Obama calls for municipal broadband • Hacker News Board

Re: Obama calls for municipal broadband

#261

Post by derekp7 » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 3:22 PM UTC

danans wrote: post #140

derekp7 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They already do this, with these things called roads. In fact, I saw a tax-payer funded road that gave access to a church, a bar, and an adult store.

A tax-funded road built with the explicit the purpose of giving access to all three of these? Did the places exist there before the road, and if so, how did people get to them? Are the places located very close to each other or just coincidentally on the same road that stretches a long distance?

So I take it that you are agreeing that there is no fundamental difference between a road and the internet, when it comes to people complaining about the government using tax dollars to facilitate access to undesirable places?

Re: Obama calls for municipal broadband

#262

Post by CWuestefeld » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 3:28 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #198

justizin wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I definitely agree, and this is one reason I advocate against overly harsh or vindictive rules that are unbalanced against ISPs because of our feelings about AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner - it would bite us later if we have a massive shift to municipal broadband. Sure, we can change the law, but we would have regulations in place that could interfere with the government entering the market, we might have gotten…

If the government was your ISP, what are the privacy implications?

This is my concern, in the Snowden/NSA age. While few ISPs are willing to go to the mat defending their customers' privacy, I am absolutely certain that when it comes to governmental providers, it will never happen.

Re: Obama calls for municipal broadband

#263

Post by exelius » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 3:43 PM UTC

mseebach wrote: post #233

curun1r wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it would bite us later if we have a massive shift to municipal broadband. Municipal broadband doesn't mean shutting out ISPs. If done right, it means that the municipalities own the last mile infrastructure and charge a per-customer rate to ISPs that serve residents. But what that does is significantly lower the bar for ISPs to offer service. It can cost millions of dollars to build out that infrastructure in a cit…

> If done right That's a pretty big if. There's a very real possibility that the same municipal governments that granted the cable monopolies in the first place, will either license the network to an ISP that will either become Comcast-like (monopoly lazyness does that), be bought by Comcast or actually just simply is Comcast (remember, the municipalities have a "good working relationship" with Comcast) or they will…

You're right, it is a pretty big if.

Here's what I foresee actually happening: these networks will work great for 10 years or so. But eventually the maintenance costs will catch up, and you'll have service outages that take days to fix because it's run by lazy government workers with a guaranteed pension. Customers will complain, but nothing will happen until the city goes broke (as happens to nearly every city every decade or so). So the city auctions off the telecom infrastructure to private buyers for pennies on the dollar or spin it off as a new private entity. The net result is the same: the taxpayers will have subsidized the construction of yet another redundant telecommunications network owned by private money.

The reason I'm pretty sure that this is what will happen is because this is exactly what's happened to most of the municipally-owned utilities across the nation. Chances are that your gas company or electric company are privately owned (water/sewage tends to remain municipally owned because it's simply not profitable under any scenario that preserves basic sanitation). The city hits a budget crisis and starts looking for assets to sell, and utilities are huge capital assets that can bring in a lot of cash relatively quickly.

Re: Obama calls for municipal broadband

#264

Post by lione » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 4:11 PM UTC

discardorama wrote: post #207

oldmanjay wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not one of the municipalities I've called home in the last 40 years runs any of those things you've mentioned

Surely water and roads, of all things listed, are managed by the municipality? Who maintains the local streets otherwise?

Yeah I don't know what that person is talking about. Those MUNICIPAL services are typically taken care of by.... The Municipality!

Re: Obama calls for municipal broadband

#265

Post by fnordfnordfnord » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 4:16 PM UTC

gfdgh54yhgf wrote: post #256

fnordfnordfnord wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Select "wired" and you're back to what FireBeyond said. One provider. As I replied to you earlier in another thread, cellular internet isn't equivalent, nor is it priced comparably. http://www.broadbandmap.gov/internet-service-providers/olymp... re: EDIT: I didn't DV you but you shouldn't be surprised. There probably isn't a single HN'er without direct experience shopping for an ISP, and thus few without the knowledg…

But the argument here is "broadband monopoly" not "wired broadband monopoly", which municipalities have direct control over on who gets to lay cables. The "broadband monopoly" argument should stop since American consumers aren't limited to one broadband provider. Anyway, one of the wired ones that's listed (CenturyLink) does residential internet from what I can tell[1]. Another wired one that's also listed for reside…

>But the argument here is "broadband monopoly" not "wired broadband monopoly"

No, to repeat myself, cellular wireless ISP service is neither functionally equivalent to other wired nor even to other wireless ISP service offerings. Cellular offers include low data throughput limits, and are not priced comparably. If there were two DSL offerings and one was priced higher for a lower level of service that would also not be reasonably considered a competitive market situation.

As for CenturyLink in Olympia, Wa. the poster already replied that Century Link do not offer service to his/her residence.

I'm not going to audit the claim about Megapath, but instead just assume that FireBeyond was truthful and correct when they said that Megapath did not offer residential services to their address.

