8 ms·

Washington state removes all barriers to municipal broadband

324 points by joeyespo 5y ago

ttul 5y ago
I was involved in a local government committee to investigate local broadband for my town. The incumbents were understandably lazy at improving service quality, so we struck out on our own to look at alternatives, including a municipally run service or wholesale backbone. What actually happened is someone in government called up a friend at a municipal fiber specialist company, who agreed to start making rumblings that they were going to pull fiber to our town. Within two weeks, one of the large incumbents announced their own project for a $6M upgrade, which involved running submarine cables and totally rewiring the town’s network to enable gigabit service. I’m saddened that the town never got a chance to build and own its own infrastructure, which would have been so much better, because it would have put locals in charge of this essential infrastructure - much as they already control water, roads, and sewage. But, ultimately, I now have gigabit service at a reasonably competitive price, in a small town that arguably never “deserved” it.
- chmod775 5y ago
  > in a small town that arguably never “deserved” it. Apparently it was still profitable. Just less so than continuing to milk old infrastructure.
  - smiley1437 5y ago
    I suspect the incumbents also want to minimize the number of precedent-setting municipalities that control their own broadband. Each one could potentially become a good example of the benefits of publicly owned infrastructure - and then inspire other cities to do the same.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- darig 5y ago
  I live in a small city, but it's the biggest one 100+ miles in any direction, so it shows on most maps. AT&T laid fiber everywhere, but just capped off all the endpoints. Now any plan to lay municipal fiber would probably interfere with AT&T's infrastructure, and AT&T could hold up the process. If anyone actually made anything that worked, AT&T could just finish the job (that they got grants to do that assumed they wouldn't just stop after the fiber was laid), and compete on price. Shady, shady business.
- rz2k 5y ago
  The incumbent ISP would have eventually had to upgrade to gigabit anyway. Maybe they were waiting until the same upgrade would cost $2M instead of $6M. Clearly, they revised their schedule because decades of revenue streams, even from a small town, can be worth more than the relative expense of upgrading now rather than later. Did the rates increase for customers who chose the new gigabit service? Often the new service offering doesn't make sense to a monopoly provider in terms of revenue increases in the short term, so competition or threat of public options are an important tool that can work even better than public utility boards. Finally, it's worth noting that with changing political climates priorities changes, especially when it comes to infrastructure. The Flint water system was publicly managed, and it isn't even the worst one in the country. Thousands of publicly managed bridges are at risk of collapse due to underfunded maintenance. Cold War fears about existential threats motivated great federal projects that focused on resiliency and creating the foundations for productivity. Without those same threats, legislation mandates intentional vulnerabilities like backdoors, fails to fund national standards that could limit cyber-extortion, and new internet-related initiatives are regularly more intent on erecting barriers to entry and toll booths than they are on nurturing any new or disruptive industries.
  - doikor 5y ago
    > Maybe they were waiting until the same upgrade would cost $2M instead of $6M. Most of the cost is the actual digging/laying new fiber. The price of that does not really go down over time (instead the cost of labor goes up over time usually). The actual fiber and equipment is a very small part of the cost. This happened at my parents town. They were looking at setting up their own municipal ISP and after some research/quotes it ended up costing X which was too much. They tried again a decade later and the cost for roughly the same system was 1.5X so even more out of their budget. The other case is the fiber already existing and the ISP refuses to upgrade to enable higher speeds then that is just pure greed.
    - toomuchtodo 5y ago
      The trick is to seize on when existing infra projects are being done (major roadwork or perhaps replacing water, sewer, or buried power) and throw the conduit and fiber down at the same time, as the incremental cost is trivial. This is referred to as Dig Once policy. Fiber is cheap. When you dig, install fiber! https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/otps/policy_brief_dig_once.pdf https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/otps/policy_brief_dig_once.p...
- skybrian 5y ago
  That’s some good negotiating. It’s probably for the best because the town doesn’t have to take the financial risk? If something goes wrong you want there to be some shareholders to take the loss. (In return, they profit if nothing goes wrong.) A lot of towns have a huge bill coming up when they have to replace outdated sewer systems. > The EPA reckons water and sewer systems will need $743 billion of upgrades through 2035 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/climate-change-means-water-and-sewer-utilities-will-need-billion-of-upgrades-over-the-next-decade-report-says-11620753790 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/climate-change-means-water...
  - ttul 5y ago
    As a consumer, I am not terribly displeased. Value-wise, I would have preferred that the municipality ended up owning the base fiber infrastructure and leasing it out to commercial operators. But that fantasy has passed.
- m463 5y ago
  > reasonably competitive price I would suggest that this is a lower price, but not a price you would get with robust competition.
  - xbar 5y ago
    No doubt. But it's 2021 and rural communities are catching up to where urban centers were 10 years ago. Not perfect, but better.
AS_of 5y ago
Great news, for them. For the rest of us, Are there any organizations we can support to help do this in more places?
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  https://ilsr.org/ https://ilsr.org/ https://ilsr.org/broadband-2/ https://ilsr.org/broadband-2/ https://muninetworks.org/ https://muninetworks.org/
