The unreasonable fight for municipal broadband
tylercipriani.com
tylercipriani.com
That's because they knew that even in this relatively center-right leaning state, people will know a good deal when they see it: so job 1 was to make sure they never do. So far their efforts at blocking competition have been successful. Except for a few very limited areas where Google Fiber was able to pry its way in, there has been no competition to the incumbents from muni or private parties.
At this point our best hope may be that changing demographics and the undeniable drift away from traditional programming will result in their financial collapse, finally allowing communities to serve themselves.
The other option is for people to get out and pressure their political reps to make muni or community broadband easier to deploy, maybe even run for office themselves and replace those who have sold out. Broadband access isn't as important as homelessness or healthcare, but it is important. Maybe it's a good place to start reversing the crappification of everything many here have lived through their whole lives.
1. small NC municipality had a town manager with the foresight to deploy municipal wifi and plan for fiber during that interim period when FCC declared it legal. Good service (symmetric, price adjusted for the actual signal you get), good support
2. that FCC ruling was overturned in the courts
3. municipality spun off the wifi into a little company. Still good service, good support
4. fiber got rolled out
5. municipality leased it to some company that somehow has worse ratings than comcast. That company took also took over operations of the little wifi company
So now what? Even if technologists in NC band together to overturn that state law, the municipality still has a 20-year lease with that company.
the only thing that municipal run wireless services do is serve to sour people on the concept of municipal run network infrastructure, because almost inevitably they're flakier, slower, and less reliable than the existing terrestrial based for profit ISPs in the area.
show me a single municipal run wireless operator today that can match the speeds of a LTE/3gpp based MU-MIMO last mile with carrier aggregation.
skip the wireless part and go straight to fiber.
A company wouldn't let a little thing like contract law stop them from doing what they want, as they did when they overturned the FCC the rule of law is made to be broken.
We could just change the law to make comcast and all isps owned by the government because the the law says so and comcast could do nothing about it. I know its not smart to advocate that we just change the law to steal stuff from others but this is what corporations, do they take wifi paid for by the public and change the law so that its owned by them, why don't we just do this to corporations?
Oh yea because thats socialism.
If you have the aerial ROW fully under your own ownership and control the $/km to do rural FTTH is vastly reduced.
There are a lot of efficiencies if this is done as a nonprofit at a municipal/county level entity, one random example, county run fiber PUD calls up the same-county sheriff's department and is like "oh yeah we're gonna need to block a lane and have some traffic flaggers at place X and Y and Z, and we need to shut down avenue C for a while", and everything goes very smoothly.
I'll give you a few easy examples: I moved from one house to another, the city owned electric company demanded a $200 deposit. Literally in the same area, same city owned electric. According to them I had a "history of non-payment". I asked about my original deposit, the employee told me I got it back. I asked when, he told me he could not tell me. I asked to speak to his supervisor, who also told me he could not tell me. He then proceeded to tell me to shut up about it. So far, I've payed $400 in deposits that I'll never see again.
The same city utility routinely sent me water bills that made no sense. I would get bills for <500 gallons of usage per month. Then suddenly a bill for 10x the usage amount, but all billed for water. Somehow I didn't use any sewer. Had a plumber confirm no leaks in the system. Later I would find out the meter readers simply falsify the readings in that area.
Somehow when I moved, they put trash service on my account. I'm not even in their service area for trash.
But the real icing is COVID! For years the city has operated a bulk trash collection at the curb and hazardous waste collection at a facility. When COVID started, they just suspended it. For health concerns. 2 years later they are still collecting fees while city council is holding meetings about the increase in illegal dumping of trash in the area.
This is the same group that is going to provide me internet service? Pass.
We can do anecdata all day; my city owned electricity is great. But more to the point, the line between "public" and "private" in a lot of these cases is rather thin; given the heavy amount of outsourcing that occurs regardless.
The major difference is this, and only this: If you call the thing public, you get a better view and say of how the proverbial sausage is made. Due to a naive public this ends up cutting both ways. When it works well, you see it. When it doesn't work well, you still see it and other parties take advantage of it based on their own interests.
I assure you, you will find no non-anecdotal relationship between quality of service and public/private status.
Thus why, generally, you want to lean toward public.
I agree, but the "limited government" alternative in practice is monopoly telcos. What's the difference? Actual competition is not on offer from anyone.
Naturally, utilities owned by the people--all the people--would be exempt from taxes for access to the people's land. Taxes paid by private telecoms could fund research into the viability and advisability of muni services. It will cost more and more money for the private companies to own the political landscape.
