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When I call the water company, I don't talk to some guy in India who has never heard of my state, let alone my city. When the power and water go out, the service isn't great but compared to my internet provider it would be a huge improvement. YMMV.

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I don't think net neutrality will dictate that support staff be located in America.

No, but part of the idea is that you will get small local providers again (like you did fifteen to twenty years ago), and five-man companies don't usually outsource tech support to India.

That ship has sailed. There's be no margin in the business. That's why you don't have little water utility startups popping up everywhere.

The statement was more in the direction that when it's a utility local people / municipality are responsible for the maintenance of that system, local people means that there is a far greater chance of getting local, mostly because there is someone local with _responsibility_ for keeping it working.

I worked at a utility, the phone company (GTE), in the mid-90s. Our call centers, while domestic, were certainly not local.

Customers in Muskegon, MI were always shocked that we didn't know what local street they were talking about. How could we? We were in Pennsylvania.

I don't think anyone has run a truly local call support center, for anything, in decades.

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