Obama calls for municipal broadband
vox.com
vox.com
Why is my government providing access to porn? To religious sites? To sites that violate copyright? To sites that contain many sorts of 'unsavory' content? Allowing children uncensored access to many things?
I don't know how those complaints would fare, but I'm absolutely certain they'd be made.
Why would this be different?
This is a very light touch intervention to increase market-based competition. How much more quickly would there be privately owned fiber networks if consumers had the option of going to City Internet for $150/GB/s?
The UK's (big) ISPs are already required to 'offer' Internet filtering to all customers, collect activity logs, and prevent access to certain torrent sites.
None of them have had a problem implementing this at a national level.
(Setting up a DNS blacklist/redirect isn't hard - you do it in your network/backbone gateways, which aren't anywhere near your subscribers.)
The government being in the delivery business is nothing new. Historically, it has worked out for the better more often than not.
However, we know that government policy is to record all meta-data, forever, without a warrant. HTTP/2 can't come fast enough, but even that doesn't really hide enough meta-data to trust the government with the pipe. E.g. You can tell fairly well what static pages on a domain someone is visiting by simply correlating the size of the response packets.
Of course, they are already doing all of this already, so maybe the ship has sailed... I think the best model is that the government provides the fiber, the L2 and above service is provided by a private entity. It certainly doesn't do much to prevent mass-collection or censorship, but it's marginally better than the Fed actually providing Layer 2.
Only two possibilities: ban it -- untenable -- or allow it.
Not sure what you're trying to say here?
I far prefer to just obsolete the big providers and to implement internet as a real public utility. Even if private companies end up contracted to provide it in some cases, those would be regulated monopolies, not regulated free market businesses.
I far prefer that we build the case that even a city's own infrastructure would unlikely work without the internet, and that they should have at least some infrastructure that does not rely on commercial providers.
San Francisco's water power plant on the Russian River is a great example of this, it provides power for muni trains and electrified buses, maybe _some_ streetlights and a few other public things. If we have a full PG&E failure, we might still have running trains and lit streets. I'm not sure it doesn't all flow into the same grid, SF being one of the oldest power grids, but if that isn't fully the case now, there is enough power independence to ensure that such a thing would work.
I guess you meant those would be regulated monopolies and not unregulated monopolies ;) ISP scene is quite far from free market at the moment.
The other 3 are dedicated business telecom companies and do not offer residential service.
It appears broadbandmap.gov doesn't differentiate between residential and business.
Looking at the wireless I was excited to see Wimax offered in my zip code according to the site. When I go the provider's map of coverage I only see a small section of the metro area covered and it doesn't include my zip code.
It appears broadbandmap.gov doesn't include the actual wireless coverage provided.
There's also a potentially anti-competitive slant to this: There are government subsidies available to provide coverage to unserved areas, which might help a small ISP or competitor move into the area. But if we say we cover it...
I could give you my old Zip code, it would include a small city that had DSL providers and Cable. Where I lived there was one provider, 3mb DSL. That finally showed up about 4 years ago.
1 cable provider
2 ADSL providers
It shows FiOS also, but I can almost guarantee that there is no residence within this zip code that can get it. So, the real question is, how much do you consider ADSL "broadband"?
Real competition is for example Google Fiber or some other small ISP on the scene. That's when you starting getting 1 Gbps for less than $100. But such cases are quite rare still.
Now the "cable monopoly" is a separate issue entirely. Comcast has superior speed in some areas because the municipalities create bottlenecks that keep new wires from being laid (like charging exorbitant fees to do so). See, http://www.wired.com/2013/07/we-need-to-stop-focusing-on-jus...
> Again most Americans don't need 100Mbps+.
That's a pile of trash and song that monopolists like to sing to justify their unwillingness to upgrade their networks (since if there is nowhere else to turn, their inferior networks will be used for crazy prices anyway - users simply will have no choice). They start singing a very different song when they face actual competition. They quickly forget their previous claims that no one needs more bandwidth and start offering it. Which just demonstrates how sick the current ISP market is.
I.e. imagine you are trying to find a transport service, and local transportation company tells you that their horse and buggy service is just fine, because no one needs anything better (didn't everyone use it for hundreds of years already?). And then their competitor actually builds a railroad... You get the idea - that's exactly what's going on with ISPs now.
For my home, 2.5mi from the Capital Building in Washington State, I'm offered four wired broadband providers:
1. Comcast, "advertised 100mbps to 1gbps" (true enough, although you can only get 150mbps, so I'm not sure if that's bracketing)
2. CenturyLink, "25-50mbps" (CenturyLink's own website says "Our systems indicate that our High Speed Internet is not currently available at your service address." I tried several other streets in the area that indicated that none of them had availability either.)
3. Platinum Equity LLC, "10-25mbps" (err, Platinum Equity is an investment firm - oh, one of their portfolio offers "T1 and Bonded T1" lines to businesses)
4. Integra Telecom Holdings, "3-6mbps" (a Vancouver telco that does business fiber).
So there's one - Olympia, WA.
http://www.broadbandmap.gov/internet-service-providers/olymp...
There's Comcast, Verizon, ATT, T-Mobile and a host of others.
EDIT: Facts deserve downvotes?
http://www.broadbandmap.gov/internet-service-providers/olymp...
re: EDIT: I didn't DV you but you shouldn't be surprised. There probably isn't a single HN'er without direct experience shopping for an ISP, and thus few without the knowledge that the many promises of "broadband" service are often mere pie in the sky.
Anyway, one of the wired ones that's listed (CenturyLink) does residential internet from what I can tell[1]. Another wired one that's also listed for residential in Olympia is MegaPath (owned by Platinum Equity, another wired one)[2].
No, to repeat myself, cellular wireless ISP service is neither functionally equivalent to other wired nor even to other wireless ISP service offerings. Cellular offers include low data throughput limits, and are not priced comparably. If there were two DSL offerings and one was priced higher for a lower level of service that would also not be reasonably considered a competitive market situation.
As for CenturyLink in Olympia, Wa. the poster already replied that Century Link do not offer service to his/her residence.
