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Comment by philjohn | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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