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This was not at all a small public ISP. And it was managed by the city power company, so it had the economies of scale already. There's a lot of nitty gritty p
by legitster 3y ago
This was not at all a small public ISP. And it was managed by the city power company, so it had the economies of scale already.
There's a lot of nitty gritty policy weeds of what went wrong. But the main one was that after the public ISP incorporated in the 90s as a complimentary service to a public cable network, the state passed a legislation regulating public utility rates. Good for power/water/sewer/cable customers. But it meant that the city could not charge customers differently even with wildly different internet speeds.
Going into the 90s, as the internet aspects became more important, they couldn't keep up with upgrading the lines, especially given the costs would be born by all customers regardless of what speed they were getting.
- nobody9999 3y agoSo the issue was poor government regulation and not public ownership of the infrastructure?
- peteradio 3y agoThat was 30 years ago (sorry for the reminder) but don't you think times changed how something like that would be deployed?
- legitster 3y agoIt could be! But I think one lesson is that internet and other utilities are not quite as functionally comparable as people claim. Per capita consumption of water has not quadruped in the last 10 years, but home internet has! So the case for internet as a public utility will be stronger when the need for constantly upgrading infrastructure plateaus.