15 ms·

Obama calls for municipal broadband

520 points by davmre 12y ago

sp332 12y ago
Oh, municipal governments. From the headline, I though he was proposing some national thing.
- RexM 12y ago
  Yeah, I went from "oh, no" to "oh... ok"
- murbard2 12y ago
  Likewise. I was preparing to cringe, but municipal level utilities actually make sense. That scale is large enough to solve the inherent coordination problems, but small enough to be responsive to the preferences of the residents and subject to competition from nearby municipalities.
- metaphorm 12y ago
  the united states is a federal republic. municipal government is SUPPOSED to be the level of government where programs like this are implemented. communities will have varying needs and their local governments are best equipped to evaluate and meet those needs.
  - sp332 12y ago
    Is there really that much variation in basic infrastructure like internet access though?
    - metaphorm 12y ago
      yes. some communities have 10000 people per square mile (Brooklyn, where I live) while other communities have 6 people per square mile (rural Wyoming), and we've also got everything in between. the infrastructure requirements, costs, and issues for these communities are extremely different.
      - sp332 12y ago
        Yes, but that's not that hard to account for. Private companies don't seem to have much trouble. My question isn't "would municipal government be better than private companies", but "would federal government be worse"?
        lhc- 12y ago
        Private companies often don't serve (or underserve) those less populated areas. Their solution to that problem is to not provide service as they aren't required. Municipal broadband which is provided as a public service/utility, however, is better suited to serve everyone, as they are often required to do that rather than only focus on the areas that generate the most profit.
        sp332 12y ago
        Most local franchise agreements require a certain level of internet service to be offered to a particular percentage of people. It's not regulated at the national level like the Universal Service Fund does for phones, but a national internet would certainly have similar targets.
- forgotpasswd3x 12y ago
  Yeah it's almost as if the submitter intentionally made the title misleading.
deleted 12y ago
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ayuvar 12y ago
Municipal broadband is a great idea. A town near me, Olds, just rolled out gigabit fiber to the curb for $57/mo. Considering most of the other nearby municipalities have to live with dialup or (agonizingly slow) satellite internet, it's been a big draw to the area. I think it absolutely makes a ton of sense for rural areas; if I had a remote job it would be very tempting to head out there and get an acreage. I feel like splitting it up and having municipalities responsible for their own infrastructure makes it easier for the common man to get involved, too. You can show up at city council and express an opinion or volunteering for a committee a lot easier than walking into a federal building and doing the same. http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/small-alberta-town-gets-massive-1-000-mbps-broadband-boost-1.1382428 http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/small-alberta-town-gets-ma...
- debacle 12y ago
  > to the curb for $57/mo. What's the setup fee to run fiber 100 feet and into your house to set up the box? Because Verizon did it for free. I still think private competition is better here. Verizon only did it for free because they're trying to tread on Time Warner, which is the way it should be.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - ayuvar 12y ago
    According to the provider, the setup fee is $100. http://o-net.ca/about-us/o-net-myth-busting/ http://o-net.ca/about-us/o-net-myth-busting/
  - justizin 12y ago
    I think that the city should offer minimal service / support, and that there is opportunity for small or other businesses to buy and resell capacity wholesale, including a more full service install process. Local power monopolies in many areas, at least, have to provide options for alternate power sources. Existing regulated telco monopolies have to let other providers use their infrastructure. I think municipalities should be able to play that role, or to deem it a function of the city / county and contract out for it, letting private players compete in a market with a guaranteed baseline service.
jfb 12y ago
Really, he's calling for the FCC to prevent rent-seeking by local ISP monopolies by allowing the option of municipal networks. It's a really good idea; you can tell because of how stridently Comcast/Verizon/AT&T oppose it.
- NoPiece 12y ago
  What do you think the federal policy on torrents will be? Ask Disney.
  - jfb 12y ago
    Who cares? The Feds here are not in the business of bandwidth provision; they're acting to counterbalance the elephantine mass of Comcast by preventing them from overpowering municipal politics.
    - rev_bird 12y ago
      I think the idea was that if Disney can get the government to essentially destroy the idea of 20th century work entering the public domain, they could probably get the government to act against an open internet.
      - jfb 12y ago
        They can do this now. Municipal ownership of some of the pipes isn't going to stop what is essentially an orthogonal fight from happening at a higher level.
        djrogers 12y ago
        Yeah - I think the point was that if the pipes are owned by the same government that's already in the pocket of hollywood, then the laws (more likely regulations written by bureaucrats, not laws passed by elected officials, but..) against torrenting/pirating/distributing would be easier to get written and enforced.
Alupis 12y ago
This seems great, but I fear what is may do to the small ISP's (which generally don't pull any of the shenanigans the BIG5 do and are usually pretty pleasant to work with).
- justizin 12y ago
  I thought about this when I first started reading about municipal broadband, and I think if the local gov was required to wholesale out its' capacity the same way Title II utilities like AT&T have to now, small ISPs would be in a far better situation. AT&T is relatively hostile to the customers of other DSL providers, and I think municipal governments may be less likely to. Datacenters are also a completely reasonable metaphor, you pay the facility to run most wiring for a cross-connect to an ISP or between cages / floors, but you can provide your own transit or buy transit from any number of providers, all of whom are just other customers.
mtrpcic 12y ago
A lot of people seem dismayed that there isn't a bigger push for a federal run, country-wide internet provider, which I think is crazy. Taking the municipal approach means there isn't a huge cost for nationwide infrastructure, and small towns can develop the network that's right for them, rather than being stuck with what they're told they need from higher up. Additionally, with all the worry and fear about the NSA looking behind the scenes, putting the entire network backbone in the hands of the federal government is basically handing them exactly what they want. I'm all for municipally run internet, and hope this helps move towards that.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  small towns can develop the network that's right for them What does that even mean? Do people in Smallville use the internet differently or not like to their video to buffer too fast? A mishmash of half-assed local standards was how the road network used to be, until Dwight Eisenhower came to power and argued that the US deserved something better than the miserably inefficient network it had, and championed the development of the Federal Highway System. I'm not being sarcastic here: I really want to know what you mean by 'the network that's right for them.' Are inferior networks right for poorer towns? Should there be different network standards in different states? I presume you like the way that telephone service is uniform across the whole US, so that making a call is procedurally identical whether you're in Alaska or the Florida panhandle. What positive advantage do you see in having internet accessibility be inconsistent? I recognize that you regard the capital cost of a national network as a disadvantage, but I don't see a clear benefit to your proposal. If you're all for municipally run internet, does that mean you do favor national regulation forbidding local monopolies or strategic litigation designed to prevent municipalities from setting up their own networks, as proposed in some states?
  - coryrc 12y ago
    > Are inferior networks right for poorer towns? Yes. In rural areas, the cost per mile is much more important than in the city. If gigabit costs 10% more per mile than 100Mbit, is it worth it? Their burdens per person will be higher, in areas where the wage is typically lower. Perhaps 10Mbit wireless would be much cheaper per customer; maybe much more affordable for local residents (who have to pay through fees or taxes, one way or another). Similar thing with septic versus sewer[0]. You won't have septic in larger towns, but sewer costs can be stifling. [0] http://lancasteronline.com/news/health/small-iowa-towns-struggle-to-afford-sewer-upgrades/article_0649ce96-3e1c-5f22-99a2-3870829e0b20.html http://lancasteronline.com/news/health/small-iowa-towns-stru...
nostromo 12y ago
Municipal governments are a big part of the problem. They make it nearly impossible for companies to build new ISPs. Municipal governments: the cause of, and solution to, your ISP woes. It reminds me of housing. 1) Governments restrict new housing. 2) Housing becomes unaffordable. 3) Government builds public housing because "the free market has failed."
- sp332 12y ago
  Don't forget state laws. "Legislatures in 19 states have enacted laws restricting local governments from entering the broadband business". They can either get in the way of municipal deployments, or prevent municipal governments from interfering with public internet projects.
- Torgo 12y ago
