In theory our public transit is “locally owned and operated and is dedicated to serving the people” rather than shareholders. Yet public transit is almost uniformly awful in the US. If you live in San Francisco, do you really want your internet run by the same people who run the Muni?
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ezpk77/chattanoog...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/09/17...
https://www.thedailybeast.com/chattanooga-has-its-own-broadb...
Seems like you can't win.
Meshnet type stuff is comparable (in terms of the economic system it might "ideally" thrive within) to leftist ones like anarchism. (Any connotations a reader might be applying, like black masks or throwing shit, are simply connotations - I'm not advocating for anything political, either - I'm referring mostly to the anarchist concept of "just building things you want without asking anyone"). But you are missing the point if you are asking "do you really want your internet run by the same people who run the Muni?" without acknowledging the fact that publicly-owned transit authorities in the US are 'extra-ordinary' structures within the free-market capitalism they inhabit, and are therefore limited by it. In other words, there's no reason one couldn't have a great Muni, but you're pretending Muni exists in a vacuum when it doesn't.
Public transit is terrible for a specific reason. The majority of people don't use it which means the majority of people don't care that it's terrible and don't want to spend a lot of tax money on it.
But the majority of people do use the internet, and the funds would come from subscribers rather than taxes so you don't have to convince non-users to pay for it.
One difference you can see with London is that fares can range from a little higher than the NYC MTA to almost double. That combined with operating costs more than 50% higher explain the challenge: https://www.google.com/amp/s/ny.curbed.com/platform/amp/2017....
These same problems would absolutely affect any public internet system you built in a place like NYC or DC. On the one hand, wireline telecom is both highly labor intensive, and a heavily unionized field to begin with. So costs would be high. On the other hand, while everyone uses the internet, few people really use the kind of bandwidth people on HN do. There would be huge pressure to limit capital investment to keep prices low. If we’d built out fiber in DC in 2005 under the municipal, we’d still have 50/50 BPON for $50/month instead of gigabit GPON for $70-80/month. At least fiber cables can’t catch fire.
But now you're listing places where public transit actually works and lots of people use it. It fails in SF because it's chicken and egg. As long as most people don't use it, most people don't care or even realize how bad it is.
It also makes little sense to compare costs in NYC to costs elsewhere to try to prove municipalities are bad at things, because the lower cost one is also a municipality. And even NYC is doing something right because they actually have a popular subway system.
> On the one hand, wireline telecom is both highly labor intensive, and a heavily unionized field to begin with. So costs would be high.
How is that any different than when provided by Comcast et al?
> On the other hand, while everyone uses the internet, few people really use the kind of bandwidth people on HN do. There would be huge pressure to limit capital investment to keep prices low. If we’d built out fiber in DC in 2005 under the municipal, we’d still have 50/50 BPON for $50/month instead of gigabit GPON for $70-80/month.
Why do you assume it would cost $20-30/month more per customer?
ISPs have huge capital costs, but a huge part of that isn't network upgrades. It's a fleet of trucks that wear out and have to be replaced, and equipment strewn all over the city exposed to the elements, and tons and tons of UPS batteries, and other things that have to be replaced not because they're obsolete but because they don't last forever.
Even overall capital costs don't include all the regular staff, rent, utilities, etc.
The cost of upgrading a network switch to support faster links is a small fraction of their overall costs.
I half suspect the reason the incumbent ISPs don't like to upgrade is that it makes it harder to price discriminate. You can't charge $1000/month for a symmetric 100Mbps connection while offering gigabit for ~$50/month.
It doesn’t work well in NYC and DC. Here in DC, lines have been shut down for weeks at a time due to deferred maintenance. Several lines are completely unable to keep their scheduled time. The New Carrollton to Foggy Bottom trip is listed on the timetable at 36 minutes. (It used to be 32 minutes.) On a typical day it takes 45-50 minutes. And forget about service upgrades! Due to decades of wasteful spending and deferred maintenance, the most recent schedule change made everyone’s commute worse by decreasing rush hour train frequency. NYC is having similar, though less severe problems. They’re way behind European countries in automation and signaling despite spending substantially more money.
And yes it makes sense to compare to other municipalities. If you were proposing to have the Barcelona government run my internet here in DC, I’d say have at it. But I don’t live in Barcelona. I live in America, where our local governments re uniquely incompetent and wasteful compared to those in other developed nations.
> I half suspect the reason the incumbent ISPs don't like to upgrade is that it makes it harder to price discriminate. You can't charge $1000/month for a symmetric 100Mbps connection while offering gigabit for ~$50/month.
