The Washington state legislature has voted to end limits on municipal broadband | Hacker News Reader

The Washington state legislature has voted to end limits on municipal broadband

arstechnica.com

319 pointsmpweiher112 comments

I’m sure Seattle will try to do this, even though I wish they wouldn’t.

Seattle’s utility companies, owned by the city, are poorly managed and keep having budget shortfalls despite charging very high rates for services. Electricity costs, for example, are growing at several multiples of inflation. Despite having more access to fresh water than just about any US city not on the Great Lakes, our water and sewage rates are higher than desert cities like Vegas and LA.

Who knows where all the money goes? I know one individual personally that was paid a six-figure salary by the electric utility to study how the utility grid was systemically racist. Best I can tell he wrote some emails and made a few presentations and that’s about it. We also have one of the most expensive sewage treatment plants on Earth, which has a museum and wedding / event space for some reason. We spent more on that than Dubai spent on the Burj Khalifa. Maybe that’s why there’s a budget shortfall.

I can think of a lot of places in WA that need this more urgently than within the city limits of Seattle, however...

Seattle itself is fairly well covered by a combination of centurylink, wave and comcast, depending on the exact location. Big chunks of single family detached housing in Seattle where the centurylink copper cables were >90% aerial have now been overbuilt with gigabit class GPON. In addition to the gigabit MDU/apartment services on offer from wave and competitors.

Olympia. State Capital. You have Comcast. And Centurylink will give you up to 8mbps in many places. Oof.

What doesn’t work in one place can work in others. As another comment describes [1] several Washington counties along the Columbia River Valley have gigabit fiber built out by public utility districts.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26828097

The big thing that differentiates those counties is they already operate the last mile electrical grid as a PUD (public utility district). So they already have bucket trucks, crews of linemen, flaggers, reel trailers, other aerial fiber/cable construction resources on staff and trained. Other parts of WA state have privately owned last mile grid operators like Puget power and Avista.

Washington state viewed from a whole-state colored map perspective is a wild patchwork quilt of different last mile telco operators (mostly centurylink or ziply now, but others exist, like how the ellensburg valley is neither), and mottled variety of different types of electrical grid operator. Or different types of combination aerial/underground cable operator (comcast or charter, mostly, but by no means all).

It will be somewhat more time consuming, costly and difficulty for a county that is not also a PUD to set up their own fiber construction enterprise.

Also, they generate way more electricity than they use, so they use the extra money selling it to subsidize local efforts.

In chelan and Douglas counties, the PUD essentially owns the fiber networks as well as the power networks, but they are only allowed to sell power directly. For broadband I have to go through another provider, I’ve always thought this was silly. A few of those providers have done quite well financially, in leveraging this situation. All they do is customer service, and hook up from the pole to the house, and lease routers. the infrastructure investment was prepaid by the public.

I don't see why that is such a terrible situation. Sure some providers are profiting off of people's naïveté, but other providers could easily undercut them with minimal investment. And let's face it, govt orgs have a bad reputation in the customer service area.

So do telcos

Except in this case the PUD are not for profit and do not have a monopoly. So they are forced to compete. Sad that so many public utilities have screwed up so bad and ruined the idea for the rest. The customer service at the local PUDs are quite simply amazing. They pay and treat their employees incredibly well also.

In this case I think the PUD can actually undercut the existing providers as they already have support staff in place, linemen, etc. but aren’t allowed to take a profit.

Similar great article on this about why building a subway in NYC is so expensive https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/new-york-infrastruct...

They will have multiple “studies” by politically connected firms that go straight in the trash as they have no value whatsoever (among many other scams).

A friend of mine was interested in opening a coffee shop with a wine license in Boston near the common, and the consultant she hired said that the best way to make this happen was to hire this specific law firm at $1000 per hour, and all the permits would sail through committees. If she hired any other firm it would be delayed, and delayed, put on extra reviews, cost her more and take years to complete. Corruption in a less overt way.

Big government types have their heart in the right place, but the reality of human nature and the dirty business of politics is why we can’t have nice things. Some people in government are good, but those that seek and gain power are not the type of people you want guarding our treasury. It’s a tale as old as civilization and it never changes.

