Is there a link anywhere to the actual study this post references? I was surprised to read that there were over 100 cities in the U.S. offering municipal broadband as of 3 years ago and even more surprised to read there now would be 560 cities offering municipal broadband. I know there are at least 18 states that restrict cities from creating municipal broadband networks[1]. Does anyone know if there's a comprehensive list of municipal broadband offerings? This lists a lot of municipal broadband providers but it's nowhere near even the 100 quotes from 3 years ago: https://www.allconnect.com/blog/cities-with-cheap-high-speed-internet https://www.allconnect.com/blog/cities-with-cheap-high-speed... [1] https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadblocks/ https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc...

maxharris 5y ago

I moved to Tennessee recently, and we have municipal broadband from EPB. On the one hand, it's offered at a fair price ($68/month for a symmetric gigabit connection). On the other hand, they have been promising IPv6 support for years but have completely failed to deliver. Unfortunately the sales people are every bit as non-technical at EPB as they are anywhere else, and they don't seem to understand the issue at all. Does anyone else have the same experience, or is just EPB in particular that's bad on offering IPv6? Obviously, I still prefer EPB's service over that of Comcast, AT&T or Cox. I'm not complaining about municipal broadband in general. (I would like to see a NAT-free internet in my lifetime, that's all.)

p1mrx 5y ago
It would be nice if municipal fiber just provided a dumb "layer 2" pipe to some nearby PoP where you could shop around for an ISP who knows how the internet works. Basically the dialup model, but 10000X faster. Then municipalities wouldn't have to worry about stuff like IP addressing and DMCA notices. The main disadvantage is that packets to your neighbors need to hairpin through the PoP instead of staying local, but that's probably not a big deal for residential traffic.
- iptrans 5y ago
  Light travels more than a 100 miles per millisecond, so as long as the POP is within a few hundred miles you are good. Tromboning local traffic isn’t much of an issue anyway since very little of your traffic is hyper local. Most of your traffic will be going to CDNs and other ISPs.

brutal_chaos_ 5y ago

Cynical me: oh, so now there are 4 municipal broadband ISPs? I'm sure it's more than that, of course. I am glad to see the numbers growing. I, for one, am damn tired of the "options" I have around me. >$50/mo for 50/5 Comcast or ~$40/mo for 1.5/0.5 with centrylink DSL. Its all garbage and we gave them billions to not do this...

Aa9C4xPz43Gg7k6 5y ago

s/broadband/fiber/

ripdog 5y ago

Municipal broadband really isn't the solution here. Sure, it's miles better than private infra, but we down here in NZ have a much better solution. (Not claiming we invented it, of course.) In 2011, Central government started a big infrastructure project to roll fibre out to ~80% of the population. (Called UFB - ultra fast broadband.) However instead of making this just be state owned, the money was paid as cheap loans with a competitive bid system. Companies bidding had to agree to a significant number of regulations, including a requirement to not act as an ISP and to offer wholesale access to the network for a set fee. They could also offer their own services above and beyond the regulated maximum. So to start an ISP in NZ, all you need is some national and international transit, and at least one server to do billing and core routing. As a result, we have dozens of major, actually good ISPs and many more niche ones. Most of them service the whole country - at least the UFB service area. I actually like my ISP. I have IPv6 and a static public IPv4. Peering is excellent and international bandwidth plentiful. Gigabit bandwidth with no usage call and no fair use policy (at least no policy regarding days usage). Municipal internet is great until you realize you just turned a monopoly into a duopoly. Without competition, what drive your new ISP to do better? If you're super lucky, the goodness of their hearts, I guess. Because you know the old incumbent will just match the new ISP and do not better. EDIT: Folks in other threads have pointed out how bad US government bodies have historically been at investing in infrastructure maintenance. I'd like to note that the NZ model neatly deals with those concerns too. The companies which build out the networks are made the owners presumably when the loans are paid off. These companies become very profitable even though they can't become ISPs themselves, and are thus heavily incentivized to invest their profits back into their networks to keep them working well and to come up with new products to sell. Already a NZ fibre company has deployed 10gbit fibre commercially, with no extra government support.

erentz 5y ago
The UFB program was a gift to the incumbent Telecom NZ. Their design was expensive and overwrought as you’d expect from a legacy telco. While it is nice that NZ has semi-decent fiber it’s still worse than my experience of FTTH overseas. Note that there is nothing inherent about muni fiber that prevents it providing the same unbundled layer 2 and dark fiber services. But in your example of Chorus they backhaul customers over layer 2 to your location for you. That’s how your example of one guy with a router works. He puts it in Auckland and everything is backhauled hundreds of miles to it. Munis do not operate backhaul networks, these aren’t state wide networks where a guy with his router can drop it in one pop in the biggest city and serve customers from across the state. This kind of design also becomes incredibly inefficient. The provider Chorus here is really doing most of the heavy lifting and doing it in the least efficient way possible. (Back hauling layer two to POPs hundreds of miles away.) Today all services live at layer 3 and are provided over the top. There’s a good case for just simplifying this and munis just providing the layer 3.

Black101 5y ago

Are those setup mostly as cooperatives? like some power companies

cwiggs 5y ago

If anyone in the Phoenix Metro area is looking to team up with someone to start a WISP let me know, I'd love to get this setup in PHX.

thehappypm 5y ago

This is just an anecdote, but I just moved to the suburbs from the city. My WiFi is so much better in the suburbs! In my apartment I had no choice but to run ethernet cables through the whole place because I couldn't get strong WiFi despite having a gigabit connection. Can't get much more than 100 Mbps down over WiFi with a clear line-of-sight and often much worse. My apartment would find dozens of wireless networks. When I moved to the suburbs, I immediately started researching how to get ethernet to my home office (upstairs from the router) but was stunned to be getting 300 Mbps+ download through WiFi, same router, through a wall, despite having slightly slower hard-wired download speeds. Interference from the other networks is my theory.