Washington state removes all barriers to municipal broadband
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What actually happened is someone in government called up a friend at a municipal fiber specialist company, who agreed to start making rumblings that they were going to pull fiber to our town.
Within two weeks, one of the large incumbents announced their own project for a $6M upgrade, which involved running submarine cables and totally rewiring the town’s network to enable gigabit service.
I’m saddened that the town never got a chance to build and own its own infrastructure, which would have been so much better, because it would have put locals in charge of this essential infrastructure - much as they already control water, roads, and sewage.
But, ultimately, I now have gigabit service at a reasonably competitive price, in a small town that arguably never “deserved” it.
Apparently it was still profitable. Just less so than continuing to milk old infrastructure.
Clearly, they revised their schedule because decades of revenue streams, even from a small town, can be worth more than the relative expense of upgrading now rather than later.
Did the rates increase for customers who chose the new gigabit service? Often the new service offering doesn't make sense to a monopoly provider in terms of revenue increases in the short term, so competition or threat of public options are an important tool that can work even better than public utility boards.
Finally, it's worth noting that with changing political climates priorities changes, especially when it comes to infrastructure. The Flint water system was publicly managed, and it isn't even the worst one in the country. Thousands of publicly managed bridges are at risk of collapse due to underfunded maintenance.
Cold War fears about existential threats motivated great federal projects that focused on resiliency and creating the foundations for productivity. Without those same threats, legislation mandates intentional vulnerabilities like backdoors, fails to fund national standards that could limit cyber-extortion, and new internet-related initiatives are regularly more intent on erecting barriers to entry and toll booths than they are on nurturing any new or disruptive industries.
Most of the cost is the actual digging/laying new fiber. The price of that does not really go down over time (instead the cost of labor goes up over time usually). The actual fiber and equipment is a very small part of the cost.
This happened at my parents town. They were looking at setting up their own municipal ISP and after some research/quotes it ended up costing X which was too much. They tried again a decade later and the cost for roughly the same system was 1.5X so even more out of their budget.
The other case is the fiber already existing and the ISP refuses to upgrade to enable higher speeds then that is just pure greed.
Fiber is cheap. When you dig, install fiber!
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/otps/policy_brief_dig_once.p...
My cynicism does not let me agree with you.
A lot of towns have a huge bill coming up when they have to replace outdated sewer systems.
> The EPA reckons water and sewer systems will need $743 billion of upgrades through 2035
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/climate-change-means-water...
I would suggest that this is a lower price, but not a price you would get with robust competition.
>They used a portion of the funds to supercharge the rollout of high-speed broadband to the most underserved areas of the state in an effort to close the digital divide.
They went to rural electric co-ops -- private, independent electric utilities owned by the members they serve -- many of which were left gobsmacked by the offer, according to David O'Bryan, general manager of Delta Electric Power Association, which now serves Carroll and Grenada counties with broadband. Many of these co-ops had been preparing to deploy networks but lacked the cash to begin a major project, especially in the most remote and sparsely populated parts of their territories.
The result has been an acceleration in broadband deployment that could make Mississippi one of the most connected states in the nation within the next five to six years. That's a huge leap for the state, which last year ranked 42 out of 50 in BroadbandNow's 2020 connectivity rankings.
https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/how-coronavirus-stimulus-...
Props to MS legislators for seeing the value in municipal broadband.
- 18 states have restrictive legislation in place that make establishing community broadband prohibitively difficult.
- Five additional states (Iowa, Arkansas, Colorado, Oregon, and Wyoming) have other types of roadblocks in place that make establishing networks more difficult than it needs to be.
- A further five states (Arkansas, Idaho, Tennessee, Washington, and Montana) have introduced bills to remove municipal broadband restrictions so far this year. Montana’s bill has failed, while Arkansas’ passed in February.
It's hard to imagine some state law that prohibits a town (or neighborhood for that matter) from building out some kind of internet access.
If a city can force everyone to pitch in for a library (cough homeless center), I'd think that running some wires and hooking up some gear would be a no-brainer.
That seems more like a failure of imagination, since ALEC[0] has been writing bills for state legislators to do just that for many years.
cf. https://www.prwatch.org/news/2014/02/12385/how-alec-helps-bi...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Legislative_Exchange_...
What we've seen happen: network construction is contracted out to Comcast. They now have [yet another] local monopoly.
The Washington state legislature has voted to end limits on municipal broadband - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26803426 - April 2021 (112 comments)
There have been tons of threads about municipal broadband of course, but a lot of them are in the key of repetitive/indignant. But this one is also recent and also pretty good:
The number of cities with municipal broadband has jumped over 4x in two years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26970493 - April 2021 (324 comments)
See my other comment about contractors though... what we saw in TN was Comcast "contracting" its services to "build a municipal network", but instead just built their own crap using taxpayer funding.
Almost all these pseudo-government projects are funded out of the general budget, and some are off-books but still off-balance sheet liabilities of the government. E.g. a port authority that floats its own bonds, but those bonds are guaranteed by the local government, so if the port authority becomes insolvent the government is on the hook. If you think entity X can make its own profit and loss, then ask yourself: who is on the hook when the bonds sold by X default? It is always going to be a taxpayer for a government project.
A clean separation between things that are supposed to turn a profit and things that should be funded socially is a good separation, and trying to blur those lines is usually a bad idea, as you create these unaccountable subsidized bureaucracies that end up being poorly run sources of graft after a few generations.
Now whether internet access itself should be subsidized or turn a profit is a different matter. It's critical infrastructure, like roads, so you can make a case for subsidies.
And they run out of money because of pension benefit requirements and a lot of other politically mandated issues (see e.g. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/apr/15/afl-cio/wi...).
Not to mention the events of the 45th Presidency with tearing down sorting machines and other actions intended to impede by-mail voting...
They also get to regulate their competition.
Which in turn means no one tries to compete, since it's pointless, and the city has a monopoly by default.
Or at least that's how it usually plays out. Don't know if any jurisdictions have found a way to make this work well.
As I understand it, under WA law, public utility districts have a specific set of things they are authorized to do. Prior to 2000, this didn't include telecommunications at all. In 2000, the legislature passed a law [1] that authorized public utility districts to build/acquire/operate telecommunications networks, but only for: 1) internal use by the district or other public entities, or 2) to resell on wholesale terms to other providers. It specifically said "Nothing in this subsection shall be construed to authorize public utility districts to provide telecommunications services to end users". This new law amends the 2000 language to allow providing direct service to end users as well.
[1] http://lawfilesext.leg.wa.gov/biennium/1999-00/Pdf/Bills/Ses...
I'm fairly convinced it's just greed and laziness. It's funny how back when Google fibre was rolling into town, suddenly centurylink upgraded its service...
https://www.chelanpud.org/my-pud-services/residential-servic...
I've never really bought into that line of reasoning though, especially when upkeep can be bid out to these ISP's.
But this is still a good and necessary first step at removing an asinine prohibition.
There is still no plan or funding for building out municipal broadband services, but it opens the door to having that discussion that was previously off-limits.
Alternatively, it puts pressure on private ISPs to improve service or else potentially face competition from future municipal broadband.
Are there any organizations we can support to help do this in more places?