Towns in Massachusetts Are Building Their Own Gigabit Fiber Network
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“Our family has lived in Goshen for almost 30 years. Over that time during town meeting, we’ve debated the costs of a fire truck, an ambulance, several highway trucks and police cruisers, capping our dump, a new elementary school, an addition to the high school and now the construction of a regional broadband network. Never [before] in the history of Goshen have we had to change the venue of the meeting because so many people turned out.” All 240 voters were unanimous in their support of the bond authorization.
1. http://www.greenlightnc.com/
2. http://www.wired.com/2011/05/nc-gov-anti-muni-broadband/
3. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/05/north-carolina-su...
I don't defend big ISP monopolies. But my concern with municipal broadband is that municipalities generally do a bad job running what should be private sector services. They end up being used for patronage jobs and other political shenanigans among other things. Plus your average elected city councilman doesn't know the first thing about the technical or financial realities of running an ISP. It's more like "hey we can pass a tax levy and take some money from each citizen to build a Cadillac internet service with no concern for profit or cost." It's thinking like this that had my town buying acres of land for a "tech park" that has sat undeveloped for years, and working plans for a waste materials separation facility that no private waste hauler will build because it's a guaranteed money-loser.
I wish I had more choice in ISPs. But I don't think my neighbor should be forced to pay for my internet service.
You can privatize bus or trash service and hand the concession to someone else should the incumbent be too awful at their job, but things like water, sewage and data are natural monopolies, and for these different rules apply.
The sad thing is that we know how regulated utilities ought to be run, but we choose not to. Hence Comcast and the Enron-sponsored electricity shenanigans in CA.
I'd largely agree with this from my own experience. The caveat here in comparing water & sewage to internet service is that water and sewage service - at least what we experience as end users - hasn't changed much over the years. Municipal governments are good at managing that type of service. I'm happy with the same water and sewage service that I had 15 years ago. Not sure I'd like the same Internet service. And I'm not so sure I'd trust my city to keep such a service up to date.
I'm not so sure I'd trust my city to
keep such a service up to date.
Unfortunately some Americans don't seem very happy with the level of service the market is providing [1] - IMHO if people are attending meetings and voting in favour of municipal broadband, it indicates the private sector isn't doing a very good job of keeping services up to date either!
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/2ei1qj/after_an_inter...
The type of waste going down the toilet has changed tremendously during the 20th century. As a couple of examples, pharmaceuticals and tampons frequently go down the toilet now (even if people are told not to flush them).
Additionally, acceptance of dumping raw sewage or overflows into waterways has hugely changed. I know many people who would roll up their windows when driving over the Potomac in DC. In Boston, the Harbor was absolutely atrocious and smelled for decades.
Together, these two factors have led to large amounts of research into sewage treatment, new technologies, and upgrades nationwide. Just because you apparently are ignorant of them doesn't mean they haven't been occurring.
The pace over the last 15 years has probably been slower, but if you look at the 1970's and 1980's following the passage of the Clean Water Act, upgrades of these systems were occurring on as large a scale as ISP upgrades. In fact, they probably were larger in total cost.
While admittedly ignorant of the specific changes in water and sewage provision, I never suggested they weren't occurring - I said the experience for an end user hasn't really changed much. Even if the water quality has increased tenfold and a city's demand trebled in a decade, we're still pulling water from the tap the same way we were before, and our usage year over year doesn't change that much (on a household basis). My household needs and expectations for water service don't seem any different than 15 years ago, whereas my household needs and expectations for internet service are radically different. Governments do 'big' better than 'fast'.
The fiber network was built and maintained by the local municipality-owned power company who knows a thing or two about running grids (and already had conduits running all over the place)
And I view sanitary drinking water as a public health obligation. Internet service isn't even in that ballpark for me. It's a convenience, and one that people should be able to choose to pay for, or not.
http://images.masscec.com/uploads/attachments/ElectricUtilit...
Massachusetts has a real problem with patronage jobs, but it is at the state level, not local.
With each new community that succeeds, that's one more example we can point to in our own communities.