I'm not going to audit the claim about Megapath, but instead just assume that FireBeyond was truthful and correct when they said that Megapath did not offer residential services to their address.
Also - yes, I'm aware CenturyLink does home internet. Not at any of four addresses, including mine and major streets in 98501 where it says they are available according to the original site.
Megapath (the one I found) does residential - in theory. After inputting my service address (and I'm in the heart of the residential area, in a division less than ten years old), here are my options:
1. "Symmetric Ethernet: 6.0M to 45.0M (* Requires Business Account)"
2. "SDSL: 192k" (fairly sure that doesn't meet any current definition of "broadband")
3. "T1: 384k to 3.0M (* Requires Business Account)"
I wouldn't call that a realistic residential broadband offering.
Apropos of anything else, it's as much as you can't just blindly point at broadband.gov and say "look, healthy marketplace!".
I'm looking at the telephone pole near my house and there are only two wires coming off it: one from Comcast and one from the phone company. And the phone lines can't do more than 1mbps.
Wireless - Poor reception, technicians unable to connect to uplink/head-end equipment
Cellular - Too expensive, data caps, and poor reception (really).
DSL - I used this for four years at my home and was generally satisfied with my private DSL reseller's service. I only left because their service only allowed 1.5Mb, which was no longer satisfactory. Ironically, AT&T now offers 6Mb/s service in my area but DSL resellers apparently aren't permitted to resell "U-verse" even though it is provided via an industry standard protocol, ITU G.992.3
Cable - I have cable now 15Mb, the highest speed they offer. They keep promising to roll out higher speeds, but have yet to do so.
Satellite - Does that count as broadband? Not for me. High latency and low uplink speed rules it out, and expense.
This is an especially crazy situation for me considering that I live near a major internet backbone corridor (0.5mi from my home).
So, strictly speaking there is no monopoly, but the result is hard to distinguish from that of a monopoly/cartel situation.
Likewise, why are speeds so low still if there is all that competition? Once the wiring is done, it should be fairly inexpensive to upgrade performance and that should be a pretty clear competitive edge. Are they colluding? Or is it really somehow a noncompetitive market?
I've been in Comcast country a couple times, as soon as there were even whispers of not renewing their franchise, comcast just magically upgraded everyone's performance, I saw that twice. No fee increase.
Now that I've left SF after living there most of a decade, and I live in the east bay, I think it's also a concern that SF gets to own a power source so far away, because of the historical timing of when it was implemented.
The SF Bay Area's intertwining municipalities are a major impedance to certain types of progress, but I also think they are a valuable alternative to a region like NYC where you have a massive city with areas that aren't really like one another.
Anyway, my understanding is that the water power plant supplies muni and other SF public purposes, such as possibly some street lights. I know, though, when I lived in the TL, and we had a power outage, the street lights would go out, so this may all flow together and be metered, rather than be separate, redundant systems.
My point was, we could probably change that. :)
Municipal broadband doesn't mean shutting out ISPs. If done right, it means that the municipalities own the last mile infrastructure and charge a per-customer rate to ISPs that serve residents. But what that does is significantly lower the bar for ISPs to offer service. It can cost millions of dollars to build out that infrastructure in a city/town and that's assuming you have right of way to actually lay the fiber. If the city does that itself, then ISPs only need to connect the city's infrastructure to the larger internet...something that's significantly cheaper.
The Comcasts of the world would still be free to offer service to customers. But they'd have to compete with the smaller ISPs on equal footing and without the giant markups they have today.
This is _precisely_ the discussion I want to have.
Transit is not the same as interconnect, we should have some private competition, but if an entire city is all AT&T and Comcast, I'd rather just have it be municipal fiber.
I have no problem with AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, etc.. running their businesses over a combination of private and municipal networks.
I feel that's ideal.
Let me tell you: BT sucks. They are technically a private company, but operating with all the ills that a large governmental monolith has accumulated over decades. With the system you're proposing, you're basically creating a BT. Hopefully it's a small, city-specific BT so at least if one city has a very shitty infrastructure you can move to another city to avoid it... but still. Caveat emptor...
And while I agree with about BT as a whole, OpenReach - the subsidiary of BT that handles the last-mile network - is very different from BT as a whole even though they certainly share a lot of history and baggage. For starters, OpenReach is vastly more tightly regulated (leading to, for example, all prices being publicly available on their website), but OpenReach is also subject to a lot of additional scrutiny and pressure from the 500+ companies that rely on their network to provide services, especially because many of said 500+ companies are directly competing with Virgin for business.
The baggage of BT is also less of an issue simply because while most ISPs uses OpenReach for their backhaul services (relying on OpenReach to provide an IP connection from the subscriber to the ISPs network), OpenReach also provide raw access where the ISP can put equipment in BTs exchanges and get a direct physical connection to the subscribers line, and a number of providers have and do make use of this to provide faster connections than what OpenReach offers for backhaul.
With LLU unbundling the only limitation provided by OpenReach is down to physical constraints of a network they inherited and was not endowed with enough cash to somehow instantly upgrade.
But most ISPs are not willing or able to cover the costs even of taking advantage of the LLU unbundling, which should illustrate that there really isn't a willingness for most to pay for much faster rollouts of higher speeds.
And yes, there are some new developments, there is some hope in the horizon.
Meanwhile, I regularly see tweets from people in, say, Norway, with gigabit internet access.
For example, the broadband service in my town suffers from random slowdowns where everyone's speed drops from 8mb/s down to 0.1mb/s for days at a time. As a town we have been complaining about it for years but nothing ever happens as we have no power over Openreach because they are a private company and are not answerable to us and they also have a de facto monopoly on the infrastructure so we can't take our business elsewhere.
At least if broadband was provided by the local council, we could complain to our local councillor when it's not working. This system works fine for other infrastructure, e.g. if the council haven't gritted the roads we phone our councillor and she gets on to the right department, gives them a row and they sort it out.
As it is, most broadband infrastructure improvement projects in the UK are government driven any way. I don't see the point of Openreach existing as a private company, seems like extra unnecessary bureaucracy which exists purely for the dogmatic reason that private companies are supposedly always more efficient, a claim which I have never seen any serious peer reviewed research to support.
