Cleveland launches plan to provide cheap broadband | Hacker News Reader

Cleveland launches plan to provide cheap broadband

techdirt.com

242 pointsrntn80 comments

I just moved back to Cleveland, and I signed up for Cleveland Broadband (clevelandbroadband.com), which is incredible! I pay $50/mo for 1 Gb/s download and upload speeds with no contract or temporary introductory pricing. The best part is the customer service, which I've only had to use twice while initially setting it up, but it's a direct line to a person who physically came to my place within an hour and was super knowledgeable! We had a lengthy discussion about Ubiquiti networking gear.

I previously had Comcast/Xfinity, which was reliable, but felt absolutely scammy due to constantly changing pricing with multi-year contracts. Talking to a human for basic tasks like upgrading or canceling service was nearly impossible. Apparently their chatbot is capable of these tasks, but I could never get it to work.

I had municipal broadband in a town I lived in and it was the same experience: you get the feeling that everyone involved really cared about it because it's our town, not just an account number somewhere.

Municipal fiber in Chattanooga is the same way and it’s nearly 15 years old at this point.

Customer service and speed hasn’t declined and prices haven’t gone up (they haven’t even kept pace with inflation) like the naysayers predicted.

For what it's worth, I have Frontier in Los Angeles County and I have the same positive experience, other than that my gigabit connection is $70/month (it's possible that's reasonable given overall cost of living differences).

Do they provide an IPv4 address or CGNAT? An IPv6 prefix or sadface?

I'm considering moving there. How are you liking it? How is the tech jobs market there?

Not OP, but Cleveland is kinda great kinda terrible. I spent a few years there in my early adulthood.

It was once one of the nicest richest cities in America, and it has some of the best cultural institutions in the country as a result. It has every major sports franchise. It has some great architecture. It’s extremely affordable. The food is much better than comparable midwestern cities.

There’s a reason it’s so affordable. Jobs are not plentiful. The weather is terrible. Infrastructure is lackluster. It’s somehow a city of townies, not somewhere like SFBA/NYC that’s full of people that have big goals and ambitions and worldly experiences. Good and bad.

It does really seem like a city on the rise. At least when I was there last. They’re really investing in themselves, but the population has a really gloomy self image that honestly got me down.

I just visited a few days for a surgery and this seems pretty accurate.

The food weirdly was the same at every restaurant, regardless of the cuisine: super oiled up. Usually mayonnaise and something pickled on top. Like preparing me to go to a factory for 14 hours.

Nearly every Uber had a sports station on.

Everyone seemed pretty gloomy there. "What's a must-do before we leave?" "Umm...yeah it's too cold for a Brown's game, so not much. Yeah."

A strange obsession with Taylor Swift "bringing money into the city" because of the sports guy she's dating now from Cleveland.

A Clevelander told you it was too cold for a Browns game? In October?

I currently live in Toledo and it’s amazing. They feed me well and there are no beatings.

> The food is much better than comparable midwestern cities.

whew that's a low bar :-P

If you're into music, they also have one of the best orchestras in the country.

Is Cleveland an outlier of sorts? I expected broadband to be much cheaper in the US. Here in South America, I pay $30 USD/month for 1Gbps up/down. Considering all the equipment is imported, that seems way cheaper.

Damn, got my hopes up but this is for large apartment buildings only :/

Enjoy your gig, I’ll be here waiting for spectrum to arbitrarily raise my rates again

Welcome back btw!

I wish ARSTechnica would pick up this story and do a deep dive. They have done an amazing job keeping up with all of the shenanigans that incumbent telcos pulled in the case of the town/city of Wilson in North Carolina back in the day rolling out their Greenlight fiber muni broadband network:

- https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/11/the-price-of-mun...

- https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/03/cable-backed-ant...

- https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/02/fcc-o...

- https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/09/muni-...

- https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/10/city-...

Would it make sense for the municipality to own the pipes that run in the city ? Like some cities own the sewer pipes. Could it be an infrastructure that the city builds, owns, maintains and rents to ISP ? The city would have a full control on how many houses are connected. That is the type of investments that a city is suited for (i.e. large upfront cost financed by bonds). AT&T, Charter, Comcast, they have no incentive to invest a lot upfront. And they might duplicate the infrastructure. At the end the customer pays for the piecemeal fiber deployment, and redundancy.

