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The unreasonable fight for municipal broadband

357 points by thcipriani 5y ago

car_analogy 5y ago
The best defense is a good offense - start lobbying to break-up incumbent ISPs, and force them to share cables, ideally owned by an independent spinoff company. If they want to hurt municipal broadband, hurt them back.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- g_p 5y ago
  Spun-out infrastructure is probably better than the current situation for many people, but it's not necessarily the best outcome - the UK has a setup a bit like this, with the access networks spun out into a wholesale company. It still took rivals digging up streets to lay fibre to move things along. Absent genuine competition, I am sceptical proper investment can be forced in a wholesale "spinoff" provider. It also means ISPs are effectively limited to offering the same quality of customer service that the wholesale provider offers, because they need/choose to use the wholesale provider for technician work. That kind of thing can be quite problematic, at least judging by the kinds of complaints you read online. Depending on the nature of the access network, it might also result in an outdated network seeing no further investment. The UK is only just getting a fibre roll-out going in earnest, and this has come from lots of government encouragement, as well as private new-entrant providers increasingly deciding to just lay their own fibre in. That, plus a reasonably widespread hybrid fibre coax (cable) network offering up to approx gigabit downstream services, providing widespread competition. I would definitely agree that opening up passive infrastructure (ducts and poles, etc.) would help, as it makes it cheaper for new entrants to rapidly deploy coverage. I think people need to be careful what they wish for though - if the only infrastructure available is outdated copper that can barely manage ADSL2 speeds - where will the investment come from to get to fibre? If there's already a passive optical network deployed then this is less of an issue for now, but I think it's important to note that, at least in the UK market, the impact of competitive provision has been pivotal to getting fibre rolled out quicker. Without rivals raising investment and digging up roads to lay fibre in large cities, the incumbent "spun out" wholesale provider was calling VDSL "fibre to the cabinet" a "superfast fibre" connection. Once rivals did that, competitive pressures meant FTTP deployment followed.
  - CraigJPerry 5y ago
    >> the impact of competitive provision has been pivotal to getting fibre rolled out quicker Yeah i agree, although it does seem like someone there is now awake to the idea that they might not be the most efficient operation. OpenReach installed fibre in my street’s existing underground network over the pandemic via a subcontractor then they subcontracted a company for the customer premises hookup. That latter company were way more efficient than i expected. At my property the previous owners cemented over the opening at the house end of the duct that runs from the BT pit out in the street, under my garden to my house. It meant the chap who was due to install my FTTP couldn’t run the fibre from the pit to my house. He phoned his colleagues in another van, they showed up 20 mins later and broke ground in my garden to intercept the duct then run a new sub-duct to my house then fed the fibre. The original chap in the meantime went and installed another house. These chaps put everything back as it was except i had a nice neat new fibre box at the front of the house from under the garden. Original chap came back another hour or two later and finished off the commissioning. When the problem became apparent i was expecting weeks of delay with openreach, instead my install took 2.5 hours instead of 45 mins but all done same day. It’s nice finally having decent broadband speeds…
  - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
    > It still took rivals digging up streets to lay fibre to move things along. No it didn't. The UK government had a very forward looking fibre internet rollout that started in the 80s. Thatcher canned it for ideological reasons. > “In 1979 I presented my results,” he tells us, “and the conclusion was to forget about copper and get into fibre. So BT started a massive effort – that spanned in six years – involving thousands of people to both digitise the network and to put fibre everywhere. The country had more fibre per capita than any other nation. > “In 1986, I managed to get fibre to the home cheaper than copper and we started a programme where we built factories for manufacturing the system. By 1990, we had two factories, one in Ipswich and one in Birmingham, where were manufacturing components for systems to roll out to the local loop”. > At that time, the UK, Japan and the United States were leading the way in fibre optic technology and roll-out. Indeed, the first wide area fibre optic network was set up in Hastings, UK. But, in 1990, then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, decided that BT’s rapid and extensive rollout of fibre optic broadband was anti-competitive and held a monopoly on a technology and service that no other telecom company could do. > “Unfortunately, the Thatcher government decided that it wanted the American cable companies providing the same service to increase competition. So the decision was made to close down the local loop roll out and in 1991 that roll out was stopped. The two factories that BT had built to build fibre related components were sold to Fujitsu and HP, the assets were stripped and the expertise was shipped out to South East Asia. > “Our colleagues in Korea and Japan, who were working with quite closely at the time, stood back and looked at what happened to us in amazement. What was pivotal was that they carried on with their respective fibre rollouts. And, well, the rest is history as they say. > “What is quite astonishing is that a very similar thing happened in the United States. The US, UK and Japan were leading the world. In the US, a judge was appointed by Congress to break up AT&T. And so AT&T became things like BellSouth and at that point, political decisions were made that crippled the roll out of optical fibre across the rest of the western world, because the rest of the countries just followed like sheep. https://webreturn.co.uk/how-thatcher-killed-the-uks-superfast-broadband-before-it-even-existed/ https://webreturn.co.uk/how-thatcher-killed-the-uks-superfas...
- beams_of_light 5y ago
  We already did this. CLECs popped up and offered DSL and cable internet services for a while, throughout the late 90s and early 00s. Here's the real reason competition doesn't pop up in the footprint of the incumbents - when they do, the incumbents sue them into submission. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/one-big-reason-we-lack-internet-competition-starting-an-isp-is-really-hard/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/one-b...
  - glasss 5y ago
    They sue and buy each other out, it's happened repeatedly across every industry that ma bell was broken up into.
    - Finnucane 4y ago
      rinse and repeat.
  - walrus01 5y ago
    the modern trend is for cable operators to amalagamate themselves together, if you look at the investment group that bought Wave/RCN/Grande and similar as an example.
- Zigurd 4y ago
  There is a name for this: Structural separation. It should be a regulatory norm. What it does for consumers is to eliminate the barriers to entry for multiple retail competitors. Those competitors then make deals with upstream bandwidth providers who also have to compete.
remir 5y ago
It's inspiring to see good municipal broadband in the US. I wish this was more common here in Canada. To me it make sense that a city owns and operate critical infrastructure such as this.
- forum_ghost 5y ago
  in some sense, this is even better in the US, as First Amendment applies to governments, they shouldn't be able to censor your communications.
- throwaway48375 5y ago