So much propaganda has been foisted upon people that they believe everything the government touches is shit and corporations should run everything. If you want to see change, you have to fight that nonsense.
The problem under discussion was the ability of special interests to control the government to block competition. I was illustrating just one subtle political maneuver. Special interests combat each other all the time. It is not inevitable that the same special interest will win every battle, especially when they don't even recognize subtle flanking maneuvers.
It is, of course, unfortunate for the poor farmer upon whose fields the battles are waged.
There's nothing wrong with municipal networks, or competition in general, but there should be a level playing field. Muni should not be subsidised by taxes, it should be paid for by users.
Increasing competition is a valid way to increase value while decreasing price, and markets with good compeditive options are the ones that fare best.
Unfortunately tax-supported ones, or ones which have other unfair advantages don't need to keep improving or maintaining good levels of service.
Plus,bear in mind there are competent and incompetent munis. Whatever scheme you adopt should work regardless. Having them compete on equal footing means that in some places Muni will win, in others cable might, and in others small local ISP might emerge.
The limited competition between consumer ISPs in the current landscape isn't providing value by any meaningful assessment. Internet service is functionally a commodity: so long as it's fast enough with consistent uptime it's functionally identical no matter who's providing it. As much as Comcast would like to believe otherwise, consumers largely aren't choosing them for their shitty Netflix knockoff or their free email inbox, they're choosing them because they're probably faster than AT&T DSL. In most markets they're "providing value" by deferring infrastructure upgrades and leveraging dark patterns to generate additional revenue (lol at the common scam-level prices for router rental) to increase profits for their shareholders. Commercial consumer ISPs do not have the best interests of residents in the service areas as a priority.
If nothing else, allowing municipalities to run fiber is in favor of far better competition than the status quo. I sincerely doubt that competence is a major concern with the simple practice of laying infrastructure in a trench (if it is, it doesn't bode well for your water and sewage systems, and that's probably a far more pressing concern), and that's the main barrier to entry for competition. /Running an ISP/, an entity that handles routing and uplink agreements with peers for its customers, is not profoundly heavy on infrastructure cost: you can start your own with leased access, a couple blokes in a shed, some routing and switching gear, and someone who can negotiate a transit contract or two. /Laying a shitton of last-mile fiber across public land/ is infrastructure intensive. The incumbent providers just happen to do both.
You could easily have a municipality provide only the fiber or have it provide both the physical infrastructure and run an ISP service atop it while leasing out line bandwidth to other ISPs. A single ISP can't really monopolize last-mile bandwidth--its usage is a function of the last mile users, not who offers service over it. Fundamentally though, choosing whether subsidize an entire ISP including infrastructure, subsidizing infrastructure alone and renting it, or subsidizing nothing should be the choice of citizens through their government. There's no god-given right that telecom companies have to that market, but they're often able to secure it by bribing a few state reps to listen to their stories about the SCARY PERILS OF MUNICIPAL INFRASTRUCTURE and THE GREAT THREAT TO THE TOTALLY REAL VIBRANT ISP COMPETIIVE LANDSCAPE and vote on something most constituents aren't aware of for a continued stream of campaign contributions.
One doesn't offer IPv6. Two won't provide a static IP, and the other charges an extra $15/month for that. Two are highly assymetrical, and one of those won't even tell you before you subscribe what the upstream speed is. One of them wants to impose extra-cost fees above a datacap which my house has exceeded (by 10-30%) for 6 months of the last 12.
That's what competition with 3 commercial participants looks like. We need about 7 to get a functional market.
So let me be clear, because I think you somewhat misread my point. I am in favor of competition, be that Muni or collectives or whatever. My point is that the factors that make it hard for an isp to enter a market should be "made easier" - and I don't think you need tax subsidies to do that.
Could a Muni provide capital to say lay fibre, absolutely. Could they effectively create an income stream from leasing that fibre to ISPs, absolutely. Perhaps in some rural areas they may even provide a subsidy to consumers (regardless of isp) because of cost /density reasons.
So let me tell you about the bizarro world I do live in. Over here, while there are still regulations, it is possible with relatively little hassle to lay fibre. Literally under the road. For years we've seen trenches being dug next to roads.
The folk who lay the fibre are not the isp. The isps run on top of the fibre, and compete. I have about 20 to choose from - it's easy for a company to enter the space, and it's easy for large incumbents to play as well.
The one I chose went bust, I switched in 30 minutes. (I was offline for about 24 hours before customers collectively realised they were gone.) The fibre provider confirmed they had been turned off for outstanding bills, and at that point I switched to another isp.
