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Comcast rejected by small town, residents vote for municipal fiber instead

arstechnica.com

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Re: Comcast rejected by small town, residents vote for municipal fiber instead

#4
1300 residents? How many individual premises? That is a rather small scan gpon project. Hope they hire someone with a clue and experience to build and run it, there is not a lot of Venn diagram overlap between municipal managers and network engineers.

I do hope they realize that if they want to do everything themselves, they'll still need transport links to the nearest major IX point, and IP transit upstreams. I don't know of many small towns, sub 5000 population, that have successfully become their own "real" ISP (ARIN AS, their own IP space, presence at an ix with a bgp speaking router, all of the typical ISP back-end operational support software). In addition to all of the costs of being a wholly facilities based ISP at layer 1 in the OSI model.

Another way to do it is for the town to simply build dark fiber, and rent it to interested ISPs. Or to build a layer 2 gpon transport network and do nothing at L3, and no individual customer service, and let different ISPs compete for business with the town running the gpon OLTs only.

Re: Comcast rejected by small town, residents vote for municipal fiber instead

#5
post #4

1300 residents? How many individual premises? That is a rather small scan gpon project. Hope they hire someone with a clue and experience to build and run it, there is not a lot of Venn diagram overlap between municipal managers and network engineers. I do hope they realize that if they want to do everything themselves, they'll still need transport links to the nearest major IX point, and IP transit upstreams. I don'…

Sounds like they need to hire you. Your third option sounds pretty smart.

Re: Comcast rejected by small town, residents vote for municipal fiber instead

#8
post #7

When the company offerings can be beaten with local government offerings you know something is bad. Wondering why US has such terrible internet options.

corruption.

Yup. Good old corruption. Funny fact I learned recently: The US is one of the most corrupt countries in the first world, especially at the state and municipal level.

Re: Comcast rejected by small town, residents vote for municipal fiber instead

#9
post #7

When the company offerings can be beaten with local government offerings you know something is bad. Wondering why US has such terrible internet options.

corruption.

To people who downvoted op - it's absolutely corruption.

Comcast lobbies the government, sues competitors and hogs taxpayer money to remain in power.

Re: Comcast rejected by small town, residents vote for municipal fiber instead

#10

When the company offerings can be beaten with local government offerings you know something is bad. Wondering why US has such terrible internet options.

It's inevitable when a private entity has monopoly of infrastructure. The people have no choice but to buy from it, the private entity has minimal incentive to invest in the infrastructure since it has a guaranteed revenue stream. The only thing they have to do is keep the population placated just enough so that enough voters don't get mobilized to make a stink out of it. For utilities, there is no reason why a private entity should have complete control over it. Water, sewer, gas, electricity, and internet infrastructure should be owned by taxpayers.
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