This sounds a lot like what’s happening in Seattle. There was a recent controversy with the “Black Brilliance Project” (https://sccinsight.com/2021/03/08/black-brilliance-research-...) that seems to have been just blatant corruption that took advantage of the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement. A bit further back, the city has been giving away taxpayer owned property to favored nonprofits instead of selling them (https://durkan.seattle.gov/2020/11/mayor-durkan-applauds-cit...), and justifying it using vague progressive justifications. If you go back further there are examples of corruption in the city’s “homeless-industrial complex” (https://roominate.com/blog/2016/anatomy-of-a-swindle/).

What I have seen in government is that there are lots of constraints laid down by politicians that are ill-considered, and the bureaucrats work around them such that in practice, things function more like a private business.

How do you know the consultant wasn't lying in order to get business for the law firm?

Totally agree with this characterization. Everything is immensely well funded and completely unimpressive for a city with this kind of budget. Whether it is massive utility bills or shocking costs for bike lanes in the millions per mile, it seems they simply can’t manage funds responsibly and yet complain that they are owed more in taxes from “the rich”.

Even the city’s vaccination efforts have been focused on “systemic racism” and “equity”. Apparently their vaccine list prioritizes zipcodes with higher representation of races they deem disadvantaged. Many people sat in the Seattle queue with no notifications coming their way before finally finding out about this insanity and seeking vaccinations through other means.

The sewage treatment plant you reference is also not even doing its job. Every year it leaks millions of gallons of raw untreated sewage into the Puget Sound (example https://www.king5.com/article/news/3-million-gallons-of-sewa...). For a city so focused on the environment they only seem to pay lip service to it, as both water bodies and parks (from drug addicted vagrants) are polluted.

The internet service here is fine and the costs are less enraging than city utility bills. Personally I don’t want a public run alternative to kill the acceptable service I get now. At worst I would be worried that Seattle would censor the content accessible via a public internet service given the city leadership’s politics.

Can you buy 20Mbit service for $20? Municipal ISPs are the only hope to break the price fixing of the incumbents.

I just checked and Comcast provides 25 Mbps service here for $20/month. There’s a large number of tiers going up to 1000 Mbps at $85/month, and an even pricier 2000 Mbps option. Other providers are available including CenturyLink, who offers 100 Mbps for $50/month and 1000 Mbps for $65/month.

Very few places have access to a symmetric fiber connection. I know from plugging in addresses over and over into Comcast and Centurylink’s website while searching for properties.

And Centurylink is desperate to ensure that this kind of manual plugging of addresses into websites is the only way to find out anything about availability.

I learned to assume any development older than 2010 with buried utilities does not have fiber.

Unfortunately that's not really accurate. :(

CenturyLink has aerial fiber and underground copper in several areas. For example, in Aberdeen it happened because they got a grant from the FCC.

The whole situation is a mess, and CenturyLink likes the mess.

The bike lanes being expensive is mostly that it's a lie that they're bike lanes -- the money is really going to replace the whole road

If you are in one of the suburbs of Seattle, you pay even more for utilities, so they can’t be more wasteful than average (or at least in the greater Seattle area).

There are a lot of games played with utility rates (eg: have taxpayers on the hook for infrastructure rather than ratepayers), so it’s hard to compare across regions and correctly account for the true cost.

Seattle had a municipal broadband program, but, unsurprisingly, was uncompetitive.

I think the water and electricity utility inefficiency is more state issues than city. The money is being spent on fish rights, tribal obligations, getting the last 1% of sewage spill (when the counties across the sound have broken septic flowing constantly) etc. These are hitting the other dam owners too.

You can see some budget breakdown here: http://openbudget.seattle.gov/#!/year/2020/operating/0/servi...

Oh, don't forget the billions spent on that last bit of sewage while allowing open defecation in parks and on roadways.

"Allowing" is the wrong word. It's more like requiring, since there aren't any public toilets.

Where can I read about Seattle's municipal broadband program? The city only mentions a fiber network for city agencies, lots of studies, and corporate initiatives.[1]

[1] http://www.seattle.gov/tech/initiatives/broadband/studies-an...

https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/blog/techflash/2014/01/s...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabit_Seattle

Looks like a corporate initiative. Puget Sound Business Journal said the city would have owned the network but the company said not.[1] And the company and the city both said the city wouldn't invest money.[1][2] So probably the PSBJ writer misunderstood the dark fiber lease.

And did it ever launch? It would be strange to call it uncompetitive when the real problem was it never existed because the company couldn't raise funding.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20130215072656/http://gigabitsea...

[2] http://www.seattle.gov/tech/initiatives/broadband/studies-an...