Separating the physical wire from the service over that wire is the best play. I don't need a choice of wire, but as it happens in some neighborhoods there are 2 cables laid, by different providers (to the same neighbourhood).
Could munis lay fibre, or WiFi, or whatever infrastructure they like? Sure. And clearly they can use tax money to do that. Just don't grant any monopolies over that wire, and you foster competition. You don't need ongoing taxes to be an isp, you just maintain the infrastructure just like a road or water or whatever.
Give ammo to average folks to advocate for muni broadband in a manner that is simple and compelling.
Anyone have a resource?
There was a question on a local Facebook group the other day from a person who just moved here asking which ISP she should use.
The replies were nothing but pages and pages of EPB, EPB, EPB… (EPB is the name of the municipal power company and ISP). Along with glowing reviews about how better their customer service is than Comcast.
EPB is so much better, I’d have a really hard time moving somewhere else that didn’t have something similar.
I would trust muni broadband over Comcast any.day.of.the.week.
Similar to the author, I also get 1Gbps symmetric, no outages, no data caps and I pay only $32 (Canadian) a month. The telcos charge four times as much for the same service (but less reliable) in the residential areas not covered by the city network.
The city-managed part of the service is called Bridgenet. Internet service is provided by Novus, Urbanfibre and a couple of other ISPs. Urbanfibre is the cheapest, and just as reliable as the others.
ps: this is a very good reason to move to new west!
In those counties, which are fortunate enough to also be their own last-mile electrical grid operators (so they already have bucket trucks, linemen, spool trailers, lashers, etc), the county builds and owns a dark fiber network. Various 3rd party ISPs can rent space on it. It works great.
The great advantage of being able to build a last mile and middle mile dark fiber plant with municipal money is the extremely long time scale of a typical municipal bond. And the low interest rate paid on it. As we have seen with fiber from the mid 1980s that's currently in use with 100GbE DWDM systems, modern singlemode fiber can have very long lifespans.
There's no reason to believe that a new-build last mile dark fiber network serving single family homes today, if architected correctly, can't be viable for 40-50 years.
In places where there is a duopoly from the incumbent local phone company (centurylink, frontier, verizon, AT&T, whatever) and a cable operator (comcast, charter/spectrum, altice, wave, etc) neither of the two incumbent operators has any interest in seeing a new entrant 3rd party network built. And I can expect that they will lobby hard against the concept of municipal broadband, claiming that their DOCSIS3 on coax last mile service (250 down x 16 Mbps up and 0.03% packet loss) is "good enough".
I'm all for municipal broadband and sticking it to the incumbents, but DOCSIS3 is far better than you give it credit for. My current DOCSIS3 service from Comcast is 1200 down/45 up, and it's rock solid. And there are network architecture improvements on the roadmap that will allow that relatively paltry upload speed to rise significantly in the future.
Well duh. Assuming five people per home, and a market penetration of 50% (probably higher when you’re the only game in town), that’s only $50/home. That’s less than half of what they’d be getting from a subscribed home per month.
I’m surprised they didn’t spend even more fighting this.
50% penetration = 10,000 homes
$50/home = 50 * 10,000 = $500,000
It's exactly same not half.
This in in Marin County.
I gave up talikibg to customer service in "I can't speak your language very well, but my name is Steve. Can I put you down for VOIP, and free credit monitoring for and additional $40/mo."
When trying to lower your bill, go to the website. The foreign help don't have a clue to what you are trying to convey.
Of course, that's not how they teach it in elementary school...
The government intervention was mostly to fix that existing problem.
It's called "capital"-ism for a reason.
> Scale enables efficiency
Efficiency on which dimension? You can only optimize on one dimension: customer satisfaction? Employee salary? Profit?
Here's the real reason competition doesn't pop up in the footprint of the incumbents - when they do, the incumbents sue them into submission.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/one-b...
It also means ISPs are effectively limited to offering the same quality of customer service that the wholesale provider offers, because they need/choose to use the wholesale provider for technician work. That kind of thing can be quite problematic, at least judging by the kinds of complaints you read online.
Depending on the nature of the access network, it might also result in an outdated network seeing no further investment. The UK is only just getting a fibre roll-out going in earnest, and this has come from lots of government encouragement, as well as private new-entrant providers increasingly deciding to just lay their own fibre in. That, plus a reasonably widespread hybrid fibre coax (cable) network offering up to approx gigabit downstream services, providing widespread competition.
