Colorado communities secure the right to build their own broadband

Yes, this one anecdote must mean the entire concept of municipal broadband is untenable.

Is the internet truly municipal or is only the fibre community owned? The distinction is important as a lot of private ISPs pay the local government a fee to use their existing infrastructure, while they provide the connectivity to the rest of the internet.

This arrangement also comes with the ISP's own flavor of EULA.

Can you elaborate on which town and who provides the service? The example above you cited Chattanooga and epbfi.com website that basic service costs $57.99/mo for 100 Mbs internet with no reference to a cap. Your comment seems disingenuous that you don't provide any details.

I live in Massachusetts and I would have surely heard about this Stalinist regime. Where are these broadband Bolsheviks?

To check for that leak they had to have customer service reps, city vehicles, fleet insurance, technicians qualified to work on a live, potentially leaking gas line, gasoline for the vehicle, and they arrived at my home in less time than a phone-call to TWC generally takes. I really doubt some IT staff costs more.

As for the Torrent: Give the customer what they pay for, and no more. If my internet issues are because of Torrents, I have to ask: Why does the lack of competency ISPs have never seem to work in my favor?

edit: Also "not very difficult compared to":

I have an amateur's idea of the utility side (mostly from DIY and having relatives in the trades) and I think you're sorely underestimating the skill and care involved in making sure this stuff actually works. Large scale projects for anyone can be challenging, but it'd be amazing if anything ever worked at all if utilities put the same (lack of) planning care into their projects that most tech companies do.

Most people probably don't even know what a P-trap is for. Or ever noticed that their gutters are actually sloped for drainage. What material their plumbing is made from. How many receptacles can be placed on a circuit. That the brick on your house isn't actually load-bearing. What weeping holes are for.

This stuff has to last decades.

>> "Providing electrical power, sewage lines, etc.. is not very difficult compared to handling Internet traffic."

There is no question that each of these things is difficult at scale. Furthermore I have never done either of them.

However, power systems EE is perhaps the most widely-known example of Big Boy Engineering except building rockets. In the power business, they have an distribution/cabling problem which is at best isomorphic to that found in the ISP business (though probably greater, because ISP's don't have millions of volts to worry about) wedded to far greater stationing/substationing/production problems, and they still have (as noted by someone else in this thread) far more 9's of uptime than Time Warner. As compensation for this, ISP's have a greater Signals and Systems flavored problem, but it doesn't seem like it balances out.

So basically I'm trying to say that "... not very difficult..." seems inaccurate.

I think you are seriously underestimating the modern electrical grid. This is a control room that controls high voltage lines in the Midwest:

http://www.chronicletimes.com/photos/17/86/19/1786193-H.jpg

Ok you don't have to worry about torrents but people expect pretty much 100% uptime on electrical service and you are dealing with transmitting an insane amount of energy which is technically non-trivial and can be extremely dangerous. You have to worry about power plant failure, maintenance, load balancing renewable and fossil fuels, meeting peak demands(rather than just slowing down everyone) and so on.

Why is some customer torrenting movies supposed to be the ISP's problem any more than some customer powering grow lamps to grow marijuana supposed to be the power company's problem?

> Providing electrical power, sewage lines, etc.. is not very difficult compared to handling Internet traffic.

That was true in the 1990s, when I got my first job as a techie at an ISP. Things have changed since then.

I think what we are really seeing here is that different municipalities have different degrees of success... In mine, no one even thinks about power/water/sewage/roads (except during road repair), but the poor quality of internet service is a weekly subject.

Just this morning, comcast had a massive outage across philadelphia and southern new jersey. Comcast is BASED in philadelphia. There was no explanation or warning, just as the work day started. If that were electric, it'd be national news; instead, it's just another day in the shitty world of comcast: accountability is way down on the list compared to fees, bugging me to upgrade my service.

So still anecdotal, but hundreds of thousands of people were affected.

> Please address this part of my post: "none of those areas has [seen] any significant improvement in service level, cost, efficiency, or technology for many years".

What improvements are you expecting? Some things don't need to change. It serves its purpose the same way it did a hundred years ago and there is nothing wrong with that.

> ISPs and cell service providers have many faults, but they have been constantly improving the service level (bandwidth)

That's the terminating equipment. The expensive part, which is the wire or fiber in the ground, hasn't changed materially in decades or more. You could easily have a municipal last mile and competing providers who supply their own terminating equipment at the endpoints.

> In addition, you are not addressing any of the drought/road quality & cost/police abuse/fire department cost which I raised, and which are real problems.

Would you like to explain how a monopoly for-profit entity can be expected to do any better? Why would they care about droughts or abuse if it isn't costing them money?

The internal combustion engine has not improved much in the last few decades either. Perhaps whoever is building those things is incompetent too.

Oh wait, it's the laws of physics that have greatly diminished progress in this area...