> broadband service in Wilson County, but is unable to expand its broadband network due to the state law
This gives the impression Greenlight covers most of the city. It's never been true: Time-Warner of Wilson doesn't even suffer real competition.
Here's a map:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Wilson,+NC/@35.7378769,-77...
I'm not aware of any place at all on Nash, Ward, 264, Airport, or Forest Hills with Greenlight. If you know someone who has it, I'd love to know where.
"Wilson's muni broadband success story" is a fairy tale kept alive by credulous reporting.
Laying water pipes is expensive.. but water pipes are good for what, 80 years? The cost spread out through bonds over a long period is not that bad.
The trick is how long is gigabit "good" internet for? In 2001, they could have built a 1mbit connection to every house and been seen as pretty awesome, but now, 15 years later, it would be pretty worthless.
Though I am not a fiber expert, I think there may be ways to future proof it so current 1gbit fiber could be 10gbit or 100gbit down the road with better back office equipment..
Let's estimate that about $60 million of the cost is the actual build out of fiber, and $20 million is other expenses. If we're going to upgrade our backend equipment every 3 years over a 20 year life span on the fiber, we're talking about another $100 million on top of our $80 million investment. So we could have constantly upgrading backroom fiber laid down on a 20 year infrastructure cycle for $180 million, or about $22,500 per household (over 20 years).
So the cost per household to lay down fiber, even if only 40% of the households are paying, is about $100/mo per household for 20 years.
Given that we need to pay bond interest rates and cut some money in for the company managing your ISP account on the fiber, we're talking more like $130/mo, maybe $150/mo.
So in short, if $130/mo-$150/mo for 1gig internet with open ISP competition instead of getting dicked by Comcast all the time sounds good, talk to your local government.
While in most cases I would agree with the uptake analysis (eg, if we were talking about coffee shops), I'm not sure that it applies to the particular case of talking about rolling out a government monopoly in place of a natural monopoly using city bonds to cover the upfront cost (and time to smother people not using the city network).
Further, I was actually just interested in plausibility: I didn't account for growth rates, the attractiveness of a city wide network, competition between ISPs, etc. That the answer was ~100 and not ~10 or ~1,000 is interesting to me, because it means that even if the technology isn't there, that the details work out a lot closer than I was expecting -- expensive, but not impossible.
tl;dr: Deciding if we should roll out government infrastructure isn't quite the same analysis as seeing if a business works, and I only did the latter as a proxy for plausibility.
If fiber is run through people's neighborhoods, 1gb is not any sort of hard limit, it is just a nice round number that coincides with 1gb ethernet being a limit of most people's equipment. Even now DOCSIS 3.0 can give people 300mb connections over cable, so cable has advanced an enormous amount.
Just like an ethernet cable has scaled up from 10mb to 1000mb fiber can carry more. You could wire your home up with a 40gb network right now if you wanted to pay for the $400 network cards and more expensive routers.
I am purposefully not even addressing the multiplicative power of multi-modal fiber connections, or any such in-medium improvements.
Fiber strands are also quite cheap. It is often faster, cheaper and easier to direct bury a fiber cable with "enough" fiber strands to cater for current and any forseeable demand than to install a condiit system in rural areas.
Furthermore it is quite rare to replace the fiber in a last mile network. I can't recall a single instance since single mode fiber was introduced. It just isn't cost effective. It's much easier, cheaper and faster to just change the electronics/optics.
Even adding more fiber strands by means of a new cable is rare. Again it just isn't cost effective. It's much easier, cheaper and faster to just change the electronics/optics. Even so, in rural areas it is just cheaper to plow down another cable than to build a conduit network.
In summary, a conduit system is more expensive to install, repair and maintain than a direct burial network. Aerial systems are generally even cheaper, but have their own downsides.
A direct burial network might not be as flexible and easily upgradeable as a conduit system, but sometimes this does not matter, especially if you are on a fixed budget.
Where I lived in Maryland (which installed FIOS, then comcast upgrades, then a municipal broadband network), they literally tore up the same streets 3 times in a year and a half.
This is why it's so expensive.