Re: Obama calls for municipal broadband

#266

Post by shmerl » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 4:29 PM UTC

broadband432 wrote: post #251

shmerl wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something like DSL or satellite service is not comparable with others (it's too inferior). As well as a capped service is not comparable. Discarding all that you get something that is clearly a monopoly. Plus several companies which do offer something substantial but operate in collusion are essentially a monopoly anyway. Real competition is for example Google Fiber or some other small ISP on the scene. That's when y…

Going by your definition, does Apple have a monopoly on phones since every other phone is inferior? Just because one broadband provider has greater speeds than the others, it doesn't mean it has a 'broadband monopoly'. Again most Americans don't need 100Mbps+. They are fine with 25Mbps. Netflix only requires 3Mbps. Now the "cable monopoly" is a separate issue entirely. Comcast has superior speed in some areas because…

Apple has a lot of monopolistic (anti competitive) problems, not just in attitude but in practice. A perfect example is their ban on alternative browsers on iOS. So bringing Apple doesn't help your cause.

> Again most Americans don't need 100Mbps+.

That's a pile of trash and song that monopolists like to sing to justify their unwillingness to upgrade their networks (since if there is nowhere else to turn, their inferior networks will be used for crazy prices anyway - users simply will have no choice). They start singing a very different song when they face actual competition. They quickly forget their previous claims that no one needs more bandwidth and start offering it. Which just demonstrates how sick the current ISP market is.

I.e. imagine you are trying to find a transport service, and local transportation company tells you that their horse and buggy service is just fine, because no one needs anything better (didn't everyone use it for hundreds of years already?). And then their competitor actually builds a railroad... You get the idea - that's exactly what's going on with ISPs now.

Re: Obama calls for municipal broadband

#267

Post by fnordfnordfnord » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 4:30 PM UTC

wglb wrote: post #82

WillNotDownvote wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, and libraries in various municipalities are in fact censored, both in terms of publications and in internet access they allow. Why would this be different?

How are they censored? Do you have any examples of this?

The public library a few hundred feet from my residence heavily and ridiculously censors its internet access. The censorship is provided by a third party and getting a site whitelisted is practically impossible to achieve.

Re: Obama calls for municipal broadband

#268

Post by tw04 » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 4:39 PM UTC

djrogers wrote: post #68

jfb wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can do this now. Municipal ownership of some of the pipes isn't going to stop what is essentially an orthogonal fight from happening at a higher level.

Yeah - I think the point was that if the pipes are owned by the same government that's already in the pocket of hollywood, then the laws (more likely regulations written by bureaucrats, not laws passed by elected officials, but..) against torrenting/pirating/distributing would be easier to get written and enforced.

Because Comcast has no stake in Hollywood?

Re: Obama calls for municipal broadband

#269

Post by yourapostasy » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 4:58 PM UTC

exelius wrote: post #263

mseebach wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If done right That's a pretty big if. There's a very real possibility that the same municipal governments that granted the cable monopolies in the first place, will either license the network to an ISP that will either become Comcast-like (monopoly lazyness does that), be bought by Comcast or actually just simply is Comcast (remember, the municipalities have a "good working relationship" with Comcast) or they will…

You're right, it is a pretty big if. Here's what I foresee actually happening: these networks will work great for 10 years or so. But eventually the maintenance costs will catch up, and you'll have service outages that take days to fix because it's run by lazy government workers with a guaranteed pension. Customers will complain, but nothing will happen until the city goes broke (as happens to nearly every city every…

The useful life of fiber installs can be even shorter than 10 years in specific cases [1].

What if the municipality owned, laid, and maintained the physical conduit/poles/enclosures but not the actual network physical plant itself, which is then deliberately designed to be replaceable so commercial providers fish through the cabling they want to municipally-owned physical hubs that are equipped and operated by the providers? The municipalities already have the resources and staff to do so relatively competently from water, wastewater and electrical grid deployment and maintenance. Most of the cost of last-mile deployment is the physical laying, but if that is shifted to a public utility while fishing cables (at most) is left to the providers, then might the providers see dramatic increased incentives to compete on quality of service and price?

[1] http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-lifespan-of-fiber-optic-cab...

Re: Obama calls for municipal broadband

#270

Post by digikata » Thu, Jan 15, 2015, 5:02 PM UTC

vidarh wrote: post #238

digikata wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that kind of structural split you mention first could be a nice low-regulation/high effectiveness solution, at least compare to other alternatives. However, I haven't seen any kind of willingness to impose that kind of regulation by agencies for at least the past two or three decades. As a matter of fact past structural regulatory market walls have been getting consistently removed in other industries.

I find it a quite amazing situation. It's a good demonstration that US politicians are not interested in free market competition. In Europe, this structural split was a key part of the de-regulation of the telecoms market. In the UK alone, OpenReach, the BT subsidiary that inherited the last mile network, counts more than 500 companies as customers that provide telecoms and ISP services to end-users. Many of them are…

Looking at some of the other complaints re: OpenReach, the best setup might be municipal ownership/oversight of the last-mile, but with operations contracted out to private companies. That way you can split the network ops among vendors, or periodically reassess effectiveness of the private companies.