Seattle has pretty decent utilities, although not perfect by any means. I feel like it's the most Seattle comment to talk about how terrible things are here never having lived in any other major US city.

Seattle has a lot of unnecessary problems and the government is convinced the only solution is more taxes. I’ve seen this city regressive massively in the past 10 years. I honestly have no idea what they do with public money. The council members have openly called for nationalizing big companies and adopting a communist model - something my immigrant parents fled from.

Seattle has one of the best mass transit systems I've seen for the size, it has a very walkable and livable city, tons of parks, and very good government transparency.

This is what I'm saying, people hate on this city but if you've ever lived in LA, Chicago, NYC...oh boy are you in for a shock if you're not a fan of "I honestly have no idea what they do with public money."

Please, move to Chicago then come back to this thread.

Oh we know where the money goes here, it's just ridiculous. Pensions and under table deals that make politicians and their friends wealthy. Want to get something done? Bribe, I mean contribute, to the local alderman.

I haven’t lived in LA, Chicago, or NY. But please help me understand — why does another city being worse off (whether that’s true or not is besides the point) makes it okay for Seattle to regress?

And why would I move from my city to Chicago? I was born here and lived here my whole life. Chicago is worse so I should be thankful it’s not as bad as Chicago? I mean, should I be happy it’s not as bad in Seattle as Mexico City, or the pollution isn’t as bad as New Delhi? I’m genuinely interested in where you’re going with this.

Quite frankly Seattle is quickly fading from being a livable city. My children go to a school that has homeless people shooting up heroine and throwing needles on the school grounds. But sure, Chicago is worse in your opinion, and so I should pay taxes to city of Seattle while law enforcement becomes a joke.

So move to Bellevue. It's not like that extra 10 mins on the highway is "moving away from home"

If you don’t want to see homeless and/or needles go to most of the east side including Bellevue.

Median home sale price is 1.15MM though so a little more expensive.

> I know one individual personally that was paid a six-figure salary by the electric utility to study how the utility grid was systemically racist. Best I can tell he wrote some emails and made a few presentations and that’s about it.

That salary was paid to discover (and make discoverable in the event of a suit, useful for making sure no one sits on the data) the specifics around systemic racism in the utility in order to improve the diversity of both representation and opinions in order to strengthen financial performance (https://www.catalyst.org/research/why-diversity-and-inclusio...). It's an investment with commonly solid returns for businesses struggling with inclusion challenges, but more importantly, dismissing the money spent on raising the bar on equality in the workplace is something I think many minority participants on HN abhor but are afraid of speaking against because majority participants are quick to express opinions like this as if they're factually correct.

I think you are missing the main point of the original comment, using it as an opportunity to virtue signal about systemic racism.

A six-figure salary to study whether the electric grid is racist is absolutely excessive, but it’s just a small detail of the overall fraud, waste, and abuse that drives the exorbitant utility prices in Seattle.

The original comment seemed to imply that a tiny portion of the budget apparently spent on investigating systemic racism is a larger systemic problem than, well, any other systemic problems the city might have (including actual systemic racism).

i'm sure the salary was paid according to the employer's desire for the labor to be done, and the available supply of that kind of labor in the market

Why are you so sure of that?

>A six-figure salary to study whether the electric grid is racist is absolutely excessive

How so? Doesn't seem any more ridiculous than any other six-figure job.

> A six-figure salary to study whether the electric grid is racist is absolutely excessive, but it’s just a small detail of the overall fraud, waste, and abuse that drives the exorbitant utility prices in Seattle.

Yikes. If the market demand for the role is six figures (because the financial rewards more-than-justify the spend; see my previous citation), then the cost is absolutely a good value for the grid, for the employee, and for the customers who get better service out of the utility.

And to tshaddox's point, nostromo's comment picked this specific spend as an (implied) example of fraud and waste... over all the other inefficiencies in the system. Utilities are wasteful in so, so many more ways, largely around maintaining manual and error-prone processes that are both slow and costly as a result. These inefficiencies are leagues worse tha studying "how the utility grid was systemically racist" in wastefulness.

I'm not really sure this conversation makes any more sense to pursue.

In defense of the original commenter, they mentioned they had a personal connection to the person paid to do that work. It seems plausible enough that that was the reason it was picked as an example, over other things they might have no personal connection to. I would be inclined to chalk it up to that, rather than anything else.

That may be one defense, but the counter to that is that personal stories do a better job of winning people to pick a side versus facts and stats.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S07495...

