Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cleveland launches plan to provide cheap broadband

techdirt.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 86 posts

Re: Cleveland launches plan to provide cheap broadband

#61

Post by beeburrt »

sxg wrote: post #33

I just moved back to Cleveland, and I signed up for Cleveland Broadband (clevelandbroadband.com), which is incredible! I pay $50/mo for 1 Gb/s download and upload speeds with no contract or temporary introductory pricing. The best part is the customer service, which I've only had to use twice while initially setting it up, but it's a direct line to a person who physically came to my place within an hour and was super…

I'm considering moving there. How are you liking it? How is the tech jobs market there?

Re: Cleveland launches plan to provide cheap broadband

#62

Post by tight-ship »

sxg wrote: post #33

I just moved back to Cleveland, and I signed up for Cleveland Broadband (clevelandbroadband.com), which is incredible! I pay $50/mo for 1 Gb/s download and upload speeds with no contract or temporary introductory pricing. The best part is the customer service, which I've only had to use twice while initially setting it up, but it's a direct line to a person who physically came to my place within an hour and was super…

Is Cleveland an outlier of sorts? I expected broadband to be much cheaper in the US. Here in South America, I pay $30 USD/month for 1Gbps up/down. Considering all the equipment is imported, that seems way cheaper.

Re: Cleveland launches plan to provide cheap broadband

#63

Post by selimthegrim »

thelastgallon wrote: post #3

> despite billions in tax breaks, regulatory favors, and subsidies, companies like AT&T have long refused to upgrade low-income and minority Cleveland neighborhoods to fiber. There is a very easy solution to this. Electric utilities should be required to lay fiber along with electric. They can choose to offer internet (better) or offer fiber with a choice of carriers. EPB in Chattanooga has been providing fiber to ho…

CPP is city owned, doesn’t sound like anyone is stopping them.

Re: Cleveland launches plan to provide cheap broadband

#64

Post by sarchertech »

sxg wrote: post #33

I just moved back to Cleveland, and I signed up for Cleveland Broadband (clevelandbroadband.com), which is incredible! I pay $50/mo for 1 Gb/s download and upload speeds with no contract or temporary introductory pricing. The best part is the customer service, which I've only had to use twice while initially setting it up, but it's a direct line to a person who physically came to my place within an hour and was super…

Municipal fiber in Chattanooga is the same way and it’s nearly 15 years old at this point.

Customer service and speed hasn’t declined and prices haven’t gone up (they haven’t even kept pace with inflation) like the naysayers predicted.

Re: Cleveland launches plan to provide cheap broadband

#65

Post by vineyardmike »

beeburrt wrote: post #61
sxg wrote: post #33

I just moved back to Cleveland, and I signed up for Cleveland Broadband (clevelandbroadband.com), which is incredible! I pay $50/mo for 1 Gb/s download and upload speeds with no contract or temporary introductory pricing. The best part is the customer service, which I've only had to use twice while initially setting it up, but it's a direct line to a person who physically came to my place within an hour and was super…

I'm considering moving there. How are you liking it? How is the tech jobs market there?

Not OP, but Cleveland is kinda great kinda terrible. I spent a few years there in my early adulthood.

It was once one of the nicest richest cities in America, and it has some of the best cultural institutions in the country as a result. It has every major sports franchise. It has some great architecture. It’s extremely affordable. The food is much better than comparable midwestern cities.

There’s a reason it’s so affordable. Jobs are not plentiful. The weather is terrible. Infrastructure is lackluster. It’s somehow a city of townies, not somewhere like SFBA/NYC that’s full of people that have big goals and ambitions and worldly experiences. Good and bad.

It does really seem like a city on the rise. At least when I was there last. They’re really investing in themselves, but the population has a really gloomy self image that honestly got me down.