exabrial 5y ago
On the surface, this looks great. An independent municipal provider? Saweet! What we've seen happen: network construction is contracted out to Comcast. They now have [yet another] local monopoly.
- floatingatoll 5y ago
  I have few objections to Cox, Comcast, and so forth being reduced to a CLEC-alike for DOCSIS connections, especially if the municipalities sign contracts that require the CLEC-alike to spend x% of revenue paid them by the city on infrastructure buildout first, performance upgrades only if no unserved areas remain.
- scythe 5y ago
  My city's government has a lot more leverage negotiating with Comcast than I do alone.
calvinmorrison 5y ago
Who created the barriers?
- exabrial 5y ago
  In the USA, typically government agencies are prohibited from selling services that compete with private sector companies.
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    Buzzare. If they can compete without making a loss/tapping taxpayer money, then incumbents don't deserve to survive.
    - exabrial 5y ago
      That should be the way it works, but the [federal] government is allowed to incinerate a nearly infinite amount of cash. Some state governments are becoming that same way unfortunately. Municipalities don't really have this option, so it may not be as big of a deal. See my other comment about contractors though... what we saw in TN was Comcast "contracting" its services to "build a municipal network", but instead just built their own crap using taxpayer funding.
    - rsj_hn 5y ago
      It is never the case that they can compete without making a loss, as that would effectively make them a private company. The Post Office, for example, is supposed to have its own P&L, yet we keep giving them billions every time they run out of money. So you get the worst of all worlds, the lack of accountability of a private company but the taxpayers are on the hook. Almost all these pseudo-government projects are funded out of the general budget, and some are off-books but still off-balance sheet liabilities of the government. E.g. a port authority that floats its own bonds, but those bonds are guaranteed by the local government, so if the port authority becomes insolvent the government is on the hook. If you think entity X can make its own profit and loss, then ask yourself: who is on the hook when the bonds sold by X default? It is always going to be a taxpayer for a government project. A clean separation between things that are supposed to turn a profit and things that should be funded socially is a good separation, and trying to blur those lines is usually a bad idea, as you create these unaccountable subsidized bureaucracies that end up being poorly run sources of graft after a few generations. Now whether internet access itself should be subsidized or turn a profit is a different matter. It's critical infrastructure, like roads, so you can make a case for subsidies.
splithalf 5y ago
Will be great for Bitcoin values.
- redisman 5y ago
  Why? Is BTC somehow bandwidth bound?
inson 5y ago
What does that mean for regular customers like myself?
- rtkwe 5y ago
  Either a locally run ISP offering gigabit speeds at good prices or it'll scare in incumbent ISPs into doing upgrades to lesser but improved levels for higher prices. That's just going off the pattern I've seen in a lot of places when cities start looking into making their own ISP; local government starts looking into running fiber and suddenly the incumbent ISP comes and runs their own fiber.
- ptmcc 5y ago
  As of yet, nothing. But this is still a good and necessary first step at removing an asinine prohibition. There is still no plan or funding for building out municipal broadband services, but it opens the door to having that discussion that was previously off-limits. Alternatively, it puts pressure on private ISPs to improve service or else potentially face competition from future municipal broadband.
- mjevans 5y ago
  I would really like to know where to look to MOVE TO as a result of new ISP competition making compelling offerings for a well connected future.
throwawaysea 5y ago
Given how remarkably one-sided the Washington legislature and Governor and AG have been, I am wary of municipal broadband in Washington. This is a one party state where leftists are embedding their ideology into virtually every public institution. For example public schools now push flawed gender ideology, critical race theory, and “civics” that are really progressive activism. Anyone speaking up against this injection of politics into our public agencies is in danger of losing their job, so there is nothing to balance out this bias. Given all this, I am worried that government controlled Internet services may come with censorship, controls, and surveillance aligned with their political views. If it displaces private providers that could be a huge threat to free speech and societal discourse. What I want is more competition and choice, not less, and I’m not convinced municipal broadband is the solution since it may end up removing choice and leave us with only a single public provider.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  Municipal broadband cam be organised as a charity. If 'private' get outcompeted by a charity, they deserve to die
  - longhairedhippy 5y ago
    I live in Washington state and already under a single provider, Comcast, and it sucks, I pay $120 a month for unlimited gigabit which tops out at 400Mpbs if I'm lucky, and often cannot support a zoom call with video. I, for one, am thrilled this law passed. Anything that can force a broken monopoly to be more competitive is a win in my book.
    - throwawaysea 5y ago
      A Zoom video call can be supported on less than 10 Mbps, so it’s hard for me to accept this claim that your gigabit service can’t support a Zoom call. I have Comcast (at a much lower tier) and have never had issues with steaming from multiple devices while video conferencing as well. If you have CenturyLink as an option for gigabit (available in several WA cities), they provide symmetric gigabit service for $70. In many parts of Seattle both providers are an option. In terms of affordability, I find the current providers to be VERY affordable. Comcast provides 25 Mbps service for $20 a month - more than enough for typical use. CenturyLink has cheaper tiers available as well, depending on location. As for choice - I would support laws that require sharing of last mile cabling and things like that. But if a public provider has unlimited funds and can run at a loss, that’s going to cause private providers to exit or stop investing at least, leading us back to square one - a single provider, except now it’s a slow bureaucratic government service.