It's also why anecdotes are often used as a technique of persuasion, because so many people eat them up and it eliminates the need for a citation.

Private companies orders of magnitude smaller than the public utilities for a major metro area hire such six figure consultants all the time, and investors don’t seem to mind at all. In my experience those types of things always seem ridiculous until you actually know the context, so I’ve learned to assume some measure of competance. This has generally served me quite well, and I also don’t walk around the world outraged constantly by things I don’t understand.

As opposed to six-figure salaries paid to software engineers?

City governments have already been able to provide and sell Internet service - it is PUDs* that are banned from selling until and unless this bill is signed. And not only is the ban only on retail as opposed to wholesale service, there is also already a slight and temporary relaxation of the ban for coastal regions west of the Seattle area. [1]

Since you're also a Seattle-area local, you might remember that Seattle tried to do a public-private partnership with a company called Gigabit Squared to run fiber into Seattleites' homes. That initiative failed in 2014 [2], but the Seattle City Council has always been able to reconsider, with or without this bill.

* Public Utility Districts are special-purpose governments in Washington dedicated to being non-profit electric or water utilities, with limited tax powers (.045% property tax per year). Many counties have county-wide PUDs that are independent of the county government, such as Snohomish County PUD (Seattle's northern suburbs; no broadband offering) and Chelan County PUD (central Cascade mountains like Wenatchee and Leavenworth; does offer wholesale broadband).

[1] https://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=54.16.420

[2] https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/blog/techflash/2014/01/s...

I am curious: who operates the "publicly owned" networks?

I think having having the government lay fiber while they are already doing work on the electric infrastructure is an obvious thing to do. But I would be extremely hesitant if the government is the one who owns and runs all the networking equipment (routers, switches, firewalls, etc).

> sewage treatment plants on Earth, which has a museum and wedding / event space

Why is that a problem? I always wanted to get married at a romantic sewage plant.

Sounds like Atlas Shrugged

Yeah, it does sound like low tier fiction.

As someone who grew up in USSR it is actually pretty accurate description of what happened there. It seems some idealistic people want to try again.

I'm no fan of Seattle's government, but FWIW, I have lived in one of those Desert cities (San Diego). They have a sewage pipe that goes about 2.5 miles into the ocean [1] and spews out "lightly" treated sewage water. There is no secondary treatment, they even have a waiver to do this (I believe from the federal government or possibly state government) [2].

In Seattle, on the other hand, we are not allowed to dump water at that level of contamination into lake Washington or the Sound. It costs a LOT of money to do secondary treatment, and we are taking it even further by building a massive underground holding tank to make sure that we don't dump any overflow in the event of heavy rain.

This is more than what is federally required, but in this instance I actually think the extra cost is worth it.

[1] https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/1989/sep/21/end-pipe/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_Loma_Wastewater_Treatmen... [3] https://www.surfrider.org/campaigns/san-diego-secondary-trea...

Seattle has failed to modernize it water infrastructure. I spoke with an engineer that moved from SoCal, where they are constantly in drought, to Seattle and he said the difference in water management was night and day. In those dry areas they are efficient by necessity. Everything is networked, monitored, and automated. If something goes wrong they can turn water off and try to address it remotely. In Seattle they will send someone hours out to the site to turn a spigot. The younger people at the bottom know the system can be improved, but this is not encouraged. By younger I mean 10 years of experience. Those at the top have achieved sinecure through seniority and have no interest in rocking the boat. The good people eventually leave.

Seattle's electricity rates are 1/3 below the national average apparently.[1] The water and sewage rates are some of the highest. But they include infrastructure costs other cities pay with tax revenue.[2]

King County commissioned the new plant. Seattle officials suggested taking less expensive steps first or building smaller plants.[3] I remember reading the local geology makes underground construction especially expensive. And probably you don't want to copy Dubai's working conditions.

[1] https://www.electricitylocal.com/states/washington/seattle/

[2] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/rain-soaked-s...

[3] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/how-brightwater-so...

Those numbers are wrong. I don't know why -- they're probably just years out of date.

https://www.seattle.gov/city-light/residential-services/bill...

You're right. But Seattle's rates are 20% below to 4% above the national average still.[1]

[1] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

I am QUITE ready for real competition in this market.

100 USD a month for Internet? OK, that's not so bad.

1 gbit down, it's not as good as other places (Edit: for price) but thats...

35 mbit up? That's really the maximum offered; how will I ever use online backup services?

