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> The big guys won't LOVE it because they still lose their monopolistic stranglehold, but at least you aren't using public revenue to push them out of the market. You're using public revenue to create a road that any business can use for an equal fee.

I really can't imagine the response from larger incumbents being any different if this sort of format were being proposed. Why accept any competition at all when you can have none or almost none?

Why accept any competition at all when you can have none or almost none?

Because that won't last forever. One top-level comment here lays out how much money the incumbents spent to defeat such measures, and they still lose. Incumbents such as Comcast appear to be so hated that the only thing keeping them in place are monopoly deals written years ago. IOW, they are not going to get widespread public support.

Without public support, they rely on cronyism and old regulatory deals. They would do well to at least have a plan for how they would fit in this new world order (and I would be shocked if they didn't), if for no other reason than to not be caught off guard when the tide changes.

They don’t always lose though. And winning a legislative victory banning muni competition seals their revenue stream for years.

The tide won’t change for years or decades.

Relatively few places have the ability to do ballot measures like this, and the feds will make it more and more onerous to comply with various regulations.

> Relatively few places have the ability to do ballot measures like this

By my count, 33 states make it even easier to build municipal broadband than Colorado, including most of the big ones (CA, NY, IL, NJ, PA, TX, MA): https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qkvn4x/the-21-law.... Most have no restrictions on such networks at all.

Because that's the same thought process that seems to be prevalent among the very ISPs we're critisizing all the time. Should that kind of thinking really be copied? Why not use the chance and show how it's done properly?

My understanding is that in Utah they did that with Utopia and the lobbyists put some pretty big roadblock in it (and refused to use it). So I don't think it's that simple.

I'm not super knowledgeable in the field, but it's also my understanding that it's much, much harder to do TV + Internet, while just Internet is significantly easier. A lot of the shady deals with municipalities and regulations involve the TV part of things.

I'd personally be happy with just one hassle-free, super fast pipe just for the internet, relying on Netflix, Youtube, Hulu, Amazon, Twitch, Crunchyroll, etc for all of my TV needs (that's what I do right now already). But it seems that the majority is not willing to give up cable TV entirely, and that limits the target audience.

Why not just let citizens use it for a standard fee, just like a regular road? (In the case of roads, the fee is gas taxes, registration fees, and sometimes car property tax in addition to the general fund.)

Why should the businesses get preferable treatment to individuals or citizens?

Because customers need support. They need someone to call when service goes down, they need someone to call when a billing error occurs, they need someone to call when moving properties. I wish Open Access networks applied to more services in the states like telecom, gas/electric, railways etc. Let the government worry about city planning and where to lay pipes, rails or lines, and let the companies do the day to day management of servicing customers.

I don't know much about how ISPs operate, but I do know a bit about gas, electric and water and I can't see how they would work without some sort of central entity managing it. It's hard to see what benefit leasing that infrastructure out would be considering the municipality would still need to load balance, repair, and meter. And frankly, those services don't need that much maintenance on the service end and when they do, private companies do generally supply it. I hope that someday using the internet becomes as easy and natural as using the electrical grid.

Open Loop is pretty common in Europe. I have one electricity line, one gas line, one phone line but I can choose from multiple providers for each service. For gas and electricity whoever I buy from is responsible for putting the correct amount into the network. For the phone line for fiber to the cabinet internet they hook up their network at the exchange and patch my through. In all cases the providers have to pay a fee to the infrastructure owner that's a fixed regulated rate which pays for maintenance on the network.

There is now point running more than 1 fiber optic cable to each house just like there isn't a point running more than one electricity or gas line to each house.

> Because customers need support.

All the more reason not to let Comcast use it.

That was discussed as one model. I suspect the city is not "against" such a model, but doesn't want to tie the success of the rollout to private providers. Fort Collins already got burned by Axia backing out of talks about a contracted model.

Once you assume the city is both building the fiber and providing services over the fiber, I'm not sure if also making it an OAN makes sense anymore?