  Rogers has entered the chat...
  - deepspace 5y ago
    There are actually not many barriers to municipal broadband in Canada (yet). Your city just has to commit to it and execute on the plan. It is admittedly easier to do in small, dense cities than in cities with sprawling suburbs.
AtlasBarfed 5y ago
I see they went easy on you. Just marketing? Where are the armies of on-retainer lawyers? If they paid a million dollars in marketing, what are they paying for ongoing lobbying? Telecoms knows that this is war, you just won a battle.
phlipski 5y ago
Longmonsters!!! I love it!! Fuck Comcast!
- mountainriver 4y ago
  Longmonsters unite! Nextlight for the future!
koolba 5y ago
> Comcast spent $500,000 in a tiny city of less than 100,000 people. You can be sure, Comcast will do all this again in a heartbeat. Well duh. Assuming five people per home, and a market penetration of 50% (probably higher when you’re the only game in town), that’s only $50/home. That’s less than half of what they’d be getting from a subscribed home per month. I’m surprised they didn’t spend even more fighting this.
- tauwauwau 5y ago
  100,000 people = 20,000 homes 50% penetration = 10,000 homes $50/home = 50 * 10,000 = $500,000 It's exactly same not half.
  - FireBeyond 5y ago
    The average household in the US is 2.6 people, not 5. And let's be honest, the average Xfinity bill for internet alone is $60-100.
    - donthellbanme 5y ago
      Closer to the $100 plus. I pay $170 for basic cable, and the lowest speed wi-fi. This in in Marin County. I gave up talikibg to customer service in "I can't speak your language very well, but my name is Steve. Can I put you down for VOIP, and free credit monitoring for and additional $40/mo." When trying to lower your bill, go to the website. The foreign help don't have a clue to what you are trying to convey.
    - tauwauwau 4y ago
      You're right, I had spectrum for 5 years and by the time I was leaving the country I was paying 80$ for unlimited 120+ mbps. I also found it very odd and frustrating that they don't allow cancellation in the website or over the support chat, you have to call them to get the service cancelled. I had to do that in roaming :), well it's not like there are choices of broadband vendors in US. Who are you gonna go to, if not these 2 companies
DubiousPusher 5y ago
Selling your public goods and resources to monopoly and credulously believing it'll all work out somehow while counting your money is the most American thing there is, going back to the railroads.
- rectang 5y ago
  Nah, it's way more murican to pretend that de facto monopolies established through regulatory capture and the legal bribery of campaign contributions are morally superior because although they own the government for all intents and purposes, they're ostensibly "private".
  - hedora 5y ago
    Ironically, the Boston Tea Party was less about taxation than it was about the Brits imposing an artificial monopoly on tea imports to the US. Of course, that's not how they teach it in elementary school...
- pitaj 5y ago
  You mean monopolies created by government intervention, like the railroads?
  - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
    Railroads were very similar to broadband. "Competition" at the national level, but each local area was controlled by the first network to be established. Dont like your railroad/internet, well you're free to move to another city, where the exact same problem exists. The government intervention was mostly to fix that existing problem.
- goodpoint 4y ago
  ...while also refusing to consider coops.
  - DubiousPusher 4y ago
ncphil 5y ago
Hopefully this piece gets a lot more views, because this is an issue that pretty much any rational technoligist should get involved with. Here in NC, our state legislature also caved to cableco and telecom pressure to make it nearly impossible for muni broadband to spread. That was after a single city's service succeeded so spectacularly that the incumbents had visions of Armageddon. That's because they knew that even in this relatively center-right leaning state, people will know a good deal when they see it: so job 1 was to make sure they never do. So far their efforts at blocking competition have been successful. Except for a few very limited areas where Google Fiber was able to pry its way in, there has been no competition to the incumbents from muni or private parties. At this point our best hope may be that changing demographics and the undeniable drift away from traditional programming will result in their financial collapse, finally allowing communities to serve themselves. The other option is for people to get out and pressure their political reps to make muni or community broadband easier to deploy, maybe even run for office themselves and replace those who have sold out. Broadband access isn't as important as homelessness or healthcare, but it is important. Maybe it's a good place to start reversing the crappification of everything many here have lived through their whole lives.
- germinalphrase 5y ago
  There should be(and maybe, probably, is?) be political action organization that provides case studies and background research materials to support community level action. Give ammo to average folks to advocate for muni broadband in a manner that is simple and compelling. Anyone have a resource?
- bigjimmyk3 5y ago
  I live in an area with great fiber internet service (gigabit synchronous unmetered) thanks to a rural electric co-op. It worked here because co-ops still have a fair bit of political power (in my state anyway).
  - walrus01 5y ago
    One of the great advantages of a last mile rural electrical coop is that they already own/control the ROW (right of way), for the most part, wood utility poles, they have crews of linemen, bucket trucks, spool trailers, GIS people who know how to do aerial ROW planning, etc. If you have the aerial ROW fully under your own ownership and control the $/km to do rural FTTH is vastly reduced. There are a lot of efficiencies if this is done as a nonprofit at a municipal/county level entity, one random example, county run fiber PUD calls up the same-county sheriff's department and is like "oh yeah we're gonna need to block a lane and have some traffic flaggers at place X and Y and Z, and we need to shut down avenue C for a while", and everything goes very smoothly.
mjevans 5y ago
Archive.org link https://web.archive.org/web/20220421012017/https://tylercipriani.com/blog/2022/04/20/the-unreasonable-fight-for-municipal-broadband/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220421012017/https://tylercipr...
sarchertech 5y ago
We’ve had gigabit municipal internet here in Chattanooga for 12 years now. It’s better than Comcast in every possible way—speed, price, reliability, customer service, install time, install windows, availability (within the state limited geographical area) etc… There was a question on a local Facebook group the other day from a person who just moved here asking which ISP she should use. The replies were nothing but pages and pages of EPB, EPB, EPB… (EPB is the name of the municipal power company and ISP). Along with glowing reviews about how better their customer service is than Comcast. EPB is so much better, I’d have a really hard time moving somewhere else that didn’t have something similar.
- q1w2 5y ago
  What about from a privacy perspective? This is essentially a government run internet connection to your home.
  - rini17 4y ago
    Corporate ISPs sell whatever customer data they can get and meddle with traffic already, is there a way government can do worse than that? Not even Big Govt just municipal one...
    - koheripbal 4y ago
      - jaywalk 4y ago
        I'd assume that municipal broadband providers still have a privacy policy that would require a court order to turn over data to law enforcement. And that would be the exact same thing binding a corporate broadband provider.
        q1w2 4y ago
        That is an assumption based on no evidence.
deepspace 5y ago