  Ten years ago my hometown built a municipal ISP. It since then has done the bare minimum to keep the network going, and is total crap. There is one other cable ISP, but they effectively have to compete with the terrible speeds and service of the muni, which conspires to improve nothing. State laws preventing municipal ISPs should be gotten rid of, but some people seem to think that a municipal ISP will solve all their problems, and it won't.
  - jrochkind1 12y ago
    > but they effectively have to compete with the terrible speeds and service of the muni, which conspires to improve nothing Wait, shouldn't that be easy for them to compete with, then? You say it like terrible speeds and service are somehow challenging competition for the cable company? Of course, they would prefer no competition at all, as all companies would.
    - Torgo 12y ago
      Muni had uptake mainly in the areas that commercial didn't service, and after that everything just kind of froze. They never, ever seem to try to compete on price, and I assume that upgrading equipment is expensive for either ISP. Wwhen it first started, it served unserved areas and was definitely better than commercial ISP by not being overutilized. Now that coverage is complete it just acts like there are two commercial ISPs. It seems like this a lot in the Midwestern rural areas, even with competition, they all settle into a low standard of service to avoid an arms race. My impression of what municipal Internet does, based on my experience, is they immediately implement state of the art, and then stagnate. By the way, our municipal ISP is opposed to net neutrality.
metaphorm 12y ago
I wish we had seen this more progressive, pro-active Obama 6 years ago. Squandered his political capital on a shitty health care reform bill, got shell shocked by Republican opposition and crawled up his own ass for a couple of years. Now that he doesn't give a shit about elections anymore he's actually doing something.
- cubano 12y ago
  I wish we had seen this more progressive, pro-active Obama 6 years ago. More progressive and pro-active then basically socializing 1/7th of the US economy with the ACA? Wow. [edit] I used the wrong term "socializing" when I meant "intervening in"
  - metaphorm 12y ago
    are you serious? you can't be serious. i usually assume that hacker news has a bit more sophistication than this. i would actively celebrate a legitimate socialized health care system in the U.S. but that's not what we got. ACA is basically a huge middle class tax with the proceeds paid almost entirely to health insurance companies. its a massive expansion of a deeply entrenched private industry.
    - cubano 12y ago
      I, personally, would not celebrate that outcome. I believe in the power in markets and price signaling, ala Hayek, and there is nothing unsophisticated about that. We agree on more then you may be aware...the HI industry is a giant problem, and must be fundamentally altered for the market-based solutions I prefer to do their magic.
      - metaphorm 12y ago
        so if you really do read a lot of Austrian economics and really do have a sophisticated view of political economy then why did you label ACA as "socialist"? at best that's ignorant, and at worst it's an actively deceptive slander of both ACA and real socialism.
jMyles 12y ago
Absent from the conversation is the actual obvious generational shift: final-mile mesh networks in every sufficiently large and dense community.
- metaphorm 12y ago
  not a mature technology. how would the mesh be established? run ethernet cables between people's homes? have everyone open a port on their wifi router? this is beyond the technical capability of the vast majority of people. it would require a company to coordinate this, and at that point you've got just got an ISP running the last mile anyway.
  - walterbell 12y ago
    Some work on these issues is being done by the Free Network Foundation, https://thefnf.org/ https://thefnf.org/ Edit: There's also Guifi.net in Spain, http://guifi.net/en http://guifi.net/en
    - metaphorm 12y ago
      cool! thanks for the link.
  - jMyles 12y ago
    True, but neither are municipal broadband ISP's a mature organizational model. In both cases, we have a few plausible examples, but much more work is needed to verify their viability. For my eye, I think that CJDNS is the most likely of the current candidates to emerge as useful for this sort of implementation.
whoisthemachine 12y ago
That title is a little (may I say intentionally?) misleading, by leaving important context out. He is not proposing his government runs a high-speed internet project, he is proposing local municipalities be allowed to run high-speed internet projects, or rather, states be banned from banning them (confused yet?).
- dang 12y ago
  We changed the title to the more accurate and neutral one suggested by the article's URL.
  - whoisthemachine 12y ago
    Thanks!
tzs 12y ago
It's not clear that the FCC can preempt state laws that prohibit municipal broadband. From the Wikipedia article on municipal broadband [1]: In 2000, the Federal Communications Commission endorsed municipal broadband as a "best practice" for bringing broadband to under served communities. The FCC also addressed the question of whether a municipality was an "entity" under the Telecommunications Act which mandates that "No State or local statute or regulation, or other State or local legal requirement, may prohibit or have the effect of prohibiting the ability of any entity to provide any interstate or intrastate telecommunications service." 47 USC 253(a). The legal question revolved around whether a state could prevent a municipality, as its subordinate government body, from entering the telecommunication market. In the case of Missouri Municipal League v. Nixon, the U.S. Supreme Court concluded that a municipality was not an entity under the Telecommunications Act and that a state could determine what authority its own subordinate jurisdictions had. I have not yet had a chance to look at Missouri Municipal League v. Nixon to see if the above is correct. It's also possible that the FCC is considering using some different regulatory authority to preempt state laws this time. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_broadband http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_broadband
- warfangle 12y ago
  Yeah, looks like the courts agreed that municipalities, as a subsection of the state, are not considered an entity: http://www.oyez.org/cases/2000-2009/2003/2003_02_1238 http://www.oyez.org/cases/2000-2009/2003/2003_02_1238
fche 12y ago
"Obama calls for government-run ..." (the rest is redundant)
walterbell 12y ago
From a decentralization point of view, it's usually not good when a larger construct (federal) wants to impose regulation on a smaller construct (state). But in this case, the proposed federal regulation would encourage more decentralization, as it would empower an even smaller construct (municipality).
bcheung 12y ago
The government can't even manage its own budget, I don't trust them with the Internet.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
Someone1234 12y ago
The ultimate solution is for the government (federal and local) to run the physical side of the internet (e.g. run wires to homes/business, manage the exchanges, etc) but let private companies actually sell the data access directly to the public. As an analogy this is like the Greyhound Bus Line. When you buy a ticket to go from A to B on Greyhound you pay the bus company money and they provide you the service (and support as required), but the buses actually run on government constructed and maintained roads, bridges, and related infrastructure. The internet would work the same way, the government does the physical side of things, and that gets paid for through tax and rental fees from the ISPs. Then the ISPs upsell the rental fees to cover support, advertising, and so on to provide end users with the actual service (e.g. they pay $.20/Gps to the government to maintain the physical bits, but charge $.40/Gps to the public). This is how BT is kind of run in the UK. BT does the physical side of things, but then five or six different ISPs (including BT themselves) all resell internet using that physical infrastructure. Those ISPs then pay BT for the pleasure (and BT pays itself). This would be one use of eminent domain that I would happily support.
- davidgerard 12y ago
  Yes. This works really well in the UK. OpenReach, the bit of BT that operates the infrastructure, is part of a private company, but operates like part of the civil service. They are completely impartial. It is so illegal for OpenReach to offer BT anything they don't offer anyone else, that both BT Broadband and OpenReach staff cringe at the very concept. tl;dr public wires that many ISPs can supply service over.
  - bainsfather 12y ago
    I've read that twice, and I'm still not sure if you are being sarcastic. For me, those 'public wires' are old and slow - all 3 places I have lived recently. The government have gifted lots of money to BT to roll out fiber, and BT have taken the cash and sat on their hands. It is an awful situation - allowing BT to sabotage our nation's competitiveness whilst stealing taxpayer money [0]. So having competition on the common infrastructure is indeed good, but the overall system definitely does not work "really well". [0] A House of Commons Select Committee slammed the whole setup - e.g. here: http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/public-accounts-committee/news/rural-broadband-report/ http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/...
paulhauggis 12y ago
I'm fine with it, if there are laws in place that prevent governments from stifling free speech through Internet controls.
- bmelton 12y ago
  Censorship is on the rise in popularity. The most recent polls indicate that 51% of democrats and 33% of the nation overall is supportive of censorship, so in the absence of treating the first amendment as absolute, which simply does not happen, there could be no law put in place now that would not be equally superseded by the law that repeals it. As such, there may as well not be any such laws in place, as they would only serve to supply false confidence. http://hotair.com/archives/2014/10/02/poll-51-of-democrats-support-criminalizing-hate-speech/ http://hotair.com/archives/2014/10/02/poll-51-of-democrats-s...