nealabq 5y ago
https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadblocks/ https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc... (3 May 2021) outlines which states have broadband restrictions. Key quotes: - 18 states have restrictive legislation in place that make establishing community broadband prohibitively difficult. - Five additional states (Iowa, Arkansas, Colorado, Oregon, and Wyoming) have other types of roadblocks in place that make establishing networks more difficult than it needs to be. - A further five states (Arkansas, Idaho, Tennessee, Washington, and Montana) have introduced bills to remove municipal broadband restrictions so far this year. Montana’s bill has failed, while Arkansas’ passed in February.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  With regards to legislation repealing restrictions and enabling muni networks, it’s like marijuana legalization. You keep throwing it on the ballot each election cycle until it sticks from cohort turnover. Some states turn over faster than others.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- kingsuper20 5y ago
  Does 'prohibitively difficult' mean that towns aren't allowed to put in networks? or simply that it's hard to get funding from some higher level of government? It's hard to imagine some state law that prohibits a town (or neighborhood for that matter) from building out some kind of internet access.
  - smelendez 5y ago
    Those laws absolutely exist. Usually passed by state legislatures who see it as government overreach, encouraged by the big ISPs.
    - kingsuper20 5y ago
jorblumesea 5y ago
Realistically, municipal broadband doesn't make sense for every town or city. But what this should hopefully do is open up avenues to create competition for ISPs to create the services they promised, or upgrade existing services. I'm fairly convinced it's just greed and laziness. It's funny how back when Google fibre was rolling into town, suddenly centurylink upgraded its service...
GeekyBear 5y ago
Mississippi did this in 2019, and used a portion of the first round of Coronavirus stimulus money to offer block grants to get the ball rolling, to great success. >They used a portion of the funds to supercharge the rollout of high-speed broadband to the most underserved areas of the state in an effort to close the digital divide. They went to rural electric co-ops -- private, independent electric utilities owned by the members they serve -- many of which were left gobsmacked by the offer, according to David O'Bryan, general manager of Delta Electric Power Association, which now serves Carroll and Grenada counties with broadband. Many of these co-ops had been preparing to deploy networks but lacked the cash to begin a major project, especially in the most remote and sparsely populated parts of their territories. The result has been an acceleration in broadband deployment that could make Mississippi one of the most connected states in the nation within the next five to six years. That's a huge leap for the state, which last year ranked 42 out of 50 in BroadbandNow's 2020 connectivity rankings. https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/how-coronavirus-stimulus-funds-helped-one-state-create-a-broadband-miracle/ https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/how-coronavirus-stimulus-...
- twalla 5y ago
  That's....uh... remarkably progressive for Mississippi - and the first bill (HB 366 from 2019) passed nearly unanimously [1] https://legiscan.com/MS/votes/HB366/2019 https://legiscan.com/MS/votes/HB366/2019 Props to MS legislators for seeing the value in municipal broadband.
  - ls-lah_33 5y ago
    Most electrical transmission is cooperatively owned in rural areas of the US. https://www.electric.coop/electric-cooperative-fact-sheet https://www.electric.coop/electric-cooperative-fact-sheet
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
grahamburger 5y ago
I've been helping some cities recently to price out the cost of broadband projects. Cities often have some assets (property, access to fiber, sometimes access to wireless spectrum) that can make building a broadband network feasible. I'd love to chat with anyone interested in doing this in their city - email in my profile.
dang 5y ago
Recent related thread. Others? The Washington state legislature has voted to end limits on municipal broadband - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26803426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26803426 - April 2021 (112 comments) There have been tons of threads about municipal broadband of course, but a lot of them are in the key of repetitive/indignant. But this one is also recent and also pretty good: The number of cities with municipal broadband has jumped over 4x in two years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26970493 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26970493 - April 2021 (324 comments)
bilater 5y ago
As someone who is not well versed in this debate - can someone explain to me why it is a...debate? As in what is a (valid) argument against giving municipals the right to provide an internet service? Obviously big companies don't want the competition but how can they legally make an argument against it?
- salawat 5y ago
  The normal logic is that private industry can't get a foothold against something subsidized by tax revenue, therefore the municipal option amounts to unfair competition. I've never really bought into that line of reasoning though, especially when upkeep can be bid out to these ISP's.
  - bilater 5y ago
    Ah interesting point. Thanks for pointing this out.
reilly3000 5y ago
Props to Chelan County in WA for leading the charge on making this a viable model. The county P.U.D. owns and maintains the fiber infrastructure and sells it wholesale to ISPs. A friend of mine worked on that project and it has netted some concrete economic development wins. Wenatchee has been an ag center but is adding plenty of clean energy jobs and expanding into a Seattle alternative for tech (trying at least). https://www.chelanpud.org/my-pud-services/residential-services/fiber-optics https://www.chelanpud.org/my-pud-services/residential-servic...

