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

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

#81

Post by jgroszko »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #26
49531 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're no more corrupt than large corporate players, but I can vote for my local government.

> They're no more corrupt than large corporate players, but I can vote for my local government My point is that's a terrible baseline to settle for. If our metric for "should we do it" is solely "is it better than Comcast," we've got a problem. My specific concern is around local police having expanded access to locals' internet activity.

Seems to me law enforcement having access to our internet activity (presumably moderated by the courts) is better than private companies just selling that data to the highest bidder

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

#82

Post by rmrfrmrf »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #15
epoch_100 wrote: post #2

Good! By allowing individual municipalities to manage their own Internet infrastructure, we can help keep the Internet from becoming effectively owned by the likes of Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon.

> By allowing individual municipalities to manage their own Internet infrastructure, we can help keep the Internet from becoming effectively owned by the likes of Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon I'm nervous about how thoughtlessly we're embracing public ISP ownership. Local governments are notoriously corrupt, in both politics and police. These referenda expand their power without rebalancing any checks or balances. We ju…

Privatization has been a disaster for US broadband. I'd love to know which local governments you're talking about, especially considering that all cases of corruption I've heard center around bribes from private capital to influence public policy. If anything, public internet infrastructure would reduce corruption given the number of local governments that grant statuatory monopolies to telcos.

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

#83

Post by 51lver »

paulie_a wrote: post #63
takeda wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best way is to let the city provide the last mile infrastructure (the connection between nearest POP and your house), and then lease it to ISPs for a fee to maintain it. That way we once again can have competition like during the time DSL was popular (telcos were required to lease their wires, that's why there was so much choice of ISP for anyone who remembers early 2000)

The dsl days were terrible. Installers would literally move wires from a competitor because that green box didn't have the capacity.

ISPs are cheap. They use contractors rather than do the work themselves. Keeps them blameless.

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

#84

Post by netcan »

quasse wrote: post #54
takeda wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best way is to let the city provide the last mile infrastructure (the connection between nearest POP and your house), and then lease it to ISPs for a fee to maintain it. That way we once again can have competition like during the time DSL was popular (telcos were required to lease their wires, that's why there was so much choice of ISP for anyone who remembers early 2000)

I hear this argument all the time, but I don't really see it. What value is the ISP providing here? They sell you service on physical infrastructure that you the taxpayer already paid for? Peering? It seems like it would be much more efficient for a municipality to just negotiate citywide peering agreements for everyone. Some people try to push the "value adds" line, like IPTV and phone service, but I don't see any r…

Some things tend to be outside the competence of government departments. Face-to-consumer business tends to be one of them.

Public telcomms were the norm in most of the world (sans US) until the 80s-90s. It wasn't good.

What an ISP is is customer support & infrastructure. These sorts of ideas make ISPs less infrastructure, more customer facing services.

Btw, this is not some untested theory. It's been done a bunch of times. Work's well enough, done right.

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

#85

Post by jessaustin »

hedvig wrote: post #75
jessaustin wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps I wasn't clear. It's obvious that some people simply prefer to live in areas of relatively sparse population. What is in question are the benefits of imposing cumbersome governance structures on situations that don't require them. In a rural USA context, basic health and safety minimums are adequately enforced by the county. In some locations there might be a sewer & water district with part-time local admini…

FCC has been coopted by industry, so I don't think that excuse flies anymore.

As if that's a recent thing? It was "coopted" from its creation. It was created to protect Ma Bell (later the "daughters bell" ATT, VZN) and that's all it has ever done. ILECs don't want small WISPs to succeed, so FCC works against small WISPs. (I'm not talking about MNOs, because of course all the FCC protection allowed ATT and VZN to buy and steal their way into that.)

