The FCC Can't Save Community Broadband, But We Can
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In Sweden, I could get symmetric 1 Gbit for $93/mo; I don't even have that option in NYC. Installation? I just connected my computer, chose a plan via my web browser and had everything working within 20 minutes.
We'll see how long I can keep it up.
A counterargument might be that both the city and Comcast could both raise money through munipical or corporate bonds from investors, so local citizens might not need to pay any extra taxes as long as the city breaks even charging for its wiring.
Once the take rate for the municipal network is high enough, paying for it with taxes is more efficient anyway.
As with roads, you get one regardless of if you have a car or not, no you pay for it via taxes.
A good model would be to pay for the fiber network via taxes and then you'd pay a monthly fee to your ISP of choice, if you want service.
This has the additional benefit of giving you connectivity anywhere within city limits, as the fiber network would be ubiquitous. Plug in anywhere, connect to any wifi, authenticate and you'd be online.
That was just my very basic thought about how this could feel less anti-consumer/monopolistic--I don't actually know how these types of things are usually done so feel free to let me know if you have more expertise!
It's a good model, but unfortunately there have been few takers to date.
What building management told me is that Comcast actually owns the data pipes inside my apartment building, thus preventing Webpass (or any other ISP) from ever being an option. I'm looking to move soon, in part because of this situation.
It still requires cables all the way to the data center. Webpass may use wireless for the last hop or a few hops, but sooner or later you need wireline infrastructure to backhaul all the traffic to the data center.
There are a few reasons for this:
- there are, if any, 10G wireless links
- wireless requires line of sight to work
- wireless is less reliable than fiber
> What building management told me is that Comcast actually owns the data pipes inside my apartment building, thus preventing Webpass (or any other ISP) from ever being an option.
Comcast may or may not own the inside wiring. Comcast obviously has no incentive to either disprove the claim or let anybody else use the cabling or install new cables, but probably neither has management either as they may be getting kickbacks from Comcast.
Here's a good article on what monkey business is going on behind the scenes:
https://backchannel.com/the-new-payola-deals-landlords-cut-w...
As far as I can tell, most of the ISP objections to such efforts involve a local government effectively creating its own ISP. Objecting to that doesn't seem particularly unreasonable; a government ISP has inherent anti-competitive properties (such as tax funding), even if it doesn't go even further and ignore regulations it applies to everyone else. Imagine trying to compete with a competitor that everyone has to pay for (in whole or in part) whether they use it or not, and that gets to set the rules you have to follow but that it can choose not to.
I don't think any of the ISP objections or court cases would hold up against an actual community effort, as opposed to a government effort. If a group of people got together and decided to start a community ISP, nothing should stop them.
The competition that's actually worth caring about and encouraging and protecting is competition for backhaul connectivity to CDN nodes and peering points, and services offered on top of the internet connection (email, VoIP, TV content, etc.). Trying to make things fair for two competitors putting trenches along the same street is a fool's errand and obscenely wasteful.
This is (sort of) the UK model with 'local loop unbundling'. BT Openreach maintains the wiring and is supposed to sublease it to various ISPs, including BT-the-consumer-ISP.
It works OK, except that customer service issues in the wiring can take a long time to be resolved.
Comcast and others got exactly that. They got federal/state/local money to wire up the country with high speed internet and then fell short when they hit the rural areas that needed it most.
Not only that but certain cities gave them exclusivity agreements so that there couldn't be competition for X years.
Why do rural areas need the Internet the most?
Of course, by the same logic city apartments should have excellent internet service because of the low installation costs. I gather this is not always the case, so the assumptions above over-simplify the issues somewhat.
Because rural areas do not have the same concentration of services that urban areas have.
In urban areas you can visit offices/shops close by to get things done if you don't have the Internet. In rural areas you have to travel X miles to get a single thing done if you lack online access.
You might think the situation is different in cities, but that is the case only on the surface. The fact is that in dense urban settings, many apartment buildings form exclusive partnerships with cable providers such that residents must sign up with that provider of they want cable/internet.
/anecdote
It's unreasonable, when those who object are themselves monopolists (private ones), and as such are themselves anti-competitive. I'd say, for any community private monopolist vs city / state owned (or hybrid partnership) ISP is a better situation than private monopolist alone. Especially since private monopolists have zero interest in wiring or upgrading rural areas, which aren't profitable for them. So community owned ISP is for sure the only option there if you want to have high quality modern network.
Either that, or private monopolists should be regulated to the point of requiring modern bandwidth and fair pricing.
Beyond that, though, having a monopoly doesn't inherently imply anti-competitive behavior. Nor does it excuse creating a new anti-competitive ISP.
> So community owned ISP is for sure the only option there if you want to have high quality modern network.
I agree, a community-owned ISP can be a great solution, especially for areas under-served by available options.
Removing the artificial barriers to competition does nothing to abolish the natural one, nor to remove the advantage an incumbent ISP has from having been helped overcome that natural barrier.