324 points by joeyespo 5y ago

ttul 5y ago

I was involved in a local government committee to investigate local broadband for my town. The incumbents were understandably lazy at improving service quality, so we struck out on our own to look at alternatives, including a municipally run service or wholesale backbone. What actually happened is someone in government called up a friend at a municipal fiber specialist company, who agreed to start making rumblings that they were going to pull fiber to our town. Within two weeks, one of the large incumbents announced their own project for a $6M upgrade, which involved running submarine cables and totally rewiring the town’s network to enable gigabit service. I’m saddened that the town never got a chance to build and own its own infrastructure, which would have been so much better, because it would have put locals in charge of this essential infrastructure - much as they already control water, roads, and sewage. But, ultimately, I now have gigabit service at a reasonably competitive price, in a small town that arguably never “deserved” it.

chmod775 5y ago
> in a small town that arguably never “deserved” it. Apparently it was still profitable. Just less so than continuing to milk old infrastructure.
- smiley1437 5y ago
  I suspect the incumbents also want to minimize the number of precedent-setting municipalities that control their own broadband. Each one could potentially become a good example of the benefits of publicly owned infrastructure - and then inspire other cities to do the same.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
darig 5y ago
I live in a small city, but it's the biggest one 100+ miles in any direction, so it shows on most maps. AT&T laid fiber everywhere, but just capped off all the endpoints. Now any plan to lay municipal fiber would probably interfere with AT&T's infrastructure, and AT&T could hold up the process. If anyone actually made anything that worked, AT&T could just finish the job (that they got grants to do that assumed they wouldn't just stop after the fiber was laid), and compete on price. Shady, shady business.
rz2k 5y ago
The incumbent ISP would have eventually had to upgrade to gigabit anyway. Maybe they were waiting until the same upgrade would cost $2M instead of $6M. Clearly, they revised their schedule because decades of revenue streams, even from a small town, can be worth more than the relative expense of upgrading now rather than later. Did the rates increase for customers who chose the new gigabit service? Often the new service offering doesn't make sense to a monopoly provider in terms of revenue increases in the short term, so competition or threat of public options are an important tool that can work even better than public utility boards. Finally, it's worth noting that with changing political climates priorities changes, especially when it comes to infrastructure. The Flint water system was publicly managed, and it isn't even the worst one in the country. Thousands of publicly managed bridges are at risk of collapse due to underfunded maintenance. Cold War fears about existential threats motivated great federal projects that focused on resiliency and creating the foundations for productivity. Without those same threats, legislation mandates intentional vulnerabilities like backdoors, fails to fund national standards that could limit cyber-extortion, and new internet-related initiatives are regularly more intent on erecting barriers to entry and toll booths than they are on nurturing any new or disruptive industries.
- doikor 5y ago
  > Maybe they were waiting until the same upgrade would cost $2M instead of $6M. Most of the cost is the actual digging/laying new fiber. The price of that does not really go down over time (instead the cost of labor goes up over time usually). The actual fiber and equipment is a very small part of the cost. This happened at my parents town. They were looking at setting up their own municipal ISP and after some research/quotes it ended up costing X which was too much. They tried again a decade later and the cost for roughly the same system was 1.5X so even more out of their budget. The other case is the fiber already existing and the ISP refuses to upgrade to enable higher speeds then that is just pure greed.
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    The trick is to seize on when existing infra projects are being done (major roadwork or perhaps replacing water, sewer, or buried power) and throw the conduit and fiber down at the same time, as the incremental cost is trivial. This is referred to as Dig Once policy. Fiber is cheap. When you dig, install fiber! https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/otps/policy_brief_dig_once.pdf https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/otps/policy_brief_dig_once.p...
