The number of cities with municipal broadband has jumped over 4x in two years

Honestly, this doesn't sound like a bad idea in my area. I can likely put the tower right on my own land and immediately cover a decently sized neighborhood.

Of course it’s all relative. Verizon has supposed to have been rolling out FIOS to my neighborhood for a decade or more now.

Which means the biggest thing you need from the feds (and for that matter the state governments) is to get out of the way and stop actively interfering with cities that want to do this. Which doesn't seem like much to ask, but the incumbents have spent the last hundred years capturing every level of government in the US, and then we got the likes of Ajit Pai running the FCC, which was an impediment.

The other thing to watch out for is the classic regulatory capture move where the government is about to spend money on municipal infrastructure to compete with the incumbents and the incumbents lobby instead to give the money to them. In this context here you're looking for money that goes to "5G" instead of fiber. Because "5G" means incumbents who own wireless spectrum and/or want to "buy" it from the taxpayer using tax money and then sit on it to exclude any other competitors from having it. Or have the taxpayer pay for their privately-owned infrastructure, providing a permanent cost advantage so that no one else can ever competitively enter the market in the future.

First rule of the game is never give tax money to the incumbents. History has shown that it's a black hole that produces no results, and anybody who doesn't understand this is either captured or not paying attention.

Would love it for dinosaurs in politics to get with it and understand the implications of technological investment (or lack thereof).

The problem is that in a city there's limited space to run the wires to each home.

Also if you want to have 10 competitors is really silly to expect having 10 fiber optic cables going to every home when majority of people wouldn't use more than one ISP at the time. Then 9 fibers will be then unused and degrading.

When Internet was reclassified to Title II, Wheeler specifically excluded Title II's provision that required existing ISPs to lease their infrastructure to competitors. Back in late 90s, early 2000s we had tons of ISPs to chose from, exactly because of that provision.

This needs to change if we want to get competition back.

Or we would need cities to build such infrastructure which is even harder and more expensive thing to do.

Either way it requires government intervention.

Anarcho-libretarianism isn't the solution here and neither is rejecting balanced legislation out of a force of habit.

https://www.waveform.com/a/b/guides/hotspots/t-mobile-5g-gat...

Does that mean the 5g internet is really slow(DSL speed?) or do they actively block streaming? Is there another reason streaming wouldn't be supported even at a decent speed?

Have had almost zero issues, and their support has been tremendous.

[0]: https://naturalwireless.com/

On the topic of T-Mobile home internet, it does support streaming. Availability is determined by the network in your local area though.

If you are only actually getting 200, you might as well switch to the 200 plan and save $20/month.

My only gripe is I really wish they would roll the FC Connexion to my neighborhood in midtown now lol

This situation can't be solved without changing laws and local governments.

Yet, you cannot buy a service like broadband or sewage, put it in a box and sell it to someone living in another continent.

Location-bound services usually become quasi-monopolies, where free market does not apply. The quasi-monopolist is able (and happy) to charge the maximum price that people can pay.

Cell companies need space for towers and fiber to those antennas. It turns out that these don’t take up all that much space, so it’s trivially possible for multiple cell phone companies to setup towers covering the same customers.

Cable companies however have to deal with the “last mile” problem, which is both massively more expensive than installing more centralized infrastructure, but also involves installing infrastructure on much more restricted areas.

That being said, I agree that natural monopolies should be considered an issue for the state.

The problem Republicans (in general) have with government-run businesses is not that they operate at a lower cost and so thwart competition, but that they seem to operate at a lower cost because they run on tax dollars rather than on paying customers. Combine that with the fact that the government is not incentivized to make the business profitable and you have a lot of wasted resources used to provide a service that isn't any good but is so cheap to the end user (not to the taxpayer) that it's impossible to compete.

Whether this model of government-run systems is accurate is open to debate, but it's not helpful to set up straw men.

In fact, the Republican perspective is the opposite; that government-provided options will be invariably be worse value for money - this is why Republicans favor privatization.

I think the Republican objection is to general revenues being used to operated a subsidized Internet service.

If that is what you mean by "government-supported", then there is a reasonable argument to be had about whether forcing everyone to pay for the municipal option through taxes really results in a fair competitive landscape for private providers.

FFS that’s not why republicans have problems with the government services. The issue isn’t that government doesn’t have to make a profit, it’s that it doesn’t have to be sustainable at all (i.e. it doesn’t even have to bring in enough money to support itself unlike a non-profit).

Additionally, nobody is afraid the government is going to be “better quality”. That’s not the case in most markets where the government operates.

The concern is that the government can operate a service financially unsustainably and and offer a shitty service for so cheap that it destroys the market for better services.

A government-funded high-speed deployment of 20mbps to the house that goes out for an hour during the night and occasionally disconnects for a few seconds throughout the day that only costs $2.99/mo will destroy the competition, run a deficit, and people will have worse service because of it.

The UK does not have any low cost healthcare providers because you can’t compete with a tax payer funded organisation.

Now, do government services tend to be better? That’s another question.