I live in one of the few Canadian cities who were progressive enough to install city-managed fiber in most areas zoned for high-rise buildings. Actual internet service is provided by ISPs, but they deliberately excluded the large telcos. Similar to the author, I also get 1Gbps symmetric, no outages, no data caps and I pay only $32 (Canadian) a month. The telcos charge four times as much for the same service (but less reliable) in the residential areas not covered by the city network.
- 20kleagues 5y ago
  Oh wow I had no idea Canada did municipal broadband and $32 a month is insanely cheap compared to what shaw/telus charge in the west. Which city do you live in and what's your city-managed ISP called? Would love to know more
  - mikepurvis 5y ago
    Looks like probably Moncton, New Brunswick.
  - deepspace 4y ago
    New Westminster, BC. The city-managed part of the service is called Bridgenet. Internet service is provided by Novus, Urbanfibre and a couple of other ISPs. Urbanfibre is the cheapest, and just as reliable as the others.
    - 20kleagues 4y ago
      I live in Surrey and had no idea New West was doing this, it's like 15 minutes away. We need this idea to spread across Metro Vancouver, I'll definitely do more research into how it came about. ps: this is a very good reason to move to new west!
panic 5y ago
Why doesn’t the Bay Area have its own fiber internet service? Surely there’s enough talent and collective political influence here to get Comcast out of our own neighborhoods.
- toast0 5y ago
  There's Sonic, but fiber rollout is expensive when you're not the incumbent. It doesn't help that AT&T rolled fiber out to parts of the Bay Area once Google announced their list of cities. How many customers can a competitor get if they overbuild where AT&T has built fiber? Or where AT&T builds fiber in response. Some small number of people understand that differences in peering and transit are a thing, but most of the population is going to be I already have fiber because AT&T was telling people VDSL is fiber.
- jounker 5y ago
  Sonic is pretty good. https://www.sonic.com/ https://www.sonic.com/
  - bubblethink 4y ago
    It doesn't even cover the majority of SF, and SF is a small city. Same story with fiber everywhere. Google fiber also barely covered any territory in Atlanta, Austin, etc.
matttproud 5y ago
If you weren’t aware of how bad the regulatory capture is, you should check out this article and its map: https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadblocks/ https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc.... It’s staggering to me the public hasn’t pilloried Comcast at the stockades after the pandemic.
titanomachy 5y ago
I'm impressed that Longmont was able to pull this together. It seems like living in a small city like this might make it easier to coordinate common-sense measures like this. Comcast/Centurylink spent $500k in a city of <100k people to try and convince residents to give up on municipal broadband, but citizen activists were able to make it happen anyway. Is there a way to find places to live that are populated by mostly sane people with some minimal brainpower and engagement in their community? My (wealthy and educated) city has voted several times against our own interests on this issue and many others.
- FireBeyond 5y ago
  > Comcast/Centurylink spent $500k in a city of <100k people That seems a lot of money until you think revenue. Average household, 2.6 people, so let's say 38,000 households. Let's say half of them have internet from one of these providers and we'll be "generous" and say they're averaging $50/mo on their bill. That's 17 days revenue, if it had succeeded. An entirely worthwhile investment on their part. To be clear though, I despise efforts to fight municipal broadband.
  - malwarebytess 5y ago
    It's sickening to me that corporations can engage in politics as "investment."
spamizbad 5y ago
I feel like broadband is one of those things like sewer and water: it really doesn't make sense to privatize it and you're better off operating it like a municipal utility.
walrus01 5y ago
People looking for a viable government based model to do municipal broadband can look at some of the counties in eastern WA. In those counties, which are fortunate enough to also be their own last-mile electrical grid operators (so they already have bucket trucks, linemen, spool trailers, lashers, etc), the county builds and owns a dark fiber network. Various 3rd party ISPs can rent space on it. It works great. The great advantage of being able to build a last mile and middle mile dark fiber plant with municipal money is the extremely long time scale of a typical municipal bond. And the low interest rate paid on it. As we have seen with fiber from the mid 1980s that's currently in use with 100GbE DWDM systems, modern singlemode fiber can have very long lifespans. There's no reason to believe that a new-build last mile dark fiber network serving single family homes today, if architected correctly, can't be viable for 40-50 years. In places where there is a duopoly from the incumbent local phone company (centurylink, frontier, verizon, AT&T, whatever) and a cable operator (comcast, charter/spectrum, altice, wave, etc) neither of the two incumbent operators has any interest in seeing a new entrant 3rd party network built. And I can expect that they will lobby hard against the concept of municipal broadband, claiming that their DOCSIS3 on coax last mile service (250 down x 16 Mbps up and 0.03% packet loss) is "good enough".
- jaywalk 4y ago
  >DOCSIS3 on coax last mile service (250 down x 16 Mbps up and 0.03% packet loss) I'm all for municipal broadband and sticking it to the incumbents, but DOCSIS3 is far better than you give it credit for. My current DOCSIS3 service from Comcast is 1200 down/45 up, and it's rock solid. And there are network architecture improvements on the roadmap that will allow that relatively paltry upload speed to rise significantly in the future.
  - briffle 4y ago
    In my area, the highest upload with comcast and DOCSIS3 is 15Mb/s, and only the gigabit plans. My 250Mb plan gets a wonderful 5Mb/s upload.its completely rediculous.
j16sdiz 5y ago
Is municipal internet controlled by the government? Does it have any implications on state imposed censorship?
voiper1 5y ago
>And when I returned my cable box to Comcast to cancel my service, the representative felt compelled to counsel me: “NextLight, huh? you know,” he said, leaning in, “if you miss even a single payment, they’ll raise your price?” And then they'll still charge less than you? How is that even a threat?!
fareesh 5y ago
Seems like one step along the way for the government to criminalize personal VPN access and ban the websites they don't like. They could already do it but this way is so much easier.
- mellavora 5y ago
  Looks like you missed forum_ghosts point, "in some sense, this is even better in the US, as First Amendment applies to governments, they shouldn't be able to censor your communications" It is illegal for govnt to censor communication, it is not illegal for Comcast to do so. Likewise, if govnt wanted to criminalize personal VPN access, they just pass a law. They don't need to own the infrastructure to do this. However, if Comcast decides it doesn't like personal VPN, what are you going to do? So, actually government-owned internet is the best protection against the harms you warn of.
- sobkas 5y ago
  > Seems like one step along the way for the government to criminalize personal VPN access and ban the websites they don't like. They could already do it but this way is so much easier. You mean much harder, because when government (ISP) is blocking sites it's censorship, that is against constitution, while corporations can do whatever they want (especially if it is heavily "encouraged" by government), so your only action is to change ISP(good luck with that in land of the freedom). And even when there is a competing ISP in your area, odds are that it also was "encouraged" by government.
  - fareesh 4y ago
    In theory sure but in reality merely 2 days ago I saw calls from both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for governments to adopt more internet censorship. I don't have confidence that the new crop of lawmakers are in sync with the constitution, particularly on the subject of free speech. Ultimately this becomes reliant on the judiciary, which is also political.
