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Comment by curun1r | Hacker News Reader

> it would bite us later if we have a massive shift to municipal broadband.

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.

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Thanks for explaining this important point. Competition outside of the last mile would be good for everyone, and the last mile infrastructure makes a lot of sense to run as a utility.

That's exactly what I was trying to get across, if I did so poorly, I apologize.

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.

> If done right

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.

You're right, it is a pretty big if.

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.

The useful life of fiber installs can be even shorter than 10 years in specific cases [1].

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...

When you are dealing with a city of millions does it really seem right to fish one wire at a time? That means terminating the wire at the home too. With multiple ISP's how many of them would need access to the "Main St" section at a time? The cost of booking a time, sending a worker out to fish and terminate possibly kilometers of wire per customer as each customer signs up would be a logistical nightmare. Then what happens when the customer leaves you for the other guy? Never mind the cost differential of running one wire vs bundle of wire.

Except you almost never want to pull fiber when you can help it (fiber is far more fragile than copper). In the scenario you describe, instead of burying a conduit, you would just bury a jacketed fiber bundle containing hundreds of fiber threads, even if you only need a couple dozen right now. This is where the term "dark fiber" comes from. Also, in this scenario, if a fiber cable "goes bad", you can just swap out another, unused cable.

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).

Good points, thanks for contributing your domain knowledge. So the issue seems to remain: fiber can be made in different ways to accommodate different signaling technologies, and what we lay down into the ground and run through buildings today might not be what we want to use 5/10/15 years from now. Is there a potential way to economically mitigate that, and at the same time turn Internet access into a public utility so the bulk of the initial capital costs are somehow only paid once by the utility?

This is how UTOPIA in Utah is run. There are a myriad of ISPs to choose from, and the pricing is excellent ($70/mo for gigabit from Xmission, for example).

http://www.utopianet.org/pricelist/

Ohh how I wish we had that further north. Or that we could get logan city council to see the benefit of UTOPIA

That's kind of how it works in the UK, with BT being that last-mile provider for every UK ISP.

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...

BT is not the last-mile provider for every UK ISP. For starters there's Virgin (cable), but there are also a growing number of smaller providers that bypass BT/OpenReach to provide both fibre and wireless services (LTE in particular) without it.

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.

4 out of 5 of the places I've lived in London had DSL but no cable, so for 80% of my experience in London BT was the onyl last mile provider available.

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.

Yes. But the way the system in the UK works is the worst of both worlds. Openreach is a private company (a subsidiary of BT I believe), which has been granted a monopoly and as a result has to be constantly audited by the government at great expense to ensure that they are not making too much profit or favouring some ISP's over others. As a result, the way they make a profit for their shareholders is by being as tight as possible about everything that has no regulated minimum requirement.

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.

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