Hate Your ISP? Maybe You Need Community Fiber

I once lived in a city with a community run fiber network. It was pretty damn amazing. They still have great rates for what you get: http://www.sfcn.org/sfcn/internet/

I paid about how much the "Plus" plan cost, without TV, just for 3Mps down/1Mps up in the next two places I lived. It really does spoil you when you've had a proper ISP compared with the TWC/Comcast/Cox monopolies that run in other locales.

Edit: and note, this was a tiny (less than 30k residents) at the time I had it. Incredible value for the service. I'm sure there's lots of happy customers there still.

I wonder if there is a way to adopt something analogous to a franchise model here. It strikes me that only the communities that are really, really engaged are going to be able to pull this off (which is true of most public works projects). That being said, it would be great to not have every small town and borough have to figure everything out for themselves. A franchise operator for a fast food restaurant doesn't have to worry about where to buy burgers, the brand of deep fryers, or even the optimal amount of time to fry the tater tots. If there was a full on recipe for doing this that is proven to work, a small number of citizens might be able to make it happen even in places where the local government is ambivalent. A proper setup would include some national branding to help with PR (I.e. Every article in every newspaper about community broadband would use the same name for it). It would include marketing materials for the public as well as briefing packs for local officials, legal briefs for attorneys, etc... On the technical side it would recommend specific hardware, suppliers, and designs.

The advantage to such an approach would be to harness economy of scale at a national level, but allow local communities to drive the process and own the network.

I'm not sure how you would structure it to avoid creating another monopoly in the parent company of the franchises. But perhaps a nonprofit or a corporation 100% owned by the community franchisees would work.

I've thought the "open access" type model would work for a couple years now and I'm glad to see it being discussed here. Community Fiber may work in pro-active cities. However problems may reveal themselves in other cities when the politicians make campaign budget promises and usage statistics make some people angry they're paying for people who use more internet than they do. You can't expect every mayor of every small town in the US to understand enough about fiber equipment to make the right purchases for their local infrastructure.

The fundamental problem is the cost of the last mile infrastructure is too great to allow much competition. (Though existing companies have worked with lawmakers to further cement their position.) Open access would allow companies to compete with their service, knowledge, and connection to the internet at large, while reducing the cost of gaining you as a customer to plugging you in at the central hub.

At one point long ago our nation decided that broad communication networks which included every household benefited the whole enough that shouldering the upfront cost was far worth the rewards. We wired up every household with a copper line and access to phone service. Now that the internet has surpassed and commenced the phone we have forgotten the lessons of the past and are struggling along with "good enough" copper instead of again shouldering the cost and laying down fiber lines. It would cost a lot to reach rural areas and connect every last household. However fiber is great in that you can upgrade the equipment at the end to continue to increase speed, and in a country where websites can assume all of their potential customers would have very fast internet radical technological advancements could occur.

The technological advancements will occur in the end. The biggest question is whether or not the US will reap the rewards that it has been these last several decades, or if another country will. There is no faster way to irrelevance than doing nothing.

Where it only makes sense to build one of some piece of infrastructure, isn't it really obvious that it should always be owned by the people? I suspect that this applies to quite a few things: cable data networks, wireless data networks (phone masts), electricity transmission grid, railway lines, roads, etc.

Historically, national infrastructure seems to tend towards becoming a monopoly anyway under private ownership. Further, when these are privately owned, we seem to end up with a lumbering private company regulated by a lumbering state bureaucracy which duplicates a large part of the accounts department of the private company to keep them in check.

This means that we have the worst of both worlds; no real choice, patchy service, high prices for the service and a whole load of hidden regulatory costs which come out of our taxes.

Anecdotally, I've consulted for a state regulated privately owned monopoly company, there is no way that private sector efficiency is driving these places, the bureaucracy is intense. Example: A decision from the company on whether it was acceptable to use a different, cheaper but better looking style of suspended ceiling took 6 months and went all the way to the board of directors of this multi billion pound company.

I'm especially enthusiastic about their endorsement of open access.

I'm generally skeptical of such things, but I can see the point in local government (community != government, that's newspeak) taking a lead in running fiber in much the same way they do electricity and plumbing, mostly because it seems that fiber is sufficiently future proof - it seems plausible that transmission technology on fiber can keep up with domestic applications without having to rely on horrible stop-gap tech like ADSL.

But one thing is laying a cable, that's a largely neutral and objective undertaking, another is running a good ISP - that's a completely different beast. I strongly doubt a government run ISP is going to be great, especially if something happens and it turns into a cost centre, or if it's "awarded" to the highest bidder to run, or stuffed full of overpaid incompetents by way of political nepotism. As with anything government run, when first things starts going down that route, it's incredibly difficult to reverse.

This is exactly what we've been doing in Sweden the last 10 years, at least.

Local electrical companies usually offer a city wide fiber grid in small towns. Sometimes housing companies that own a few apartment buildings have their own fiber grid. And ontop of that there are communities in more rural areas that come together and pay for the work to have fiber dug to their houses.

But that's just fiber, they still need an ISP for internet service and there we usually have at least a dozen different companies to choose from.

