Comcast Tries to Derail Fort Collins Community Broadband

Longmont's story is rather complicated and interesting. I don't know all the details, but knew a fair number of the key players. Essentially, Longmont allowed an upstart ISP to put cable in the ground. Part of the deal was that if they were going to sell it, Longmont got first right of refusal (or something similar), and when they went under, the city bought the fiber for cheap. They were sitting on dark fiber for a long time, and they leased it out to several companies who failed to make it work. Then, after enough people in the town and city government cared (I'll call out Jim Wall - the town CTO - for being awesome), the vote passed and with some creaking and groaning, the roll-out got started. Residents got 1 Gigabit symmetric for $50 per month (you're reading that correctly).

Interestingly, nearly overnight, both Comcast and Charter were offering more than 1 Gb/s for $75ish.

We could use such a law in California.

There is a theory, I think first proposed by Arthur Schlesinger Jr (who won two Pulitzer prizes, had an equally renowned father, and was one of Kennedy’s top advisors) that American history tends to move in 80 year cycles divided into two forty year periods or so. Every 40 years US society shifts from capitalism and individualism to community and strong federal government. Neither period is inherently bad, but it’s just that capitalism and democracy don’t coexist as much as rule independently, taking turns.

Schlesinger dated the capitalism period to 1980 starting with Ronald Reagan. That means it should end in 2020 or so.

For all the crimes that fall out of the statue of limitations, I can imagine, not necessarily in a good way and probably will be frowned upon by later historians, that McCarthy-style commissions will be set up and these executives blacklisted from business.

Sadly, there are some inroads against it. In a rare show of bipartisanship, both the Republican and Democratic parties supported this 'Raise the Bar' initiative to make it more difficult to add initiatives to the state ballot. It doesn't remove the right, but it requires a lot more organization by requiring 2% voter signatures from each state district within a 60 day collection window.

It sucks, but I'm not too distraught. A little more authority was ceded to the political parties but I still have faith that the citizenry are active and involved. We don't all believe the same thing (it's a swing state), but at least we act.

What I absolutely love is the freedom to be independent. As an independent voter, I can vote in the primary for any of the political parties, as long as I only vote once. I don't need to pre-register for that party to be eligible. There are a lot of other improvements to the electoral process we could potentially make, but I'm glad we at least pulled down this low hanging fruit as a first step.

They promoted a law in a Montana town that would have allowed corporations to vote in the municipal elections.

People who bought the special ~$150 indoor receiver got decent throughput, once Ruckus Wireless shipped the 20th firmware revision (I kid not.)

Almost all of the complaints came from people who didn't buy the right equipment. And that was a lot of people.

A decade later, the same thing is probably much cheaper and easier.

Fixed wireless may have nicer economics with the right geography. My parents use it on a farm. I doubt you're going to be able to stream HD netflix/amazon over it through.

Somewhat unique situation but very cool.

http://chrishacken.com/starting-an-internet-service-provider...

Costs here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13689309

E.g., here in the Bay Area, I have a choice in my area to go with AT&T[1] for Internet connectivity, but IIRC, they don't meet the FCC's definition of "broadband", so really, for broadband Internet access, my only choice is Comcast. (Now, the FCC was recently trying to re-write the definition of broadband s.t. mobile connectivity could count, but that's such an absurd stretch of the imagination when discussing the market of high-speed Internet access.)

While there is also TWC, I've found that where TWC exists, typically they also enjoy a similar status.

Chattanooga, TN, interestingly, offers ~50x the speed for the same price as Comcast here.

As for having abused their status,

http://www.tennessean.com/story/news/local/2016/10/25/comcas...

https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/1/8530403/chattanooga-comcas...

[1]: AT&T also has a history of disregarding consumer privacy (e.g., https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/08/att-selling-data_n...), so I avoid them for that, too.

But public utilities have always been an exception. The theory is that it's so expensive to run residential infrastructure like wires (electricity, tip-ring phone, cable) or pipes (gas, water, sewer) that a single company gets to do it and charge for it. In return they

a) must build their facilities to serve the entire community. No cherrypicking dense or wealthy neighborhoods to jack up return on investment. b) must, in the case of cable TV, offer public access. c) must submit to public utilities commission regulation

This theory helped push through widespread rural electrification, which was a major progressive victory in the first third of the 20th century.

Is internet-over-Cable-TV infrastructure regulated like Cable TV is regulated? After all it is a repurposing of the regulated infrastructure. In many jurisdictions that's a gray area. Lobbyists and change-averse businessmen LOVE gray areas. They can use them to make legislators' heads hurt, and then say, "pass this law and your heads will stop hurting." It's a tried and true lobbying tactic.

Making the case that a public-utility monopoly should be abolished means convincing everybody involved that the infrastructure cost isn't a driver any more. For broadband it generally isn't: the electric utilities usually own the poles and are happy to have another tenant utility.

The problem is convincing people. You gotta make the case. Good luck Fort Collins.

The law attempts to prevent the artificial raising of prices by restriction of trade or supply.[3] "Innocent monopoly", or monopoly achieved solely by merit, is perfectly legal, but acts by a monopolist to artificially preserve that status, or nefarious dealings to create a monopoly, are not. The purpose of the Sherman Act is not to protect competitors from harm from legitimately successful businesses, nor to prevent businesses from gaining honest profits from consumers, but rather to preserve a competitive marketplace to protect consumers from abuses.[4]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act

There's much more to it and the matter is, as you might suppose, complicated.