Arnor 12y ago
> Last year, the Republican-controlled House passed language banning the FCC from banning states from banning cities from building municipal networks. This should be a case study in every civics class...
- hawkice 12y ago
  A less pathological phrasing: Congress says states can boss around cities and force them not to build municipal networks, and the FCC can't do anything about that.
gaius 12y ago
Saves having to wiretap commercial ISPs, is why he's doing it.
meesterdude 12y ago
I think its simple. Municipalities should at this point feel responsible for ensuring their residents have good internet access. Its also good for the tax payers, because its money going back into the government, and not into the coffers of some mega-corp who's just going to hoard it. I think there is a balance to be had between too much government and not enough. I think its easy to sway too far one way or another as history has shown, and neither are particularly good. Corporations will run rampant just like government will, given the freedom to do so.
- bduerst 12y ago
  It's almost better to think of power as static. For some areas, if you have a smaller government, it's not a loss of power so much as a void of power, which will be filled by corporations or other large organizations. A lot of people look at a smaller government as increasing their personal liberty, which is true for some issues, but for other areas it only means swapping out one organization for another (which may not be aligned with your interests).
bluedino 12y ago
What are the implications of this? What would it cost to build out fiber to even 10 or 15 % of homes and businesses that don't currently have it? What kind of insane cyberattacks could you get from 10% of the consumer market having gigabit connections? How much backbone upgrades would there be required?
3327 12y ago
ABOUT TIME. Internet is a utility and time to break the verizon atnt monopoly.
randyrand 12y ago
Municipal broadband has a serious problem. Namely, those that don't want it are still forced to pay for it. If you don't see how this is unfair competition well... I don't know what to tell you.
- zdw 12y ago
  <sarcasm> Ah, like the military, and any number of other similarly wasteful government projects? </sarcasm> There will always be things the government buys that you won't particularly want or feel are necessary.
- dj2stein9 12y ago
  Water pipes, phone lines, and electrical lines are built into your house too and you're not usually forced to sign up for the monthly services if you don't want them. Fiber would be the same way, the lines would be in the ground before the buildings are erected, and you'd be able to sign up for service if you want it.
- kalleboo 12y ago
  It doesn't have to be set up that way. Where I used to live, the municipal broadband network was run by the municipally-owned power company, who were required to balance their budget, so it was fully funded by fees.
mholt 12y ago
I live in Provo, which has Google Fiber. As the article says, Google took over their failed public fiber project. (Google purchased the infrastructure for $1.) Provo is a very unique city. It's a big city, but most of its residents are college students or young, newly married recent graduates. It's also a technology hotspot. Comparing the success of its fiber project to predict the success in other cities is hardly fair. For the record, Google Fiber has really lit up this town. Internet service here is unbearable unless you have Google Fiber (or deep pockets to dish out for Comcast). My building only has CenturyLink, and service just came back up an hour ago after suffering 80% packet loss for the last day. And this is our regular experience. Competition for ISPs, especially around here, is good (Veracity has been grappling to upgrade their network, and Comcast, well, everyone still hates them). On the other hand, the behavior and quality of service from American ISPs in the last 10 years is inexcusable. While I do think that private companies will do better "in the long run", time is running out for them to prove themselves.
- ScottBurson 12y ago
  So with Provo having so many young people and being a technology hotspot, why do you think the public fiber project failed? (In general I'm in favor of municipal broadband, so I'm curious why it didn't work as well as hoped in this case.)
  - mholt 12y ago
    I actually don't know, since I wasn't here during the "iProvo" days. One guess is that so much of the housing are rental units. Since residents don't own the properties they live in, the landlords have to approve the installation of a fiber link, but that costs money (even if it's cheap), and they can justify not spending it since there's an existing DSL or cable connection. Google Fiber faces the same problem, and this, I suspect, is precisely why my building's management company decided to forgo Google Fiber for DSL. Yuck. Fortunately, Google Fiber generated enough hype and made the installation fee so low that it appealed to lots of landlords.
- driverdan 12y ago
  The fact that the municipal fiber network failed shows that we shouldn't inherently trust the government to run these networks for us.
duncan_bayne 12y ago
From the perspective of a non-American, it's sad to see you taking _another_ step away from laissez-faire capitalism. In what world is it reasonable to take money from people by force and use it to compete with private business? If people want municipal broadband, let them form non-profits to provide it through voluntary donations. That should be legal, and if it's not, that'd be something to fix.
- orthecreedence 12y ago
  Wow, so much wrong with your statement. Obama isn't trying to rally all the states to create broadband that competes with the big telecoms, he's proposing we strike down laws that telecoms lobbied for that forces people not to form their own local broadband. So what we have currently is citizens being forced NOT to exercise the democratic process thanks to the efforts of large companies. That is laissez-faire capitalism at work, my friend, in it's most common form. Secondly, I can't imagine anybody in the world (US citizen or not) thinking the US needs to move more towards laissez-faire capitalism. It's about as brutally capitalist/monopolistic/imperialist as anyone could ever want, and the citizens' collective voice has never been so drowned out as it has right now. Any time anyone even talks about some kind of social service or public good (including local broadband), everyone comes out of the woodwork screaming "COMMUNISM!!!" What we need is to strangle our corporate culture back into complete submission of the American people. No more spending our tax dollars invading countries or setting up puppet dictators so the corporate good ol' boys can steal from the locals. No more politicians entirely in the pocket of a bunch of greedy fucks, fighting for legislation they don't even understand. No more US banks destroying the world economy and having zero repercussions whatsoever. In what world is it reasonable to want more of these things?
  - duncan_bayne 12y ago
    You're wrong. The laws Obama is planning to strike down are entirely reasonable; they prevent people from being _compelled_ to fund municipal broadband. That is, there is a difference between: a) some people setting up a non-profit to offer broadband, provided by voluntary donations, sponsorship, whatever and b) local Government taxing people to offer same The former is as I understand it entirely legal, and entirely compatible with a free market.
imgabe 12y ago
> The president is asking the Federal Communications Commission to preempt those laws. Can someone explain this? The FCC is part of the administrative branch right? Don't they work for the President? Why doesn't he just tell them to preempt the laws?
- rhino369 12y ago
  FCC is an independent agency. He can't tell them to do anything.
vlunkr 12y ago
I can understand the Republican point of view here: the government doesn't care about customer satisfaction or uptime because they can't go out of business. However, american ISPs have proven over and over they are unfair and incompetent. It's 2015 and I can barely get speeds over ~1mbps (I live in Idaho, but still). Maybe they would try a little harder if they had government competition.
lnkmails 12y ago
I am from India and one of the major broadband providers is BSNL. It used to be core part of the government (Department of Telecom) but was made a corporate in 2000 (but still owned by Govt. of India which is confusing). Anyways, BSNL is the reason a lot of remote villages in India get mobile & broadband connections. If it were left to private companies, they would never expand the infrastructure beyond urban centers where they could cover a lot of people per square area. BSNL also has a lot of fiber optic deployments that private companies rent in suburban areas to provide service. They get it at a cheaper price and don't have the problem of maintaining them. So I can see how municipal internet can help people. OTOH, there is a huge cost load on the government and people in remote villages don't use Internet much. I wonder if private companies were regulated to mandatorily have presence in all areas and are allowed to borrow government/municipal owned infrastructure at competitive rates, would the situation be better? This way there is both competition and better connectivity.
drawkbox 12y ago
I hope his next step is setting a goal for 1-5Gbps internet access to everyone in this country within 5-6 years based on this. Reward companies for building it to allow expansion and to non economical areas, which could become more economical with it. Let's build this internet cornerstone for commerce like Eisenhower's interstate system. Everyone can build on a platform that puts us back in competition for internet bandwidth/throughput with the surpassing world. We do not want to be behind in the bandwidth race, maybe if we make it a bandwidth race or war we can make it happen.
- FireBeyond 12y ago