It would allow the city to earn additional revenue by leasing the lines to other ISPs. There are a lot of situations the city can be in where they would make less money overall by offering the whole service than they would by just charging for the infrastructure. In many cases the customer support and technical support staff would be government employees with the extra costs that involves, a private company can often provide this service more efficiently.

What actual services are really left for them to provide on an OAN though that aren't just as well served being a website?

All the stuff they offer today. Comcast / Xfinity for example could offer the following over an OAN:

  Telephony / VOIP
  Television channels, especially sports
  Free/sponsored content (NBC etc)
  Email
  "security" virus protection etc
  Business services
  Home security systems

But couldn't they could also offer that same stuff over the regular Internet? Why do they need to be your "ISP" to offer that? So that they can sneak extra stuff onto a single confusing bill?

Yes, and they don't, respectively. Comcast could simply choose not to use the public OAN and stay on their private (or "private") lines, for better or for worse.

As for your third question: probably yes, heh.

P.s. I think Ammon, Idaho is the model for this. Here's a recent article describing the setup: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/what-...

There's also Utopia in Utah. It's not all sunshine and roses but it's pretty good.

http://www.utopianet.org

Ideally, anything that requires maintenance and upgrades is handled by a private company. In Stockholm, for example, the publicly-owned company only provides dark fiber. All of the active equipment (switches, routers, etc.) is provided by private companies.

customer service. cpe rental/installation.

hypothetically the actual internet bandwidth itself. cities could provide a nice big fiber network, and then let independent companies actually bring in the internet connection(s) that they're going to resell.

customer service. cpe rental/installation.

The downside is that when you call the "ISP" they pass the buck to the wire company, who usually passes it right back and your Internet never gets fixed.

hypothetically the actual internet bandwidth itself.

That's a commodity, so having faux competition to resell commodity transit/peering seems like it would just add overhead. Also, splitting a market between multiple small ISPs potentially reduces their volume discounts.

Why would you let them in? The point is to fight so you won't have to deal with them in any shape or form and any profit that will come of this endeavour will all go to the municipal coffers.

That sounds kind of like how it works in Washington. Public utility districts can "construct, purchase, acquire, develop, finance, lease, license, handle, provide, add to, contract for, interconnect, alter, improve, repair, operate, and maintain any telecommunications facilities within or without the district's limits", but only for their own telecommunications needs or for "the provision of wholesale telecommunications services within the district and by contract with another public utility district".

Fine as long as there is also a Public Option so the privates can't collude and sabotage the thing as they've done in other situations.

Except that nationalization is part of the plan, under the guise of "affordable municipal broadband". A government owned near-monopoly replacing a private one.

When has that ever been the case? The FCC doesn't build anything. If you're worried about the federal government paying private companies to build out such a thing, take a look at the first decade of the current century where taxpayers funded the telecoms to build out broadband infrastructure with pretty much zero regulation around, well, any of it. There was no specification that the network be nationalized or become government property or that some random government agency could coerce the telecoms into controlling information on the internet ...

So what are you talking about?

It's local governments, not the federal government. In theory there is a concern that a municipal ISP could outcompete commercial ISPs due to lower cost of capital and such, but it's not clear if that has ever happened.

Uhh, isn't that a GOOD thing though.

If the other companies can't compete because their prices are too high, well sucks to be them.

The only thing that matters is the consumers.

Artificially suppressed or subsidized prices are not a good thing and in fact are a huge problem in the infrastructure world. It kills infrastructure investment. Our electrical grids, water and sewer systems, transit systems, roads, etc., are all crumbling because short-sighted "pro consumer" types thought the most important thing was to keep prices low for consumers.

We're getting high prices and dogshit slow internet anyways due to laws that keep competition out. Even Google gave up on trying to deal with the telecoms. Your argument would be fine if our high prices actually resulted in innovation but we haven't had that in a decade. For a while my family was paying about fifty bucks a month for three megabits down.

High prices yes, slow internet no.

It's no longer true that the US lags behind on Internet access speeds.

The US is ranked #10 in the world in average Internet access speeds, just barely behind Denmark and Japan. The countries that rank in front of the US are mostly tiny population wise. We're far faster than eg France, or Australia. Competitively, US access speeds have improved substantially in the last ten years.

