We need a permanent solution for universal broadband access
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PG&E gets to effectively tax Californians an amount of money determined, roughly, as whatever they can spend times 1.1. Guess who massively overpays and who ends up kicking an enormous amount of money toward PG&E for essentially no value.
The US allows medical providers to collect money on a basis that has essentially nothing to do with value delivered. Services end up very very expensive.
The US kicks approximately fixed amounts of money toward broadband providers. Guess who has no incentive whatsoever to maximize the value delivered for that price?
(Comcast recently quoted me approximately $27/foot to extend aerial fiber along an existing Comcast attachment, on a route with no complications whatsoever, so they can provide me (expensive) improved service. If they’re charging rates like this, then it doesn’t matter where the Federal assistance comes from: one way or another, everyone is massively overpaying.)
If the FCC wants to improve broadband cost-effectively, they should either attach conditions forcing their money to be well-spent or rework their process to enforce the existence of a genuinely competitive market. Then fiber could be installed at something approximating reasonable prices, and service could be delivered over that fiber at reasonable rates.)
I rarely pull up my Xfinity account but I did the other day when I moved and was shocked at how bad the experience was. I counted that it took ~3 minutes of loading + redirects to get me from the login screen to my account screen, and that's on a gigabit internet connection from Xfinity!
I was pissed but then I relized, they have a virtual monopoly in my region and besides paying for Starlink, there are no other options. These guys have zero incentive to make thier website better, because what are you going to do?
To me, it’s a bit like saying every town needs a Starbucks, and a Home Depot, and a target. And if the town can’t sustain the economics of those businesses, everyone else needs to pay higher prices to subsidize them, because... reasons.
Unfortunately, the way the US and state governments tend to do these uneconomical "public good" things is: "Throw money at already-large corporations, who pocket the money and don't do the thing anyway, because there were no strings attached."
The deal with these protected monopolies, when the public grants them, is that the receiver is required to build out infrastructure to serve all the citizens who granted them the privilege of planting poles or digging trenches all over their public property (for comfy profit) in the first place. However those incentives are at conflict with a for profit charter as you understand.
We’ve done a woefully terrible job holding these companies accountable for building and investing in infrastructure even when it wouldn’t be convenient, which has been demonstrated time and again as people are raising in this thread. These telcos literally take billions in gov’t grants and sit on them saying “we tried it was too expensive, moar $$ plz”, which is complete and utter BS.
If we didn't have these arrangements then sure, let a for profit company do as it pleases. Let it negotiate the land rights with individual citizens. Let it raise the initial capital privately to fund buildouts. Etc. That’s just not how we handle common good utilities.
I agree that throwing tax money at corporations without clear deliverables is bad policy. It's also bad policy to waste taxpayer dollars building bridges to nowhere, which is precisely what broadband access in the middle of nowhere is.
Access to infrastructure makes places more desirable to live. It increases property values, which in turn encourage more development. I get it. I understand why local governments throw incentives to telcos to artificially make their cities more attractive and lucrative for business. It's not just telcos. We do it for sports stadiums, factories, movie productions. By and large, these policies end up being wealth transfers from the poor and middle class to wealthy people.
> A bridge to a town of 10k can be quite profitable
If it was, someone would do it. That's the beautiful thing about capitalism.
We can opine about living in a libertarian paradise, but we don’t.
A lot of the problems seems to be that Internet service doesn't need to be a full monopoly. Separate the organization that tears up the ground and from the one that provides data service.
Aerial fiber cable costs ~ $8 per foot. Those towns already have electricity, so they have telephone polls. 100 miles * 5280 * 16 (doubling the material cost to account for termination, connectors, etc), is $8.5M. Assuming the fiber lasts 30 years, that’s $281K per year. Small towns in the US have 2500-4999 people. At the minimum size to qualify as a town, that’s $112 per person per year, or under $10/month for the trunk line. At $100/month per house that should be profitable.
Also, the trunk will serve people outside of town.
The ACP money should be used to fund build-outs like this and dictate that the resulting lines have common carrier status (any ISP can rent bandwidth on them at the same price and priority).
My organization is fighting for funding to continue it because despite the abuse, it is very much helping folks. I personally hope it dies though. This is how we get entrenched broken systems. We need to be fighting for a real solution (Municipal ISPs) instead.
This is the crux of it - there is no reason we can't proposition something to replace it while continuing to move forward.
If you want muni ISP, it'll take a few years just to get the ducks in a row.
What's your take Google Fiber's foray into ISP territory and it's associated snail pace progress/surrender?
I'd actually broaden that to say that we love to throw poorly determined sums of money at idealized end-goals.