The price discrimination point actually cuts against municipal broadband. When the city runs things, prices become a social justice issue, which forces prices too low. NYC subway fares, for example, are just $2.75 regardless of distance, while the London Tube ranges from $3-6 (the minimum fare was over $5 using exchange rates from a couple of years ago). That’s despite the fact that operating costs for the NYC Subway are 60% higher per mile. If 50 Mbps is seen as “good enough” by voters, there will be a huge incentive to do the minimum required to hit that speed in order to drive down the price. And if you can’t price discriminate, there might not be much room in the price structure to offer higher tiers for more money. (Indeed, people hate tiered pricing for public services. See the recent outrage over congestion pricing of I-66 express lanes in DC.)
I don't know what private ISPs are like outside the D.C. area. I can push 700/700 on my FiOS regardless of time of day (and I suspect my limiting factor is the fact that my only wired machine is an Atom mini-pc with realtek nic). I find it totally not believable that DC/NYC/Phila/Baltimore (to name the last several places I've lived) could give me a similar level of service. I think it'd be more about oversubscribing OLTs until speeds during prime time dropped to just above what's necessary for Netflix. Because that's what all our other public services are like in these cities.
This is demonstrated by Albany, NY, where I live. [1]
> [Mayor] Sheehan said Albany must create a policy that could move this forward, with a focus on it being affordable to residents.
> “We would provide a certain bandwidth to every home at no charge,” she said.
The study we commissioned[2] focuses on providing free low-speed access to everyone with an option to upgrade to "high-speed" (>= 100 Mb). The idea of actually laying fiber to everyone's homes is considered, but mostly just to show how unappealingly expensive it is, especially when only a small minority of people will pay for the upgraded service.
[1] http://www.timesunion.com/news/article/Albany-pursuing-wirel...
[2] http://timesunion.com/file/235/4/2354-Broadband%20feasbility...
DC is uniquely screwed because the city is under the jurisdiction of the federal Congress, so you have the problem of representatives elected by far away constituents not caring even when the subway has high usage.
> If you were proposing to have the Barcelona government run my internet here in DC, I’d say have at it. But I don’t live in Barcelona. I live in America, where our local governments re uniquely incompetent and wasteful compared to those in other developed nations.
That's fair. And installing municipal fiber in DC probably is a bad idea. But that doesn't mean it's a bad idea in every US city or anywhere the local government is better managed.
> The price discrimination point actually cuts against municipal broadband. When the city runs things, prices become a social justice issue, which forces prices too low.
This is only true where it's true. For example, any town without a huge income disparity wouldn't have this problem, or anywhere that redistributive policies aren't locally popular. And where redistribution is popular enough to control local policy, it can be satisfied in the same way it is for food or housing -- taxpayer subsidies to low income people. Or, ideally, a UBI; but that's harder at the local level (where you can't control local immigration), and taxpayer subsidies are obviously still preferable to underfunding infrastructure. Then if the taxpayers later choose to spend less money, they can reduce the subsidies without underfunding the network.
It's not as if price discrimination is actually desirable. The profit-maximizing pricing for a food cartel is charging twenty odd times as much for normal food and then capturing the low end of the market by offering a miserable gruel for 90% of the previous average price, which is intentionally so bad it will ward off anyone who can afford to pay more. The takeaway from that can be that a food monopolist would allow the poor to lower their food bills by 10%, but only if you count solely dollars and not value for money. And that's assuming the gruel would be 10% less than now rather than 10% more -- anyone with enough market power to price discriminate tends to also have enough market power to capture more of the surplus from everybody.
> I don't know what private ISPs are like outside the D.C. area. I can push 700/700 on my FiOS regardless of time of day (and I suspect my limiting factor is the fact that my only wired machine is an Atom mini-pc with realtek nic).
90+% of the country doesn't have that. In many places you can get 50Mbps/20Mbps from Comcast, but plenty of unfortunate souls are stuck with Frontier as the only provider.
And even if you're "lucky" enough to have Comcast, their reliability is terrible. They've having an outage right now.
> I find it totally not believable that DC/NYC/Phila/Baltimore (to name the last several places I've lived) could give me a similar level of service.
These are not instances of well-managed cities. NYC is probably the least worst, but even that's more because of high density and wealthy people making up for government waste.
The ideal place for municipal fiber isn't huge high density cities that already have FiOS and two other providers, it's cities with population ~200K with enough density to be worth the candle but not so much that multiple incumbents are already providing symmetric gigabit for affordable prices.
> I think it'd be more about oversubscribing OLTs until speeds during prime time dropped to just above what's necessary for Netflix. Because that's what all our other public services are like in these cities.
The difference is the proportion of the total cost needed to add capacity. To add a subway line you have to spend a billion dollars digging tunnels, buy more subway cars and then pay to operate them indefinitely. To make the internet faster, you have a one-time cost to upgrade the terminating equipment but can reuse everything already in the ground and thereafter your operating costs are the same as before, if not lower when newer equipment is more efficient.
It's less expensive to the point that not doing it is typically either incompetence or for strategic reasons, e.g. for price discrimination or because purposely not upgrading transit links hampers video competitors and forces Netflix to pay for peering.