In Tennessee, four bills seek to reverse restrictions on public broadband | Hacker News Reader

In Tennessee, four bills seek to reverse restrictions on public broadband

arstechnica.com

72 pointsRougeFemme23 comments

I've had two good broadband ISPs in my life. The first was the bay area's Raw Bandwidth. The second was a small municipal electic utility providing fiber to the home in my hometown in TN. Who I switched to when Charter was making noises about intercepting all HTTP traffic to puts ads in it..

My current location in rural TN has no broadband access at all, only satellite. I doubt any traditional ISP is going to find it worth their while to provide service in most of my county, which is one of the poorest in the state. They'd rather spend their money lobbying to retain their lucrative monopolies than on infrastructure.

What's the state of satellite access today in terms of cost, quality, speed and service?

Is it completely acceptable or a frustrating experience? I ask because of all the open source developers out there, I'm kind of envious of the way you go about it. More and more, I'd love the opportunity to go spend a few weeks to a few months in some cabin in the woods just building stuff.

(edit: for those that don't know, the above poster is Joey Hess who makes git-annex, etckeeper, tig, mr, etc. If you haven't already read it, check out: http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/notes_for_a_caretaker/ )

Slight delay..

The last time I used satellite was ten years ago and, I was on a Huges satellite which had a FAP that meant the max transfer per week was as small as dialup. (Possibly excluding some http pages that get cached in the satellite itself..) Plus ten times the latency.

On a related note: Chattanooga's local electric cooperative is deploying fiber throughout the city. They currently offer gigabit speeds for ~$70/mo. Have a look at: http://chattanoogagig.com/

It's (EPB) community owned, as I understand it. I assume these bills are at least vaguely related to this, but I'm not quite sure how...

I recall that they used to offer slower speeds for more, but they decided to be like Google when Google moved into Kansas City.

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/125831

This is true. I actually had the opportunity to sit in many meetings with EPB "officials" as the pricing aspects were discussed.

It was fascinating - but ultimately they threw a dart on a high price, IMO, basically out of fear of the unknown. Once Google Fiber announced prices, EPB had a lot of data and got a lot of pressure from the local startup community/ general population to bring prices in line. Luckily, they listened.

Google is considering Nashville for Google Fiber, I think these are all to just clear the way for that.

Google is considering Austin too but we hear nothing about Round Rock next door. Is it because Austin is a liberal enclave?

Round rock is quite suburban. Fiber scales better in more urban areas, which also happen to be liberal enclaves. Maybe DELL would take up your cause?

Yeah, makes sense, TWC has improved their high speed offering, guess that will need to hold us for now.

As a Tennessean, I'm pretty proud of this.

If you want a really cheap city to work in that still has a fairly sophisticated technology community, consider Nashville!

Cheers to that!

Shameless plug: Tennessee is a great place for startups. Ambition (YC w14) is based in Chattanooga, TN - a beautiful city, nestled in the mountains, with great quality of life, low cost of living, plus an awesome, smaller but energetic downtown + hip surrounding neighborhoods (think Boulder, CO or a very mini-Austin, TX).

We are also ~ 90 minutes from downtown Nashville and downtown Atlanta.

If anyone is ever passing through or interested in a change of scenery from the Southeast (or the Bay Area, DC, NYC... cough, anywhere), let us know. We're hiring.

I love Chattanooga. It's beautiful, has a ton of entertainment options (especially if you're into being outside), and the people are great.

The fact that we have residential fiber also helps.

I just got a 250k BitAngels grant for a project I'm working on. I'm in Austin, but I've also been considering a move to a less expensive place as long as it had good broadband and an active developer community. Chattanooga is definitely on the short list.

Just noticed your comment, albeit a few days late. If you have questions about getting started or making connections in Chatt - shoot me an email and we'll try to set some intro's up. Per your ideals, this could be a pretty good place to work on your project. Cost of living will definitely be less than Austin. (although our brisket is not quite as good).

Amen! Just putting my finishing touches on my corporate migration to Chattanooga. Signed the lease on Monday, family moves next week.

Gigabit access, mountains, hiking and low cost of living actually made it difficult not to make the move. Now, the worst part? Leaving San Diego :)

Hear hear, Nashville is a great place to live and work if you are in the tech community. We have a great tech scene, and some big players, like Google, are really starting to take notice. We are one of their inaugural Tech Hub cities, and they have been working with entrepreneurs here for a few years. We have several great initiatives like the Jumpstart Foundry and the Entrepreneur Center that other cities are now emulating. Also, my own company, Populr, was in 500 Startups Batch 7. We have good food, nice people, and cheap living. Come join us :)

From the Tennessee Telecommunications Associations chief (a laughably bureaucratic-sounding job if I've ever heard one):

"These bills would allow municipalities to expand beyond their current footprint and offer broadband in our service areas. If this were to happen, municipalities could cherry-pick our more populated areas, leaving the more remote, rural consumers to bear the high cost of delivering broadband to these less populated regions"

What slimy shit-talk. Hopefully the rest of the TN state legislators aren't as dumb as state legislators typically are and go forward with such measures.

This is good news. As I understand, there is city-owned fiber in Nashville (from NES?) that is currently unused. Not sure if that's related to the current legality of municipal broadband or not.

If you're in the Nashville (mid-state) area be sure to check out the variety of channels on Freenode (#nashjs, #pynash #nashfp #nashvillephp nashvillevim and many others). Would love to have you join us.

I'm up in Knoxville (about 1.5 hours north of Chattanooga) and while our startup scene isn't as web focused or developed (the Co.lab is awesome). We do have some fairly major businesses, Scripps Networks, Regal Cinemas, Pilot Flying J, Bush's Baked Beans, PetSafe, Alcoa, SeaRay boats, MasterCraft boats and Ruby Tuesday top the list and really smart people at The University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Lab - one of six national labs. If you ever want to visit, I'd be glad to play tour guide of my adopted city.

Any hiking and/or mountains nearby?

Yes. A large portion of the state is state ran parks.

http://www.state.tn.us/environment/natural-areas/natural-are...

http://tnstateparks.com/parks/about/fall-creek-falls

http://hikingchattanooga.com/

http://www.appalachiantrail.org/hiking/find-a-hike/interacti...

And yet, the silicon valley is a broadband wasteland. Google Fiber can't come soon enough.

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