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Comment by deeg | Hacker News Reader

For myself, it's because it's physically prohibitive to have competing roads but it is possible in most cases to have competing internet providers.

In general I am of the opinion that fostering competition results in the best internet. That said I disagree with the GOP here; for some rural areas it's hard to get companies to run cable without some guarantees. Outright banning them hurts rural communities.

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> for some rural areas

Not just rural. I live in a medium density suburban metro and we can't get more than one provider to compete. They've divvied it up amongst themselves so they maintain a monopoly in their area.

Exactly. I am in silicon valley (FFS) and have exactly two choices: AT&T and Comcast.

Curiously they cost the same and run about the same speeds. Both of them continue to increase their rates.

I'm all for competition, but I'm not seeing it. Worse, I see the U.S. heading in precisely the opposite direction with acquisitions, mergers, buyouts.....

Competing internet providers still need to invest in last mile costs, which are prohibitively expensive (just like roads).

Why is competition the goal? Because it ultimately lowers prices for consumers? That is what municipal internet achieves.

And innovation. Don't forget that.

I'm being somewhat sarcastic here, as its not clear there has been that much innovation in this space for a while. Or if there is, I welcome hearing about it.

I think any innovation we'll see is 5G wireless towers going up.

The innovation is realizing that consumers are tired of your tiered upsell bs (looking at you Xfinity/comcast) and just offering everyone 1000/1000 and being done with it. That is literally what some of the reseller ISP are doing now.

Real innovation would be going the EPB route and offering 10-gigabit for $300/month. https://epb.com/fi-speed-internet/

Starlink doesn't.

My feeling is municipal broadband is a good idea from a decade ago, but about to be made obsolete by fast wireless.

Is starlink performance comparable to a symmetric fiber connection? I’m not aware of any wireless technologies that come close.

>In general I am of the opinion that fostering competition results in the best internet.

I wholeheartedly agree.

That said, I posit that municipal broadband, implemented as wired infrastructure to the premise, fosters competition rather than limits it.

IIUC, most planned/completed municipal broadband networks only provide last-mile connectivity, while internet connectivity is (or will be) provided by private ISPs.

This definitely fosters competition because a broader set of ISPs can service these customers since they don't actually have to run wires to each premise, rather they just need internet uplinks from the municipal broadband interchanges.

What's more, we can even have private or quasi-public[0] businesses/entities using ISP connection fees to manage and maintain the last-mile infrastructure. Quite possibly with a surplus for upgrades/support for other municipal programs.

That leads to more competition and not less.

I suppose it's possible that my analysis is flawed, but I'm not seeing how. If I missed/glossed over some stuff, I'd appreciate being corrected.

[0] Such as the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTA_Bridges_and_Tunnels )

Edit: Added cited reference.

"competing internet providers" I wish this was the case. I have lived in 6+ homes in the last 15 years and I cant remember a single time I had a choice of internet provider. They seem to have an agreement amongst themselves to not compete.

> In general I am of the opinion that fostering competition results in the best internet.

How do you square this with that the US trails all the more heavily regulated internet infrastructures in the rest of the world?

That's all well and good - but when there are 88.3m Americans that have only a single ISP serving them, that model breaks down.

In this case, the competition only seems to come from municipal broadband, so to your argument that fostering competition results in the best internet, the status quo currently in operation is in opposition to that.

If you count all the people whose 2nd or 3rd ISP options are Hughesnet and Frontier dsl (or mobile broadband hotspots with abysmally low data caps) those options barely count.

If only 1 option can provide me with greater than 25 Mbps bandwidth (what is the minimum requirements for a single 4k Netflix stream) with unlimited (or at least reasonably high) data caps, it is hard to see the alternatives as truly competitive options.

If we count everyone who then falls under this definition that be double the number you provided.

We should have full starlink coverage of the USA by end of next year, not the greatest but it will beat Hughesnet and DSL.

In that case, if it provides real choice and the level of service required, the case for municipal broadband falls away. I find it hard to believe that any municipality WANTS to go through with the arduous task of setting up a locally bounded ISP, it's just that the commercial market has, by and large, sat on its hands - if the outcome is more choice in the market, more realistic pricing and removal of data caps that seems like a win for consumers, which IMHO is a good thing.

Isn’t it physically inefficient and wasteful to have multiple companies running fiber through a neighborhood? Why not run one set of fiber and let companies compete for the customers on those lines?

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