I would definitely agree that opening up passive infrastructure (ducts and poles, etc.) would help, as it makes it cheaper for new entrants to rapidly deploy coverage. I think people need to be careful what they wish for though - if the only infrastructure available is outdated copper that can barely manage ADSL2 speeds - where will the investment come from to get to fibre?
If there's already a passive optical network deployed then this is less of an issue for now, but I think it's important to note that, at least in the UK market, the impact of competitive provision has been pivotal to getting fibre rolled out quicker. Without rivals raising investment and digging up roads to lay fibre in large cities, the incumbent "spun out" wholesale provider was calling VDSL "fibre to the cabinet" a "superfast fibre" connection. Once rivals did that, competitive pressures meant FTTP deployment followed.
No it didn't. The UK government had a very forward looking fibre internet rollout that started in the 80s. Thatcher canned it for ideological reasons.
> “In 1979 I presented my results,” he tells us, “and the conclusion was to forget about copper and get into fibre. So BT started a massive effort – that spanned in six years – involving thousands of people to both digitise the network and to put fibre everywhere. The country had more fibre per capita than any other nation.
> “In 1986, I managed to get fibre to the home cheaper than copper and we started a programme where we built factories for manufacturing the system. By 1990, we had two factories, one in Ipswich and one in Birmingham, where were manufacturing components for systems to roll out to the local loop”.
> At that time, the UK, Japan and the United States were leading the way in fibre optic technology and roll-out. Indeed, the first wide area fibre optic network was set up in Hastings, UK. But, in 1990, then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, decided that BT’s rapid and extensive rollout of fibre optic broadband was anti-competitive and held a monopoly on a technology and service that no other telecom company could do.
> “Unfortunately, the Thatcher government decided that it wanted the American cable companies providing the same service to increase competition. So the decision was made to close down the local loop roll out and in 1991 that roll out was stopped. The two factories that BT had built to build fibre related components were sold to Fujitsu and HP, the assets were stripped and the expertise was shipped out to South East Asia.
> “Our colleagues in Korea and Japan, who were working with quite closely at the time, stood back and looked at what happened to us in amazement. What was pivotal was that they carried on with their respective fibre rollouts. And, well, the rest is history as they say.
> “What is quite astonishing is that a very similar thing happened in the United States. The US, UK and Japan were leading the world. In the US, a judge was appointed by Congress to break up AT&T. And so AT&T became things like BellSouth and at that point, political decisions were made that crippled the roll out of optical fibre across the rest of the western world, because the rest of the countries just followed like sheep.
https://webreturn.co.uk/how-thatcher-killed-the-uks-superfas...
Yeah i agree, although it does seem like someone there is now awake to the idea that they might not be the most efficient operation.
OpenReach installed fibre in my street’s existing underground network over the pandemic via a subcontractor then they subcontracted a company for the customer premises hookup. That latter company were way more efficient than i expected. At my property the previous owners cemented over the opening at the house end of the duct that runs from the BT pit out in the street, under my garden to my house. It meant the chap who was due to install my FTTP couldn’t run the fibre from the pit to my house. He phoned his colleagues in another van, they showed up 20 mins later and broke ground in my garden to intercept the duct then run a new sub-duct to my house then fed the fibre. The original chap in the meantime went and installed another house. These chaps put everything back as it was except i had a nice neat new fibre box at the front of the house from under the garden. Original chap came back another hour or two later and finished off the commissioning.
When the problem became apparent i was expecting weeks of delay with openreach, instead my install took 2.5 hours instead of 45 mins but all done same day.
It’s nice finally having decent broadband speeds…
It’s staggering to me the public hasn’t pilloried Comcast at the stockades after the pandemic.
Is there a way to find places to live that are populated by mostly sane people with some minimal brainpower and engagement in their community? My (wealthy and educated) city has voted several times against our own interests on this issue and many others.
That seems a lot of money until you think revenue. Average household, 2.6 people, so let's say 38,000 households.
Let's say half of them have internet from one of these providers and we'll be "generous" and say they're averaging $50/mo on their bill.
That's 17 days revenue, if it had succeeded. An entirely worthwhile investment on their part.
To be clear though, I despise efforts to fight municipal broadband.
And then they'll still charge less than you? How is that even a threat?!
Internet is infrastructure. ISP companies get paid handsomely for a service that should an itemized line in our electric bill.
How many customers can a competitor get if they overbuild where AT&T has built fiber? Or where AT&T builds fiber in response.
