Hacker News Reader

Municipal fiber is a far easier service to provide than almost anything else a municipality does. One tiny plastic cable into the house. It can be run on telephone poles. Plumbing, sewer, and roads are many orders of magnitude more complex and expensive to build and maintain.

Fiber optic cables contain glass strands. That’s what’s what’s used to transfer the signal. The plastic sheet is just mechanical protection.

Not to be confused with the plastic ducts the fiber optic cables are often placed in.

I have no problem with public broadband as long as commercial broadband is allowed as well. Let the best format win.

The ideal situation would be to run the fibres (or maybe just ducts) centrally and allow different ISPs to run their own equipment.

Makes perfect sense for the last mile to be run by the government, just like the last mile of roads are.

Then you can have choice of ISPs. Or run your own.

if you want to an ISP which gives you a real IPv4 address, a guarenteed service and known contention ratio -- say they buy a couple of 10G lines from two diverse upstream providers like HE or Tata to a central location, land on a 52 port switch, and use it to serve their customers with 400mbit each way guaranteed and upto 10G if there's capacity.

On the other hand if you just want basic broadband with contention meaning that you could run into problems if everyone is pulling 50mbit, even though you can burst upto 1G, and perhaps you have CGNAT, you'll be paying less for it (the 10G uplink is spread out over more people), but that's your choice

This empowers the customer and ensures competition in the market, while the basic costs of fibre from a central internet exchange point are borne by either taxes or access charges (if you use the circuit you pay $5/month)

This is the correct idea. It maximizes competition while minimizing barrier to entry. Micro IPSs become extremely affordable, and all you have to do is have each ISP pay a set fee for each customer for line maintenance and expansion.

> I expect in time (like over the next 80yr) it will follow the model of other government services and everywhere that can afford the graft, boondoggles and BS will have the graft, boondoggles and BS and the Detroits and BFEs who simply can't afford to do it wrong it will be the only ones left with municipal broadband done right.

so, basically what we have now for non-muni net in most places with telco+cableco duopoly?