  "Reward companies for building it to allow expansion" It needs to be done this way. By all means, pay companies for their investment in infrastructure, after the fact - not before, like has already happened, where these companies were given billions to expand rollouts and we got, well, very little.
crudbug 12y ago
A better solution would be: municipalities building infrastructure and private ISPs running on top of it. This will encourage more competition and better service for customers. Similar to other Utilities.
- bcheung 12y ago
  One more bureaucracy to add to the pile. ISP: "It's not our fault, it's your demarc". Demarc: "It's not our fault, it's the city". City: "It's not our fault, it's the ISP." A better solution would be for the building owner to provide for the last line and contract the work out to 3rd parties. This gives them control over price, timing, quality, and maintenance. It also creates a market for last mile line installers and competition. With a government run last mile you have none of those choices. If you aren't satisfied with the level of service you have no options. If you don't want to subsidize someone else's Internet, you have no options. If you want to upgrade you line, you have no options.
bcheung 12y ago
Aren't we trading one monopoly for another? Not sure that is any better. Especially considering the track record of the post office or public education. There would need to be some way to allow competition so there is incentive to provide quality service.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- dj2stein9 12y ago
  You don't typically call publicly owned infrastructure a monopoly. Public utility companies are created to prevent exactly what's going in broadband internet service. If the city owned the lines, it would put all ISP's on a level playing field and enable broadband competition for the first time. They wouldn't be able overcharge you 10,000% mark up for the price of bandwidth anymore, and they'd have to compete based on the quality of their service.
  - bcheung 12y ago
    Typically, no. But it meets the literal definition of one. My concern is that government often does not have any incentive to innovate and often operates extremely inefficient due to bureaucracy. As far as opening up for competing ISPs I'm all in favor of that. However, I would be much more in favor of a building tenant being the owner of the last mile line and contracting out work to a 3rd party company. That way the tenant has the option to lease or purchase outright. Let the tenant decide the level of quality and the price they are willing to pay. With taxes and the gov't providing it you take away choice and force people to pay for things they may not need. Or if they want to pay more for higher quality, they don't really have that option either.
  - nemothekid 12y ago
    If the city owned the lines, do now have to fight [concerned parent] on getting internet upgraded to 2gbit/s in the future because billy will download porn/music/guns?
- esturk 12y ago
javert 12y ago
Because it's better to have broadband be many little tyranies than a few big tyrannies.
lettergram 12y ago
Yeah, I definitely want my government running my internet. Not only do they get to monitor all of my traffic (more/easier than they do now), but they also will be in charge of delivery. I can already imagine it! My tax dollars paying for Comcast level quality service, at the same time I'll be receiving internet in the most "fair" way possible ("fair" being in quotes because who knows what legislation will be placed on it). Yeah, I'm just looking forward to the day they enforce the whole Google-Verizon frequency band agreement. Or perhaps when they don't sell exclusive rights for fiber connections. In all honesty, I'll take Comcast over the government any day of the week. At least Comcast has an incentive to make money (hopefully reducing corporate waste). The government will have far more bureaucratic bloat and either fund it with tax dollars or end up charging the same amount. I really loved how the healthcare system has been improved.
bcheung 12y ago
"Obama calls for municipal broadband" "White House just endorsed CISPA measures, two years after veto threat" http://www.zdnet.com/article/white-house-just-endorsed-controversial-cispa-measures-two-years-after-veto-threat/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/white-house-just-endorsed-contr... Coincidence?
ochoseis 12y ago
> As a result, households there can now get 1 gigabit (1,000 Mbps) service for just $70 per month. > The Obama administration is also planning to offer subsidies to promote investments in local broadband. While $70 doesn't seem like an outrageously great deal (it is good), it brings up an interesting point my dad had the other day. Is the true cost of that gigabit internet $100/mo, and tax dollars subsidize $30 while you cover the other $70 as stated? If municipalities truly can provide faster cheaper internet I'm all for it; however, I would hate to have another reason to bump taxes, nor a reason to crowd out competition and remove the incentive for innovation.
- nemothekid 12y ago
  Most likely the true cost to you in densely populated area X is more like $30/mo and the cost to someone out in sparesly populated area Y is $170/mo. Considering most plans cost the same regardless where you live, you all pay the "true" $100/mo.
finid 12y ago
> Municipal broadband is controversial — especially among Republicans > But House Republicans don't agree. Last year, the Republican-controlled House passed language banning the FCC from banning states from banning cities from building municipal networks. You can always trust those guys to work against consumers.
finid 12y ago
In cities with apartment complexes (most of the southern USA have those), ISPs like Verizon make deals with the apartment complex owners such that only one ISP is officially allowed to offer service to residents. Clearly illegal, but who's taking them to task?
- driverdan 12y ago
  Why would you think that's illegal?
AaronFriel 12y ago
Cedar Fallsian here - our broadband service is amazing and unfaltering. The alternative cable company that serves our area on the other hand has weekly and monthly outages, and I regret to say, that's not even purely a residential deployment issue. In Waterloo, IA, our neighboring town, the city council initially approved then backed out of working with Cedar Falls to participate in a greater municipal fiber deployment. Following a storm in 2009 that damaged utility lines on poles, I believe Cedar Falls moved forward with their plans to deploy fiber and deployed service to almost all homes over the course of a year and a half. The transition was seamless, and since then bandwidth has more than quintupled for the regular tier. I get 50/25 and it's rock solid. The best internet service I've ever had. On the other hand, as an IT consultant I have businesses I work with in Waterloo. Some of them would like to switch to technologies like VOIP to reduce costs, but their Mediacom cable goes down on a weekly basis. I have one client for whom I have never seen a whole month of uptime, and they have had multiple business days without service in the past year. The only alternative for most of my clients is CenturyLink DSL, which hardly qualifies as broadband with most of the DSLAMs too widely distributed and over-subscribed for reliable throughput. Mediacom is the same company that signed a letter to congress decrying municipal investment, and published a press release today[1] about how insulting it was that the President chose to support a municipal utility instead of their investment in Iowa. If companies like Mediacom and Century Link really cared about providing a service, they would support Title II and competition. But they don't. The high barrier to entry suits them just fine, and as a result, internet options are terrible in Waterloo, and technology businesses have fled to Cedar Falls. We've even apparently been named the "Digital Capital" by Google (but I have no idea what that means, I personally think Des Moines has the best access to the backbone with Microsoft and Facebook both opening up datacenters there). Sure, our gigabit fiber isn't $70 here, like Google offered, but it's there. And my internet service has never been more reliable. I know people who have Mediacom and Centurylink, and they hate it. And unlike their press release speaks about, the fiber deployment wasn't financially unsustainable or a waste of taxpayer dollars. As Mediacom says, "there is no reason to invest even more government dollars in municipally-owned broadband ventures, many of which wind up in financial difficulty." Well, I'm curious if Mr. Commisso of Mediacom did any fact checking. CFU is self-funded. Even better, CFU actually contributes back to the city's general fund its excess revenue. It's not so much "spending taxpayer money" as it is saving, at least now that it's up and running. Edited in addendum: Oh yeah, and for something the network engineers here might approve of: even when torrenting at 50mbps, my latency to Google and Microsoft is unchanged (10-13ms) and there appears to be little or no bufferbloat causing congestion. I've been able to play competitive real-time games and Skype while streaming, downloading, etc. [1] http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20150114006231/en/Mediacom-Communications-Issues-Statement-President-Obama%E2%80%99s-Visit http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20150114006231/en/Medi...
LBarret 12y ago
not to troll and no expert on the topic, but from outside, the US broadband situation is really puzzling. Many countries have cheap broadband and seems to have found good systems to make its market work. The installed monopolies looks like a very wrong decision that cannot be changed without legal conflict.
tn13 12y ago
Yeah, lets throw more of taxpayers money in the drain. FCC has one job which they cant do properly and now they want to create one more problem.
mikelbring 12y ago
If there is anything that can be done to give me a better option at internet than the local crappy / expensive DSL provider I have to go with now, I am all for it.
logfromblammo 12y ago
I wouldn't care about any of this if I could just lay my own cable between any two buildings in town without having to hire at least one lawyer and at least one lobbyist first.