1.2 TB (I think Byte?) cap for data, IRRESPECTIVE OF PLAN SPEED, and a 50 USD per month charge for lifting that?

Highway robbery.

Sorry, I just woke up from a long sleep.

When did $100 USD become "not so bad"?

When Seattle area software engineering salaries range from $98-170k

But the 100/month is 1200/year, and the 100K-170K is before taxes, right? How much is that after taxes? Is there sales tax on that 100/month? Internet access seems to be a significant part of that disposable income?

Even at a marginal rate of 40%, that $60k-102k a year.

At 1200/year, that's 2-1.2% of aftertax income.

Also this is for gigabit home internet, which could be considered a premium service.

Here (Hungary) Telekom (the subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom) offers 2G/1G for ~30 USD / month. Interestingly the median pay (after taxes) here is ~710 USD / month (8520 / year).

Comcast and friends are going to deliver 10 Gigabit symmetric Internet for $122/month or less? This is already the reality of municipal broadband in a small college town in the middle of nowhere Iowa.

https://www.cfu.net/tv-internet/shop-plans/internet

It is amazing how rural internet can be great in one area and non-existent in another. There are islands in Alaska with gigabit service now, yet I know somebody who lives ~3 miles from a state capitol who can't get more than 3mbit DSL.

Time to move to Alaska then.

Just lay the fibre please, then open up the ISP market.

I don’t want my ISP run by the people responsible for fixing roads, but I’m happy to let these road-diggers install the cable conduits.

It really is their political and moral responsibility to do so. The roads belong to the taxpayer: we’ve paid for them and yet they are failing to provide us the glass fibre we so desperately want.

Even without these changes, Washington state's utilities and governments have already been able to sell Internet service, but mostly only on a wholesale basis - they can advertise, but only to direct you to third-party reseller ISPs.

In rural central Washington, several county electric utility government districts already offer gigabit to the home through their resellers (Chelan, Douglas, Grant among them). From my understanding, that infrastructure and the cheap hydro power attracted Microsoft to build multiple cloud data centers in Quincy, Grant County.

For many years the county wide intranets were faster than any connection they had to the internet. Some of the business around town had crazy fast speeds between sites but the internet was still slow. I think once the DCs moved in, that all changed.

Wonder if there's more of a co-op approach that could be used to avoid municipal broadband being sold off when it's politically expedient to do so at some random point in the future.

Wonderful! This bill has been submitted for several legislative sessions now, and it’s great to see it finally pass. I am really looking forward to getting fiber from our county PUD and finally ditching Comcast.

I’m sure this has its negatives . I lived in Seattle and have experienced the issues with the current system first hand , when moving I looked at houses in historically redlined parts of the city , some of the houses I looked at had abysmal options for internet 7mbps was the max I was getting . There’s only two companies that provide service Centurylink and Comcast , I tired calling and visiting offices of both companies to find out if there was any chance I could get better speeds in the future , there was none , each company said these areas were under the area of the other and refused to install upgrades . I’ve also moved around a lot in the city , each place had different broadband prices from Comcast , if there were other competing services you could get 1000 mbps for 70-100 $ but if there are no other competitors in the building you are in you are paying the same 70-100 for 45 mbps speeds . These companies have stopped innovating completely and are only doing rent-seeking . Any change is better than the status quo .

The question is the individual counties or city...

I wanted to implement muni broad band in Alameda, but they said they wouldn’t allow it as they gave a contract to only allow Comcast or att..

However common came along and gave awesome wifi... don’t know if they are still operating?

Too bad about the ubiquity leak, as it would be awesome if their radio tech could get some long haul signals bouncing around remoter parts as well.

common was acquired by monkeybrains.net in the last few months

Relevant Planet Money

https://www.npr.org/2020/05/29/865908114/small-america-vs-bi...

Muni broadband is a terrible idea on its own. You essentially lock in the present SOTA as nearly all future state since few munis will upgrade and almost all will, instead, add blockers to competing better services. Munis also have poor expertise in comparison to private ISPs.

However, even given all this it is obvious why muni broadband is a good idea. Currently, even low-disruption cheap services like Sonic's microtrenching are blocked in municipalities where wealthier people (who already have broadband) and their children (who performatively hate "capitalism" or "the wealthy" - defined by adding another 9 to whatever percentile they're currently in) oppose private ISPs adding service to everyone.