If anyone can explain why this is not a stupid system, then I'm all ears.
That's a pretty big if. There's a very real possibility that the same municipal governments that granted the cable monopolies in the first place, will either license the network to an ISP that will either become Comcast-like (monopoly lazyness does that), be bought by Comcast or actually just simply is Comcast (remember, the municipalities have a "good working relationship" with Comcast) or they will setup their own ISP, which might get off to a decent start, but will either make money, and then go on to be milked hard, or it will lose money, and will have to fight with the fire service and the water utility over every last penny for infrastructure upgrades ("What do you mean you need a $5000 router? I have a $30 router at home and it works just fine! In fact, I'll go to Best Buy myself and get you a few of those tomorrow. What the next item on the agenda?").
But IF they do it right, it would be a great solution.
Here's what I foresee actually happening: these networks will work great for 10 years or so. But eventually the maintenance costs will catch up, and you'll have service outages that take days to fix because it's run by lazy government workers with a guaranteed pension. Customers will complain, but nothing will happen until the city goes broke (as happens to nearly every city every decade or so). So the city auctions off the telecom infrastructure to private buyers for pennies on the dollar or spin it off as a new private entity. The net result is the same: the taxpayers will have subsidized the construction of yet another redundant telecommunications network owned by private money.
The reason I'm pretty sure that this is what will happen is because this is exactly what's happened to most of the municipally-owned utilities across the nation. Chances are that your gas company or electric company are privately owned (water/sewage tends to remain municipally owned because it's simply not profitable under any scenario that preserves basic sanitation). The city hits a budget crisis and starts looking for assets to sell, and utilities are huge capital assets that can bring in a lot of cash relatively quickly.
What if the municipality owned, laid, and maintained the physical conduit/poles/enclosures but not the actual network physical plant itself, which is then deliberately designed to be replaceable so commercial providers fish through the cabling they want to municipally-owned physical hubs that are equipped and operated by the providers? The municipalities already have the resources and staff to do so relatively competently from water, wastewater and electrical grid deployment and maintenance. Most of the cost of last-mile deployment is the physical laying, but if that is shifted to a public utility while fishing cables (at most) is left to the providers, then might the providers see dramatic increased incentives to compete on quality of service and price?
[1] http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-lifespan-of-fiber-optic-cab...
Regardless, the architecture you propose would be incredibly expensive for ISPs to implement on any large scale - so much so that it would create significant barriers to entry for any new entrant, and a big incentive for horizontal consolidation. Ideally, the utility ISP would provide route tunneling from a specific port on their demarc switch representing a home to a specific provider at a NOC at the edge of their network. This does create some bottlenecks, but it's better than having 5 ISPs have to put 1,000 switches all over a city just to cover all the homes. Coverage is the entire problem that causes a monopolistic situation - so let the shared service provider worry about coverage.
Even still, I'm not sure of the value that ISPs provide in such a scenario. It seems like a commoditized service with very little in the way of competitive advantage - which means that advertising dollars will be the biggest differentiator (similar to how it is today).
Obviously there are continued risks with the crypto arms race, but if Google is being beam-split by the NSA, why would we choose a solution that uses more power, provides less overall individual freedom, costs more, and is slower, to guard against a bogeyman that's getting in anyway.
We must always assume we are being wiretapped.
Let's get a discount on being wiretapped, eh? ;)
How so? Whether its good or bad, ISPs would be against it. Most companies do not want competition. (regardless of what they say)
>by allowing the option of municipal networks.
I personally think its rather unfair to ask a for-profit company to compete against a tax funded service.
>Really, he's calling for the FCC to prevent rent-seeking
You can prevent rent-seeking by repealing any "sponsored" laws that protect their monopoly.
Instead, why not change the law (if needed) to prevent monopolies from happening?
ksk's comments were not out of place.
The problem isn't that the government should prop-up start ups in this specific industry to prevent a monopoly, but that the government should embrace communications as a regional monopoly - i.e. own the utility infrastructure and reduce costs for the entire economy.
Obviously they can't nationalize the current companies, but they can start building public infrastructure.
With last-mile internet, if you lay in a redundant competitive network in a neighborhood - the capital efficiency of both networks goes down, with no mechanism to make that capital work more. You're limited to the houses in the neighborhood. So in that case you have high cost barriers, and natural monopoly conditions limiting how well that capital can be used to generate return...
Not so much -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_integration#Oil_indust...
You can probably observe some region-locking effects short of monopoly by relate the cost of gas in come areas with ability to choose alternatives. e.g. Driving in the middle of nowhere, there are few gas stations and the cost of gas is high. Redundant stations aren't built in competition to one another along those stretches because the volume of traffic isn't high enough along the 'network' of the road, but within the range of the typical car, some will drive on and others will be forced the stop. So even that isn't as airtight a natural monopoly as last-mile internet.
But if last-mile links are a natural monopoly (or at least demonstrably low competition markets), how do we get better broadband than we have now? We have data points from other nations that seem to indicate that publicly owned or open-access last-mile links create market conditions that deliver broadband more efficiently - both in lower cost and higher bandwidth. There is still competition - it just shifts to different market boundaries.
One other option is to opt for a consumer ownership model where the each home pays for the bit of fiber that connects them to the neighborhood hub or w/e.
In the UK alone, OpenReach, the BT subsidiary that inherited the last mile network, counts more than 500 companies as customers that provide telecoms and ISP services to end-users. Many of them are business focused or offer only specific subsets of services, but there are a huge number of nationwide ISPs using OpenReach's services.
Especially because the starting point is very simple: You can start out using their "backhaul" service which lets you integrate with OpenReach a couple of places and be able to offer broadband nationwide in the UK and have OpenReach provide you with IP connections to each customer for you to do whatever you want with. You can then if you want "graduate" to local loop unbundling where you put equipment in local exchanges as/when demand justifies it, allowing you to connect directly to the local loop (line) of each of your subscribers, which allows you to offer services in excess of what OpenReach does (e.g. some ISPs offer higher speeds).
Once you go the LLU route, you can turn around and offer backhaul services yourself if you wish, in competition with OpenReach.