xyst 5y ago
There’s another municipal internet service provider in TN (chattanooga?) that offers all customers 1Gbps or 10Gbps service to your home or business. The 1 Gbps plan is comparable to Google Fiber and just a tad bit cheaper. I have always envied them since I live in a state that has banned municipalities from creating their own ISP. Even trying to convince a few people is a difficult task.
guilhas 5y ago
What is the purpose of municipal broadband if we already have several companies, with a working business model, providing the same service?
parkingrift 5y ago
I live in New York City, in Manhattan, and I have a single option for high speed internet. This despite the city paying Verizon to wire everyone with Fiber. Grifters, grifters everywhere.
- imtringued 4y ago
  Why do cities pay money without at least getting shares of the company they are subsidizing? They wouldn't even need publish shares, private shares of the local city branch could be more than enough.
- emteycz 5y ago
  The city sponsors a company and you expect it to have competition and its own services to be focused on consumers? Why would anyone go into that risk when profits can be made much easier, and how do you expect the non-sponsored companies to gather enough profit to build up their infra?
  - parkingrift 4y ago
    Sorry, I should have clarified. Verizon is not available at my apartment. I get Spectrum and Spectrum only. The city paid Verizon to ADD competition, Verizon took the money, and then they just… didn’t fulfill the contract.
    - emteycz 4y ago
      But that's what I meant. You can't expect someone who gets paid for nothing to just go and increase their risk of failure infinitely by doing something. Not doing anything is much more profitable in their situation. I'd never pay a telecom company before I got my services and used them. They always found a way to screw me over when I did (many years ago). Your city just got the classic treatment on a massive scale.
  - rectang 4y ago
    It's not like the situation is markedly better elsewhere in the country. Sponsor a company, get a single option. Don't sponsor a company, still get a single option. In one scenario, the government signs an exclusive contract. In the other, the absurd levels of control over government exercised by "private" entities in the name of "free speech" (thanks Citizens United) ensure perpetual corruption and de facto private ownership of public resources. All paths lead to monopoly. The only difference is the level of hypocrisy.
NovemberWhiskey 5y ago
I don't know how I feel about municipal electric utilities extending into areas like broadband, as is described here. In most places, broadband is a fairly competitive market; and municipal utilities are significantly subsidized by the public purse: I'm pretty sure I'd be able to run a successful ISP if I didn't have to pay federal income tax and any debt I issued was also exempt from federal income tax, reducing my cost of capital.
- JaimeThompson 4y ago
  >In most places, broadband is a fairly competitive market I would love to see data that supports that statement, most areas have a single high speed provider.
TZubiri 4y ago
This reads like an ad.
javier_e06 4y ago
Do you have to pay $40.00/month to use the streets to go to work? No. Do you have to pay $40.00/month to use fiberoptics to work from home? Yes. ISP's love this. Internet is infrastructure. ISP companies get paid handsomely for a service that should an itemized line in our electric bill.
- zippergz 4y ago
  I have to pay for electricity and water, both of which are vastly more important than internet.
- blown_gasket 4y ago
  I do pay federal income taxes which of that 3% is for transportation. If I were to look at per month of my salary ~$40 goes to transportation. So yes, I broadly pay $40/month to use the streets.
- MrBuddyCasino 4y ago
  I don't understand your point. If it was "an itemized line in our electric bill", you'd presumably still pay for it? You also pay lot more than $40 a month to finance the infrastructure surrounding you, even though that is not were most of the money goes to (mostly social / medical / military, not infra).
mountainriver 4y ago
I have lived in Longmont for a good part of my life. There’s an important note here that Longmont’s fiber was basically bought at auction by a company that laid it and went bankrupt in the early 2000s. This significantly lowered the cost, which I understand has put other cities into bankruptcy. Next light is really a fantastic service and better than comcast in every way. It’s just worth noting the economics are unique here.
exabrial 4y ago
It's an expectations vs reality and software engineers having no experience in real-world construction or government. What a bunch of bright-eyed internet posters think would happen: A small city somehow manages to hire a competent staff, paying under market value for talent, to expertly engineer and then construct, a brand new fiber network from scratch, that's done on-time, while buying the latest/greatest available cost effective solutions from multiple vendors, without any red tape or lawsuits, all while owning all of the infrastructure and finally providing services at amortized costs. Citizens could use the network to provide ah-hoc services to other residents and the city could use it to modernize their infrastructure and create connected cities that provide valuable information to their citizens. What happens in reality: A small city thinks they can't do any of the above so they hire a "contractor". Which somehow we've gotten into law that that must be bid on... so Comcast bids under cost to protect it's monopoly. City hires Comcast as a "contractor" to "build" a "new" network. Comcast spends most of the money by providing executives with Vegas trips and catered meetings at the golf course. Once realizing they actually need to deliver something they "leverage their existing assets" to "save money" and force everyone onto their existing cable network that gets .25mbps upload and "500mpbs" download (for 1s at a time, then throttled to 2mbps, 3.5mbps on thursdays) (still counts as broadband) , all while telling Netflix and other content providers they have to "pay to play" to send content to customers... er citizens, to "cover costs". Then, they couldn't possibly let users use their own equipment like a standard router with ethernet handoff "because security reasons" so they need to charge a $45/mo rental fee to all suckers.... er citizens, for "their safety". The city catches wind of this and Comcast promises a Certification program for routers, and "project delays" delay this for multiple years before finally it's announced but it costs $20k to have a router "certified" for your safety... all while they leave the default firmware password of "Icanthearyouoverthesoundsofthecashregisterringing" on all the "secure routers". Oh and theirs a 1gb monthly data cap because thats all anyone would ever need, according to the Comcast CEO.
- exabrial 4y ago
  Call me bitter, but it's happened. I think the best solution is to break these companies up the way we did with Bell. No national telecom companies, franchises, shared ownership, shared revenue, or profits. Force each company to be a local provider. Outlaw contracts for more than 6months where infrastructure is already built. Why would this work? Take what happened with Google Fiber. In KC where I live, as soon as Comcastic saw an approved "fiber hood", they blitzed the area, and I mean drenched the area, with door hangers, mailings, and other propoganda to sign up for services with 2-5 year contracts that were likely below cost. This prevented Google Fiber from recovering any investment quickly. There's no way a hometown local provider could finance such shenanigans. Creating an ISP for a single neighborhood isn't terrible expensive if there's backhaul in place. Having a plethora of choices would be good for everyone.