Re: Cleveland launches plan to provide cheap broadband

#66

Post by _lqaf »

CSMastermind wrote: post #47
jrgifford wrote: post #16

It'll be interesting to see if they can do this better than previous attempts. I remember in 2009 when OneCommunity tried[1], 2014 when OneCommunity launched everstream, their for-profit arm (and didn't change much)[2], or the 2018 Old Brooklyn/Ward 13 project[3]. Somewhere in there, there was an initiative (probably 2009 or so?) that included public wifi in Cleveland Heights along much of Cedar Road, where One Commu…

My buddy was at Case Western back in 2007/8ish and worked on that One Community project. He called it 'porn for the poor'. There were all these utopian ideas getting floated about how revolutionary the idea was and that basically lack of high speed internet access was the only thing keeping all these people in poverty. If we just gave the poor fast internet access as a public service then they would all learn to code…

> There were all these utopian ideas getting floated

Funny how the sales pitch and reality collide, eh?

The sad part is that stupid sales pitches like that are required to get movement. Internet access is 21st century dial tone, the vast majority of people need it to function in normal society. Universal Service was the sort of socialism a fast-growing capitalist society needed; internet service is the same now.

People seem to think of it as a luxury. They're wrong: it is a control mechanism that comes with access to videos of naked people. To the extent you want the machinery of society to keep working, you should want everyone attached, including those smut-loving poor people you seem to want to judge.

Re: Cleveland launches plan to provide cheap broadband

#67

Post by vineyardmike »

parineum wrote: post #22
nerdponx wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine that: company gets free money from the government to do such-and-such thing but isn't strictly required to do it, then they take the free money and don't do the thing. It's almost like corporations are self-interested and un-altruistic.

I don't know why you'd be railing against the company here for acting in it's best interest (exactly as you'd expect) rather than the state for giving away money with no strings attached. A private business sure as hell wouldn't be so foolish as to sign such a contract.

There’s a real physical human being making that decision. Corporations aren’t amorphous blobs. What a scum, to abuse the society they live in.

Corporations exist to make a profit and that’s fine, but they don’t need to claw and steal every penny they can find. Why do we perpetuate this idea that the appropriate behaviors for an organization are these horribly antisocial actions.

Re: Cleveland launches plan to provide cheap broadband

#68

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

p1mrx wrote: post #56
llsf wrote: post #25

Would it make sense for the municipality to own the pipes that run in the city ? Like some cities own the sewer pipes. Could it be an infrastructure that the city builds, owns, maintains and rents to ISP ? The city would have a full control on how many houses are connected. That is the type of investments that a city is suited for (i.e. large upfront cost financed by bonds). AT&T, Charter, Comcast, they have no incen…

Ideally the municipality should provide a "dumb pipe" to a point of presence, where the customer chooses an ISP. That way the municipality doesn't have to deal with IPv4/IPv6 addressing, or DMCA notices.

That's what OpenInfra does. They lay the fiber infrastructure and a bunch of ISPs are available to buy service from. They're still trenching around here. Our ONT is installed by the fiber won't be lit until New Years.

Re: Cleveland launches plan to provide cheap broadband

#69

Post by gooseyman »

llsf wrote: post #25

Would it make sense for the municipality to own the pipes that run in the city ? Like some cities own the sewer pipes. Could it be an infrastructure that the city builds, owns, maintains and rents to ISP ? The city would have a full control on how many houses are connected. That is the type of investments that a city is suited for (i.e. large upfront cost financed by bonds). AT&T, Charter, Comcast, they have no incen…

And Cleveland already has Cleveland Public Power!

Cleveland Public Power is the City of Cleveland's municipally-owned electric company and is a Division of the Department of Public Utilities. The Department provides water, sewer, and electricity to the residents and businesses in the City of Cleveland.

Edit - link https://www.cpp.org/index.php/About

Re: Cleveland launches plan to provide cheap broadband

#70

Post by gooseyman »

xenospn wrote: post #44
jpk wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of me likes this approach, but another part of me is hesitant putting the local government in control of all of the network infrastructure. It could conceivably allow local officials to turn it all off during a protest or something; similar to what we saw during the Arab Spring events.

They can already do that with ease by instructing the companies that own it to shut it down. I’d argue that having local officials in charge offers more transparency than a nameless corporation.

Cleveland has a public owned utility for power that does publish an annual.

https://www.cpp.org/About/Annual-Reports

The non-Cleveland owned utility data is also available, it’s just not as “Cleveland specific”

Post reply on HN