Here's who ranks in front of the US: South Korea, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Hong Kong, Finland, Switzerland, Singapore, Japan.

Here is who the US ranks in front of: Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Russia, Brazil, China, Mexico, Taiwan, New Zealand, India, Indonesia, Netherlands, Romania, Britain, Czech, Belgium, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Poland, Italy, Greece, Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia - and all of Africa + all of Latin America.

The US has 2x the average access speeds of Italy, and neary 2x the speeds of France.

Within 24 to 36 months, the US will likely pass Japan on average access speeds.

This is a massive improvement over where the US was ten years ago and it's getting better faster than most countries.

The US ranks #8 on percentage of connections above 15mbps (48%), just behind Sweden and in front of Denmark. The US ranks #10 on percentage above 25mbps, with dramatically faster growth in that segment than anyone else in the top 10. Between Q1 2016 and Q1 2017, the US saw a 65% leap in % of connections over 25mbps; Finland, ranked #9, by comparison saw a 31% improvement.

So not only is the US killing it on access speeds now, particularly for a massive country of 330 million people, it's improving far faster than most other comparable nations.

Sounds like you have a good source of information; any chance you can share pointers? Thanks! Apologies if I missed this in upstream posts.

Akamai's State of the Internet quarterly reports are the only authoritative source I'm familiar with that confidently publishes at a global data scale. They have one of the only true global networks, that reach basically into every market. They're the only global network that I know that publishes routine detailed information like that. It's not perfect, I'm not aware of anything better however. They've been publishing it for a number of years, so there's a decent tracking history of trends over time.

Here's the Q12017 pdf:

https://www.akamai.com/fr/fr/multimedia/documents/state-of-t...

How can the government investing too much money into infrastructure cause a decrease in the total amount of money invested in infrastructure?

It is self contradictory logic.

Price controls, such as what happens in the electricy and water market might cause that. But the government getting into the game, and spending more money on infrastructure wouldn't....

> If you're worried about the federal government paying private companies to build out such a thing, take a look at the first decade of the current century where taxpayers funded the telecoms to build out broadband infrastructure with pretty much zero regulation around, well, any of it.

Except this isn't true. Almost all the existing broadband infrastructure was built with private money, not taxpayer money.

Except it absolutely is true. The incumbent ISPs were granted hundreds of billions of dollars to wire the country with fiber. They took the money, and did jack shit with it.

http://newnetworks.com/ShortSCANDALSummary.htm

The claim is FUD. No governments wrote $200 billion of checks to have broadband built. Look at the methodology used to derive that number: https://www.ntia.doc.gov/legacy/broadbandgrants/comments/61B... (starting on page 222).

$103 billion is "excess profits." I.e. if you pretend that telcos should receive the same profit margins as water companies, during a period of massive growth in demand for their product, then you can count any profits above that level as "taxpayer money paid to the telco." By that logic, taxpayers are giving Apple hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies.

$78 billion in "excessive depreciation." If you assume that depreciation schedules during the POTS era should be the same as during a period where everyone was replacing their networks to build broadband, then you can count the "excessive depreciation" as "taxpayer money paid to telcos."

If you actually read the origin of the number, nowhere will you find reference to checks written. The gripe is about deregulation in and of itself--the very idea that the government should not be deciding what prices to charge for what services. That kind of thinking is totally outside the mainstream among telecom regulators in the developed world. Every major European country deregulated their telcos in the 1990s and 2000s. The government in Germany or France doesn't sit there and decide how much broadband service should cost, and call everything above that "excess profits."

Ahh, TeleTruth, the New Networks Initiative, Bruce Kushnick and the "Irregulators", author of such things as "Not happy with your wireless service? Blame the FCC"? I'm sure this won't be biased, at all...

Given the choice between a government-owned monopoly and a private monopoly, why would you choose the latter?

That's a bit of a false dilemma though, as you don't need any monopoly. It is the local governments that granted the monopolies in the first place.

Because the latter can and will be displaced by a shift in the marketplace. The former can literally shut down its competitors with state power.