5 ms·

> it would bite us later if we have a massive shift to municipal broadband. Municipal broadband doesn't mean shutting out ISPs. If done right, it means that th

by curun1r 12y ago

> it would bite us later if we have a massive shift to municipal broadband. Municipal broadband doesn't mean shutting out ISPs. If done right, it means that the municipalities own the last mile infrastructure and charge a per-customer rate to ISPs that serve residents. But what that does is significantly lower the bar for ISPs to offer service. It can cost millions of dollars to build out that infrastructure in a city/town and that's assuming you have right of way to actually lay the fiber. If the city does that itself, then ISPs only need to connect the city's infrastructure to the larger internet...something that's significantly cheaper. The Comcasts of the world would still be free to offer service to customers. But they'd have to compete with the smaller ISPs on equal footing and without the giant markups they have today.

sanderjd 12y ago
Thanks for explaining this important point. Competition outside of the last mile would be good for everyone, and the last mile infrastructure makes a lot of sense to run as a utility.
- justizin 12y ago
  That's exactly what I was trying to get across, if I did so poorly, I apologize. This is _precisely_ the discussion I want to have. Transit is not the same as interconnect, we should have some private competition, but if an entire city is all AT&T and Comcast, I'd rather just have it be municipal fiber. I have no problem with AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, etc.. running their businesses over a combination of private and municipal networks. I feel that's ideal.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
jewel 12y ago
This is how UTOPIA in Utah is run. There are a myriad of ISPs to choose from, and the pricing is excellent ($70/mo for gigabit from Xmission, for example). http://www.utopianet.org/pricelist/ http://www.utopianet.org/pricelist/
- ticviking 12y ago
  Ohh how I wish we had that further north. Or that we could get logan city council to see the benefit of UTOPIA
- ticviking 12y ago
  Ohh how I wish we had that further north. Or that we could get logan city council to see the benefit of UTOPIA
- ticviking 12y ago
  Ohh how I wish we had that further north. Or that we could get logan city council to see the benefit of UTOPIA
swombat 12y ago
That's kind of how it works in the UK, with BT being that last-mile provider for every UK ISP. Let me tell you: BT sucks. They are technically a private company, but operating with all the ills that a large governmental monolith has accumulated over decades. With the system you're proposing, you're basically creating a BT. Hopefully it's a small, city-specific BT so at least if one city has a very shitty infrastructure you can move to another city to avoid it... but still. Caveat emptor...
- vidarh 12y ago
  BT is not the last-mile provider for every UK ISP. For starters there's Virgin (cable), but there are also a growing number of smaller providers that bypass BT/OpenReach to provide both fibre and wireless services (LTE in particular) without it. And while I agree with about BT as a whole, OpenReach - the subsidiary of BT that handles the last-mile network - is very different from BT as a whole even though they certainly share a lot of history and baggage. For starters, OpenReach is vastly more tightly regulated (leading to, for example, all prices being publicly available on their website), but OpenReach is also subject to a lot of additional scrutiny and pressure from the 500+ companies that rely on their network to provide services, especially because many of said 500+ companies are directly competing with Virgin for business. The baggage of BT is also less of an issue simply because while most ISPs uses OpenReach for their backhaul services (relying on OpenReach to provide an IP connection from the subscriber to the ISPs network), OpenReach also provide raw access where the ISP can put equipment in BTs exchanges and get a direct physical connection to the subscribers line, and a number of providers have and do make use of this to provide faster connections than what OpenReach offers for backhaul. With LLU unbundling the only limitation provided by OpenReach is down to physical constraints of a network they inherited and was not endowed with enough cash to somehow instantly upgrade. But most ISPs are not willing or able to cover the costs even of taking advantage of the LLU unbundling, which should illustrate that there really isn't a willingness for most to pay for much faster rollouts of higher speeds.
  - swombat 12y ago
    4 out of 5 of the places I've lived in London had DSL but no cable, so for 80% of my experience in London BT was the onyl last mile provider available. And yes, there are some new developments, there is some hope in the horizon. Meanwhile, I regularly see tweets from people in, say, Norway, with gigabit internet access.
mseebach 12y ago
> If done right That's a pretty big if. There's a very real possibility that the same municipal governments that granted the cable monopolies in the first place, will either license the network to an ISP that will either become Comcast-like (monopoly lazyness does that), be bought by Comcast or actually just simply is Comcast (remember, the municipalities have a "good working relationship" with Comcast) or they will setup their own ISP, which might get off to a decent start, but will either make money, and then go on to be milked hard, or it will lose money, and will have to fight with the fire service and the water utility over every last penny for infrastructure upgrades ("What do you mean you need a $5000 router? I have a $30 router at home and it works just fine! In fact, I'll go to Best Buy myself and get you a few of those tomorrow. What the next item on the agenda?"). But IF they do it right, it would be a great solution.
- exelius 12y ago
  You're right, it is a pretty big if. Here's what I foresee actually happening: these networks will work great for 10 years or so. But eventually the maintenance costs will catch up, and you'll have service outages that take days to fix because it's run by lazy government workers with a guaranteed pension. Customers will complain, but nothing will happen until the city goes broke (as happens to nearly every city every decade or so). So the city auctions off the telecom infrastructure to private buyers for pennies on the dollar or spin it off as a new private entity. The net result is the same: the taxpayers will have subsidized the construction of yet another redundant telecommunications network owned by private money. The reason I'm pretty sure that this is what will happen is because this is exactly what's happened to most of the municipally-owned utilities across the nation. Chances are that your gas company or electric company are privately owned (water/sewage tends to remain municipally owned because it's simply not profitable under any scenario that preserves basic sanitation). The city hits a budget crisis and starts looking for assets to sell, and utilities are huge capital assets that can bring in a lot of cash relatively quickly.
  - yourapostasy 12y ago
    The useful life of fiber installs can be even shorter than 10 years in specific cases [1]. What if the municipality owned, laid, and maintained the physical conduit/poles/enclosures but not the actual network physical plant itself, which is then deliberately designed to be replaceable so commercial providers fish through the cabling they want to municipally-owned physical hubs that are equipped and operated by the providers? The municipalities already have the resources and staff to do so relatively competently from water, wastewater and electrical grid deployment and maintenance. Most of the cost of last-mile deployment is the physical laying, but if that is shifted to a public utility while fishing cables (at most) is left to the providers, then might the providers see dramatic increased incentives to compete on quality of service and price? [1] http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-lifespan-of-fiber-optic-cable-when-laid-in-the-ground http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-lifespan-of-fiber-optic-cab...