Well-defined projects, with clear strategic approaches and benchmarks of success, are often missing from the equation, and money is regularly spent on activities that are purely performative, or even counter-productive.
The use of Throwing here seems to focus ire on the existence of funding. Poorly Determined then amplifies the effect. Together, they would invite a conclusion that funding shouldn't be.
The remainder hints that may not have been your intent, tho.
I mean that's strictly not true. PG&E's spend has to be approved by a regulator who in the past has not approved capital expenses.
> When PG&E suggested inspecting 300,000 poles a year to ensure safety in 2012, CPUC cut the total to 235,000.¹¹ In 2011 and 2012, when PG&E spent almost $100 million more on replacing poles than allowed by CPUC, the regulator took that as a reason to deny future claims for pole replacement spending. It said “PG&E demonstrated the capacity and willingness to spend more than previously authorized…to meet service obligations,” thus they would not include extra required pole replacements in the “rate base.” These sorts of decisions created exactly the wrong incentives, penalizing PG&E for doing more than was required.¹²
PG&E is currently charging 4-7x the national average rate, with CPUC approval. [0] And, even if reimbursement for long-overdue safety improvement is a reasonable idea, the way they’re approaching it is absurd.
As an example, there’s a technology called, variously, “rapid earth fault clearance” or a “ground fault neutralizer”. It’s a device at a station that massively reduces the amount of energy delivered into a downstream ground fault (e.g. downed power line hitting dry vegetation). California is uniquely suited to deployment of these devices because CA is the only state that bans the practice of using a neutral conductor that’s grounded along the utility poles (and thus produces a residual current even without a fault if the loads are unbalanced between the phases).
The recent PG&E “rate case” in which PG&E got permission to yet again raise rates despite already being hilariously expensive gas PG&E spending ludicrous amounts of money on poles and vegetation management and installing a whopping two REFCL devices per year.
For context, a fire-prone region of Australia tested these devices a few years ago by intentionally dropping a protected, energized conductor into a box of dry plants, and they didn’t catch fire. The protection worked.
[0] In the state that created Tesla, it’s not actually especially economical to drive one if you live in PG&E territory. This is pathetic.
This compares to the power grid or water supply in a given city, which are more of a natural monopoly. (Or indeed the railway lines)
If all the ridiculous permitting and attachment rights get sorted out, single-mode fiber is cheap and straightforward to install.
Take a look at any of the rural nonprofit fiber services. They’re not particularly expensive to build or operate.
I'm strongly in favor of capitalism, but deeply oppose the concept of privately-held utilities with local monopolies. No company should be able to "own the telephone poles" and have the last word on how they are used and by who. The poles, water pipes, gas pipes, sewer lines, etc, should all be owned by the municipality or county and vendors should have to compete to service and maintain them. There would be a lot of red tape, and plenty of room for corruption, but at least we wouldn't be starting from the position of, "oh, we can't have municipal broadband because that company a few states over owns all of our infrastructure."
They don't need gigabit internet but for large numbers rural residents even normal 25Mbps broadband isn't available.
This incredible event led to the US becoming the first country to have fiber deployed nationwide.
Wait, I'm misremembering that slightly... Oh yes, I remember now: The telecoms pocketed the money instead of delivering the promised infrastructure, and now the US lags much of the world on Internet connectivity.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5...
There is still a place for companies to build the internet backbone and maintain the big pipes connecting cities.
I think it makes sense for governments to provide "roads, wires, and pipes" and then let the private companies decide what goes over the roads, wires, and pipes.
My municipality can maintain my wires but I can choose my ISP. Just like they maintain the roads, but private companies use them.
I didn't get Comcast.
For situations where they need to run an entrance line, especially for fiber-optic entrances, the prices can truly be absurd. I previously was charged $12/foot for coax entry for a cable connection at a house that didn't previously have cable service, and they made no efforts to optimize for length, fiber is usually $25/foot or more. This is on top of an "service initiation fee", which was $500 for gigabit over coax, and would have been $2500 for gigabit over fiber. All told it was nearly $3k to get gigabit coax as new service at my prior house, and fiber would have cost me more than $15k, despite it all being microtrenched in an existing easement where the provider had right of way, no street crossings, and covered in part by state and federal subsidies on the back-end.
What these broadband regional monopolies do is basically double-charge for the same work. The state and feds pay them to do it, then they also charge the customer to do it, and they take no efforts to minimize any of the costs because there is no incentive to do so. The prices they charge are also outrageously higher than the actual cost of delivering the service. I was once a BICSI certified fiber optic installer. I happen to know exceptionally well exactly what the costs are for running that service. For what they wanted to charge me $7000 for, I could have done the work myself (including my former labor rates) for a mere $1600, which includes a healthy margin. That's also based on fiber prices from ~20 years ago, and things are much cheaper now from a materials perspective. There's really no excuse.