In my part of the globe the city is in the process of finishing installing fiber ducts to all addresses in the city (currently around 3.5M people) and ISPs run microfiber to any residential area, event apartment buildings. The effect is that you can get service from whatever provider you want without the hassle of "we don't have the infrastructure to do it". ISPs rent the fibers on a per distance price, but it is pretty much negligible.

When I say installing fiber ducts, I mean trenches with ducts that have exits on every address. And the microfibers are blown through those and you have a fiber optic cable to your door.

That's what they do here in Utah: UTOPIA (the municipality) runs its own fiber lines, and leases its network to private ISPs. That way, there is a single physical network with competitive pricing.

Of course, that doesn't stop Comcast, Centurylink, Google Fiber, etc. from running their own networks, and UTOPIA's coverage generally doesn't overlap where these other ISPs already have infrastructure.

Ideally the municipality should provide a "dumb pipe" to a point of presence, where the customer chooses an ISP. That way the municipality doesn't have to deal with IPv4/IPv6 addressing, or DMCA notices.

That's what OpenInfra does. They lay the fiber infrastructure and a bunch of ISPs are available to buy service from. They're still trenching around here. Our ONT is installed by the fiber won't be lit until New Years.

https://us.openinfra.com/ seems available in various parts of Texas. I wonder if they'll expand to other states?

Edit: it looks like there are other "open access fiber" deployments, e.g. Utopia, SiFi, and Gigapower.

And Cleveland already has Cleveland Public Power!

Cleveland Public Power is the City of Cleveland's municipally-owned electric company and is a Division of the Department of Public Utilities. The Department provides water, sewer, and electricity to the residents and businesses in the City of Cleveland.

Edit - link https://www.cpp.org/index.php/About

Being NAASCO certified and having seen a lot of sewer pipe that's owned by a city, that's probably a terrible idea. Cities are also partially responsible for the bribing scheme required to open a Telco in a town.

There are already backbone providers, having communities band together as last mile providers would likely be far more optimal. It may seem like a minor distinction, but to me theres a big gap between "co-op" and "city owned".

It's what happens in a lot of places with open access networks. And it's what we do with a lot of infrastructure, such a streets.

As a general rule of thumb utilities is a mode of market failure for capitalism. No one's going to run multiple power/water/communication/sewer lines to your house and compete. At the very least they'll want to share poles/pipes.

Anyway the solution is easy and exactly as you suggested. No idea why people find this hard to comprehend.

For the broadband topic at hand there are places where exactly this "no one's going to run multiple ... lines" happens and results in lower prices due to the market failure of capitalism

Part of me likes this approach, but another part of me is hesitant putting the local government in control of all of the network infrastructure. It could conceivably allow local officials to turn it all off during a protest or something; similar to what we saw during the Arab Spring events.

They can already do that with ease by instructing the companies that own it to shut it down. I’d argue that having local officials in charge offers more transparency than a nameless corporation.

Cleveland has a public owned utility for power that does publish an annual.

https://www.cpp.org/About/Annual-Reports

The non-Cleveland owned utility data is also available, it’s just not as “Cleveland specific”

Sure, but the company has an incentive to resist such an order. So there's a check there. I guess all I'm saying is there should be a check, and transparency about when that check is tested.

I mean where the ISP that was shutdown during the Arab spring state owned?

Also having one municipal network doesn't prevent others from building their own infrastructure.

It'll be interesting to see if they can do this better than previous attempts. I remember in 2009 when OneCommunity tried[1], 2014 when OneCommunity launched everstream, their for-profit arm (and didn't change much)[2], or the 2018 Old Brooklyn/Ward 13 project[3].

Somewhere in there, there was an initiative (probably 2009 or so?) that included public wifi in Cleveland Heights along much of Cedar Road, where One Community had a wifi SSID "OneCommunityPublic" (or something similar). That got shut down quickly.

[1] https://www.cleveland.com/business/2009/07/onecommunity_seek...

[2] https://everstream.net/press-releases/onecommunity-launches-...

[3] https://connectyourcommunity.org/cdjc-program-four-points/fr...

My buddy was at Case Western back in 2007/8ish and worked on that One Community project. He called it 'porn for the poor'.

There were all these utopian ideas getting floated about how revolutionary the idea was and that basically lack of high speed internet access was the only thing keeping all these people in poverty.

If we just gave the poor fast internet access as a public service then they would all learn to code, get remote jobs, and raise themselves out of poverty.

Months into the experiment they discovered that no one used the free job training features that came with the internet access and instead they were just using it for porn and piracy.