This means that the best way to connect the rest of America is to offer some means that satisfies the political angle of 'socialism'. This will be good for the Googles and Netflixes and bad for private ISPs unless munis decide to outsource the actual rollout and operation to them.

So, on the whole, I'm pro-muni-broadband and I hope we will find some way to combat the ossification that will result from this.

EDIT: I can't respond to you guys because I'm rate-limited but if you want to have a convo, email in profile.

> Muni broadband is a terrible idea.

Tell that to the people on gigabit GPON in Grant, Douglas, Chelan, Benton and other counties in WA state right now. The county PUD electrical grid operator builds the fiber and splitters, and sells L2 transport services to independent ISPs. The ISPs do the layer 3 IP part, customer support, billing, etc. It works great.

Do you know why those counties built their last mile fiber networks? Because the incumbent telco (centurylink or frontier, for the most part) and cable (comcast or charter) private entities in the same service territory were showing no signs of building anything better than 20 Mbps down x 2.5 Mbps up.

Don't private ISPs behave this way because competition with them was outright banned? I remember most cable companies agreed to do all the heavy digging and cabling only in exchange for being exclusive service providers in the area.

So the ISPs may formally be private, but market forces are absent, with predictable consequences. A municipal network breaks this monopoly, adds competition, so, it's good.

They behave this way because the restricted nature of the physical plant of last mile access makes them a duopoly. In some of those areas of centurylink and comcast, neither one wanted to flinch first and be the first to spend many millions replacing their copper plant with fiber. Since they were both equally aware that the consumers in the area had available service options from only two companies, and exactly what the prices/packages/speeds of those services were...

In some cases where the copper phone lines are degraded or a long loop length, it's worse than a duopoly. It's a monopoly since the service options might be 5 Mbps down x 768 kbps on ADSL2+, or 200-300 down and 15 Mbps up on comcast or charter DOCSIS3.

So, do you posit that there's just not enough money in the business for a third company to come over, lay fiber, and own the market?

That can be the case depending on what the population density looks like and how much of the infrastructure has to be aerial vs. underground. Doing a fully independent overbuild for GPON FTTH to individual houses can have a cost per house of $4000, which results in unacceptably long ROIs for fully private investment. Private investors who fund startup ISPs will go elsewhere.

It can also be complicated and costly as a new-entrant 3rd provider to force the local entities controlling the wood utility poles to permit you to install infrastructure through entire neighborhoods and cities.

$4k amortized over a few years is very reasonable for a utility every house will buy. The problem is that Comcast already exists and will undercut you with an very inferior product, but the general populace is not educated enough to differentiate fiber vs coax, so Comcast will drop their prices to whatever they have to do the fiber won’t get purchased.

Which bring us back to why it works for a PUD or municipality, which has the wherewithal to amortize things like that over 20 years from funding on municipal bonds, and can compel every homeowner in an area to pay for it.

The existing duopoly have deep pockets and could protect their duopoly by also laying fiber anywhere that a third company tried to start up. The new entrant would not be able to maintain a profitable competitive advantage in any market.

Comcast has upgraded its service in the cities where Google Fiber has been rolled out.

On the other hand, Tacoma Power couldn't make the economics of their own-brand broadband Click Network work, [1] so they cut their losses to some extent by transferring operations to a private company, Rainier Connect. [2] Rainier Connect's Tacoma system is still owned by the city of Tacoma, though, and hopefully there will not be further moves toward complete privatization.

[1] https://www.mytpu.org/community-environment/projects/click-n...

[2] https://www.rainierconnect.com/welcome-click-customers

[2]

Click was built as a coaxial copper last mile network - not comparable in performance to any new build fiber based efforts in the years 2016 and later. In industry terms, it was best charitably described as "HFC" - hybrid fiber/coax, meaning they would have some small amount of fiber to the network node locations of the CMTS, but the actual houses were all served over copper.

I think we both agree on this, but in case not: I don't think Click's uncompetitiveness was due to inherent limitations of hybrid fiber/coax. These days, cable TV companies routinely sell gigabit or near-gigabit download speeds to their HFC-network customers. Yet Click doesn't sell more than 100 Mbps even now. Click's financial problems may or may not have started because they stopped being competitive - perhaps the causation went the other way - but that failure to change certainly didn't help.