skybrian 5y ago
That’s some good negotiating. It’s probably for the best because the town doesn’t have to take the financial risk? If something goes wrong you want there to be some shareholders to take the loss. (In return, they profit if nothing goes wrong.) A lot of towns have a huge bill coming up when they have to replace outdated sewer systems. > The EPA reckons water and sewer systems will need $743 billion of upgrades through 2035 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/climate-change-means-water-and-sewer-utilities-will-need-billion-of-upgrades-over-the-next-decade-report-says-11620753790 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/climate-change-means-water...
- ttul 5y ago
  As a consumer, I am not terribly displeased. Value-wise, I would have preferred that the municipality ended up owning the base fiber infrastructure and leasing it out to commercial operators. But that fantasy has passed.
m463 5y ago
> reasonably competitive price I would suggest that this is a lower price, but not a price you would get with robust competition.
- xbar 5y ago
  No doubt. But it's 2021 and rural communities are catching up to where urban centers were 10 years ago. Not perfect, but better.

AS_of 5y ago

Great news, for them. For the rest of us, Are there any organizations we can support to help do this in more places?

toomuchtodo 5y ago
https://ilsr.org/ https://ilsr.org/ https://ilsr.org/broadband-2/ https://ilsr.org/broadband-2/ https://muninetworks.org/ https://muninetworks.org/

exabrial 5y ago

On the surface, this looks great. An independent municipal provider? Saweet! What we've seen happen: network construction is contracted out to Comcast. They now have [yet another] local monopoly.

floatingatoll 5y ago
I have few objections to Cox, Comcast, and so forth being reduced to a CLEC-alike for DOCSIS connections, especially if the municipalities sign contracts that require the CLEC-alike to spend x% of revenue paid them by the city on infrastructure buildout first, performance upgrades only if no unserved areas remain.
scythe 5y ago
My city's government has a lot more leverage negotiating with Comcast than I do alone.

calvinmorrison 5y ago

Who created the barriers?

exabrial 5y ago
In the USA, typically government agencies are prohibited from selling services that compete with private sector companies.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  Buzzare. If they can compete without making a loss/tapping taxpayer money, then incumbents don't deserve to survive.
  - exabrial 5y ago
    That should be the way it works, but the [federal] government is allowed to incinerate a nearly infinite amount of cash. Some state governments are becoming that same way unfortunately. Municipalities don't really have this option, so it may not be as big of a deal. See my other comment about contractors though... what we saw in TN was Comcast "contracting" its services to "build a municipal network", but instead just built their own crap using taxpayer funding.
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    It is never the case that they can compete without making a loss, as that would effectively make them a private company. The Post Office, for example, is supposed to have its own P&L, yet we keep giving them billions every time they run out of money. So you get the worst of all worlds, the lack of accountability of a private company but the taxpayers are on the hook. Almost all these pseudo-government projects are funded out of the general budget, and some are off-books but still off-balance sheet liabilities of the government. E.g. a port authority that floats its own bonds, but those bonds are guaranteed by the local government, so if the port authority becomes insolvent the government is on the hook. If you think entity X can make its own profit and loss, then ask yourself: who is on the hook when the bonds sold by X default? It is always going to be a taxpayer for a government project. A clean separation between things that are supposed to turn a profit and things that should be funded socially is a good separation, and trying to blur those lines is usually a bad idea, as you create these unaccountable subsidized bureaucracies that end up being poorly run sources of graft after a few generations. Now whether internet access itself should be subsidized or turn a profit is a different matter. It's critical infrastructure, like roads, so you can make a case for subsidies.