"Community fiber" is working towards a practical implementation of ambient connectivity that Bob Frankston's been talking up for years through IEEE and elsewhere. Some of his essays lay some good groundwork for governance and expansion. http://frankston.com/Public/

I've been wanting to push for community fiber in my area, but I have no idea where I would even begin. Are there any resources available for those of us who want to get involved?

Just as an aside on one of the points they try to make (not about residential internet access):

"Imagine the Director of Public Works using her smart phone to reschedule all the sprinklers in the city with just a few clicks."

This makes me really uncomfortable. I think infrastructure needs to be physically separated from the public networks. Everything else just asks for somebody to cause mayhem, un- or intentionally.

I live in a small village (2,000 people) and would love to implement something like this but the costs, as mentioned in articles about communities that have done it, seem prohibitive in the extreme (many millions of dollars). The article talks about underserved rural communities but how in the world do such places afford this (aside from the wealthiest locales, anyway)?

Community fiber optics is the way to go. In Bucharest, in 2000, when fiber was really expensive a small community, like a block of apartments, would get much better quality service by sharing a business type of connection than buying for each apartment a "home/personal" service. The initial cost is that someone needs to step up, build the infrastructure and start the sharing service. In Western countries this might be a little bit more difficult than it was in Bucharest in 2000 because of the regulation regarding wires, cable tunnels etc. However it is not impossible and the benefits of such a service in the community exceeds the initial pain of setting up the service.

In Bucharest, experience showed that once a community connected to internet via a dedicated fiber service, self maintained, the neighbouring blocks and adjacent residential areas start to press for connecting to the same service. Soon a network serving 30 families, grew to 100 then 500 or even more. A single connection became 4 load balancing the load. You had a problem with your connectivity? Just pick up the phone and call a guy 10 houses away from yours.

I may not be very accurate about the prices in 2000 but the first connection we had in our block was a 350 euro/ month + 150 set up fee for a 100Mbs bandwidth with no traffic limit. In my block 27 families out of 36 decided to join the network and the initial set up of the fiber + local ethernet infrastructure cost was split among residents. No filtering, no connection throttling, no interference. We were paying 15 euro per month to cover some maintenance cost and future failures of cables and routers. These 100 Mbps are not much they were 100 Mbps were steady. The thing is that when we upgraded our link to a 500 euro/month we got 250 Mbps. So bandwidth and cost don't scale linearly. The more people in your network the better the service.

Maintaining a large network can be a pain. However, if you give incentives to the sys admin, and the does a good job by deploying a network with little quarks, he can actually have a passive income without much of a hassle. Networks with more than 2000 families generally had a team of 1-3 sys admins taking care of the network full time.

We also had the traditional cable companies offering a package of TV + phone + internet based on coaxial cable. Their offering was so inferior to the "neighbourhood network". The large companies ended up by stepping up their game and offering similar quality services. They were actually struggling to keep up the pace. The local networks, created around 2004-2005 a backbone network which allowed every "neighbourhood network" to connect to the other networks via high speed 10Gbps fiber cables. This became later the ANISP a national association. Yes, the small networks were in the end bought by large companies but at least the standard was set high enough so that it cannot be rolled back.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Romania

> "People love to complain about the speed of their Internet access and with good reason."

I'm sorry, but no, in my experience, they don't. I can't think off hand of any non-tech person in my area complain about their Internet speed. People pay $42/mo here for 9/2Meg and because it will play Netflix and get them on Facebook, it's good enough. I'm not arguing against a fiber upgrade, I'd love to see it, but in the end, non-techy people don't seem to see much advantage. You're not going to build a community network unless the community is engaged. How other non American countries have done it I don't know, how you get that level of engagement in the most individualized culture in the world is beyond me. Sadly, I feel the only way this would really happen in most of urban America would be to beat the incumbents on price. Which sounds possible, but not by much, especially with the fact that if you don't offer bundled cable-vision, people then have to break their other provider's bundle and pay more for cable elsewhere so the difference is even less. I hate to be pessimistic about it (I think gig everywhere could have huge economic advantages), but this is a major hurdle. People often hate their providers, but it's often due to price or customer service, not speed.

My community might get Google Fiber soon. I still am pretty excited about that, but the more I read about community fiber, the more torn I feel.

I may be missing something but is the suggestion that local municipalities dig their last mile and run their own fiber?

That's ... Not likely to succeed surely? I assume the actual dig out is a specialised job, with no private hire market, the back haul ... To where and to whom? Do most towns know where their nearest telehouse/interconnect is? The support tasks are difficult - and scale pretty well, but not if you have no scale.

Ultimately this sounds like "hey let's build a public ally owned nationwide fiber network!" Why not start at that point?

Do we have something like this in SF Bay Area?

The sad thing is it is taking local community governments to compete with broadband 'providers'. You know you need some competition when local governments are the tip of innovation and your biggest competition. I hope many more communities and Google Fiber wake up the slumbering cable companies and telcos.

I am currently involved in a community project to build fiber in our rural Missouri county- DadeCountyFiber.org

We are hoping to participate in the FCC's Rural Broadband Experiments for the Connect America Fund.

Any ideas or feedback are most welcome!

Definitely hate TWC, but no other option.

No shit?

Wheeler is still a dingo.

I'd love to have fiber dropped to my home but this article glosses over the privacy implications of having a government entity have direct access to everything you do online.