Some small number of people understand that differences in peering and transit are a thing, but most of the population is going to be I already have fiber because AT&T was telling people VDSL is fiber.
What a bunch of bright-eyed internet posters think would happen: A small city somehow manages to hire a competent staff, paying under market value for talent, to expertly engineer and then construct, a brand new fiber network from scratch, that's done on-time, while buying the latest/greatest available cost effective solutions from multiple vendors, without any red tape or lawsuits, all while owning all of the infrastructure and finally providing services at amortized costs. Citizens could use the network to provide ah-hoc services to other residents and the city could use it to modernize their infrastructure and create connected cities that provide valuable information to their citizens.
What happens in reality: A small city thinks they can't do any of the above so they hire a "contractor". Which somehow we've gotten into law that that must be bid on... so Comcast bids under cost to protect it's monopoly. City hires Comcast as a "contractor" to "build" a "new" network. Comcast spends most of the money by providing executives with Vegas trips and catered meetings at the golf course. Once realizing they actually need to deliver something they "leverage their existing assets" to "save money" and force everyone onto their existing cable network that gets .25mbps upload and "500mpbs" download (for 1s at a time, then throttled to 2mbps, 3.5mbps on thursdays) (still counts as broadband) , all while telling Netflix and other content providers they have to "pay to play" to send content to customers... er citizens, to "cover costs". Then, they couldn't possibly let users use their own equipment like a standard router with ethernet handoff "because security reasons" so they need to charge a $45/mo rental fee to all suckers.... er citizens, for "their safety". The city catches wind of this and Comcast promises a Certification program for routers, and "project delays" delay this for multiple years before finally it's announced but it costs $20k to have a router "certified" for your safety... all while they leave the default firmware password of "Icanthearyouoverthesoundsofthecashregisterringing" on all the "secure routers". Oh and theirs a 1gb monthly data cap because thats all anyone would ever need, according to the Comcast CEO.
It helps that our electorate is very progressive, and are not always pushing the City to cut expenses at all costs.
I think the best solution is to break these companies up the way we did with Bell. No national telecom companies, franchises, shared ownership, shared revenue, or profits. Force each company to be a local provider. Outlaw contracts for more than 6months where infrastructure is already built.
Why would this work? Take what happened with Google Fiber. In KC where I live, as soon as Comcastic saw an approved "fiber hood", they blitzed the area, and I mean drenched the area, with door hangers, mailings, and other propoganda to sign up for services with 2-5 year contracts that were likely below cost. This prevented Google Fiber from recovering any investment quickly.
There's no way a hometown local provider could finance such shenanigans. Creating an ISP for a single neighborhood isn't terrible expensive if there's backhaul in place. Having a plethora of choices would be good for everyone.
Grifters, grifters everywhere.
I'd never pay a telecom company before I got my services and used them. They always found a way to screw me over when I did (many years ago). Your city just got the classic treatment on a massive scale.
In one scenario, the government signs an exclusive contract. In the other, the absurd levels of control over government exercised by "private" entities in the name of "free speech" (thanks Citizens United) ensure perpetual corruption and de facto private ownership of public resources.
All paths lead to monopoly. The only difference is the level of hypocrisy.
Where are the armies of on-retainer lawyers?
If they paid a million dollars in marketing, what are they paying for ongoing lobbying? Telecoms knows that this is war, you just won a battle.
Next light is really a fantastic service and better than comcast in every way. It’s just worth noting the economics are unique here.
I have always envied them since I live in a state that has banned municipalities from creating their own ISP.
Even trying to convince a few people is a difficult task.
It is illegal for govnt to censor communication, it is not illegal for Comcast to do so.
Likewise, if govnt wanted to criminalize personal VPN access, they just pass a law. They don't need to own the infrastructure to do this.
However, if Comcast decides it doesn't like personal VPN, what are you going to do?
So, actually government-owned internet is the best protection against the harms you warn of.
You mean much harder, because when government (ISP) is blocking sites it's censorship, that is against constitution, while corporations can do whatever they want (especially if it is heavily "encouraged" by government), so your only action is to change ISP(good luck with that in land of the freedom). And even when there is a competing ISP in your area, odds are that it also was "encouraged" by government.
Ultimately this becomes reliant on the judiciary, which is also political.
In most places, broadband is a fairly competitive market; and municipal utilities are significantly subsidized by the public purse: I'm pretty sure I'd be able to run a successful ISP if I didn't have to pay federal income tax and any debt I issued was also exempt from federal income tax, reducing my cost of capital.
I would love to see data that supports that statement, most areas have a single high speed provider.