357 points by thcipriani 5y ago

The best defense is a good offense - start lobbying to break-up incumbent ISPs, and force them to share cables, ideally owned by an independent spinoff company. If they want to hurt municipal broadband, hurt them back.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
g_p 5y ago
Spun-out infrastructure is probably better than the current situation for many people, but it's not necessarily the best outcome - the UK has a setup a bit like this, with the access networks spun out into a wholesale company. It still took rivals digging up streets to lay fibre to move things along. Absent genuine competition, I am sceptical proper investment can be forced in a wholesale "spinoff" provider. It also means ISPs are effectively limited to offering the same quality of customer service that the wholesale provider offers, because they need/choose to use the wholesale provider for technician work. That kind of thing can be quite problematic, at least judging by the kinds of complaints you read online. Depending on the nature of the access network, it might also result in an outdated network seeing no further investment. The UK is only just getting a fibre roll-out going in earnest, and this has come from lots of government encouragement, as well as private new-entrant providers increasingly deciding to just lay their own fibre in. That, plus a reasonably widespread hybrid fibre coax (cable) network offering up to approx gigabit downstream services, providing widespread competition. I would definitely agree that opening up passive infrastructure (ducts and poles, etc.) would help, as it makes it cheaper for new entrants to rapidly deploy coverage. I think people need to be careful what they wish for though - if the only infrastructure available is outdated copper that can barely manage ADSL2 speeds - where will the investment come from to get to fibre? If there's already a passive optical network deployed then this is less of an issue for now, but I think it's important to note that, at least in the UK market, the impact of competitive provision has been pivotal to getting fibre rolled out quicker. Without rivals raising investment and digging up roads to lay fibre in large cities, the incumbent "spun out" wholesale provider was calling VDSL "fibre to the cabinet" a "superfast fibre" connection. Once rivals did that, competitive pressures meant FTTP deployment followed.
- CraigJPerry 5y ago
  >> the impact of competitive provision has been pivotal to getting fibre rolled out quicker Yeah i agree, although it does seem like someone there is now awake to the idea that they might not be the most efficient operation. OpenReach installed fibre in my street’s existing underground network over the pandemic via a subcontractor then they subcontracted a company for the customer premises hookup. That latter company were way more efficient than i expected. At my property the previous owners cemented over the opening at the house end of the duct that runs from the BT pit out in the street, under my garden to my house. It meant the chap who was due to install my FTTP couldn’t run the fibre from the pit to my house. He phoned his colleagues in another van, they showed up 20 mins later and broke ground in my garden to intercept the duct then run a new sub-duct to my house then fed the fibre. The original chap in the meantime went and installed another house. These chaps put everything back as it was except i had a nice neat new fibre box at the front of the house from under the garden. Original chap came back another hour or two later and finished off the commissioning. When the problem became apparent i was expecting weeks of delay with openreach, instead my install took 2.5 hours instead of 45 mins but all done same day. It’s nice finally having decent broadband speeds…
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  > It still took rivals digging up streets to lay fibre to move things along. No it didn't. The UK government had a very forward looking fibre internet rollout that started in the 80s. Thatcher canned it for ideological reasons. > “In 1979 I presented my results,” he tells us, “and the conclusion was to forget about copper and get into fibre. So BT started a massive effort – that spanned in six years – involving thousands of people to both digitise the network and to put fibre everywhere. The country had more fibre per capita than any other nation. > “In 1986, I managed to get fibre to the home cheaper than copper and we started a programme where we built factories for manufacturing the system. By 1990, we had two factories, one in Ipswich and one in Birmingham, where were manufacturing components for systems to roll out to the local loop”. > At that time, the UK, Japan and the United States were leading the way in fibre optic technology and roll-out. Indeed, the first wide area fibre optic network was set up in Hastings, UK. But, in 1990, then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, decided that BT’s rapid and extensive rollout of fibre optic broadband was anti-competitive and held a monopoly on a technology and service that no other telecom company could do. > “Unfortunately, the Thatcher government decided that it wanted the American cable companies providing the same service to increase competition. So the decision was made to close down the local loop roll out and in 1991 that roll out was stopped. The two factories that BT had built to build fibre related components were sold to Fujitsu and HP, the assets were stripped and the expertise was shipped out to South East Asia. > “Our colleagues in Korea and Japan, who were working with quite closely at the time, stood back and looked at what happened to us in amazement. What was pivotal was that they carried on with their respective fibre rollouts. And, well, the rest is history as they say. > “What is quite astonishing is that a very similar thing happened in the United States. The US, UK and Japan were leading the world. In the US, a judge was appointed by Congress to break up AT&T. And so AT&T became things like BellSouth and at that point, political decisions were made that crippled the roll out of optical fibre across the rest of the western world, because the rest of the countries just followed like sheep. https://webreturn.co.uk/how-thatcher-killed-the-uks-superfast-broadband-before-it-even-existed/ https://webreturn.co.uk/how-thatcher-killed-the-uks-superfas...
beams_of_light 5y ago
We already did this. CLECs popped up and offered DSL and cable internet services for a while, throughout the late 90s and early 00s. Here's the real reason competition doesn't pop up in the footprint of the incumbents - when they do, the incumbents sue them into submission. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/one-big-reason-we-lack-internet-competition-starting-an-isp-is-really-hard/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/one-b...
- glasss 5y ago
  They sue and buy each other out, it's happened repeatedly across every industry that ma bell was broken up into.
  - Finnucane 4y ago
    rinse and repeat.
- walrus01 5y ago
  the modern trend is for cable operators to amalagamate themselves together, if you look at the investment group that bought Wave/RCN/Grande and similar as an example.
Zigurd 4y ago
There is a name for this: Structural separation. It should be a regulatory norm. What it does for consumers is to eliminate the barriers to entry for multiple retail competitors. Those competitors then make deals with upstream bandwidth providers who also have to compete.

remir 5y ago

It's inspiring to see good municipal broadband in the US. I wish this was more common here in Canada. To me it make sense that a city owns and operate critical infrastructure such as this.

forum_ghost 5y ago
in some sense, this is even better in the US, as First Amendment applies to governments, they shouldn't be able to censor your communications.
throwaway48375 5y ago
Rogers has entered the chat...
- deepspace 5y ago
  There are actually not many barriers to municipal broadband in Canada (yet). Your city just has to commit to it and execute on the plan. It is admittedly easier to do in small, dense cities than in cities with sprawling suburbs.