Maybe puritans would have objected to the poor using the internet to get their rocks off in 2007. However, in 2023 - I cannot imagine anyone applying for a job without using the internet in some fashion. Could one discover job openings in a newspaper and mail their resume by post and wait for a phone call? Perhaps, but even McJobs have QR codes now.

I have no doubt that anyone in the US who doesn't have internet access is severely disadvantaged on the job market (or even accessing Khan academy). Yes, they may use most of the bandwidth for entertainment,but gatekeeping what poor people should do with their resources seems a tad paternalistic, this includes policing what should be in the shopping baskets of SNAP beneficiaries.

> There were all these utopian ideas getting floated

Funny how the sales pitch and reality collide, eh?

The sad part is that stupid sales pitches like that are required to get movement. Internet access is 21st century dial tone, the vast majority of people need it to function in normal society. Universal Service was the sort of socialism a fast-growing capitalist society needed; internet service is the same now.

People seem to think of it as a luxury. They're wrong: it is a control mechanism that comes with access to videos of naked people. To the extent you want the machinery of society to keep working, you should want everyone attached, including those smut-loving poor people you seem to want to judge.

I remember that and did contact Everstream for internet service. It was 1000/1000, but they wanted $500 for running the lines from across the street and then $500 per month after that. Insane.

$500 for running the lines under a street isn't too far out of the ordinary (I paid $300 for a longer run, but there was nothing to go under, so the job was easy).

That said, $500/month for service is insane.

That sounds like pricing for a "business-class" Dedicated Internet Access service, with meaningful SLAs and no oversubscription.

There's actually an existing initiative that provides cheap wireless across parts of lower income areas run by PCs for people and pretty large nonprofit. So there's definitely hope with expansion from wireless to fiber I think.

Really frustrating that this article focuses so much on the partisan attacks in the back half.

When I lead the (successful) effort to build a city wide FTTH network in Quincy, IL, our most fervent supporters were all Republicans. We got far more support from the IL GOP than the IL Democratic Party. (The former helped us, at the federal level, secure additional funding for the local telco coop that runs Adams County’s fiber lines.) Despite this, I wouldn’t promote our success as the story of one party beating another and it really diminishes the hard work of people from both sides of the political divide.

> despite billions in tax breaks, regulatory favors, and subsidies, companies like AT&T have long refused to upgrade low-income and minority Cleveland neighborhoods to fiber.

There is a very easy solution to this. Electric utilities should be required to lay fiber along with electric. They can choose to offer internet (better) or offer fiber with a choice of carriers.

EPB in Chattanooga has been providing fiber to homes for decades.

Imagine that: company gets free money from the government to do such-and-such thing but isn't strictly required to do it, then they take the free money and don't do the thing. It's almost like corporations are self-interested and un-altruistic.

I don't know why you'd be railing against the company here for acting in it's best interest (exactly as you'd expect) rather than the state for giving away money with no strings attached.

A private business sure as hell wouldn't be so foolish as to sign such a contract.

One can blame both parties. It was foolish (or corrupt, take your pick I guess) for the government to give out money without formal strings attached. It is unethical for the companies to take that money knowing it's intended for $thing, without ever intending to do $thing. Neither is good.

This is a classic example of the scorpion and the frog though.

The government is ostensibly giving them money and saying, "We hope you choose to do the thing we want with this money but you don't have to, no pressure."

Exactly what you'd expect happened, they took the money and did nothing. I honestly have a hard time finding that nearly as unethical as the government being incredibly irresponsible with our money, either through naivety or corruption.

I don't understand how you can think the government is the more unethical party here. Should they do better? Yes. But in the scorpion and the frog story, the scorpion is the bad guy. You don't get to go "sorry it's just how I am bro" after you take advantage of someone.

> don't understand how you can think the government is the more unethical party here

They aren’t saying that. They’re saying the ethics are functionally irrelevant. It’s not dastardly enough to provoke a standard. It’s just monumentally stupid on the government’s part.

It is in a company’s best interest to make sure corruption is legal?

I think you misread the parent comment, I'd say they are blaming the government for not covering their "investments" legally, same as you.

There’s a real physical human being making that decision. Corporations aren’t amorphous blobs. What a scum, to abuse the society they live in.

Corporations exist to make a profit and that’s fine, but they don’t need to claw and steal every penny they can find. Why do we perpetuate this idea that the appropriate behaviors for an organization are these horribly antisocial actions.

It's not mandatory to lick the corporate boots stepping on us, you know.

It's the obvious solution, so of course it won't be done.