The FCC Is Taking Steps to Wind Down the Affordable Connectivity Program
Republicans Kill Popular FCC Program That Made Broadband Affordable for the Poor
Policies designed to encourage this kind of competition should be preferred to some sort of public utility. This can include municipally-owned fiber, with the bandwidth rented out to providers, it can include subsidizing rural broadband, and it can include requiring that providers who are a monopoly in a given area meet certain standards in terms of quality and price.
What I don't want is to backslide into a situation where I have only one option, and if it sucks, well then I'm welcome to not use the Internet. That option being publicly owned is at least as likely to make the result worse as it is better.
The need for competition is real, and in many instances regulations are written by the regulated, but we need to find a way to solve our fake "ha ha it's not real socialism" model in a way that fits our American society.
I'm not denying the side effects of libraries being a beacon - that much is true.
But this program was designed to ensure folks had reliable fast internet at home.
This isn't a bad observation.
To speak plainly here: It taps at the notion that poor rural Rs ought to realize that the national R party likes them poor and angry. It's not untrue but it's totally tone deaf to the reality that the national D party hasn't given a meaningful crap about rural poverty in my lifetime. (source:recovering conservative)
> Hard-nosed politics would suggest the program should not have a bright future.
Our bazillionth lesson that hard nosed politics benefit a small group at the expense of most everyone else. Much work+money goes into making sure the lesson isn't learned.
> States can deal with this problem, or not, as they choose.
This runs up against a bright line. It runs between states that are openly, gleefully hostile toward helping vulnerable people - and the states that sometimes help when they aren't busy being inept/apathetic/confused/corrupt.
Jesus fuck, why does it always have to be us vs. them?
(I know I'll be downvoted for this because there are some with no vision, or they'll say "it's just bandwidth what does protocol have to do with")
The government has the monopoly of violence, if the government decides you can't say something on some media it won't be the fact of having it privatised that will stop them, it's as simple as that.
Your interstate highway system wasn't funded by private companies, a nationwide fiber optic infrastructure won't be either. Let the government invest in the wellbeing of its citizens, let them create a massive open fiber network (like what Sweden has done) to enable broadband for as many as possible, it's the centralisation of coordination that gives a government a lot of leverage to create benefits to its population, while you keep fighting ghosts the US will keep being a country for business first, citizens secondly.
I don’t know, that alone seems like a good enough reason to stop giving them control over things to me. I don’t want the entity providing my information also having legal authority to murder me.
Like if I can buy something from from an entity with the authority to kill me or an entity without for a little bit more, I'll pay the extra.
Communication is necessary, a government providing (or enabling) infrastructure that can reduce costs to all is a net gain for society. Your paranoia only bring higher costs to everyone, increases the gap between the haves and have-nots since poor people cannot afford a higher price for services when society is unwilling to provide a baseline for them.
Are you against public schools? A government can decide to completely indoctrinate students as they wish, even with that risk I believe most people would say that it's worth it for the government provides education for kids.
Isn't it better if everyone shares the burden through taxes for road construction enabling transportation rather than a network of private roads, each owned by a different entity that you are required to pay for access?
Having the choice to pay for a private entity to provide you services is reasonable, completely shutting off the government from providing the basics of expensive infrastructure that will pay off in a span of 15-50 years which private entities can build services on top is mind-boggling dumb for your personal and a society's finance (case in point, healthcare in the USA). Worse, without giving you any bigger freedom since an evil government won't care if it's public or private, and on top of it I'd say much the opposite since you are then beholden to private entities that you have absolutely no democratic power to go against.
> I'll pay the extra.
It's not only you paying the extra, it's every single individual in your society, cumulatively that's a bad decision since the money could be spent more efficiently elsewhere.
As a society (through our group decision-making process, politics), we decided everyone should have access to education, as it's massively beneficial to have an educated workforce and the unlocked positive-sum economic opportunities significantly reduce the number of people who elect (or are stuck with) zero-sum criminal opportunities (and these people are very expensive to have to manage).
We could leave a lot of the country without usable access to the internet, but from the start we decided it's better that everyone be connected (our Constitution explicitly authorizes Congress to establish post offices and post roads). And thanks to our political system and relatively high degree of openness, we have been able to discover and patch a lot of the abuses of the system that motivate you to prefer private options.
I'm not saying it's a slam dunk or anything, but access does at least permit another shot at viewing the world through a lens other than the movement conservative one.