AtlasBarfed 5y ago

I see they went easy on you. Just marketing? Where are the armies of on-retainer lawyers? If they paid a million dollars in marketing, what are they paying for ongoing lobbying? Telecoms knows that this is war, you just won a battle.

phlipski 5y ago

Longmonsters!!! I love it!! Fuck Comcast!

mountainriver 4y ago
Longmonsters unite! Nextlight for the future!

koolba 5y ago

> Comcast spent $500,000 in a tiny city of less than 100,000 people. You can be sure, Comcast will do all this again in a heartbeat. Well duh. Assuming five people per home, and a market penetration of 50% (probably higher when you’re the only game in town), that’s only $50/home. That’s less than half of what they’d be getting from a subscribed home per month. I’m surprised they didn’t spend even more fighting this.

tauwauwau 5y ago
100,000 people = 20,000 homes 50% penetration = 10,000 homes $50/home = 50 * 10,000 = $500,000 It's exactly same not half.
- FireBeyond 5y ago
  The average household in the US is 2.6 people, not 5. And let's be honest, the average Xfinity bill for internet alone is $60-100.
  - donthellbanme 5y ago
    Closer to the $100 plus. I pay $170 for basic cable, and the lowest speed wi-fi. This in in Marin County. I gave up talikibg to customer service in "I can't speak your language very well, but my name is Steve. Can I put you down for VOIP, and free credit monitoring for and additional $40/mo." When trying to lower your bill, go to the website. The foreign help don't have a clue to what you are trying to convey.
  - tauwauwau 4y ago
    You're right, I had spectrum for 5 years and by the time I was leaving the country I was paying 80$ for unlimited 120+ mbps. I also found it very odd and frustrating that they don't allow cancellation in the website or over the support chat, you have to call them to get the service cancelled. I had to do that in roaming :), well it's not like there are choices of broadband vendors in US. Who are you gonna go to, if not these 2 companies

DubiousPusher 5y ago

Selling your public goods and resources to monopoly and credulously believing it'll all work out somehow while counting your money is the most American thing there is, going back to the railroads.

rectang 5y ago
Nah, it's way more murican to pretend that de facto monopolies established through regulatory capture and the legal bribery of campaign contributions are morally superior because although they own the government for all intents and purposes, they're ostensibly "private".
- hedora 5y ago
  Ironically, the Boston Tea Party was less about taxation than it was about the Brits imposing an artificial monopoly on tea imports to the US. Of course, that's not how they teach it in elementary school...
pitaj 5y ago
You mean monopolies created by government intervention, like the railroads?
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  Railroads were very similar to broadband. "Competition" at the national level, but each local area was controlled by the first network to be established. Dont like your railroad/internet, well you're free to move to another city, where the exact same problem exists. The government intervention was mostly to fix that existing problem.
goodpoint 4y ago
...while also refusing to consider coops.
- DubiousPusher 4y ago

ncphil 5y ago

Hopefully this piece gets a lot more views, because this is an issue that pretty much any rational technoligist should get involved with. Here in NC, our state legislature also caved to cableco and telecom pressure to make it nearly impossible for muni broadband to spread. That was after a single city's service succeeded so spectacularly that the incumbents had visions of Armageddon. That's because they knew that even in this relatively center-right leaning state, people will know a good deal when they see it: so job 1 was to make sure they never do. So far their efforts at blocking competition have been successful. Except for a few very limited areas where Google Fiber was able to pry its way in, there has been no competition to the incumbents from muni or private parties. At this point our best hope may be that changing demographics and the undeniable drift away from traditional programming will result in their financial collapse, finally allowing communities to serve themselves. The other option is for people to get out and pressure their political reps to make muni or community broadband easier to deploy, maybe even run for office themselves and replace those who have sold out. Broadband access isn't as important as homelessness or healthcare, but it is important. Maybe it's a good place to start reversing the crappification of everything many here have lived through their whole lives.

germinalphrase 5y ago
There should be(and maybe, probably, is?) be political action organization that provides case studies and background research materials to support community level action. Give ammo to average folks to advocate for muni broadband in a manner that is simple and compelling. Anyone have a resource?
bigjimmyk3 5y ago
I live in an area with great fiber internet service (gigabit synchronous unmetered) thanks to a rural electric co-op. It worked here because co-ops still have a fair bit of political power (in my state anyway).
- walrus01 5y ago
  One of the great advantages of a last mile rural electrical coop is that they already own/control the ROW (right of way), for the most part, wood utility poles, they have crews of linemen, bucket trucks, spool trailers, GIS people who know how to do aerial ROW planning, etc. If you have the aerial ROW fully under your own ownership and control the $/km to do rural FTTH is vastly reduced. There are a lot of efficiencies if this is done as a nonprofit at a municipal/county level entity, one random example, county run fiber PUD calls up the same-county sheriff's department and is like "oh yeah we're gonna need to block a lane and have some traffic flaggers at place X and Y and Z, and we need to shut down avenue C for a while", and everything goes very smoothly.

mjevans 5y ago

Archive.org link https://web.archive.org/web/20220421012017/https://tylercipriani.com/blog/2022/04/20/the-unreasonable-fight-for-municipal-broadband/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220421012017/https://tylercipr...

sarchertech 5y ago

We’ve had gigabit municipal internet here in Chattanooga for 12 years now. It’s better than Comcast in every possible way—speed, price, reliability, customer service, install time, install windows, availability (within the state limited geographical area) etc… There was a question on a local Facebook group the other day from a person who just moved here asking which ISP she should use. The replies were nothing but pages and pages of EPB, EPB, EPB… (EPB is the name of the municipal power company and ISP). Along with glowing reviews about how better their customer service is than Comcast. EPB is so much better, I’d have a really hard time moving somewhere else that didn’t have something similar.

q1w2 5y ago
What about from a privacy perspective? This is essentially a government run internet connection to your home.
- rini17 4y ago
  Corporate ISPs sell whatever customer data they can get and meddle with traffic already, is there a way government can do worse than that? Not even Big Govt just municipal one...
  - koheripbal 4y ago
    - jaywalk 4y ago
      I'd assume that municipal broadband providers still have a privacy policy that would require a court order to turn over data to law enforcement. And that would be the exact same thing binding a corporate broadband provider.
      - q1w2 4y ago
        That is an assumption based on no evidence.

deepspace 5y ago

I live in one of the few Canadian cities who were progressive enough to install city-managed fiber in most areas zoned for high-rise buildings. Actual internet service is provided by ISPs, but they deliberately excluded the large telcos. Similar to the author, I also get 1Gbps symmetric, no outages, no data caps and I pay only $32 (Canadian) a month. The telcos charge four times as much for the same service (but less reliable) in the residential areas not covered by the city network.