If even that isn't enough, and you have the capital, you can look at laying your own lines. E.g. in some cities we're starting to see alternative fibre connections to many apartment buildings etc. as providers are capitalising on the density to bypass OpenReach.
So it encourages competition massively by creating a very low barrier to entry, while allowing larger providers to compete with OpenReach itself.
The UK did this with British Telecom (BT). In a word, it sucks. It creates confusion for consumers:
* "I get internet from Twinkle but they say they can't repair my line."
* "I signed up for service with Floyd's Internet but a truck showed up at my house that says Ben's Broadband."
* "Decker offered me fast fiber, but when I called to sign up, they said WestLane only has copper to my home and they aren't allowed to run the fiber."
The names have been changed to protect the guilty, but the experiences are real.
I still find it strange that the U.S., which is such a bastion of the free market is so anti-free market In regard to internet ISPs.
OpenReach (the BT subsidiary operating the line network) has a clear (available on their website) policy for how their engineers should interact with people that includes guidelines for informing ISP-customers about who they are and who they represent (OpenReach and the end-user ISP) and how to deal with customers in a way that represents the ISPs well (the customer of OpenReach is the ISP - they're a service delivery company working on behalf of the ISP, not the end-user).
A few years ago some of this may have been confusing, as customers used to have to deal with BT directly, but now "everyone" knows about BT/OpenReach handling the installation on behalf of a lot (not all) ISPs, and every ISP I've had in the last decade has explained this to me when I signed up, and these days customers do not have to deal directly with BT other than OpenReach engineers. And people are used to outsourced service companies dealing with utilities. E.g. I get power from Npower, and over the years a dozen different companies have done meter readings on their behalf where I live.
As for your "Twinkle" and "Decker" examples, blame your ISPs that have decided to use this as an excuse for their own problems. In the Twinkle example, the ISP is a customer of OpenReach, not you, it is their responsibility to deal with OpenReach, not yours. If they're trying to push OpenReach in front of them, that's their bad customer service.
As for your "Decker" example, it's Decker's fault they've not checked coverage prior to making promises they can't keep. And "aren't allowed to run the fiber" == "we've decided (as most, but not all, UK ISPs) that OpenReach provides a good enough network for us, so we won't make any investment in rolling out our own, sorry". Nothing prevents UK ISPs from trying to build competing networks, other than the capital investments needed, and the low projected rate of return for most of them outside of the most densely populated city cores.
The relative lack of competition for OpenReach is a good demonstration that the market doesn't share your assessment of them. Many are unhappy with them, but not unhappy enough to pay for anything better.
US local governments do not seem to have a good record of maintaining public infrastructure, so why would public internet be any different?
But much of the technology and infrastructure the ISPs use today was once built by tax-payer money.
Why? If the Free Market Fundamentalists are correct, the for-profit company should have it all over the tax-funded service, because the company would be interested in efficiency and technological advances and so on, as opposed to just being a... welfare... thing... like the US Post Office and everything else which, per dogma, Does Not Work.
> You can prevent rent-seeking by repealing any "sponsored" laws that protect their monopoly.
Like the property laws which prevent others from using the wires they pay to put in, or do you think three cable companies should mean three completely separate sets of coaxial cables running everywhere in town?
¹Modulo obvious caveats.
A private company that thinks it can be profitable can go to a bank. A city will probably have to have a bond on the ballot. And a city can't really get out of things like road repair, law enforcement, etc (they can subcontract, but they still have to provide service) whereas a private company can sell of or shut down any unprofitable aspect of it's business.
So on the surface, comcast or whomever has a lot more leeway then a city.
The issue is, a service like last mile broadband is not incredibly profitable, for a telecom. But if a city can do it, or have a local company do it and it doesn't cost too much (they can waive fees for running cable, or whatever) then it may pay for itself, at least in part, because not only do they benefit from whatever they collect in fees, but broadband can increase local tax revenue (a house with 1000mb/s internet is worth more then a house with 2mb internet).
In domains like Internet infrastructure and health insurance which are empirically pretty terrible when there's no public option, I think there's a lot to be said for that argument.
Is it "fair" for a monopoly to have to compete against an organization that has nearly infinite resources but terribly inefficient operating ability? I don't know. Maybe yes, maybe no. Is it fair to huge ISPs to impose net neutrality on them? Maybe yes, maybe no. But it's no less fair for them than not having net neutrality would be for companies who want to use that infrastructure. It's certainly no less fair than life would be for a child who can't afford access to health care in a black market-like total laissez-faire economic system. I'd prefer to live in an imperfect implementation of capitalism that tries to regulate out negative externalities when possible (despite often failing) and provide as much fairness for as many people as possible, to one that provides so much "fairness" to certain corporations that they can make the game unfair for everyone else, people and companies alike.
Well, actually, I'm claiming that a Free Market alternative should be able to win even if the Free Market includes the government.
Nobody is guaranteed to win, and I don't think a public option would necessarily be odious, but if someone's so gung-ho about competition, they shouldn't be scared of competing with a government.
Edit: OK, yes, I was mocking the Free Market Fundamentalists in my post. Fair's fair, they mock the government and the moderates, often using japes invented by Ronald Reagan (peace be upon him).
Except that shouldn't matter if the private company can compete on technology and service.
If your opponent has unlimited funds but the customer service policies of the DMV and the technological acumen of, uh, some very-non-technical government office of your choice, shouldn't you win?
Comcast alone reported a $1,900,000,000 PROFIT in the first 3 months of 2014.
To paraphrase Sam Waterston: "What can you buy for $2 billion that you can't still buy for $1.2 billion?"
Regardless, this issue is a municipal government's decision-making. If a municipal government doesn't like how their ISPs are acting, they should be able to do something about it. There's no reason for it to be _illegal_, even if it is a bad idea in some places: the local government should be able to do what they think is best for them.
Also, if ISP's have so little trouble making obscene profits, there should be little risk of the government failing to do the same.
Those for-profit companies have been granted extremely valuable rights-of-way by the municipal governments without needing to negotiate individually with each and every landowner whose property they cross with their lines. Their networks wouldn't be nearly as valuable if they had to negotiate and potentially (gasp!) share revenue with landowners.