For instance, I just picked a random house for sale in Tacoma and tried pricing Internet for new customers from Xfinity (Comcast) and Rainier Connect (former Click). Xfinity offered 1 Gigabit (fine print says 940 Mbps) downloads for $84.99/month on a 1-year contract, increasing to $100 after the contract term. Rainier Connect's fastest offering was only 100 Mbps and cost $104.95/month - pay more to get one-tenth the speed.

(These rates aren't exactly comparable, though I think they are still roughly so. In particular, Xfinity has a 1.2 TB monthly data limit, while it's not clear whether former-Click customers at Rainier have one. Click did impose a < 1 TB monthly data cap. [1])

The most silly thing about this exercise is that if you look at Rainier's rates in Puyallup [2], which is not a former Click Network location, you see that they definitely sell gigabit to some customers for only $80 - but apparently not in Tacoma.

[1] Rainier posts its own usage policy and Click's policy as separate webpages: https://www.rainierconnect.com/rainier-connect-internet-acce... ; https://www.rainierconnect.com/click-network-internet-accept...

[2] https://www.rainierconnect.com/residential/internet#puyallup...

> These days, cable TV companies routinely sell gigabit or near-gigabit download speeds to their HFC-network customers.

but ultimately coax is polishing the brass doorknobs on the titanic. gigabit down, yes, but at what contention ratio? and how many upstream channels are bonded for a reasonable upstream speed? It's not uncommon to see something like a comcast setup that is 800 Mbps down, and 16 Mbps upstream. How much traffic throughput can a given section of coax/DOCSIS3 network support if a large percentage of people actually start using their upstream for more than a tiny percentage of the time?

in terms of future upgrade path and ultimate life span of the outside plant cable network, singlemode fiber to the home wins every time...

one theory as to why the speed offerings from click/rainier connect are so poor is that the coax plant has not been subdivided into small enough sections to actually support anything like gigabit to the consumer. now this would require going through and re-engineering it, breaking parts of the network apart physically, and installing new small CMTS in neighborhood aggregation points.

> For instance, I just picked a random house for sale in Tacoma and tried pricing Internet for new customers from Xfinity (Comcast) and Rainier Connect (former Click). Xfinity offered 1 Gigabit (fine print says 940 Mbps) downloads for $84.99/month on a 1-year contract, increasing to $100 after the contract term. Rainier Connect's fastest offering was only 100 Mbps and cost $104.95/month - pay more to get one-tenth the speed

And it does not mention upload bandwidth anywhere because it will be a tiny amount split between tons of houses and the latency will be terrible compared to domestic fiber. Not to mention Comcast is probably over provisioning by a ton and selling you “1,000” Mbps “burst” speeds for 5 min or something while they slow everyone else in the neighborhood down.

I’ve learned from plenty of experience to never trust non fiber to the home marketing numbers. Coax is obviously a much inferior technology.

As a resident of Chelan county, I can attest, muni broadband is a great idea! It has allowed me to live the lifestyle I choose, where I choose. I’ve had <$80/mnth 1G fiber for years now.

Fiber is a perfect service for a municipal government to provide. It's a tiny cable going into your house. Much lighter and easier to handle than water, electric, or sewer. Once it's in, it has more capacity than we will be able to use for a very long time.

Present state of the art is pretty decent though. The fiber to each building for PON or GPON should be upgradable to 10GPON or whatever when that's cost effective. If they run individual fiber, even more upgradable.

Operating with the muni owning the loop and an unrelated ISP doing the IP means the muni just needs to be a predictable dumb pipe.

The only problem I have with this model is if I want on the network, I have to pay the full construction cost to get to my pole (plus to get from the pole to my house), and every one who it passes can get on later without needing to pay for that. I could try to organize neighbors to share costs, but I don't want to organize anything. I wish I could pay that cost, and get rebated over time as others attach, perhaps with some time dependence. Otherwise, I'm stuck with bonded VDSL cause $50k is a lot to pay for better internet.

I wish I could pay that cost, and get rebated over time as others attach, perhaps with some time dependence.

Some utilities do work that way in some places, though I only know of one example as a proof of existence. When someone I know built their fairly isolated country house, they had to pay for a sewer line. When someone else built nearby, the second house just had to pay an impact fee, which went to the first house to offset the initial cost of the pipe.

So you have this as a very example of bad government policy against the best interest of the people. How is it a surprise that there’s a housing crisis, that they scape goat Amazon for?

This is mostly a fight between Google/Netflix and traditional telecoms. Google wants to be able to connect everyone with subsidized resources from municipalities, telecoms want individuals to pay for the privilege.