by curun1r 12y ago

sanderjd 12y ago

Thanks for explaining this important point. Competition outside of the last mile would be good for everyone, and the last mile infrastructure makes a lot of sense to run as a utility.

justizin 12y ago
That's exactly what I was trying to get across, if I did so poorly, I apologize. This is _precisely_ the discussion I want to have. Transit is not the same as interconnect, we should have some private competition, but if an entire city is all AT&T and Comcast, I'd rather just have it be municipal fiber. I have no problem with AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, etc.. running their businesses over a combination of private and municipal networks. I feel that's ideal.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

jewel 12y ago

This is how UTOPIA in Utah is run. There are a myriad of ISPs to choose from, and the pricing is excellent ($70/mo for gigabit from Xmission, for example). http://www.utopianet.org/pricelist/ http://www.utopianet.org/pricelist/

ticviking 12y ago
Ohh how I wish we had that further north. Or that we could get logan city council to see the benefit of UTOPIA
ticviking 12y ago
Ohh how I wish we had that further north. Or that we could get logan city council to see the benefit of UTOPIA
ticviking 12y ago
Ohh how I wish we had that further north. Or that we could get logan city council to see the benefit of UTOPIA

swombat 12y ago

That's kind of how it works in the UK, with BT being that last-mile provider for every UK ISP. Let me tell you: BT sucks. They are technically a private company, but operating with all the ills that a large governmental monolith has accumulated over decades. With the system you're proposing, you're basically creating a BT. Hopefully it's a small, city-specific BT so at least if one city has a very shitty infrastructure you can move to another city to avoid it... but still. Caveat emptor...