But nobody wants to have to subsidize anyone else when they do work, so they fight regulations around burying extra/empty conduit tooth and nail.
Yes, of course. I'm not advocating direct burial in all circumstances, just that it should be considered on it's own merits in rural deployments. Likewise one should not always build a full conduit system.
"It also makes since for cities to require anyone tearing the concrete/pavement up to allow other companies to lay conduit at the same time- it doesn't cost anything extra to the company doing the tearing up to let others install conduit into the same trench."
It always takes a bit of time, effort and planning. Subcontractors also want to be paid for any extra work, so there is always the question of who will carry that cost.
There are a lot of models for sharing digging costs, from simple co-dig projects to full scale infrastructure sharing efforts as in Stockholm.
The funny thing is that sharing dig costs would not result in a subsidy for anyone. It would actually save costs for all parties, but competition being what it is, large players would rather take the full cost hit than allow a potential competitor to also lower their costs. Barrier of entry and all that.
The EU is actually about to mandate shared digging to solve this problem.
You caught me only thinking of "town" as town and not the entirety. So in that way, I 100% agree with you that pulling pipes out to Farmer Bob's house is not a good use of capital or time.
However, while I was considering the mistake I made, it also seems that burying the fiber isn't a good use of capital for almost the same reason. I would bet that these rural areas have power and phone (maybe even cable, too) provisioned via poles and thus stringing the fiber along the poles would be the approach I would take, barring some fantastic reason why that wouldn't work [copper handles high winds better? icing? who knows].
Well, as they say, it depends. Purely on it's own aerial fiber is often cheaper than buried fiber to install. However the aerial plant is more exposed (both in good and bad), so lifetime costs depend on the location. The biggest issue is however access to poles and specifically at what cost. Pole fees and make ready work can easily push costs above direct burial costs, if there are no land usage fees and you can bury the fiber by plowing.
> barring some fantastic reason why that wouldn't work [copper handles high winds better? icing? who knows].
No need to go all fancy. Just think of shotguns, squirrels and termites.
> The kind of people who like fiber
My guess is they could charge around 60$ a month and make significant profit while paying down the outstanding loans faster than depreciation.
So no, they didn't spend huge amounts of money just to avoid the monopolist ISPs as there are none servicing the area. And this is pretty typical of the towns participating, it's not that they have crappy service, it's that they have NO service.
Also, having fiber has other ramifications. Try selling a house these days without available broadband and tell me how far you get or how much you have to drop the price. You'll get nowhere. My parents went through this several years ago when they were planning on moving, and quite literally had people simply turn around walk out when they found out that broadband was unavailable at the house.
Verizon is basically letting the copper in the area rot... it wasn't until 97? or 98? that my parents got touch tone dialing, and after every storm the line quality got worse and worse. At least now, for better or worse, the town and its residents are on the hook for the quality of service.
And I think everyone should have to dogfood their own products over a satellite connection. You'd be surprised how much everything sucks or breaks when you've got huge latency and basically modem++ speeds.
There is no way I can tell you how rural it is. When we had a medical emergency we speed 90 mph + one time down the road to meet the ambulance half way to the hospital that was 45 minutes away. Houses are about 1/2 mile away from each other on dirt roads that are not plowed during the winter. The center of town equals one general store and the post office and maybe 8 homes. The one saving grace for funding is that many rich and famous people have summer homes there. It would be great for these people to actually have
Fun bit about not plowed roads in winter. We had a storm come through one year in the... 90's? can't recall but anyway the national guard had to, well there is no good way to describe this, tunnel might be a good analogy, their way through 13" snow drifts.
That was fun. Was like driving through the death star for the rest of the winter.
I was fairly certain Verizon refused to deploy after Menino denied them tax breaks for a buildout, and have declared that they will never deploy within city limits. Ever.
If I could get FiOS within Boston city limits, I would've moved to said neighborhood already. To be fair I can't complain about Comcast's service over the past 7 years at all -- I get what I pay for, been down once ever I think -- but I'd take FiOS in a heartbeat.
You cannot get FiOS within Boston city limits. Though I'm well aware that you can get FiOS in surrounding cities.