Comment by oblib | Hacker News Reader

Comment by oblib | Hacker News Reader

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We had CenturyLink for over 20 years here. They recently sold us to Brightspeed who raised our monthly fee to $60 for what's really the very lowest end of "Highspeed" access (if that). The first thing Brighspeed did was throttle our bandwidth.

Our local electric co-op (White River Valley Electric Cooperative) is currently laying fiber optic lines to all the homes and businesses they serve now and will be offering real high speed internet (gb both up/down) next year for $30 a month to all their customers first, and then those who are not that live in the area.

When we moved here in the 90s and bought our home we really didn't think about who was providing our electricity, but we've learned since there is a huge difference.

Just this week we had a vicious storm that blew power poles down and 1000s were without power. Our power was back on in around 36 hours, others nearby were down for 3+ days.

Those who live outside the co-op are paying more than twice as much for power depending on the time of day and load on the grid.

We have a flat rate that's lower than their lowest rates.

https://www.whiteriver.org/fiber/

You don't even need a co-op for this. Local, municipal, non-profit power companies are like this too. The city of Santa Clara, in the heart of Silicon Valley, has its own power company. Their rates are less than 1/2 of PG&E (which they are surrounded by) and they were for example offering green energy back in 2005. And as you point out, were much better about maintenance.

I really miss being served by SVP.

Munis will almost always beat any other electric provider including rural coops because their customer per mile is a multiple of a rural operator. It ends up making the coops look terrible because we have to cut an order of magnitude more vegetation for the same amount of customers.

With PG&E, all of that is rounding error. They’ve been hollowed out by decades of fraud and infrastructure neglect.

In addition to dealing with inflated California construction costs, they also routinely block construction projects and urgent home repairs.

Add corruption to that. PG&E was insolvent (liabilities >> assets) and required a bailout from the state (because nobody would pay more than zero dollars for the company).

That the state didn't simply take the assets and indemnify the previous owners for the liabilities (thus turning it into a giant "municipal" power company) speaks to corruption in CPUC and the state in general.

We may pay more than urban areas around us, I'm really not sure, but not all rural areas around us are serviced by the co-op and they do pay quite a bit more.

We have 3 damns generating power very close by us, two that are pretty big, but I doubt that has much to do with our rates. If anything it's slowed the need for a natural gas or coal fired power power plant nearby, but there are those within 50 miles near the bigger metro areas around us. No nukes close by though.

> Their rates are less than 1/2 of PG&E

And their website is approximately 3141 times better than PG&E's. Electrical reliability and customer service are better, too.

It's hard to overstate how much better municipal power companies are compared to for-profit ones (LADWP is better than SoCal Edison).

Co-op utilities (and other forms of small local utilities) can have problems, but in general I prefer them. The bad isn't really that bad, and they can be very, very good.

How expensive the laying operation is? Are they using some existing channels / piping / utility poles? The last mile is usually the biggest problem and expense.

Yeah that was Longmont, CO's big expense. We had a fiber ring around town since '96 or something, used for traffic light management I guess? It took about three years to get the fiber to most peoples' doorsteps.[1]

It's been great.

[1] https://mynextlight.com/about/

They used existing poles here. I'm pretty sure that a big part of the cost is funded by a U.S. gov grant designed to get rural areas high speed internet.

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