2) Click "number of broadband providers" on bottom.
3) Set sliders to color places with 1 provider.
4) The huge areas of green across the US are monopolies.
Then click "unserved" to show those areas...
Interesting stuff...
* Unserved = red * served ~ 2-6 providers = green * white = one provider aka monopoly
Lots of white... I wonder how much is due to lack of interest vs "interference" of any sort.
As an analogy this is like the Greyhound Bus Line. When you buy a ticket to go from A to B on Greyhound you pay the bus company money and they provide you the service (and support as required), but the buses actually run on government constructed and maintained roads, bridges, and related infrastructure.
The internet would work the same way, the government does the physical side of things, and that gets paid for through tax and rental fees from the ISPs. Then the ISPs upsell the rental fees to cover support, advertising, and so on to provide end users with the actual service (e.g. they pay $.20/Gps to the government to maintain the physical bits, but charge $.40/Gps to the public).
This is how BT is kind of run in the UK. BT does the physical side of things, but then five or six different ISPs (including BT themselves) all resell internet using that physical infrastructure. Those ISPs then pay BT for the pleasure (and BT pays itself).
This would be one use of eminent domain that I would happily support.
OpenReach, the bit of BT that operates the infrastructure, is part of a private company, but operates like part of the civil service. They are completely impartial. It is so illegal for OpenReach to offer BT anything they don't offer anyone else, that both BT Broadband and OpenReach staff cringe at the very concept.
tl;dr public wires that many ISPs can supply service over.
For me, those 'public wires' are old and slow - all 3 places I have lived recently. The government have gifted lots of money to BT to roll out fiber, and BT have taken the cash and sat on their hands. It is an awful situation - allowing BT to sabotage our nation's competitiveness whilst stealing taxpayer money [0].
So having competition on the common infrastructure is indeed good, but the overall system definitely does not work "really well".
[0] A House of Commons Select Committee slammed the whole setup - e.g. here: http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/...
BT is private company and runs most of the infrastructure. That's not what is being proposed here.
In my case it took three weeks after signing up with an ISP, despite living a stone's throw from London. Especially bad for foreigners because in order to sign up, you first need a UK bank account, and to get that you need things like electric bills to prove your address (the apartment lease paperwork isn't enough, at least at Barclays). If you're moving here, be prepared for over a month without broadband.
Another example would be power (electricity). In some states, you can choose to buy power from solar, renewable sources, etc. The underlying infrastructure is the same; but the offerings change.
In the case of Internet, the government basically would give you access to some NAP or exchange; to get onto the Internet, you would have to buy access from some provider. Providers could differentiate themselves by a variety of services: some offering total privacy; some offering caching services so you get your content faster; some offering DVR/cloud services; etc. etc.
It is time we started treating access to the Internet as a service provided by the municipality, like water, power, sewage, roads, etc.
Two anecdotes:
1. In FL I was in a fairly small college town, 150k people. GRU was the utility company. We paid $13/mo connection fee plus a marginal rate of $0.084/kWh (plus the "fuel adjustment" which is of course never in your favor) since it was basically impossible to use less in the heat (https://www.gru.com/Portals/0/Legacy/Pdf/RatesCharges.pdf). In TX I now pay $0.08 with no connection fee or adjustments of which about $0.02/kWh goes for line maintenance and if I commit to buying at least 2MWh/mo I can pay even less.
2. A friend from Florida had a brother who was working for the Florida Utility Commission (http://www.psc.state.fl.us/) approving or denying utilities' requests to raise their rates. Once he's been there for a few years his plan is to become a consultant to help the utility companies game the system and raise their rates.
Considering most of the other nearby municipalities have to live with dialup or (agonizingly slow) satellite internet, it's been a big draw to the area. I think it absolutely makes a ton of sense for rural areas; if I had a remote job it would be very tempting to head out there and get an acreage.
I feel like splitting it up and having municipalities responsible for their own infrastructure makes it easier for the common man to get involved, too. You can show up at city council and express an opinion or volunteering for a committee a lot easier than walking into a federal building and doing the same.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/small-alberta-town-gets-ma...
What's the setup fee to run fiber 100 feet and into your house to set up the box? Because Verizon did it for free.
I still think private competition is better here. Verizon only did it for free because they're trying to tread on Time Warner, which is the way it should be.
Local power monopolies in many areas, at least, have to provide options for alternate power sources. Existing regulated telco monopolies have to let other providers use their infrastructure.
I think municipalities should be able to play that role, or to deem it a function of the city / county and contract out for it, letting private players compete in a market with a guaranteed baseline service.
In my neighborhood they ran promos (we have 3 competing high-speed ISPs) but even then some people reported having to call to actually get the correct bill.
Wouldn't be anything unusual, except for the fact that the nearest address to these doorsteps that could get this service were 55 miles away in Seattle.
I do wonder if Olds is just covering their costs (likely) or are turning a profit (unlikely) (most municipal initiatives I've seen aimed to provide bandwidth at cost)?
The infrastructure is new and shiny now, and works well, but in 15 years what will it look like? Most state highways systems are in atrocious condition, let alone federal interstates. If the municipal is not turning a profit (even a slight one), there might not be incentive/budget to continuously upgrade the infrastructure as new technology becomes available.
I think I would prefer a system in-which municipals lay and operate fiber throughout the city, but don't connect to the end users -- instead leaving that up to small ISP's to make the final termination and provide bandwidth (pay for the upstream, etc). This way the fiber can be available to a greater many small ISP's and give them a good footing to compete with the BIG5 and more, while simultaneously providing an incentive to keep the infrastructure current (better than the small ISP's could lay themselves and upgrades paid for by leasing fees from downstream).
Something along those lines would spur small business (small ISP) growth while forcing the BIG5 to play more fair since consumers would have a significantly larger selection of ISP's in a relatively short time.
The cost of maintaining a fixed amount of network bandwidth however, doesn't that decrease more-or-less with Moore's law? Especially if the lines are fiber, the cable can break and need to be replaced, but it never needs to be "upgraded" and the devices at either end will become exponentially more powerful over time for the same cost per port.