I think most people don’t really care about the “why” and instead just want faster and more affordable broadband.

> with subsidized resources from municipalities

Is it subsidized? Adding Fiber lazily when repaving roads and re-doing sewers is easier for a city. Their crew is already on the ground! And all they have to do is sell it at a price where the city doesn't lose money. No profit to squeeze.

There's a lot more houses where decent internet is possible, if you accept that 0$ profit.

All of this requires initial investment. Probably new loans that will have to be repaid. In the end Google will just get to use the infrastructure free and clean. It is the Uber of internet access.

> Probably new loans that will have to be repaid

Cities can borrow at rock-bottom prices. Not only that, but municipal broadband will lead to higher property values, so it indirectly profits the city.

Even still, people buy houses without looking at internet options then are surprised post-close when all they can get is 25mbps satellite internet. Property values aren't materially affected by internet access.

Not true. Citations are results of the first page of the below search.

https://www.google.com/search?q=property+values+internet+acc...

You're right, but that first result (in the google info card) is marketing material that links to another article about a study. The second article actually has scholarly sources for claims it makes:

https://realtorparty.realtor/community-outreach/rural-outrea...

Basically, it generally amounts to a very low change in property value, although studies are conflicting on whether having fast internet matters much, compared to having average internet:

> disconnecting an average property from a high-speed first-generation broadband connection (offering Internet speed up to 8 Mbit/s) would depreciate its value by 2.8%. In contrast, upgrading such a property to a faster connection (offering speeds up to 24 Mbit/s) would increase its value by no more than 1%.

> Our estimates suggest that there are declining returns to speed availability, with access to at least some type of Internet being more valuable than having only a very high-speed connection accessible.

> Results show that single-family homes with access to a 25 Mbps broadband connection have a price that is about $5,977, or 3%, more than similar homes in neighborhoods with 1 Mbps. The rural premium is lower at $5,099

The thing is: they don't have to increase that much for the investment to pay off.

I’m not sure how much longer that’s true. A family friend is a realtor and she commented about how now she’ll get asked questions like “I looked up the address and I can’t get Comcast, what are my internet choices?” — probably because of WFH. I had to give her the lowdown on area ISPs and where to look.

It's a tiny, lightweight plastic cable. How can the municipal government handle transporting hundreds of gallons of water to and from your house every day using massive physical infrastructure, but a tiny lightweight cable suddenly needs huge loans?

>subsidized resources from municipalities, telecoms want individuals to pay for the privilege.

greatest municipal subsidy is monopoly, and thus telecoms in many places have it both ways - i.e. the monopoly (or almost one) to extract payments from individuals. In this case the Google/Netflix seems to be more preferable, and they really want high bandwidth for you vs. telecoms to whom upgrading network is pure expense to be avoided whenever possible.

If you've followed Ars Technica in the past, you would have learned that the major telecoms have begged for billions from the government to expand their infrastructure, pocketed the money, and failed to do any expansion whatsoever. And then raise prices on consumers despite delivering them no extra benefits whatsoever.

There's a reason why the telecoms industry graces the bottom of consumer satisfaction lists.

Actually, I think it graces the bottom of those lists because interacting with telco customer support is like pulling teeth.

Let me tell you it is just as rough on the other end of the phone. "Yeah, I just got this email from somebody I don't know but it had an attachment I want to read. My anti-virus will not let me open it even after I disabled it. What is wrong with your email server? I even sent it to my laptop and Excel won't let me open it as well, what is wrong with your email server? Oh never mind it finally opened but it looks blank and now Outlook is acting weird, what is wrong with your email server?"

Interacting with Google-style companies is the same, the only difference is tat you just never have a human contact.

As a normie, I've never in my life had to interact with a tech company's CS. Shit either just works, or I give up and switch to a competitor.

I have, however, wasted days of my life listening to elevator music interrupted by annoying, incredibly loud upsells, going through the same dumb, patronizing troubleshooting steps with customer support, multiple times for the same incident.

> This is mostly a fight between Google/Netflix

google/netflix really doesn't care how the residential customers' IP traffic, in aggregate, gets to the nearest major city's IX point. They're equally happy to peer with things like centurylink's GPON network. Gigantic content sources will peer and offer caching appliances (netflix) to any ISP with a sufficient volume of downstream eyeball traffic.

You're trying to write it as if google/netflix and similar have some nefarious plan to interfere in various cities' last mile fiber networks, which is not the case at all.

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