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 fortu

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".