And to your point, if you the muni is responsible for little more than the fiber line itself, it really is a simple matter to maintain them, i.e. completely predictable cost structure.
That's what I was talking about. However, if the muni is responsible for the entire network, ie. routing, dc's, backup generators, upstream bandwidth, CPE devices (home termination routers/wifi access points), etc... those are all costs that might increase and/or be unpredictable, and at the very least will require some sort of re-investment from time-to-time to keep the network "current" in regards to technology used.
For example, how many years will the muni get out of the core routers they buy today? It will depend on the quality/upgradability of them when purchased, network demand/load, number of subscribers, future requirements for traffic shaping, etc. Same goes with their switches, load balancers, and other network equipment.
The actual lines themselves are unlikely to ever "break" unless someone puts a backhoe through them on a construction site, etc. So they are a relatively fixed-cost. Every home in a city could be "fiber-ready", and once you move in you get a choice of local ISP to use. There would be many local ISP's to choose from, and due to competition among themselves, service quality would increase.
Leaving everything to the muni also opens a door for vendors to oversell high margin equipment to the muni, effectively making the local tax-payer and/or subscriber foot the bill with little choice. Allowing small/local ISP's to compete for the "last mile" can reduce that cost burden based on what that particular business chooses to run equipment-wise (and to be competitive, they will strive to do the most with what they have instead of opting for the most expensive offering from the vendor, etc).
This sounds nice in theory, but some people wouldn't be able to deal with the isolation. When it comes to working remotely, it becomes too easy to just get stuck in your own world, so you need to force yourself to get out and connect with others. It's one of those things that you probably won't find out until you actually start living in the middle of nowhere and/or working remotely.
The problem with current Title II negotiations is that they still only involve top-level government officials and corporate execs. I'm afraid of making the rules too vindictive, but that doesn't mean I don't think what's currently happening is shady.
Why try to solve the internet forever in one fell swoop? Any such effort is almost certainly doomed to fail.
Municipalities sharing what does and does not work over time, and spreading working ideas to new places like wildfire is more like open-source, more agile, and more anarchist, though that's probably not a selling point for most people worded as such. ;)
Municipal governments: the cause of, and solution to, your ISP woes.
It reminds me of housing. 1) Governments restrict new housing. 2) Housing becomes unaffordable. 3) Government builds public housing because "the free market has failed."
Wait, shouldn't that be easy for them to compete with, then? You say it like terrible speeds and service are somehow challenging competition for the cable company? Of course, they would prefer no competition at all, as all companies would.
By the way, our municipal ISP is opposed to net neutrality.
> Wait, shouldn't that be easy for them to compete with, then?
The suggestion that having competition which is 'crappy' somehow encourages worse service than having a monopoly with no competition at all, seems bizarre to me.
First is service, second is new technology, and third is support. They simply have to offer the baseline requirement and all responsibility after that is farmed off. Farmed off to companies which meet very politically correct setups.
Want to see corruption hit an all new level, mandate this. It will turn into the same mess many city airports have become. Home of political friends and family. Serving the places THEY live, you might get some if your in the right zip code.
This is the same national government which people blame for everything wrong but suddenly they think it will get this right?
No one is mandating municipal ISPs. The claim is simply that there should be competition in markets, and in many cities (like mine) there is no competition by law.
My city does a great job with providing me with cheap electricity, clean water, and emergency services. Just because a group of people work for local government rather than a giant corporation doesn't make them any more or less lazy or evil.
Perhaps if my city starts investigating a municipal ISP, my one and only commercial broadband provider will finally get of their asses and upgrade my bandwidth, my uptime, and the terrible modem they made me pay for.
And whose fault is that? Yep, that's right, the ISPs.
The ISPs love to play this game of "shut the door after I've gone through it". They get the municipal governments to sign exclusivity clauses and various other laws to keep competition out.
I mean, think about it: nothing gets done in the government unless someone wants it and is willing to bribe the right people for it. Why the heck would the government go out of its way to set up roadblocks for ISPs if no one wanted it?
Plus, they won't be "running" the Internet; they would be providing a link from point A (your domicile) to point B (the gateway or NAP).
Munis really just want to take a pound of flesh from everyone who enters the market.
If it was just cable companies owning the munis then the cable companies would have gotten a sweet deal.
>Why the heck would the government go out of its way to set up roadblocks for ISPs if no one wanted it?
People hate direct taxes on themselves and don't notice indirect taxes they pay. The guy who proposes a 50 cent increase per 1000 dollars of house gets kicked out of office. The guy who builds a new school because he gouged comcast is popular, even if its the same money.
I think this is the key. And any restriction can be an indirect tax, e.g. the requirement to serve the whole city, not just the areas that the ISP chooses.
These contracts are signed under duress, then? Your representatives are free to not sign the contract.
Truthfully, as the great-grandparent said, the muni's did this, and now you want them to build broadband networks?
This will require more regulation of those networks when the muni's decide to sell your info to put ads on the connections (or whatever) due to lowering tax revenue, or whatever.
Seriously. I love the idea of muni broadband, and there are plenty of municipalities where I think it would go well due to the structure/tenor of those local governments, but i would be vastly afraid of what would happen elsewhere :(
After all, most of these government have had no trouble placing things like red light cameras and causing more rear-end accidents for revenue, and take your pick of any 5 harebrained schemes to save the children.
Provo is a very unique city. It's a big city, but most of its residents are college students or young, newly married recent graduates. It's also a technology hotspot. Comparing the success of its fiber project to predict the success in other cities is hardly fair. For the record, Google Fiber has really lit up this town. Internet service here is unbearable unless you have Google Fiber (or deep pockets to dish out for Comcast). My building only has CenturyLink, and service just came back up an hour ago after suffering 80% packet loss for the last day. And this is our regular experience.
Competition for ISPs, especially around here, is good (Veracity has been grappling to upgrade their network, and Comcast, well, everyone still hates them). On the other hand, the behavior and quality of service from American ISPs in the last 10 years is inexcusable. While I do think that private companies will do better "in the long run", time is running out for them to prove themselves.