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

#86

Post by bronco21016 »

I hate Comcast with a passion and have always fantasized about living in a progressive municipality that provides fiber to the home. However, a few years ago I bought a home and it’s only been over the last 6 months or so I’ve realized how horribly corrupt and mismanaged small city governments can be. We’re being sucked dry by our mayor who hired her cousin as city manager for an exorbitant compensation package. They had no problem spending millions on extravgently updating the city offices but have come to residents with their hands out begging for money through special assessments to fix our roads, storm water drains, and water mains that are unusable for firefighting (and the city does not have a tanker truck).

My point is simply that I’m not sure a purely municipal broadband is the panacea we all hope for. In some cases it may be better to stick with the devil you know vs the horribly slow, beaurctatic devil you don’t.

I hope that over time we find a municipal model that works well and serves residents with cutting edge broadband. Until then I’ll continue to attempt to vote these clowns out.

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

#87

Post by JumpCrisscross »

rayiner wrote: post #80
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America's present ISP situation is worse than almost any alternative. Presently, the best-run municipalities are exploring municipal broadband. Their experiences will be positive. But not all municipalities are well-run. And today's well-run municipalities turn into tomorrow dumpster fires. Publicly-owned infrastructure rented to private provider-maintainers is a proven model. It isn't a fire-and-forget solution. But…

> America's present ISP situation is worse than almost any alternative. I strongly disagree. Have you ever been to Germany? All the infrastructure we have in the U.S. is shit compared to Germany. The roads, the trains, etc. The one bit of infrastructure in the U.S. that isn't shit in comparison is broadband.

> Have you ever been to Germany? All the infrastructure we have in the U.S. is shit compared to Germany.

As a Swiss New Yorker, I get where you're coming from. It doesn't lightly occur to me that our subways were almost entirely built by private companies. (With heap loads of public funding, albeit.) We have ISP competition in New York, which is how we get superior service. That isn't the case in much of America; letting municipalities be that competition is, to me, better than letting Comcast et al retain their monopolies.

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

#88

Post by soundwave106 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #30
frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>how is it any better than current oligopoly? I mean I suppose you could ask the people that voted for it. >The solution should be raising competitiveness of the market. Networks like internet providership are notoriously hard to get competitive markets in. Even removing the regulatory barriers to entry there are still natural barriers to entry (high start up cost) and huge returns to scale. The natural state of this…

Your comment was dead, but I vouched for it because I believe your second paragraph has value. I'd ask you consider removing the first part, which is unnecessarily snarky and doesn't address the point (how is this better than an oligopoly).

The first point is valid IMHO in a way. Like a lot of small towns in Massachusetts, Charlemont uses an open town meeting style of government, which means all residents have a vote in determining how the town is run.

I would personally believe that if there are issues with quality of service or price or whatnot, this governance style allows for a much better opportunity of addressing issues. Versus being run by a very large monopoly that honestly may not care that much about the ongoing needs of a 1200 population town (read: small revenue source) in the future.

A competitive environment would be better if possible, but failing that, I personally would take a municipal broadband system with a good degree of accountability built into the town governance over an oligopoly.

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

#89

Post by pjc50 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #26
49531 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're no more corrupt than large corporate players, but I can vote for my local government.

> They're no more corrupt than large corporate players, but I can vote for my local government My point is that's a terrible baseline to settle for. If our metric for "should we do it" is solely "is it better than Comcast," we've got a problem. My specific concern is around local police having expanded access to locals' internet activity.

The police aren't running the municipal ISP? There's no sense in lumping all "government" into one bucket.

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

#90

Post by [deleted] »

soundwave106 wrote: post #88
toomuchtodo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment was dead, but I vouched for it because I believe your second paragraph has value. I'd ask you consider removing the first part, which is unnecessarily snarky and doesn't address the point (how is this better than an oligopoly).

The first point is valid IMHO in a way. Like a lot of small towns in Massachusetts, Charlemont uses an open town meeting style of government, which means all residents have a vote in determining how the town is run. I would personally believe that if there are issues with quality of service or price or whatnot, this governance style allows for a much better opportunity of addressing issues. Versus being run by a very…

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