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Comment by threemux | Hacker News Reader

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> Oswego County will own the broadband network and make it available for lease to internet service providers, including Empire Access, on a non-discriminatory and non-exclusive basis. The revenue generated from these leases will support the network's ongoing maintenance and future expansion. This innovative public infrastructure model ensures sustainable, affordable access while promoting competition among service providers.

From the first link in the article.

Subscriber to Empire Access here. They've been expanding all over upstate NY. They have been a joy to work with. Far better than the only other previous option being Spectrum.

"Oswego County will own the broadband network and make it available for lease to internet service providers, including Empire Access, on a non-discriminatory and non-exclusive basis. The revenue generated from these leases will support the network's ongoing maintenance and future expansion."

https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-announces-2...

I see - so it depends on private companies profitably providing service to rural residents.

It would be a cost to those companies to lease the lines. Whether those companies are profitable or not is up to their business models. Those companies didn't/wont invest in the infrastructure to start with, which is why this initiative exists in the first place.

You think you have some sort of gotcha argument against this but you keep missing it (largely from being uninformed on the subject). Private companies aren't investing to build the infra to remote areas due to recovery cost timelines. The Govt is providing funding to build the infra alongside private partnerships to fund the maintenance and operation of the system.

There is very little downside here, if anything it avoids monopolistic control due to infrastructure investments required to service areas by providing the infra companies can then leverage in their business model.

Very similar to roads, powerlines and other things we take for granted daily that are fundamental to the operation and success of private companies.

It's not at all similar to roads, the Dulles Greenway notwithstanding. Not really similar to power either. I'm aware of how this arrangement works and why government would want to create and own the infrastructure in an attempt to attract investment.

There is no attempt at a "gotcha" argument, just dispensing with the Panglossian notion that this will definitely work long term. It might!

Its similar to roads in a lot of ways, one of the important ones is that there is a civil/social utility in ensuring even remote people are "connected" by road or internet to the rest of the country/world, often at a cost to the society outside of private profit.

So the idea that it needs to be self-sustainable or profitable to be considered working is myopic. The completion/connection of the people is the achievement, the sustainability and integration with private companies hopefully reduces the government burden and enables innovation and competition without the need for vast capital expenditures.

Generally when this is done _well_, you'll end up with multiple ISPs who'll compete on price, so they're essentially selling a commodity product with generally fairly low margins. For instance, a somewhat similar scheme in Ireland (NBI, a state-funded thing which builds FTTH in rural areas where it would not be economical for the other FTTH infra owners to build) has _56_ ISPs currently providing service on its infra (though some of these are regional).

Like, this isn't an exciting new idea; similar things have been widely used all over the world for rural broadband for years. The US is maybe a bit unusual in that the local monopolies were in some cases never really broken, so this is going maybe a bit less rural than would be typical. In many countries the local monopolies (Charter and Verizon, from the article) would be required to allow other ISPs to use their infra at a controlled price.

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