Google Fiber faces the same problem, and this, I suspect, is precisely why my building's management company decided to forgo Google Fiber for DSL. Yuck. Fortunately, Google Fiber generated enough hype and made the installation fee so low that it appealed to lots of landlords.
If people want municipal broadband, let them form non-profits to provide it through voluntary donations. That should be legal, and if it's not, that'd be something to fix.
Obama isn't trying to rally all the states to create broadband that competes with the big telecoms, he's proposing we strike down laws that telecoms lobbied for that forces people not to form their own local broadband. So what we have currently is citizens being forced NOT to exercise the democratic process thanks to the efforts of large companies. That is laissez-faire capitalism at work, my friend, in it's most common form.
Secondly, I can't imagine anybody in the world (US citizen or not) thinking the US needs to move more towards laissez-faire capitalism. It's about as brutally capitalist/monopolistic/imperialist as anyone could ever want, and the citizens' collective voice has never been so drowned out as it has right now. Any time anyone even talks about some kind of social service or public good (including local broadband), everyone comes out of the woodwork screaming "COMMUNISM!!!"
What we need is to strangle our corporate culture back into complete submission of the American people. No more spending our tax dollars invading countries or setting up puppet dictators so the corporate good ol' boys can steal from the locals. No more politicians entirely in the pocket of a bunch of greedy fucks, fighting for legislation they don't even understand. No more US banks destroying the world economy and having zero repercussions whatsoever.
In what world is it reasonable to want more of these things?
a) some people setting up a non-profit to offer broadband, provided by voluntary donations, sponsorship, whatever
and
b) local Government taxing people to offer same
The former is as I understand it entirely legal, and entirely compatible with a free market.
In 2000, the Federal Communications Commission
endorsed municipal broadband as a "best practice"
for bringing broadband to under served communities.
The FCC also addressed the question of whether a
municipality was an "entity" under the
Telecommunications Act which mandates that "No State
or local statute or regulation, or other State or
local legal requirement, may prohibit or have the
effect of prohibiting the ability of any entity to
provide any interstate or intrastate
telecommunications service." 47 USC 253(a). The
legal question revolved around whether a state could
prevent a municipality, as its subordinate
government body, from entering the telecommunication
market. In the case of Missouri Municipal League v.
Nixon, the U.S. Supreme Court concluded that a
municipality was not an entity under the
Telecommunications Act and that a state could
determine what authority its own subordinate
jurisdictions had.
It's also possible that the FCC is considering using some different regulatory authority to preempt state laws this time.
If the city owned the lines, it would put all ISP's on a level playing field and enable broadband competition for the first time. They wouldn't be able overcharge you 10,000% mark up for the price of bandwidth anymore, and they'd have to compete based on the quality of their service.
My concern is that government often does not have any incentive to innovate and often operates extremely inefficient due to bureaucracy.
As far as opening up for competing ISPs I'm all in favor of that.
However, I would be much more in favor of a building tenant being the owner of the last mile line and contracting out work to a 3rd party company. That way the tenant has the option to lease or purchase outright. Let the tenant decide the level of quality and the price they are willing to pay.
With taxes and the gov't providing it you take away choice and force people to pay for things they may not need. Or if they want to pay more for higher quality, they don't really have that option either.
Let's build this internet cornerstone for commerce like Eisenhower's interstate system. Everyone can build on a platform that puts us back in competition for internet bandwidth/throughput with the surpassing world. We do not want to be behind in the bandwidth race, maybe if we make it a bandwidth race or war we can make it happen.
It needs to be done this way. By all means, pay companies for their investment in infrastructure, after the fact - not before, like has already happened, where these companies were given billions to expand rollouts and we got, well, very little.
There will always be things the government buys that you won't particularly want or feel are necessary.
This should be a case study in every civics class...
I can already imagine it! My tax dollars paying for Comcast level quality service, at the same time I'll be receiving internet in the most "fair" way possible ("fair" being in quotes because who knows what legislation will be placed on it).
Yeah, I'm just looking forward to the day they enforce the whole Google-Verizon frequency band agreement. Or perhaps when they don't sell exclusive rights for fiber connections.
In all honesty, I'll take Comcast over the government any day of the week. At least Comcast has an incentive to make money (hopefully reducing corporate waste). The government will have far more bureaucratic bloat and either fund it with tax dollars or end up charging the same amount. I really loved how the healthcare system has been improved.
> The Obama administration is also planning to offer subsidies to promote investments in local broadband.
While $70 doesn't seem like an outrageously great deal (it is good), it brings up an interesting point my dad had the other day. Is the true cost of that gigabit internet $100/mo, and tax dollars subsidize $30 while you cover the other $70 as stated? If municipalities truly can provide faster cheaper internet I'm all for it; however, I would hate to have another reason to bump taxes, nor a reason to crowd out competition and remove the incentive for innovation.
Edit: There's also Guifi.net in Spain, http://guifi.net/en
For my eye, I think that CJDNS is the most likely of the current candidates to emerge as useful for this sort of implementation.
Squandered his political capital on a shitty health care reform bill, got shell shocked by Republican opposition and crawled up his own ass for a couple of years. Now that he doesn't give a shit about elections anymore he's actually doing something.
More progressive and pro-active then basically socializing 1/7th of the US economy with the ACA?
Wow.
[edit] I used the wrong term "socializing" when I meant "intervening in"
I believe in the power in markets and price signaling, ala Hayek, and there is nothing unsophisticated about that.
We agree on more then you may be aware...the HI industry is a giant problem, and must be fundamentally altered for the market-based solutions I prefer to do their magic.
Based on your other comment, it appears that neither of you know what socialism is.
That also means that insurance is the wrong model.
So what's left?
What's socialist about a fine for not purchasing insurance from private corporations?!
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2010/dec/16/...
I suspect he thought health care for all was more important than fast internet for all.
What does that even mean? Do people in Smallville use the internet differently or not like to their video to buffer too fast? A mishmash of half-assed local standards was how the road network used to be, until Dwight Eisenhower came to power and argued that the US deserved something better than the miserably inefficient network it had, and championed the development of the Federal Highway System.