The only sure way to break out of the pattern is through another use of the government power that created the monopoly in the first place: either by regulating that monopoly to curb its abuses, by creating a second publicly-owned network to host a functional competitive market, or by seizing the existing infrastructure to turn it into the publicly-owned network that is a prerequisite for the kind of competitive market that can work. The above three options are things that have to be done by the government because other private enterprises either cannot do it or cannot have sufficient economic incentive to do it. Of those three options, the first is far less permanent than the latter two, and the second is far less frightening than the third.
That's an exceptionally dangerous line of thinking. And more to the point, an unnecessary one: prohibit actual anti-competitive behavior, not the existence of a monopoly. If the universal problem you hypothesize holds true, the result would have the same effect.
Also, the only natural monopoly involved is the actual fiber infrastructure, for which it does make sense to avoid duplication. That doesn't mean ISPs that run over that infrastructure are in any way a natural monopoly. Decouple the two, and you'll have plenty of opportunity for ISP competition.
And if you want to avoid duplication, you need to enforce local loop unbundling[1], which current monopolists also oppose very strongly. It even was required in the past, but those regulations were gutted, thanks to corrupted lawmaking driven by monopolistic interests.
Currently the big ISPs are making money on aging infrastructure as long as possible and not expanding coverage if it doesn't look profitable enough.
In Madison, WI the discussion of municipal fiber is in the works and they're targeting depressed communities first.
thanks smartphone autocorrect
That's the point - as a natural monopoly, ISPs are inherently anti-competitive. They should be government (or quasi-government) entities just like every other utilities.
> Imagine trying to compete with a competitor that everyone has to pay for
Imagine trying to compete for last-mile water or electric service.
It is funny that you write that. As you probably know, but to inform others, electric service in several states is competitive. Customers choose a supplier and that supplier puts enough power on the grid to serve their needs. Suppliers are generally unregulated in terms of pricing and customer selection. The last mile poles and wires are owned by a regulated company with that company's rates subject to oversight and a requirement to serve every subscriber.
That's how we should do internet connectivity.
No, last-mile fiber is a natural monopoly; connectivity through that fiber is incredibly competitive. I'm not arguing that last-mile fiber shouldn't be a utility; it especially makes sense to put it in when building new infrastructure, ideally along with conduits to allow for future expansion or maintenance. But that shouldn't imply acting as an ISP.
It is exceedingly rare that municipal networks are built with direct tax funding. Municipalities just don't have that kind of money lying around. Municipal networks are normally funded with bonds, much like commercial networks.
> even if it doesn't go even further and ignore regulations it applies to everyone else.
That's an interesting assertion. Can you name one regulation that municipal networks can ignore, that applies to everyone else?
> Imagine trying to compete with a competitor that everyone has to pay for (in whole or in part) whether they use it or not,
Municipal networks are usually paid for by it's users and subscribers. Sure, you can imagine things, but this scenario just doesn't play out that often in reality.
> and that gets to set the rules you have to follow but that it can choose not to.
Which rules are you referring to?
> I don't think any of the ISP objections or court cases would hold up against an actual community effort, as opposed to a government effort. If a group of people got together and decided to start a community ISP, nothing should stop them.
Unfortunately this isn't true. Some states even regulate what networks co-ops can build and operate.
Some ISPs even do their best to annihilate open access and dark fiber networks by municipalities.
Technically anti-competitive, yes. Although in the case of Chattanooga, residents now have the option to pay a price more in line with the global first-world market rate. comcast was simply not interested in increasing speed or lowering prices. Now that there is real 'competition' (from the govt run utility), good old comcast has magically lowered their rates and increased service offerings. Because they totally were going to do that anyway /s.
We have two cities nearby that run their own power companies and all areas around the cities are supplied by a much larger private company. Power rates in both cities are higher than the surrounding areas, and outages are far more common in the city-ran areas.
I know of several cities that have attempted to provide city-wide wi-fi service. I do not know of any that were successful. Most of them bought the mesh-networking koolaid and disaster was the result.
Many citied and towns across the globe have demonstrated that municipally owned infrastructure can be better than monopoly owned infrastructure.
It's called PILOT, payment in lieu of taxes.
1. Network tech advances at breakneck pace. Do you really think government is going to update aging infrastructure every few years? Sure the current ISPs might not to that now. Proper competiton might fix that. Government ISPs will make that even worse.
2. Censorship seems far more likely on government ISPs . Someone will lobby "the government shouldn't allow X on government run things". You'll have no recourse. Proper competiton would solve this. Government ISPs won't.
3. Spying: governemts want to spy. What better way to spy than with their own systems.
Yes there is a problem with the current local monopolies but I don't see how government run ISPs is the right solution.
On the first point—yes, I think you're quite right. But maybe FTTH is enough for many years to come?
Re 3. a diverse market for ISPs might improve this a bit though. Depending on the whims of the courts. A "renegade" ISP might decide to make a name for itself by getting into trouble for not helping out in spying.
The government does not have to run the ISP. They can just own the wires and let commercial ISPs compete. The ISPs can upgrade their equipment connected to the fiber whenever they want.