We need internet that isn't owned by big telecom

We need a handcrafted, vegan, artisan internet operated by SF hipsters. Most definitely.

It almost seems like semi-rural areas are a better place to start, as they're less regulated (no "cable monopoly", no NIMBYs) and the properties are too far away to have the options of Cable/DSL.

> But now you're listing places where public transit actually works and lots of people use it. It fails in SF because it's chicken and egg.

It doesn’t work well in NYC and DC. Here in DC, lines have been shut down for weeks at a time due to deferred maintenance. Several lines are completely unable to keep their scheduled time. The New Carrollton to Foggy Bottom trip is listed on the timetable at 36 minutes. (It used to be 32 minutes.) On a typical day it takes 45-50 minutes. And forget about service upgrades! Due to decades of wasteful spending and deferred maintenance, the most recent schedule change made everyone’s commute worse by decreasing rush hour train frequency. NYC is having similar, though less severe problems. They’re way behind European countries in automation and signaling despite spending substantially more money.

And yes it makes sense to compare to other municipalities. If you were proposing to have the Barcelona government run my internet here in DC, I’d say have at it. But I don’t live in Barcelona. I live in America, where our local governments re uniquely incompetent and wasteful compared to those in other developed nations.

> I half suspect the reason the incumbent ISPs don't like to upgrade is that it makes it harder to price discriminate. You can't charge $1000/month for a symmetric 100Mbps connection while offering gigabit for ~$50/month.

The price discrimination point actually cuts against municipal broadband. When the city runs things, prices become a social justice issue, which forces prices too low. NYC subway fares, for example, are just $2.75 regardless of distance, while the London Tube ranges from $3-6 (the minimum fare was over $5 using exchange rates from a couple of years ago). That’s despite the fact that operating costs for the NYC Subway are 60% higher per mile. If 50 Mbps is seen as “good enough” by voters, there will be a huge incentive to do the minimum required to hit that speed in order to drive down the price. And if you can’t price discriminate, there might not be much room in the price structure to offer higher tiers for more money. (Indeed, people hate tiered pricing for public services. See the recent outrage over congestion pricing of I-66 express lanes in DC.)

I don't know what private ISPs are like outside the D.C. area. I can push 700/700 on my FiOS regardless of time of day (and I suspect my limiting factor is the fact that my only wired machine is an Atom mini-pc with realtek nic). I find it totally not believable that DC/NYC/Phila/Baltimore (to name the last several places I've lived) could give me a similar level of service. I think it'd be more about oversubscribing OLTs until speeds during prime time dropped to just above what's necessary for Netflix. Because that's what all our other public services are like in these cities.

The US Internet model of "growing responsibly" in response to demand works. That model is also illegal in nearly every U.S. city. Municipalities require you to cover every neighborhood within some usually comically short time frame like 5 years. Indeed, US Internet has come under fire for this: http://www.citypages.com/news/us-internet-appears-to-be-redl....

> Here in DC, lines have been shut down for weeks at a time due to deferred maintenance. Several lines are completely unable to keep their scheduled time.

DC is uniquely screwed because the city is under the jurisdiction of the federal Congress, so you have the problem of representatives elected by far away constituents not caring even when the subway has high usage.

> If you were proposing to have the Barcelona government run my internet here in DC, I’d say have at it. But I don’t live in Barcelona. I live in America, where our local governments re uniquely incompetent and wasteful compared to those in other developed nations.

That's fair. And installing municipal fiber in DC probably is a bad idea. But that doesn't mean it's a bad idea in every US city or anywhere the local government is better managed.

> The price discrimination point actually cuts against municipal broadband. When the city runs things, prices become a social justice issue, which forces prices too low.

This is only true where it's true. For example, any town without a huge income disparity wouldn't have this problem, or anywhere that redistributive policies aren't locally popular. And where redistribution is popular enough to control local policy, it can be satisfied in the same way it is for food or housing -- taxpayer subsidies to low income people. Or, ideally, a UBI; but that's harder at the local level (where you can't control local immigration), and taxpayer subsidies are obviously still preferable to underfunding infrastructure. Then if the taxpayers later choose to spend less money, they can reduce the subsidies without underfunding the network.

It's not as if price discrimination is actually desirable. The profit-maximizing pricing for a food cartel is charging twenty odd times as much for normal food and then capturing the low end of the market by offering a miserable gruel for 90% of the previous average price, which is intentionally so bad it will ward off anyone who can afford to pay more. The takeaway from that can be that a food monopolist would allow the poor to lower their food bills by 10%, but only if you count solely dollars and not value for money. And that's assuming the gruel would be 10% less than now rather than 10% more -- anyone with enough market power to price discriminate tends to also have enough market power to capture more of the surplus from everybody.

> I don't know what private ISPs are like outside the D.C. area. I can push 700/700 on my FiOS regardless of time of day (and I suspect my limiting factor is the fact that my only wired machine is an Atom mini-pc with realtek nic).

90+% of the country doesn't have that. In many places you can get 50Mbps/20Mbps from Comcast, but plenty of unfortunate souls are stuck with Frontier as the only provider.

And even if you're "lucky" enough to have Comcast, their reliability is terrible. They've having an outage right now.

> I find it totally not believable that DC/NYC/Phila/Baltimore (to name the last several places I've lived) could give me a similar level of service.

These are not instances of well-managed cities. NYC is probably the least worst, but even that's more because of high density and wealthy people making up for government waste.

The ideal place for municipal fiber isn't huge high density cities that already have FiOS and two other providers, it's cities with population ~200K with enough density to be worth the candle but not so much that multiple incumbents are already providing symmetric gigabit for affordable prices.

> I think it'd be more about oversubscribing OLTs until speeds during prime time dropped to just above what's necessary for Netflix. Because that's what all our other public services are like in these cities.

The difference is the proportion of the total cost needed to add capacity. To add a subway line you have to spend a billion dollars digging tunnels, buy more subway cars and then pay to operate them indefinitely. To make the internet faster, you have a one-time cost to upgrade the terminating equipment but can reuse everything already in the ground and thereafter your operating costs are the same as before, if not lower when newer equipment is more efficient.

It's less expensive to the point that not doing it is typically either incompetence or for strategic reasons, e.g. for price discrimination or because purposely not upgrading transit links hampers video competitors and forces Netflix to pay for peering.