splithalf 5y ago

Will be great for Bitcoin values.

redisman 5y ago
Why? Is BTC somehow bandwidth bound?

inson 5y ago

What does that mean for regular customers like myself?

rtkwe 5y ago
Either a locally run ISP offering gigabit speeds at good prices or it'll scare in incumbent ISPs into doing upgrades to lesser but improved levels for higher prices. That's just going off the pattern I've seen in a lot of places when cities start looking into making their own ISP; local government starts looking into running fiber and suddenly the incumbent ISP comes and runs their own fiber.
ptmcc 5y ago
As of yet, nothing. But this is still a good and necessary first step at removing an asinine prohibition. There is still no plan or funding for building out municipal broadband services, but it opens the door to having that discussion that was previously off-limits. Alternatively, it puts pressure on private ISPs to improve service or else potentially face competition from future municipal broadband.
mjevans 5y ago
I would really like to know where to look to MOVE TO as a result of new ISP competition making compelling offerings for a well connected future.

throwawaysea 5y ago

Given how remarkably one-sided the Washington legislature and Governor and AG have been, I am wary of municipal broadband in Washington. This is a one party state where leftists are embedding their ideology into virtually every public institution. For example public schools now push flawed gender ideology, critical race theory, and “civics” that are really progressive activism. Anyone speaking up against this injection of politics into our public agencies is in danger of losing their job, so there is nothing to balance out this bias. Given all this, I am worried that government controlled Internet services may come with censorship, controls, and surveillance aligned with their political views. If it displaces private providers that could be a huge threat to free speech and societal discourse. What I want is more competition and choice, not less, and I’m not convinced municipal broadband is the solution since it may end up removing choice and leave us with only a single public provider.

ClumsyPilot 5y ago
Municipal broadband cam be organised as a charity. If 'private' get outcompeted by a charity, they deserve to die
- longhairedhippy 5y ago
  I live in Washington state and already under a single provider, Comcast, and it sucks, I pay $120 a month for unlimited gigabit which tops out at 400Mpbs if I'm lucky, and often cannot support a zoom call with video. I, for one, am thrilled this law passed. Anything that can force a broken monopoly to be more competitive is a win in my book.
  - throwawaysea 5y ago
    A Zoom video call can be supported on less than 10 Mbps, so it’s hard for me to accept this claim that your gigabit service can’t support a Zoom call. I have Comcast (at a much lower tier) and have never had issues with steaming from multiple devices while video conferencing as well. If you have CenturyLink as an option for gigabit (available in several WA cities), they provide symmetric gigabit service for $70. In many parts of Seattle both providers are an option. In terms of affordability, I find the current providers to be VERY affordable. Comcast provides 25 Mbps service for $20 a month - more than enough for typical use. CenturyLink has cheaper tiers available as well, depending on location. As for choice - I would support laws that require sharing of last mile cabling and things like that. But if a public provider has unlimited funds and can run at a loss, that’s going to cause private providers to exit or stop investing at least, leading us back to square one - a single provider, except now it’s a slow bureaucratic government service.

nealabq 5y ago

https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadblocks/ https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc... (3 May 2021) outlines which states have broadband restrictions. Key quotes: - 18 states have restrictive legislation in place that make establishing community broadband prohibitively difficult. - Five additional states (Iowa, Arkansas, Colorado, Oregon, and Wyoming) have other types of roadblocks in place that make establishing networks more difficult than it needs to be. - A further five states (Arkansas, Idaho, Tennessee, Washington, and Montana) have introduced bills to remove municipal broadband restrictions so far this year. Montana’s bill has failed, while Arkansas’ passed in February.