520 points by davmre 12y ago

sp332 12y ago

Oh, municipal governments. From the headline, I though he was proposing some national thing.

RexM 12y ago
Yeah, I went from "oh, no" to "oh... ok"
murbard2 12y ago
Likewise. I was preparing to cringe, but municipal level utilities actually make sense. That scale is large enough to solve the inherent coordination problems, but small enough to be responsive to the preferences of the residents and subject to competition from nearby municipalities.
metaphorm 12y ago
the united states is a federal republic. municipal government is SUPPOSED to be the level of government where programs like this are implemented. communities will have varying needs and their local governments are best equipped to evaluate and meet those needs.
- sp332 12y ago
  Is there really that much variation in basic infrastructure like internet access though?
  - metaphorm 12y ago
    yes. some communities have 10000 people per square mile (Brooklyn, where I live) while other communities have 6 people per square mile (rural Wyoming), and we've also got everything in between. the infrastructure requirements, costs, and issues for these communities are extremely different.
    - sp332 12y ago
      Yes, but that's not that hard to account for. Private companies don't seem to have much trouble. My question isn't "would municipal government be better than private companies", but "would federal government be worse"?
      - lhc- 12y ago
        Private companies often don't serve (or underserve) those less populated areas. Their solution to that problem is to not provide service as they aren't required. Municipal broadband which is provided as a public service/utility, however, is better suited to serve everyone, as they are often required to do that rather than only focus on the areas that generate the most profit.
        sp332 12y ago
        Most local franchise agreements require a certain level of internet service to be offered to a particular percentage of people. It's not regulated at the national level like the Universal Service Fund does for phones, but a national internet would certainly have similar targets.
forgotpasswd3x 12y ago
Yeah it's almost as if the submitter intentionally made the title misleading.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

ayuvar 12y ago

Municipal broadband is a great idea. A town near me, Olds, just rolled out gigabit fiber to the curb for $57/mo. Considering most of the other nearby municipalities have to live with dialup or (agonizingly slow) satellite internet, it's been a big draw to the area. I think it absolutely makes a ton of sense for rural areas; if I had a remote job it would be very tempting to head out there and get an acreage. I feel like splitting it up and having municipalities responsible for their own infrastructure makes it easier for the common man to get involved, too. You can show up at city council and express an opinion or volunteering for a committee a lot easier than walking into a federal building and doing the same. http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/small-alberta-town-gets-massive-1-000-mbps-broadband-boost-1.1382428 http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/small-alberta-town-gets-ma...

debacle 12y ago
> to the curb for $57/mo. What's the setup fee to run fiber 100 feet and into your house to set up the box? Because Verizon did it for free. I still think private competition is better here. Verizon only did it for free because they're trying to tread on Time Warner, which is the way it should be.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- ayuvar 12y ago
  According to the provider, the setup fee is $100. http://o-net.ca/about-us/o-net-myth-busting/ http://o-net.ca/about-us/o-net-myth-busting/
- justizin 12y ago
  I think that the city should offer minimal service / support, and that there is opportunity for small or other businesses to buy and resell capacity wholesale, including a more full service install process. Local power monopolies in many areas, at least, have to provide options for alternate power sources. Existing regulated telco monopolies have to let other providers use their infrastructure. I think municipalities should be able to play that role, or to deem it a function of the city / county and contract out for it, letting private players compete in a market with a guaranteed baseline service.

jfb 12y ago

Really, he's calling for the FCC to prevent rent-seeking by local ISP monopolies by allowing the option of municipal networks. It's a really good idea; you can tell because of how stridently Comcast/Verizon/AT&T oppose it.

NoPiece 12y ago
What do you think the federal policy on torrents will be? Ask Disney.
- jfb 12y ago
  Who cares? The Feds here are not in the business of bandwidth provision; they're acting to counterbalance the elephantine mass of Comcast by preventing them from overpowering municipal politics.
  - rev_bird 12y ago
    I think the idea was that if Disney can get the government to essentially destroy the idea of 20th century work entering the public domain, they could probably get the government to act against an open internet.
    - jfb 12y ago
      They can do this now. Municipal ownership of some of the pipes isn't going to stop what is essentially an orthogonal fight from happening at a higher level.
      - djrogers 12y ago
        Yeah - I think the point was that if the pipes are owned by the same government that's already in the pocket of hollywood, then the laws (more likely regulations written by bureaucrats, not laws passed by elected officials, but..) against torrenting/pirating/distributing would be easier to get written and enforced.

Alupis 12y ago

This seems great, but I fear what is may do to the small ISP's (which generally don't pull any of the shenanigans the BIG5 do and are usually pretty pleasant to work with).

justizin 12y ago
I thought about this when I first started reading about municipal broadband, and I think if the local gov was required to wholesale out its' capacity the same way Title II utilities like AT&T have to now, small ISPs would be in a far better situation. AT&T is relatively hostile to the customers of other DSL providers, and I think municipal governments may be less likely to. Datacenters are also a completely reasonable metaphor, you pay the facility to run most wiring for a cross-connect to an ISP or between cages / floors, but you can provide your own transit or buy transit from any number of providers, all of whom are just other customers.

mtrpcic 12y ago

A lot of people seem dismayed that there isn't a bigger push for a federal run, country-wide internet provider, which I think is crazy. Taking the municipal approach means there isn't a huge cost for nationwide infrastructure, and small towns can develop the network that's right for them, rather than being stuck with what they're told they need from higher up. Additionally, with all the worry and fear about the NSA looking behind the scenes, putting the entire network backbone in the hands of the federal government is basically handing them exactly what they want. I'm all for municipally run internet, and hope this helps move towards that.

anigbrowl 12y ago
small towns can develop the network that's right for them What does that even mean? Do people in Smallville use the internet differently or not like to their video to buffer too fast? A mishmash of half-assed local standards was how the road network used to be, until Dwight Eisenhower came to power and argued that the US deserved something better than the miserably inefficient network it had, and championed the development of the Federal Highway System. I'm not being sarcastic here: I really want to know what you mean by 'the network that's right for them.' Are inferior networks right for poorer towns? Should there be different network standards in different states? I presume you like the way that telephone service is uniform across the whole US, so that making a call is procedurally identical whether you're in Alaska or the Florida panhandle. What positive advantage do you see in having internet accessibility be inconsistent? I recognize that you regard the capital cost of a national network as a disadvantage, but I don't see a clear benefit to your proposal. If you're all for municipally run internet, does that mean you do favor national regulation forbidding local monopolies or strategic litigation designed to prevent municipalities from setting up their own networks, as proposed in some states?
- coryrc 12y ago
  > Are inferior networks right for poorer towns? Yes. In rural areas, the cost per mile is much more important than in the city. If gigabit costs 10% more per mile than 100Mbit, is it worth it? Their burdens per person will be higher, in areas where the wage is typically lower. Perhaps 10Mbit wireless would be much cheaper per customer; maybe much more affordable for local residents (who have to pay through fees or taxes, one way or another). Similar thing with septic versus sewer[0]. You won't have septic in larger towns, but sewer costs can be stifling. [0] http://lancasteronline.com/news/health/small-iowa-towns-struggle-to-afford-sewer-upgrades/article_0649ce96-3e1c-5f22-99a2-3870829e0b20.html http://lancasteronline.com/news/health/small-iowa-towns-stru...

nostromo 12y ago

Municipal governments are a big part of the problem. They make it nearly impossible for companies to build new ISPs. Municipal governments: the cause of, and solution to, your ISP woes. It reminds me of housing. 1) Governments restrict new housing. 2) Housing becomes unaffordable. 3) Government builds public housing because "the free market has failed."