I'm not being sarcastic here: I really want to know what you mean by 'the network that's right for them.' Are inferior networks right for poorer towns? Should there be different network standards in different states? I presume you like the way that telephone service is uniform across the whole US, so that making a call is procedurally identical whether you're in Alaska or the Florida panhandle. What positive advantage do you see in having internet accessibility be inconsistent? I recognize that you regard the capital cost of a national network as a disadvantage, but I don't see a clear benefit to your proposal. If you're all for municipally run internet, does that mean you do favor national regulation forbidding local monopolies or strategic litigation designed to prevent municipalities from setting up their own networks, as proposed in some states?
Yes. In rural areas, the cost per mile is much more important than in the city. If gigabit costs 10% more per mile than 100Mbit, is it worth it? Their burdens per person will be higher, in areas where the wage is typically lower. Perhaps 10Mbit wireless would be much cheaper per customer; maybe much more affordable for local residents (who have to pay through fees or taxes, one way or another).
Similar thing with septic versus sewer[0]. You won't have septic in larger towns, but sewer costs can be stifling.
[0] http://lancasteronline.com/news/health/small-iowa-towns-stru...
And yes, there should absolutely be different standards in different places. The most obvious relevant variable is population density: there are a lot fewer feet of fiber between residents in Manhattan than residents in rural Montana. Something that makes perfect economic sense in San Francisco's Financial District might be ruinously expensive to deploy in a small town in Oklahoma.
The Internet isn't a special snowflake here. No one builds skyscrapers in farming villages because it would be hideously costly and the local tax base couldn't support it. Same with gigabit fiber: 10,000 homes might be able to afford having better access brought in than could a hamlet of 50 people.
That's where the majority of the world disagrees with you; [1] the Internet is a special snowflake to the point of most agreeing it should be a basic human right.
ISP: "It's not our fault, it's your demarc". Demarc: "It's not our fault, it's the city". City: "It's not our fault, it's the ISP."
A better solution would be for the building owner to provide for the last line and contract the work out to 3rd parties. This gives them control over price, timing, quality, and maintenance. It also creates a market for last mile line installers and competition.
With a government run last mile you have none of those choices. If you aren't satisfied with the level of service you have no options. If you don't want to subsidize someone else's Internet, you have no options. If you want to upgrade you line, you have no options.
I think there is a balance to be had between too much government and not enough. I think its easy to sway too far one way or another as history has shown, and neither are particularly good. Corporations will run rampant just like government will, given the freedom to do so.
A lot of people look at a smaller government as increasing their personal liberty, which is true for some issues, but for other areas it only means swapping out one organization for another (which may not be aligned with your interests).
Datacenters are also a completely reasonable metaphor, you pay the facility to run most wiring for a cross-connect to an ISP or between cages / floors, but you can provide your own transit or buy transit from any number of providers, all of whom are just other customers.
"White House just endorsed CISPA measures, two years after veto threat" http://www.zdnet.com/article/white-house-just-endorsed-contr...
Coincidence?
What kind of insane cyberattacks could you get from 10% of the consumer market having gigabit connections? How much backbone upgrades would there be required?
> But House Republicans don't agree. Last year, the Republican-controlled House passed language banning the FCC from banning states from banning cities from building municipal networks.
You can always trust those guys to work against consumers.
Can someone explain this? The FCC is part of the administrative branch right? Don't they work for the President? Why doesn't he just tell them to preempt the laws?
Clearly illegal, but who's taking them to task?
In Waterloo, IA, our neighboring town, the city council initially approved then backed out of working with Cedar Falls to participate in a greater municipal fiber deployment. Following a storm in 2009 that damaged utility lines on poles, I believe Cedar Falls moved forward with their plans to deploy fiber and deployed service to almost all homes over the course of a year and a half. The transition was seamless, and since then bandwidth has more than quintupled for the regular tier. I get 50/25 and it's rock solid. The best internet service I've ever had.
On the other hand, as an IT consultant I have businesses I work with in Waterloo. Some of them would like to switch to technologies like VOIP to reduce costs, but their Mediacom cable goes down on a weekly basis. I have one client for whom I have never seen a whole month of uptime, and they have had multiple business days without service in the past year. The only alternative for most of my clients is CenturyLink DSL, which hardly qualifies as broadband with most of the DSLAMs too widely distributed and over-subscribed for reliable throughput.
Mediacom is the same company that signed a letter to congress decrying municipal investment, and published a press release today[1] about how insulting it was that the President chose to support a municipal utility instead of their investment in Iowa.
If companies like Mediacom and Century Link really cared about providing a service, they would support Title II and competition. But they don't. The high barrier to entry suits them just fine, and as a result, internet options are terrible in Waterloo, and technology businesses have fled to Cedar Falls. We've even apparently been named the "Digital Capital" by Google (but I have no idea what that means, I personally think Des Moines has the best access to the backbone with Microsoft and Facebook both opening up datacenters there).
Sure, our gigabit fiber isn't $70 here, like Google offered, but it's there. And my internet service has never been more reliable. I know people who have Mediacom and Centurylink, and they hate it. And unlike their press release speaks about, the fiber deployment wasn't financially unsustainable or a waste of taxpayer dollars. As Mediacom says, "there is no reason to invest even more government dollars in municipally-owned broadband ventures, many of which wind up in financial difficulty."
Well, I'm curious if Mr. Commisso of Mediacom did any fact checking. CFU is self-funded. Even better, CFU actually contributes back to the city's general fund its excess revenue. It's not so much "spending taxpayer money" as it is saving, at least now that it's up and running.
Edited in addendum: Oh yeah, and for something the network engineers here might approve of: even when torrenting at 50mbps, my latency to Google and Microsoft is unchanged (10-13ms) and there appears to be little or no bufferbloat causing congestion. I've been able to play competitive real-time games and Skype while streaming, downloading, etc.
[1] http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20150114006231/en/Medi...
the infrastructure requirements, costs, and issues for these communities are extremely different.
As such, there may as well not be any such laws in place, as they would only serve to supply false confidence.
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/10/02/poll-51-of-democrats-s...