20kleagues 5y ago
Oh wow I had no idea Canada did municipal broadband and $32 a month is insanely cheap compared to what shaw/telus charge in the west. Which city do you live in and what's your city-managed ISP called? Would love to know more
- mikepurvis 5y ago
  Looks like probably Moncton, New Brunswick.
- deepspace 4y ago
  New Westminster, BC. The city-managed part of the service is called Bridgenet. Internet service is provided by Novus, Urbanfibre and a couple of other ISPs. Urbanfibre is the cheapest, and just as reliable as the others.
  - 20kleagues 4y ago
    I live in Surrey and had no idea New West was doing this, it's like 15 minutes away. We need this idea to spread across Metro Vancouver, I'll definitely do more research into how it came about. ps: this is a very good reason to move to new west!

panic 5y ago

Why doesn’t the Bay Area have its own fiber internet service? Surely there’s enough talent and collective political influence here to get Comcast out of our own neighborhoods.

toast0 5y ago
There's Sonic, but fiber rollout is expensive when you're not the incumbent. It doesn't help that AT&T rolled fiber out to parts of the Bay Area once Google announced their list of cities. How many customers can a competitor get if they overbuild where AT&T has built fiber? Or where AT&T builds fiber in response. Some small number of people understand that differences in peering and transit are a thing, but most of the population is going to be I already have fiber because AT&T was telling people VDSL is fiber.
jounker 5y ago
Sonic is pretty good. https://www.sonic.com/ https://www.sonic.com/
- bubblethink 4y ago
  It doesn't even cover the majority of SF, and SF is a small city. Same story with fiber everywhere. Google fiber also barely covered any territory in Atlanta, Austin, etc.

matttproud 5y ago

If you weren’t aware of how bad the regulatory capture is, you should check out this article and its map: https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadblocks/ https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc.... It’s staggering to me the public hasn’t pilloried Comcast at the stockades after the pandemic.

titanomachy 5y ago

I'm impressed that Longmont was able to pull this together. It seems like living in a small city like this might make it easier to coordinate common-sense measures like this. Comcast/Centurylink spent $500k in a city of <100k people to try and convince residents to give up on municipal broadband, but citizen activists were able to make it happen anyway. Is there a way to find places to live that are populated by mostly sane people with some minimal brainpower and engagement in their community? My (wealthy and educated) city has voted several times against our own interests on this issue and many others.

FireBeyond 5y ago
> Comcast/Centurylink spent $500k in a city of <100k people That seems a lot of money until you think revenue. Average household, 2.6 people, so let's say 38,000 households. Let's say half of them have internet from one of these providers and we'll be "generous" and say they're averaging $50/mo on their bill. That's 17 days revenue, if it had succeeded. An entirely worthwhile investment on their part. To be clear though, I despise efforts to fight municipal broadband.
- malwarebytess 5y ago
  It's sickening to me that corporations can engage in politics as "investment."

spamizbad 5y ago

I feel like broadband is one of those things like sewer and water: it really doesn't make sense to privatize it and you're better off operating it like a municipal utility.

walrus01 5y ago

People looking for a viable government based model to do municipal broadband can look at some of the counties in eastern WA. In those counties, which are fortunate enough to also be their own last-mile electrical grid operators (so they already have bucket trucks, linemen, spool trailers, lashers, etc), the county builds and owns a dark fiber network. Various 3rd party ISPs can rent space on it. It works great. The great advantage of being able to build a last mile and middle mile dark fiber plant with municipal money is the extremely long time scale of a typical municipal bond. And the low interest rate paid on it. As we have seen with fiber from the mid 1980s that's currently in use with 100GbE DWDM systems, modern singlemode fiber can have very long lifespans. There's no reason to believe that a new-build last mile dark fiber network serving single family homes today, if architected correctly, can't be viable for 40-50 years. In places where there is a duopoly from the incumbent local phone company (centurylink, frontier, verizon, AT&T, whatever) and a cable operator (comcast, charter/spectrum, altice, wave, etc) neither of the two incumbent operators has any interest in seeing a new entrant 3rd party network built. And I can expect that they will lobby hard against the concept of municipal broadband, claiming that their DOCSIS3 on coax last mile service (250 down x 16 Mbps up and 0.03% packet loss) is "good enough".

jaywalk 4y ago
>DOCSIS3 on coax last mile service (250 down x 16 Mbps up and 0.03% packet loss) I'm all for municipal broadband and sticking it to the incumbents, but DOCSIS3 is far better than you give it credit for. My current DOCSIS3 service from Comcast is 1200 down/45 up, and it's rock solid. And there are network architecture improvements on the roadmap that will allow that relatively paltry upload speed to rise significantly in the future.
- briffle 4y ago
  In my area, the highest upload with comcast and DOCSIS3 is 15Mb/s, and only the gigabit plans. My 250Mb plan gets a wonderful 5Mb/s upload.its completely rediculous.

j16sdiz 5y ago

Is municipal internet controlled by the government? Does it have any implications on state imposed censorship?

voiper1 5y ago

>And when I returned my cable box to Comcast to cancel my service, the representative felt compelled to counsel me: “NextLight, huh? you know,” he said, leaning in, “if you miss even a single payment, they’ll raise your price?” And then they'll still charge less than you? How is that even a threat?!

fareesh 5y ago

Seems like one step along the way for the government to criminalize personal VPN access and ban the websites they don't like. They could already do it but this way is so much easier.

mellavora 5y ago
Looks like you missed forum_ghosts point, "in some sense, this is even better in the US, as First Amendment applies to governments, they shouldn't be able to censor your communications" It is illegal for govnt to censor communication, it is not illegal for Comcast to do so. Likewise, if govnt wanted to criminalize personal VPN access, they just pass a law. They don't need to own the infrastructure to do this. However, if Comcast decides it doesn't like personal VPN, what are you going to do? So, actually government-owned internet is the best protection against the harms you warn of.
sobkas 5y ago
> Seems like one step along the way for the government to criminalize personal VPN access and ban the websites they don't like. They could already do it but this way is so much easier. You mean much harder, because when government (ISP) is blocking sites it's censorship, that is against constitution, while corporations can do whatever they want (especially if it is heavily "encouraged" by government), so your only action is to change ISP(good luck with that in land of the freedom). And even when there is a competing ISP in your area, odds are that it also was "encouraged" by government.
- fareesh 4y ago
  In theory sure but in reality merely 2 days ago I saw calls from both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for governments to adopt more internet censorship. I don't have confidence that the new crop of lawmakers are in sync with the constitution, particularly on the subject of free speech. Ultimately this becomes reliant on the judiciary, which is also political.