sp332 12y ago
Don't forget state laws. "Legislatures in 19 states have enacted laws restricting local governments from entering the broadband business". They can either get in the way of municipal deployments, or prevent municipal governments from interfering with public internet projects.
Torgo 12y ago
Ten years ago my hometown built a municipal ISP. It since then has done the bare minimum to keep the network going, and is total crap. There is one other cable ISP, but they effectively have to compete with the terrible speeds and service of the muni, which conspires to improve nothing. State laws preventing municipal ISPs should be gotten rid of, but some people seem to think that a municipal ISP will solve all their problems, and it won't.
- jrochkind1 12y ago
  > but they effectively have to compete with the terrible speeds and service of the muni, which conspires to improve nothing Wait, shouldn't that be easy for them to compete with, then? You say it like terrible speeds and service are somehow challenging competition for the cable company? Of course, they would prefer no competition at all, as all companies would.
  - Torgo 12y ago
    Muni had uptake mainly in the areas that commercial didn't service, and after that everything just kind of froze. They never, ever seem to try to compete on price, and I assume that upgrading equipment is expensive for either ISP. Wwhen it first started, it served unserved areas and was definitely better than commercial ISP by not being overutilized. Now that coverage is complete it just acts like there are two commercial ISPs. It seems like this a lot in the Midwestern rural areas, even with competition, they all settle into a low standard of service to avoid an arms race. My impression of what municipal Internet does, based on my experience, is they immediately implement state of the art, and then stagnate. By the way, our municipal ISP is opposed to net neutrality.

metaphorm 12y ago

I wish we had seen this more progressive, pro-active Obama 6 years ago. Squandered his political capital on a shitty health care reform bill, got shell shocked by Republican opposition and crawled up his own ass for a couple of years. Now that he doesn't give a shit about elections anymore he's actually doing something.

cubano 12y ago
I wish we had seen this more progressive, pro-active Obama 6 years ago. More progressive and pro-active then basically socializing 1/7th of the US economy with the ACA? Wow. [edit] I used the wrong term "socializing" when I meant "intervening in"
- metaphorm 12y ago
  are you serious? you can't be serious. i usually assume that hacker news has a bit more sophistication than this. i would actively celebrate a legitimate socialized health care system in the U.S. but that's not what we got. ACA is basically a huge middle class tax with the proceeds paid almost entirely to health insurance companies. its a massive expansion of a deeply entrenched private industry.
  - cubano 12y ago
    I, personally, would not celebrate that outcome. I believe in the power in markets and price signaling, ala Hayek, and there is nothing unsophisticated about that. We agree on more then you may be aware...the HI industry is a giant problem, and must be fundamentally altered for the market-based solutions I prefer to do their magic.
    - metaphorm 12y ago
      so if you really do read a lot of Austrian economics and really do have a sophisticated view of political economy then why did you label ACA as "socialist"? at best that's ignorant, and at worst it's an actively deceptive slander of both ACA and real socialism.

jMyles 12y ago

Absent from the conversation is the actual obvious generational shift: final-mile mesh networks in every sufficiently large and dense community.

metaphorm 12y ago
not a mature technology. how would the mesh be established? run ethernet cables between people's homes? have everyone open a port on their wifi router? this is beyond the technical capability of the vast majority of people. it would require a company to coordinate this, and at that point you've got just got an ISP running the last mile anyway.
- walterbell 12y ago
  Some work on these issues is being done by the Free Network Foundation, https://thefnf.org/ https://thefnf.org/ Edit: There's also Guifi.net in Spain, http://guifi.net/en http://guifi.net/en
  - metaphorm 12y ago
    cool! thanks for the link.
- jMyles 12y ago
  True, but neither are municipal broadband ISP's a mature organizational model. In both cases, we have a few plausible examples, but much more work is needed to verify their viability. For my eye, I think that CJDNS is the most likely of the current candidates to emerge as useful for this sort of implementation.

whoisthemachine 12y ago

That title is a little (may I say intentionally?) misleading, by leaving important context out. He is not proposing his government runs a high-speed internet project, he is proposing local municipalities be allowed to run high-speed internet projects, or rather, states be banned from banning them (confused yet?).

dang 12y ago
We changed the title to the more accurate and neutral one suggested by the article's URL.
- whoisthemachine 12y ago
  Thanks!

tzs 12y ago

It's not clear that the FCC can preempt state laws that prohibit municipal broadband. From the Wikipedia article on municipal broadband [1]: In 2000, the Federal Communications Commission endorsed municipal broadband as a "best practice" for bringing broadband to under served communities. The FCC also addressed the question of whether a municipality was an "entity" under the Telecommunications Act which mandates that "No State or local statute or regulation, or other State or local legal requirement, may prohibit or have the effect of prohibiting the ability of any entity to provide any interstate or intrastate telecommunications service." 47 USC 253(a). The legal question revolved around whether a state could prevent a municipality, as its subordinate government body, from entering the telecommunication market. In the case of Missouri Municipal League v. Nixon, the U.S. Supreme Court concluded that a municipality was not an entity under the Telecommunications Act and that a state could determine what authority its own subordinate jurisdictions had. I have not yet had a chance to look at Missouri Municipal League v. Nixon to see if the above is correct. It's also possible that the FCC is considering using some different regulatory authority to preempt state laws this time. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_broadband http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_broadband

warfangle 12y ago
Yeah, looks like the courts agreed that municipalities, as a subsection of the state, are not considered an entity: http://www.oyez.org/cases/2000-2009/2003/2003_02_1238 http://www.oyez.org/cases/2000-2009/2003/2003_02_1238

fche 12y ago

"Obama calls for government-run ..." (the rest is redundant)

walterbell 12y ago

From a decentralization point of view, it's usually not good when a larger construct (federal) wants to impose regulation on a smaller construct (state). But in this case, the proposed federal regulation would encourage more decentralization, as it would empower an even smaller construct (municipality).

bcheung 12y ago

The government can't even manage its own budget, I don't trust them with the Internet.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

Someone1234 12y ago

The ultimate solution is for the government (federal and local) to run the physical side of the internet (e.g. run wires to homes/business, manage the exchanges, etc) but let private companies actually sell the data access directly to the public. As an analogy this is like the Greyhound Bus Line. When you buy a ticket to go from A to B on Greyhound you pay the bus company money and they provide you the service (and support as required), but the buses actually run on government constructed and maintained roads, bridges, and related infrastructure. The internet would work the same way, the government does the physical side of things, and that gets paid for through tax and rental fees from the ISPs. Then the ISPs upsell the rental fees to cover support, advertising, and so on to provide end users with the actual service (e.g. they pay $.20/Gps to the government to maintain the physical bits, but charge $.40/Gps to the public). This is how BT is kind of run in the UK. BT does the physical side of things, but then five or six different ISPs (including BT themselves) all resell internet using that physical infrastructure. Those ISPs then pay BT for the pleasure (and BT pays itself). This would be one use of eminent domain that I would happily support.

davidgerard 12y ago
Yes. This works really well in the UK. OpenReach, the bit of BT that operates the infrastructure, is part of a private company, but operates like part of the civil service. They are completely impartial. It is so illegal for OpenReach to offer BT anything they don't offer anyone else, that both BT Broadband and OpenReach staff cringe at the very concept. tl;dr public wires that many ISPs can supply service over.
- bainsfather 12y ago
  I've read that twice, and I'm still not sure if you are being sarcastic. For me, those 'public wires' are old and slow - all 3 places I have lived recently. The government have gifted lots of money to BT to roll out fiber, and BT have taken the cash and sat on their hands. It is an awful situation - allowing BT to sabotage our nation's competitiveness whilst stealing taxpayer money [0]. So having competition on the common infrastructure is indeed good, but the overall system definitely does not work "really well". [0] A House of Commons Select Committee slammed the whole setup - e.g. here: http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/public-accounts-committee/news/rural-broadband-report/ http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/...

paulhauggis 12y ago

I'm fine with it, if there are laws in place that prevent governments from stifling free speech through Internet controls.

bmelton 12y ago
Censorship is on the rise in popularity. The most recent polls indicate that 51% of democrats and 33% of the nation overall is supportive of censorship, so in the absence of treating the first amendment as absolute, which simply does not happen, there could be no law put in place now that would not be equally superseded by the law that repeals it. As such, there may as well not be any such laws in place, as they would only serve to supply false confidence. http://hotair.com/archives/2014/10/02/poll-51-of-democrats-support-criminalizing-hate-speech/ http://hotair.com/archives/2014/10/02/poll-51-of-democrats-s...