Republicans argue that government run programs are filled with waste, excess, and decreased output b/c they don't have a profit motive. That was the case with Soviet manufacturing operations, Chinese farming, and the US Veterans Affairs Hospitals. The Soviets could never get the right products when they were needed b/c manufacturing decisions where made from a centralized location, not by the people that needed certain goods. China used to control farming, until one day they had the bright idea to let the farmers control farm output. Chinese farming production has increased by multiples of it's government mandate levels. The VA Hospital system is the worst healthcare system in US, in terms of quality of car and lead time for an appointment. And the US Government doesn't cover military connected injuries at non-VA Hospitals.

But yes, in most areas there isn’t enough demand for internet to deploy fiber multiple times.

Money in Politics, especially when it's perfectly legal, is a massive, massive problem. It's literally impossible to get fair and impartial leaders who will make decisions in the interest of the common person when corporations are spending millions and millions.

Right now a judge sitting on the highest court in the entire country is hearing a case involving a company who openly and directly paid to have her elected into that position. I don't care if that person is from the right or left (or middle), there is no universe where that is a good thing, or should be allowed.

Having a Supreme Court Justice you paid preside over your court case sounds like a very perverted form of Justice under Democracy to me.

Politicians care about getting re-elected. That's the power fulcrum or pressure point.

Lobbying includes all attempts to influence legislators.

PACs are just a legal fiction to circumvent a law, the effect is the same: support those who's policies you prefer.

It says in 2(a):

> Except as provided in subsections 3(b)(1) and (c), a State or political subdivision thereof may not provide or offer for sale to the public, a telecommunications provider, or to a commercial provider of broadband internet access service, retail or wholesale broadband internet access service.

Subsection 3(b) starts thusly:

> Any State or political 9subdivision thereof providing or offering for sale, either to the public, a telecommunications provider, or to a provider of broadband internet access service, retail or wholesale broadband internet access service, before the date of the enactment of this section

and continues in 3(b)(1) (the first exception mentioned earlier):

> notwithstanding subsection (a), may continue to provide or offer for sale such service if the Commission finds there is no more than one other commercial provider of broadband internet access that provides competition for that service in a particular area

and on 3(c) contains the second exception:

> Notwithstanding subsection (a), this section does not apply to the Tennessee Valley Authority

The best alternative is 4G/5G btw. Can easily get 500mbit/sec up on 5G on vodafones £60 plan if you can get 5G from them.

I'm one of the earlier deploys, but they plan to have the whole city deployed in the next year-ish. My office is expecting to be built out in around 4 months.

Pricing for residential is: $59.95 (landed) for gigabit (symmetric, no caps), or $299.95/mo for 10-gig. This is Internet only, they also have phone and TV.

For businesses, the pricing is different: 250M/500M/1G is $99.95/199.95/399.95. Pretty much directly competitive with Comcast Business pricing we've been paying, but with much, much more outbound bandwidth.

https://www.catc.net/services/internet

As far as I know in Berlin they are considering re-nationalizing the waterworks because the current owner fails to adequately maintain the infrastructure.

Even if they weren’t reporting accurate data, which they don’t always do.

"...there is now very little in-house expertise left."

I don't really see this being an issue. If they are taking market share from the private sector, then it's likely that private companies will make cuts to preserve profits and those people can be hired by the government. If not having in-house expertise was really a problem then no companies would ever be able to expand. Instead they hire externally and hire consultants.

This is Palo Alto, the land of very vocal neighbors. They started a campaign where we all sent a complaint to the FCC. Within a week, we were personally contacted by a Comcast rep, techs came out, and suddenly I had 30Mbs up. And Comcast reps have been calling, emailing every week to make sure we are ok. Not sure what happened, the node did not get upgraded, but they fixed something.

And another data point on how sad the situation is in the US: my brother lives in Belgrade, Serbia, in one of those concrete high-rises from the 70s. He got fiber this year from a private company, and his speeds beat mine, and it is dirt cheap. There is no logical explanation for the fact that his internet speeds beat mine, and I am a mile away from Google HQ.

The key is being accountable to the end user. Local governments with rational and active voters and corporations with energetic competitors usually do very well.

You actually can get a vote at Concast if you buy stock, which can be more than what a single vote is worth at the federal level. The real difference is in how you can pressure them. Your single vote in the government covers a multitude of topics, in what is essentially a two choice system. You may need to vote contrary to your beliefs on one topic to protect your rights on another topic. In dealing with a single topic related to a company, you can concentrate your efforts through your voting stock, boycotts, etc.

So, when a politician hears a minority complain about an issue, they have zero incentive to listen to you because they lose nothing due to the discrete nature of measuring sucess (minority votes no longer matter once you secure the majority to win). At least companies care about losing revenue because it's measured continuously. Look at how they fight to attract and retain customers through deals, competing with other companies, and even negative stuff like fighting municipal internet.

The better choices are local companies and municipalities. This is because a person's voice is worth more and the concerns amongst the customers/voters tend to be more homogeneous than at higher levels.

City > State > Federal > Telcom Monopolies in terms of your voice being heard.

An even better solution is for municipalities to own the last mile, then sell access to that last mile to private ISPs.

This lowers barriers to entry, enables additional competition on price, bandwidth, service, etc. and provides a revenue stream to maintain, manage and upgrade the last mile infrastructure.