xyst 5y ago

There’s another municipal internet service provider in TN (chattanooga?) that offers all customers 1Gbps or 10Gbps service to your home or business. The 1 Gbps plan is comparable to Google Fiber and just a tad bit cheaper. I have always envied them since I live in a state that has banned municipalities from creating their own ISP. Even trying to convince a few people is a difficult task.

guilhas 5y ago

What is the purpose of municipal broadband if we already have several companies, with a working business model, providing the same service?

parkingrift 5y ago

I live in New York City, in Manhattan, and I have a single option for high speed internet. This despite the city paying Verizon to wire everyone with Fiber. Grifters, grifters everywhere.

imtringued 4y ago
Why do cities pay money without at least getting shares of the company they are subsidizing? They wouldn't even need publish shares, private shares of the local city branch could be more than enough.
emteycz 5y ago
The city sponsors a company and you expect it to have competition and its own services to be focused on consumers? Why would anyone go into that risk when profits can be made much easier, and how do you expect the non-sponsored companies to gather enough profit to build up their infra?
- parkingrift 4y ago
  Sorry, I should have clarified. Verizon is not available at my apartment. I get Spectrum and Spectrum only. The city paid Verizon to ADD competition, Verizon took the money, and then they just… didn’t fulfill the contract.
  - emteycz 4y ago
    But that's what I meant. You can't expect someone who gets paid for nothing to just go and increase their risk of failure infinitely by doing something. Not doing anything is much more profitable in their situation. I'd never pay a telecom company before I got my services and used them. They always found a way to screw me over when I did (many years ago). Your city just got the classic treatment on a massive scale.
- rectang 4y ago
  It's not like the situation is markedly better elsewhere in the country. Sponsor a company, get a single option. Don't sponsor a company, still get a single option. In one scenario, the government signs an exclusive contract. In the other, the absurd levels of control over government exercised by "private" entities in the name of "free speech" (thanks Citizens United) ensure perpetual corruption and de facto private ownership of public resources. All paths lead to monopoly. The only difference is the level of hypocrisy.

NovemberWhiskey 5y ago

I don't know how I feel about municipal electric utilities extending into areas like broadband, as is described here. In most places, broadband is a fairly competitive market; and municipal utilities are significantly subsidized by the public purse: I'm pretty sure I'd be able to run a successful ISP if I didn't have to pay federal income tax and any debt I issued was also exempt from federal income tax, reducing my cost of capital.

JaimeThompson 4y ago
>In most places, broadband is a fairly competitive market I would love to see data that supports that statement, most areas have a single high speed provider.

TZubiri 4y ago

This reads like an ad.

javier_e06 4y ago

Do you have to pay $40.00/month to use the streets to go to work? No. Do you have to pay $40.00/month to use fiberoptics to work from home? Yes. ISP's love this. Internet is infrastructure. ISP companies get paid handsomely for a service that should an itemized line in our electric bill.

zippergz 4y ago
I have to pay for electricity and water, both of which are vastly more important than internet.
blown_gasket 4y ago
I do pay federal income taxes which of that 3% is for transportation. If I were to look at per month of my salary ~$40 goes to transportation. So yes, I broadly pay $40/month to use the streets.
MrBuddyCasino 4y ago
I don't understand your point. If it was "an itemized line in our electric bill", you'd presumably still pay for it? You also pay lot more than $40 a month to finance the infrastructure surrounding you, even though that is not were most of the money goes to (mostly social / medical / military, not infra).

mountainriver 4y ago

I have lived in Longmont for a good part of my life. There’s an important note here that Longmont’s fiber was basically bought at auction by a company that laid it and went bankrupt in the early 2000s. This significantly lowered the cost, which I understand has put other cities into bankruptcy. Next light is really a fantastic service and better than comcast in every way. It’s just worth noting the economics are unique here.

exabrial 4y ago

It's an expectations vs reality and software engineers having no experience in real-world construction or government. What a bunch of bright-eyed internet posters think would happen: A small city somehow manages to hire a competent staff, paying under market value for talent, to expertly engineer and then construct, a brand new fiber network from scratch, that's done on-time, while buying the latest/greatest available cost effective solutions from multiple vendors, without any red tape or lawsuits, all while owning all of the infrastructure and finally providing services at amortized costs. Citizens could use the network to provide ah-hoc services to other residents and the city could use it to modernize their infrastructure and create connected cities that provide valuable information to their citizens. What happens in reality: A small city thinks they can't do any of the above so they hire a "contractor". Which somehow we've gotten into law that that must be bid on... so Comcast bids under cost to protect it's monopoly. City hires Comcast as a "contractor" to "build" a "new" network. Comcast spends most of the money by providing executives with Vegas trips and catered meetings at the golf course. Once realizing they actually need to deliver something they "leverage their existing assets" to "save money" and force everyone onto their existing cable network that gets .25mbps upload and "500mpbs" download (for 1s at a time, then throttled to 2mbps, 3.5mbps on thursdays) (still counts as broadband) , all while telling Netflix and other content providers they have to "pay to play" to send content to customers... er citizens, to "cover costs". Then, they couldn't possibly let users use their own equipment like a standard router with ethernet handoff "because security reasons" so they need to charge a $45/mo rental fee to all suckers.... er citizens, for "their safety". The city catches wind of this and Comcast promises a Certification program for routers, and "project delays" delay this for multiple years before finally it's announced but it costs $20k to have a router "certified" for your safety... all while they leave the default firmware password of "Icanthearyouoverthesoundsofthecashregisterringing" on all the "secure routers". Oh and theirs a 1gb monthly data cap because thats all anyone would ever need, according to the Comcast CEO.

exabrial 4y ago
Call me bitter, but it's happened. I think the best solution is to break these companies up the way we did with Bell. No national telecom companies, franchises, shared ownership, shared revenue, or profits. Force each company to be a local provider. Outlaw contracts for more than 6months where infrastructure is already built. Why would this work? Take what happened with Google Fiber. In KC where I live, as soon as Comcastic saw an approved "fiber hood", they blitzed the area, and I mean drenched the area, with door hangers, mailings, and other propoganda to sign up for services with 2-5 year contracts that were likely below cost. This prevented Google Fiber from recovering any investment quickly. There's no way a hometown local provider could finance such shenanigans. Creating an ISP for a single neighborhood isn't terrible expensive if there's backhaul in place. Having a plethora of choices would be good for everyone.