Arnor 12y ago

> Last year, the Republican-controlled House passed language banning the FCC from banning states from banning cities from building municipal networks. This should be a case study in every civics class...

hawkice 12y ago
A less pathological phrasing: Congress says states can boss around cities and force them not to build municipal networks, and the FCC can't do anything about that.

gaius 12y ago

Saves having to wiretap commercial ISPs, is why he's doing it.

meesterdude 12y ago

I think its simple. Municipalities should at this point feel responsible for ensuring their residents have good internet access. Its also good for the tax payers, because its money going back into the government, and not into the coffers of some mega-corp who's just going to hoard it. I think there is a balance to be had between too much government and not enough. I think its easy to sway too far one way or another as history has shown, and neither are particularly good. Corporations will run rampant just like government will, given the freedom to do so.

bduerst 12y ago
It's almost better to think of power as static. For some areas, if you have a smaller government, it's not a loss of power so much as a void of power, which will be filled by corporations or other large organizations. A lot of people look at a smaller government as increasing their personal liberty, which is true for some issues, but for other areas it only means swapping out one organization for another (which may not be aligned with your interests).

bluedino 12y ago

What are the implications of this? What would it cost to build out fiber to even 10 or 15 % of homes and businesses that don't currently have it? What kind of insane cyberattacks could you get from 10% of the consumer market having gigabit connections? How much backbone upgrades would there be required?

3327 12y ago

ABOUT TIME. Internet is a utility and time to break the verizon atnt monopoly.

randyrand 12y ago

Municipal broadband has a serious problem. Namely, those that don't want it are still forced to pay for it. If you don't see how this is unfair competition well... I don't know what to tell you.

zdw 12y ago
<sarcasm> Ah, like the military, and any number of other similarly wasteful government projects? </sarcasm> There will always be things the government buys that you won't particularly want or feel are necessary.
dj2stein9 12y ago
Water pipes, phone lines, and electrical lines are built into your house too and you're not usually forced to sign up for the monthly services if you don't want them. Fiber would be the same way, the lines would be in the ground before the buildings are erected, and you'd be able to sign up for service if you want it.
kalleboo 12y ago
It doesn't have to be set up that way. Where I used to live, the municipal broadband network was run by the municipally-owned power company, who were required to balance their budget, so it was fully funded by fees.

mholt 12y ago

I live in Provo, which has Google Fiber. As the article says, Google took over their failed public fiber project. (Google purchased the infrastructure for $1.) Provo is a very unique city. It's a big city, but most of its residents are college students or young, newly married recent graduates. It's also a technology hotspot. Comparing the success of its fiber project to predict the success in other cities is hardly fair. For the record, Google Fiber has really lit up this town. Internet service here is unbearable unless you have Google Fiber (or deep pockets to dish out for Comcast). My building only has CenturyLink, and service just came back up an hour ago after suffering 80% packet loss for the last day. And this is our regular experience. Competition for ISPs, especially around here, is good (Veracity has been grappling to upgrade their network, and Comcast, well, everyone still hates them). On the other hand, the behavior and quality of service from American ISPs in the last 10 years is inexcusable. While I do think that private companies will do better "in the long run", time is running out for them to prove themselves.

ScottBurson 12y ago
So with Provo having so many young people and being a technology hotspot, why do you think the public fiber project failed? (In general I'm in favor of municipal broadband, so I'm curious why it didn't work as well as hoped in this case.)
- mholt 12y ago
  I actually don't know, since I wasn't here during the "iProvo" days. One guess is that so much of the housing are rental units. Since residents don't own the properties they live in, the landlords have to approve the installation of a fiber link, but that costs money (even if it's cheap), and they can justify not spending it since there's an existing DSL or cable connection. Google Fiber faces the same problem, and this, I suspect, is precisely why my building's management company decided to forgo Google Fiber for DSL. Yuck. Fortunately, Google Fiber generated enough hype and made the installation fee so low that it appealed to lots of landlords.
driverdan 12y ago
The fact that the municipal fiber network failed shows that we shouldn't inherently trust the government to run these networks for us.

duncan_bayne 12y ago

From the perspective of a non-American, it's sad to see you taking _another_ step away from laissez-faire capitalism. In what world is it reasonable to take money from people by force and use it to compete with private business? If people want municipal broadband, let them form non-profits to provide it through voluntary donations. That should be legal, and if it's not, that'd be something to fix.

orthecreedence 12y ago
Wow, so much wrong with your statement. Obama isn't trying to rally all the states to create broadband that competes with the big telecoms, he's proposing we strike down laws that telecoms lobbied for that forces people not to form their own local broadband. So what we have currently is citizens being forced NOT to exercise the democratic process thanks to the efforts of large companies. That is laissez-faire capitalism at work, my friend, in it's most common form. Secondly, I can't imagine anybody in the world (US citizen or not) thinking the US needs to move more towards laissez-faire capitalism. It's about as brutally capitalist/monopolistic/imperialist as anyone could ever want, and the citizens' collective voice has never been so drowned out as it has right now. Any time anyone even talks about some kind of social service or public good (including local broadband), everyone comes out of the woodwork screaming "COMMUNISM!!!" What we need is to strangle our corporate culture back into complete submission of the American people. No more spending our tax dollars invading countries or setting up puppet dictators so the corporate good ol' boys can steal from the locals. No more politicians entirely in the pocket of a bunch of greedy fucks, fighting for legislation they don't even understand. No more US banks destroying the world economy and having zero repercussions whatsoever. In what world is it reasonable to want more of these things?
- duncan_bayne 12y ago
  You're wrong. The laws Obama is planning to strike down are entirely reasonable; they prevent people from being _compelled_ to fund municipal broadband. That is, there is a difference between: a) some people setting up a non-profit to offer broadband, provided by voluntary donations, sponsorship, whatever and b) local Government taxing people to offer same The former is as I understand it entirely legal, and entirely compatible with a free market.

imgabe 12y ago

> The president is asking the Federal Communications Commission to preempt those laws. Can someone explain this? The FCC is part of the administrative branch right? Don't they work for the President? Why doesn't he just tell them to preempt the laws?

rhino369 12y ago
FCC is an independent agency. He can't tell them to do anything.

vlunkr 12y ago

I can understand the Republican point of view here: the government doesn't care about customer satisfaction or uptime because they can't go out of business. However, american ISPs have proven over and over they are unfair and incompetent. It's 2015 and I can barely get speeds over ~1mbps (I live in Idaho, but still). Maybe they would try a little harder if they had government competition.

lnkmails 12y ago

I am from India and one of the major broadband providers is BSNL. It used to be core part of the government (Department of Telecom) but was made a corporate in 2000 (but still owned by Govt. of India which is confusing). Anyways, BSNL is the reason a lot of remote villages in India get mobile & broadband connections. If it were left to private companies, they would never expand the infrastructure beyond urban centers where they could cover a lot of people per square area. BSNL also has a lot of fiber optic deployments that private companies rent in suburban areas to provide service. They get it at a cheaper price and don't have the problem of maintaining them. So I can see how municipal internet can help people. OTOH, there is a huge cost load on the government and people in remote villages don't use Internet much. I wonder if private companies were regulated to mandatorily have presence in all areas and are allowed to borrow government/municipal owned infrastructure at competitive rates, would the situation be better? This way there is both competition and better connectivity.

drawkbox 12y ago

I hope his next step is setting a goal for 1-5Gbps internet access to everyone in this country within 5-6 years based on this. Reward companies for building it to allow expansion and to non economical areas, which could become more economical with it. Let's build this internet cornerstone for commerce like Eisenhower's interstate system. Everyone can build on a platform that puts us back in competition for internet bandwidth/throughput with the surpassing world. We do not want to be behind in the bandwidth race, maybe if we make it a bandwidth race or war we can make it happen.