I now have four separate companies' fiber running through my property, of which I am connected to only one, but I could switch to two others anytime I wanted to, and then they'd run the "last connection" to my house. It's kinda silly.

(The fourth is a business line, which I could connect to but that involves more work as it is older.)

I'm not saying it's right but I'm predicting the argument against will be that it will increase the cost of running electric which you think would be "who cares" but homeowners end up footing that bill and are more let's say more price-sensitive than governments.

It's crazy we still haven't won the fight of "if you build a house the literally state controlled electric company has to hook you up" but here we are.

Electric companies already run fiber with every new power line in most places. They simply use it as dark fiber for internal purposes. The cost to string a couple more strands for public use would be a rounding error for them.

If the municipality owns the poles and the power company this is comparatively easier. In places that own both, like Traverse City in Michigan, Chattanooga TN, or Longmont CO, this model can be incredibly effective. The problem, at least in my part of the world (Michigan) is that most municipalities do not own the poles or the power company. The power company is instead a large publicly traded corporation, albeit with strong regulation.

Adding regulation to force power companies to run dark fiber on new runs only addresses part of the problem. You still have to deal with the millions of miles/kms of installed grid that sees proactive maintenance _maybe_ once a decade.

Not to mention the state laws in dozens of states that place onerous rules on municipalities installing their own broadband service, or even outright forbid the practice entirely. These laws are often the result of ILECs lobbying state governments or using their lobbying groups to directly write "model legislation" that state governments subsequently adopt.

In Michigan only telecommunications companies, power companies, cable companies, and municipalities can be on the poles. So, an Internet only company is excluded.

Michigan also has one of the most unique laws here. A municipality needs to put out an RFP to build the broadband network. If it gets three or more qualified bids it cannot proceed.

Sorry, but if it gets more bids it can't proceed? What?

Yep. It's messed up.

I'd love to hear the rationalization for this one

The wording could be more clear. Written another way:

"a public entity may provide telecommunication services within its boundaries after issuing a request for competitive sealed bids to provide telecommunication services and receiving less than 3 qualified bids from private providers."

If you get enough bids, the assumption is that the price is competitive and therefore it's cheaper to use a private company and not have the gov't itself do the infrastructure work.

How is internet not a subset of telecommunications?

Rarely does a situation so desperately cry out for the use of eminent domain.

Add Carroll County, GA to this list. Carroll EMC which covers three counties on the border of Georgia and Alabama overlapping I-20 (all three counties Carroll, Haralson, and Heard) are getting "on pole" fiber provided by the electric company.

isn't "pole ownership" and access to those poles what doomed google fiber? In some cases it's easy to run fiber yourself in other cases it's completely impossible.

I would suspect access more than ownership. Lots of places legally limit access and Internet companies are excluded.

In some places they seem to be working around it. Here in Nashville they cut into every street/alley to run fiber (it isn't available at my apartment, but they did run it down our street, which is not a main street at all).

Given the way things go, there'll be a line item charge on every bill:

Connection to AT&T backbone surcharge..............................$39.99

CPP is city owned, doesn’t sound like anyone is stopping them.

Too little too late. Comcast is running ads trying to scare people into not dropping their home internet service. That’s a pretty clear sign that a lot of people are doing just that and relying solely on mobile.

I doubt it's so much "no one wants home internet anymore" but more "Comcast is so expensive and annoying that mobile is nicer".

I'd love it if Baltimore City could get it together. 90% of Baltimore has only one wired broadband provider, Cocmast -- who charges like 50% more for the same service than in markets with competition.

(Some tiny portion of Baltimore has verizon fiber available. Some growing portion has the new T-mobile 5G wireless home internet; apparently not enough to get Comcast to reduce prices to what they charge in markets with competition)

For anyone who wishes this post was, in fact, about a plan by data guru William Cleveland, I'm with you.

It's a post about Moses Cleveland, he's the guy who invented Cleveland YEAH! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysmLA5TqbIY

We need that! The Internet should actually be free given the value they all get from me.

"Cheap" to be determined

It's very likely to be cheaper and better than Comcast at least.

If they're not aiming to clear that bar, I think we should bin it.

I was actually really interested to hear what kinds of numbers they can pull off. I hate Comcast, and I hate my local provider even worse.

It's been much cheaper than the local mono/duopoly providers in all the other cities it's been done in so far your skepticism is unearned.

I'm not skeptical. I should have said "How cheap*..."

Given that it's the whole goal of the project, you'd think they might have come up with a number.

Cool, goodluck.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com