vidarh 12y ago
BT is not the last-mile provider for every UK ISP. For starters there's Virgin (cable), but there are also a growing number of smaller providers that bypass BT/OpenReach to provide both fibre and wireless services (LTE in particular) without it. And while I agree with about BT as a whole, OpenReach - the subsidiary of BT that handles the last-mile network - is very different from BT as a whole even though they certainly share a lot of history and baggage. For starters, OpenReach is vastly more tightly regulated (leading to, for example, all prices being publicly available on their website), but OpenReach is also subject to a lot of additional scrutiny and pressure from the 500+ companies that rely on their network to provide services, especially because many of said 500+ companies are directly competing with Virgin for business. The baggage of BT is also less of an issue simply because while most ISPs uses OpenReach for their backhaul services (relying on OpenReach to provide an IP connection from the subscriber to the ISPs network), OpenReach also provide raw access where the ISP can put equipment in BTs exchanges and get a direct physical connection to the subscribers line, and a number of providers have and do make use of this to provide faster connections than what OpenReach offers for backhaul. With LLU unbundling the only limitation provided by OpenReach is down to physical constraints of a network they inherited and was not endowed with enough cash to somehow instantly upgrade. But most ISPs are not willing or able to cover the costs even of taking advantage of the LLU unbundling, which should illustrate that there really isn't a willingness for most to pay for much faster rollouts of higher speeds.
- swombat 12y ago
  4 out of 5 of the places I've lived in London had DSL but no cable, so for 80% of my experience in London BT was the onyl last mile provider available. And yes, there are some new developments, there is some hope in the horizon. Meanwhile, I regularly see tweets from people in, say, Norway, with gigabit internet access.

mseebach 12y ago

> If done right That's a pretty big if. There's a very real possibility that the same municipal governments that granted the cable monopolies in the first place, will either license the network to an ISP that will either become Comcast-like (monopoly lazyness does that), be bought by Comcast or actually just simply is Comcast (remember, the municipalities have a "good working relationship" with Comcast) or they will setup their own ISP, which might get off to a decent start, but will either make money, and then go on to be milked hard, or it will lose money, and will have to fight with the fire service and the water utility over every last penny for infrastructure upgrades ("What do you mean you need a $5000 router? I have a $30 router at home and it works just fine! In fact, I'll go to Best Buy myself and get you a few of those tomorrow. What the next item on the agenda?"). But IF they do it right, it would be a great solution.

exelius 12y ago
You're right, it is a pretty big if. Here's what I foresee actually happening: these networks will work great for 10 years or so. But eventually the maintenance costs will catch up, and you'll have service outages that take days to fix because it's run by lazy government workers with a guaranteed pension. Customers will complain, but nothing will happen until the city goes broke (as happens to nearly every city every decade or so). So the city auctions off the telecom infrastructure to private buyers for pennies on the dollar or spin it off as a new private entity. The net result is the same: the taxpayers will have subsidized the construction of yet another redundant telecommunications network owned by private money. The reason I'm pretty sure that this is what will happen is because this is exactly what's happened to most of the municipally-owned utilities across the nation. Chances are that your gas company or electric company are privately owned (water/sewage tends to remain municipally owned because it's simply not profitable under any scenario that preserves basic sanitation). The city hits a budget crisis and starts looking for assets to sell, and utilities are huge capital assets that can bring in a lot of cash relatively quickly.
- yourapostasy 12y ago
  The useful life of fiber installs can be even shorter than 10 years in specific cases [1]. What if the municipality owned, laid, and maintained the physical conduit/poles/enclosures but not the actual network physical plant itself, which is then deliberately designed to be replaceable so commercial providers fish through the cabling they want to municipally-owned physical hubs that are equipped and operated by the providers? The municipalities already have the resources and staff to do so relatively competently from water, wastewater and electrical grid deployment and maintenance. Most of the cost of last-mile deployment is the physical laying, but if that is shifted to a public utility while fishing cables (at most) is left to the providers, then might the providers see dramatic increased incentives to compete on quality of service and price? [1] http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-lifespan-of-fiber-optic-cable-when-laid-in-the-ground http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-lifespan-of-fiber-optic-cab...