FireBeyond 12y ago
"Reward companies for building it to allow expansion" It needs to be done this way. By all means, pay companies for their investment in infrastructure, after the fact - not before, like has already happened, where these companies were given billions to expand rollouts and we got, well, very little.

crudbug 12y ago

A better solution would be: municipalities building infrastructure and private ISPs running on top of it. This will encourage more competition and better service for customers. Similar to other Utilities.

bcheung 12y ago
One more bureaucracy to add to the pile. ISP: "It's not our fault, it's your demarc". Demarc: "It's not our fault, it's the city". City: "It's not our fault, it's the ISP." A better solution would be for the building owner to provide for the last line and contract the work out to 3rd parties. This gives them control over price, timing, quality, and maintenance. It also creates a market for last mile line installers and competition. With a government run last mile you have none of those choices. If you aren't satisfied with the level of service you have no options. If you don't want to subsidize someone else's Internet, you have no options. If you want to upgrade you line, you have no options.

bcheung 12y ago

Aren't we trading one monopoly for another? Not sure that is any better. Especially considering the track record of the post office or public education. There would need to be some way to allow competition so there is incentive to provide quality service.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
dj2stein9 12y ago
You don't typically call publicly owned infrastructure a monopoly. Public utility companies are created to prevent exactly what's going in broadband internet service. If the city owned the lines, it would put all ISP's on a level playing field and enable broadband competition for the first time. They wouldn't be able overcharge you 10,000% mark up for the price of bandwidth anymore, and they'd have to compete based on the quality of their service.
- bcheung 12y ago
  Typically, no. But it meets the literal definition of one. My concern is that government often does not have any incentive to innovate and often operates extremely inefficient due to bureaucracy. As far as opening up for competing ISPs I'm all in favor of that. However, I would be much more in favor of a building tenant being the owner of the last mile line and contracting out work to a 3rd party company. That way the tenant has the option to lease or purchase outright. Let the tenant decide the level of quality and the price they are willing to pay. With taxes and the gov't providing it you take away choice and force people to pay for things they may not need. Or if they want to pay more for higher quality, they don't really have that option either.
- nemothekid 12y ago
  If the city owned the lines, do now have to fight [concerned parent] on getting internet upgraded to 2gbit/s in the future because billy will download porn/music/guns?
esturk 12y ago

javert 12y ago

Because it's better to have broadband be many little tyranies than a few big tyrannies.

lettergram 12y ago

Yeah, I definitely want my government running my internet. Not only do they get to monitor all of my traffic (more/easier than they do now), but they also will be in charge of delivery. I can already imagine it! My tax dollars paying for Comcast level quality service, at the same time I'll be receiving internet in the most "fair" way possible ("fair" being in quotes because who knows what legislation will be placed on it). Yeah, I'm just looking forward to the day they enforce the whole Google-Verizon frequency band agreement. Or perhaps when they don't sell exclusive rights for fiber connections. In all honesty, I'll take Comcast over the government any day of the week. At least Comcast has an incentive to make money (hopefully reducing corporate waste). The government will have far more bureaucratic bloat and either fund it with tax dollars or end up charging the same amount. I really loved how the healthcare system has been improved.

bcheung 12y ago

"Obama calls for municipal broadband" "White House just endorsed CISPA measures, two years after veto threat" http://www.zdnet.com/article/white-house-just-endorsed-controversial-cispa-measures-two-years-after-veto-threat/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/white-house-just-endorsed-contr... Coincidence?

ochoseis 12y ago

> As a result, households there can now get 1 gigabit (1,000 Mbps) service for just $70 per month. > The Obama administration is also planning to offer subsidies to promote investments in local broadband. While $70 doesn't seem like an outrageously great deal (it is good), it brings up an interesting point my dad had the other day. Is the true cost of that gigabit internet $100/mo, and tax dollars subsidize $30 while you cover the other $70 as stated? If municipalities truly can provide faster cheaper internet I'm all for it; however, I would hate to have another reason to bump taxes, nor a reason to crowd out competition and remove the incentive for innovation.

nemothekid 12y ago
Most likely the true cost to you in densely populated area X is more like $30/mo and the cost to someone out in sparesly populated area Y is $170/mo. Considering most plans cost the same regardless where you live, you all pay the "true" $100/mo.

finid 12y ago

> Municipal broadband is controversial — especially among Republicans > But House Republicans don't agree. Last year, the Republican-controlled House passed language banning the FCC from banning states from banning cities from building municipal networks. You can always trust those guys to work against consumers.

finid 12y ago

In cities with apartment complexes (most of the southern USA have those), ISPs like Verizon make deals with the apartment complex owners such that only one ISP is officially allowed to offer service to residents. Clearly illegal, but who's taking them to task?

driverdan 12y ago
Why would you think that's illegal?

AaronFriel 12y ago

Cedar Fallsian here - our broadband service is amazing and unfaltering. The alternative cable company that serves our area on the other hand has weekly and monthly outages, and I regret to say, that's not even purely a residential deployment issue. In Waterloo, IA, our neighboring town, the city council initially approved then backed out of working with Cedar Falls to participate in a greater municipal fiber deployment. Following a storm in 2009 that damaged utility lines on poles, I believe Cedar Falls moved forward with their plans to deploy fiber and deployed service to almost all homes over the course of a year and a half. The transition was seamless, and since then bandwidth has more than quintupled for the regular tier. I get 50/25 and it's rock solid. The best internet service I've ever had. On the other hand, as an IT consultant I have businesses I work with in Waterloo. Some of them would like to switch to technologies like VOIP to reduce costs, but their Mediacom cable goes down on a weekly basis. I have one client for whom I have never seen a whole month of uptime, and they have had multiple business days without service in the past year. The only alternative for most of my clients is CenturyLink DSL, which hardly qualifies as broadband with most of the DSLAMs too widely distributed and over-subscribed for reliable throughput. Mediacom is the same company that signed a letter to congress decrying municipal investment, and published a press release today[1] about how insulting it was that the President chose to support a municipal utility instead of their investment in Iowa. If companies like Mediacom and Century Link really cared about providing a service, they would support Title II and competition. But they don't. The high barrier to entry suits them just fine, and as a result, internet options are terrible in Waterloo, and technology businesses have fled to Cedar Falls. We've even apparently been named the "Digital Capital" by Google (but I have no idea what that means, I personally think Des Moines has the best access to the backbone with Microsoft and Facebook both opening up datacenters there). Sure, our gigabit fiber isn't $70 here, like Google offered, but it's there. And my internet service has never been more reliable. I know people who have Mediacom and Centurylink, and they hate it. And unlike their press release speaks about, the fiber deployment wasn't financially unsustainable or a waste of taxpayer dollars. As Mediacom says, "there is no reason to invest even more government dollars in municipally-owned broadband ventures, many of which wind up in financial difficulty." Well, I'm curious if Mr. Commisso of Mediacom did any fact checking. CFU is self-funded. Even better, CFU actually contributes back to the city's general fund its excess revenue. It's not so much "spending taxpayer money" as it is saving, at least now that it's up and running. Edited in addendum: Oh yeah, and for something the network engineers here might approve of: even when torrenting at 50mbps, my latency to Google and Microsoft is unchanged (10-13ms) and there appears to be little or no bufferbloat causing congestion. I've been able to play competitive real-time games and Skype while streaming, downloading, etc. [1] http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20150114006231/en/Mediacom-Communications-Issues-Statement-President-Obama%E2%80%99s-Visit http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20150114006231/en/Medi...

LBarret 12y ago

not to troll and no expert on the topic, but from outside, the US broadband situation is really puzzling. Many countries have cheap broadband and seems to have found good systems to make its market work. The installed monopolies looks like a very wrong decision that cannot be changed without legal conflict.

tn13 12y ago

Yeah, lets throw more of taxpayers money in the drain. FCC has one job which they cant do properly and now they want to create one more problem.

mikelbring 12y ago

If there is anything that can be done to give me a better option at internet than the local crappy / expensive DSL provider I have to go with now, I am all for it.

logfromblammo 12y ago

I wouldn't care about any of this if I could just lay my own cable between any two buildings in town without having to hire at least one lawyer and at least one lobbyist first.