Hate Your ISP? Maybe You Need Community Fiber

Where it only makes sense to build one of some piece of infrastructure, isn't it really obvious that it should always be owned by the people? I suspect that this applies to quite a few things: cable data networks, wireless data networks (phone masts), electricity transmission grid, railway lines, roads, etc.

Historically, national infrastructure seems to tend towards becoming a monopoly anyway under private ownership. Further, when these are privately owned, we seem to end up with a lumbering private company regulated by a lumbering state bureaucracy which duplicates a large part of the accounts department of the private company to keep them in check.

This means that we have the worst of both worlds; no real choice, patchy service, high prices for the service and a whole load of hidden regulatory costs which come out of our taxes.

Anecdotally, I've consulted for a state regulated privately owned monopoly company, there is no way that private sector efficiency is driving these places, the bureaucracy is intense. Example: A decision from the company on whether it was acceptable to use a different, cheaper but better looking style of suspended ceiling took 6 months and went all the way to the board of directors of this multi billion pound company.

I think what they are going for is: the Director of Public Works can call the sprinkler maintainers directly. Not that they literally have an app, just lower bureaucracy.

> So, would you propose a dedicated physical wire for every service?

That's actually in a twisted sense what the article is advocating. Instead of relying on commodity communications, they advocate the city putting in their own infrastructure so they can do things like this.

The article is generally good, but that section is strange. You unequivocally do not need to run high speed internet to homes in order to move towards a "smart city" - wiring up those things they mention is orders of magnitude cheaper than running fiber to every home (funny how surveillance cameras is a suddenly a good thing, by the way).

I'm especially enthusiastic about their endorsement of open access.

I'm generally skeptical of such things, but I can see the point in local government (community != government, that's newspeak) taking a lead in running fiber in much the same way they do electricity and plumbing, mostly because it seems that fiber is sufficiently future proof - it seems plausible that transmission technology on fiber can keep up with domestic applications without having to rely on horrible stop-gap tech like ADSL.

But one thing is laying a cable, that's a largely neutral and objective undertaking, another is running a good ISP - that's a completely different beast. I strongly doubt a government run ISP is going to be great, especially if something happens and it turns into a cost centre, or if it's "awarded" to the highest bidder to run, or stuffed full of overpaid incompetents by way of political nepotism. As with anything government run, when first things starts going down that route, it's incredibly difficult to reverse.

I wonder if there is a way to adopt something analogous to a franchise model here. It strikes me that only the communities that are really, really engaged are going to be able to pull this off (which is true of most public works projects). That being said, it would be great to not have every small town and borough have to figure everything out for themselves. A franchise operator for a fast food restaurant doesn't have to worry about where to buy burgers, the brand of deep fryers, or even the optimal amount of time to fry the tater tots. If there was a full on recipe for doing this that is proven to work, a small number of citizens might be able to make it happen even in places where the local government is ambivalent. A proper setup would include some national branding to help with PR (I.e. Every article in every newspaper about community broadband would use the same name for it). It would include marketing materials for the public as well as briefing packs for local officials, legal briefs for attorneys, etc... On the technical side it would recommend specific hardware, suppliers, and designs.

The advantage to such an approach would be to harness economy of scale at a national level, but allow local communities to drive the process and own the network.

I'm not sure how you would structure it to avoid creating another monopoly in the parent company of the franchises. But perhaps a nonprofit or a corporation 100% owned by the community franchisees would work.