toomuchtodo 5y ago
With regards to legislation repealing restrictions and enabling muni networks, it’s like marijuana legalization. You keep throwing it on the ballot each election cycle until it sticks from cohort turnover. Some states turn over faster than others.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
kingsuper20 5y ago
Does 'prohibitively difficult' mean that towns aren't allowed to put in networks? or simply that it's hard to get funding from some higher level of government? It's hard to imagine some state law that prohibits a town (or neighborhood for that matter) from building out some kind of internet access.
- smelendez 5y ago
  Those laws absolutely exist. Usually passed by state legislatures who see it as government overreach, encouraged by the big ISPs.
  - kingsuper20 5y ago

jorblumesea 5y ago

Realistically, municipal broadband doesn't make sense for every town or city. But what this should hopefully do is open up avenues to create competition for ISPs to create the services they promised, or upgrade existing services. I'm fairly convinced it's just greed and laziness. It's funny how back when Google fibre was rolling into town, suddenly centurylink upgraded its service...

GeekyBear 5y ago

Mississippi did this in 2019, and used a portion of the first round of Coronavirus stimulus money to offer block grants to get the ball rolling, to great success. >They used a portion of the funds to supercharge the rollout of high-speed broadband to the most underserved areas of the state in an effort to close the digital divide. They went to rural electric co-ops -- private, independent electric utilities owned by the members they serve -- many of which were left gobsmacked by the offer, according to David O'Bryan, general manager of Delta Electric Power Association, which now serves Carroll and Grenada counties with broadband. Many of these co-ops had been preparing to deploy networks but lacked the cash to begin a major project, especially in the most remote and sparsely populated parts of their territories. The result has been an acceleration in broadband deployment that could make Mississippi one of the most connected states in the nation within the next five to six years. That's a huge leap for the state, which last year ranked 42 out of 50 in BroadbandNow's 2020 connectivity rankings. https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/how-coronavirus-stimulus-funds-helped-one-state-create-a-broadband-miracle/ https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/how-coronavirus-stimulus-...

twalla 5y ago
That's....uh... remarkably progressive for Mississippi - and the first bill (HB 366 from 2019) passed nearly unanimously [1] https://legiscan.com/MS/votes/HB366/2019 https://legiscan.com/MS/votes/HB366/2019 Props to MS legislators for seeing the value in municipal broadband.
- ls-lah_33 5y ago
  Most electrical transmission is cooperatively owned in rural areas of the US. https://www.electric.coop/electric-cooperative-fact-sheet https://www.electric.coop/electric-cooperative-fact-sheet
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

grahamburger 5y ago

I've been helping some cities recently to price out the cost of broadband projects. Cities often have some assets (property, access to fiber, sometimes access to wireless spectrum) that can make building a broadband network feasible. I'd love to chat with anyone interested in doing this in their city - email in my profile.

dang 5y ago

Recent related thread. Others? The Washington state legislature has voted to end limits on municipal broadband - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26803426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26803426 - April 2021 (112 comments) There have been tons of threads about municipal broadband of course, but a lot of them are in the key of repetitive/indignant. But this one is also recent and also pretty good: The number of cities with municipal broadband has jumped over 4x in two years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26970493 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26970493 - April 2021 (324 comments)

bilater 5y ago

As someone who is not well versed in this debate - can someone explain to me why it is a...debate? As in what is a (valid) argument against giving municipals the right to provide an internet service? Obviously big companies don't want the competition but how can they legally make an argument against it?

salawat 5y ago
The normal logic is that private industry can't get a foothold against something subsidized by tax revenue, therefore the municipal option amounts to unfair competition. I've never really bought into that line of reasoning though, especially when upkeep can be bid out to these ISP's.
- bilater 5y ago
  Ah interesting point. Thanks for pointing this out.

reilly3000 5y ago

Props to Chelan County in WA for leading the charge on making this a viable model. The county P.U.D. owns and maintains the fiber infrastructure and sells it wholesale to ISPs. A friend of mine worked on that project and it has netted some concrete economic development wins. Wenatchee has been an ag center but is adding plenty of clean energy jobs and expanding into a Seattle alternative for tech (trying at least). https://www.chelanpud.org/my-pud-services/residential-services/fiber-optics https://www.chelanpud.org/my-pud-services/residential-servic...