Just because you aren't aware of them don't mean they don't exist.

PEX is very common for new residential/commercial buildings for example. I'd be surprised if municipalities in need of water treatment plant upgrades aren't looking at technologies that weren't widely available 20 or 30 years ago when the original system was put into place.

Also, complaining about increasing price (which is modest IME) is an unusual tactic. The price would have to increase at a greater rate than inflation in order to account for the increasing concentration of wealth the past couple decades right? It's a little fuzzy for me, but I feel like that's just math. If 95% of your subscribers make less than they did two decades ago, but your per-subscriber bill is the same, then average cost is going to increase.

Also tightened environmental standards that didn't exist in 80's when the systems were put into place undoubtedly play a role in increasing costs.

I get 200amp service to my house today. It originally (in the 70's) had 100amp service. I'd call doubling the power requirements for the electrical grid quite an upgrade. Houses are most certainly increasing in size. Not to mention 20 years ago you didn't have the option to pay an extra half-cent per kWh to ensure the electric company purchased enough renewable power wholesale to cover your usage.

I pay all my utilities online with auto-pay. There's another upgrade.

The police of today are most certainly better equipped, better prepared, better trained, respond quicker and there are more of them. I don't agree with all of that but it's what the voters want. All that costs money, and it's most definitely different today than a couple decades ago.

Are roads worse today? I feel like they're not. At least not where I live (which is in Dallas proper where the average home is around 2,000sqft and $150K, so not some rich enclave). I feel like we spend too much money on roads in fact. The new 635 toll-road seems a terrible waste of money when we could have just had a DART (commuter train) run West/East along it (there are almost no West/East running lines in Dallas, which makes the public rail system not all that useful for many).

I can't remember the last time I drove on a gravel road. Even the state parks are fully paved. That definitely wasn't the case 30 years ago.

So sure, we pay more today than we did decades ago. Changing subscriber-base, voter priorities and deploying the exact tech you're complaining doesn't exist is a big part of it.

This feels like an argument of "Government Bad! Business Good!" at this point to be honest.

Like saying: "Most utilities providers have not even been improving their back-end technologies, which would serve to reduce costs, or improve the service's availability."

Where do you get that from? Anecdotally that seems far from the truth considering the payment options and Customer Service available to people these days.

So they're not tearing up the roads every few years to upgrade the pipe. That's a good thing. They are OTOH purchasing more efficient fleet vehicles. Even in gas loving TX it's common for Municipal vehicles to run on LNG. My Dad as a TxDOT employee working on the Galveston ferry has been through a lot of training. I can personally guarantee you TxDOT is not the same agency or using the same tech they were 30 years ago. Except where it's not broken.

You appear to want to fix what isn't broken.

Good points—the only thing I'd say is that we're talking about a really capital intensive industry where the incumbent may be able to drop prices to compete with a newcomer. Example: If company B comes to a town where company A is already operating, company A can just offer new subscribers the same terms as B, making it hard for B to compete. If B can anticipate A's action (not that hard in this case, because I can do it after a couple of beers) then B may choose not to invest because B's road to a profit requires producing at a lower marginal cost than A and undercutting A's prices. They actually have to pull subscribers away from A. If A is already producing at a low marginal cost but overcharging, then A has the flexibility to fight a price war (and potentially win).

Ha maybe I'm banking too much on those competent government officials. The variance in quality is certainly high.

> There is no way that $70 is actually paying for capital costs.

Then why are AT&T, Grande and Google fiber are all priced at $65/mo for 1Gbps/1Gbps FTTx?

You are talking around each other because there isn't one "the government", but rather a bunch of different levels constantly pushing and pulling against one another. It's very reasonable to be a small government ideologue while simultaneously wanting a more powerful city government. Many people who want "small government" simply want a less powerful federal government. A few states are playing with this balance (Colorado certainly among them) at all levels. Should the federal government control the state's drug policy? Should the state control the county's or municipality's infrastructure or natural resources? What about schools, who should control those?

These sorts of questions are where you see major differences between lots of different people who would all identify themselves as "conservatives" and agreement with many people would would identify themselves as "liberals". It isn't a simple system!

Your statement sounds like the doublespeak to me. At the end of the day, it's government that physically enforces things with relative impunity. The "power" of corporations in this context is just the power of government being used for corporate interests; it doesn't work the other way around.

No, you blame the actual person with the gun, i.e. the group of people who physically enforce rules. That's government, not corporations.

Yes, let's definitely accuse the government officials taking the legal bribes to sell citizens down the river. They deserve a lot of blame as well.

As a resident of Colorado, I'm slightly wary of amendments with language involving the definition of personhood.

Wow, maybe I should look at other parts of CO? I just looked on zillow and saw some properties for sale in the mountains to the west, but they all seemed to be 1.5+ hours from Boulder. (even though they were less than 30 miles) I didn't see anything closer in my price range.