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Voters say “yes” to city-run broadband in Colorado

arstechnica.com

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Re: Voters say “yes” to city-run broadband in Colorado

#71

Post by bkeroack »

lotharbot wrote: post #61
bkeroack wrote: post #48

What are the odds that the city will run an ISP better than, say, the DMV?

I lived in a community with municipal broadband (Brigham City, UT / UTOPIA fiber) and it was extremely well run. There were still private ISPs handling basically everything, it's just that they used city-owned fiber and offered very reasonable rates.

So this is essentially the taxpayer paying to build out infrastructure that private enterprise then runs and collects profits on right? This is a good thing? Wasn't that always the argument why pharmaceutical companies are so evil, because they appropriate public research for private profit?

Re: Voters say “yes” to city-run broadband in Colorado

#72

Post by com2kid »

rayiner wrote: post #45
chungy wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's just me, but the right thing for Comcast to do is try to provide a better product. Competition is healthy, legislation is illness.

You can’t “compete” with a municipal service. How many competing options do you have for your water or sewer or trash pickup? It’s a reasonable argument that broadband should be provided municipally. But cloaking it in the guise of “competition” is disingenuous.

> You can’t “compete” with a municipal service.

Sure you can.

The inherent costs to provide services is similar, but Comcast can amortize costs over a larger customer base. If Comcast is at all competent (a huge if!) then they should have overall lower costs, even taking (probably reduced) profits into account.

Customer service needs to be provided, a mailing center to send out hardware, a billing system, technicians and installers need to be trained and dispatched, payroll for all said employees, and all the other costs of running a business that should, in theory, scale to Comcast's advantage.

And of course Comcast can offer quicker upgrades in service. By bringing resources to bear, they should be able to iterate on technology faster than a municipal provider can.

Comcast also has the advantages of bundling services, another way to recoup costs and compete vs the municipal provided service.

A well ran national company with should be able to put up one heck of a good free market fight going up against a municipality. The real question becomes, is Comcast able to put up that fight?

Re: Voters say “yes” to city-run broadband in Colorado

#73

Post by lisper »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #63
gigatexal wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a sad, sad world we live in where a corporation can come in and use legislation to be obviously anti-competitive. What would the world do if comcast or a group of content owners tried to sue netflix out of existence because their business model threatened the incumbents? There'd be pandemonium.

> What a sad, sad world we live in where a corporation can come in and use legislation to be obviously anti-competitive. If we actually had reasonable competition among local broadband (e.g. everyone in the country had a choice of at least 2-3 reasonable options, and DSL does not count as "reasonable" anymore), then I'd actually call the introduction of a government-backed option "anti-competitive", because how can a…

> how can any private ISP compete with that?

If the answer to your rhetorical question is supposed to be "they can't" then government-provided broadband is manifestly superior to anything the private sector can provide. Why would we as a society not want that?

Re: Voters say “yes” to city-run broadband in Colorado

#74

Post by kevindqc »

jdavis703 wrote: post #64
dchuk wrote: post #42

I’m failing to think of a single reason why it would ever be legally acceptable for a government to ban municipal broadband. I understand the whole corporate shill stuff, I’m speaking literally from the arguments FOR the ban...how is it justified at all?

I'm playing Devil's advocate here, but if you believe in a strong free-market with a minimal state then you could argue that the government should not be providing a service that private individuals could provide. Now I think most people are more pragmatic and say "whatever get's the job done," but that's the reason why some people are against many municipal services, including broadband.

As someone else pointed out in the comments, then why not have the city put the fiber in the ground, but let private ISPs run the network devices and ISP stuff (ie: a bit similar to TekSavvy in Canada which uses other ISP's infrastructure - I assume they use more than just the fiber though)

Re: Voters say “yes” to city-run broadband in Colorado

#75

Post by sanderjd »

tooltalk wrote: post #46

Knowing so little about the situation in Colorado, why can't they just allow more competition in the city, instead of running it themselves?

(I live in Boulder County, which passed something similar.)

As far as I know, competition is allowed, it just doesn't exist. The market has failed to provide us with broadband options. This vote is not actually for the government to run it themselves, it's just to override a state-level ban on municipal broadband. The next step will be for Comcast to lobby against municipalities actually setting up competing broadband offerings. A few steps after that and Comcast might actually start responding as if they are competing in an actual market, for instance by improving their services and/or lowering their prices. If they clean up their act enough, they might even get to keep their monopoly. But their reputation is already so bad that it seems somewhat unlikely at this point.

Re: Voters say “yes” to city-run broadband in Colorado

#76

Post by linsomniac »

agumonkey wrote: post #47
peterjmag wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theoretically, yes. In fact, Senate Bill 152, passed in 2005, already outlaws municipal broadband. From the article: Colorado has a state law requiring municipalities to hold referendums before they can provide cable, telecom, or broadband service. Yesterday, voters in Eagle County and Boulder County authorized their local governments to build broadband networks, "bringing the total number of Colorado counties that h…

free market much ...

The situation is that the free market has said "We're going to pass on doing this". So the free market has left the door wide open for the government to do it.

The free market spending a half million dollars trying to keep the government from even coming up with a plan for what municipal broadband would look like, after not doing it themselves, is hilarious.

Re: Voters say “yes” to city-run broadband in Colorado

#77

Post by fjjeiu3338 »

nsporillo wrote: post #56
rayiner wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t “compete” with a municipal service. How many competing options do you have for your water or sewer or trash pickup? It’s a reasonable argument that broadband should be provided municipally. But cloaking it in the guise of “competition” is disingenuous.

In the town of West Henrietta, there actually is competition for trash pickup as it is not provided by the town or county.

There is "competition" in my metro area too. They compete for city contracts. No one company handles the entire metro space.

Somehow that all went wrong with ISPs/cable/telco service

Suspect it has something to do with how these businesses came up in a period where we were bought in deep to corporate overlords having control, whereas garbage is pretty old and less sexy/lucrative to monopolize generally

Re: Voters say “yes” to city-run broadband in Colorado

#78

Post by krisdol »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #63
gigatexal wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a sad, sad world we live in where a corporation can come in and use legislation to be obviously anti-competitive. What would the world do if comcast or a group of content owners tried to sue netflix out of existence because their business model threatened the incumbents? There'd be pandemonium.

> What a sad, sad world we live in where a corporation can come in and use legislation to be obviously anti-competitive. If we actually had reasonable competition among local broadband (e.g. everyone in the country had a choice of at least 2-3 reasonable options, and DSL does not count as "reasonable" anymore), then I'd actually call the introduction of a government-backed option "anti-competitive", because how can a…

You can't simultaneously advocate for superior free-market solutions and then complain when the government outcompetes the private sector.

Re: Voters say “yes” to city-run broadband in Colorado

#79

Post by agumonkey »

linsomniac wrote: post #76
agumonkey wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

free market much ...

The situation is that the free market has said "We're going to pass on doing this". So the free market has left the door wide open for the government to do it. The free market spending a half million dollars trying to keep the government from even coming up with a plan for what municipal broadband would look like, after not doing it themselves, is hilarious.

of all the mottos the only one that should remain is "lobby free"

Re: Voters say “yes” to city-run broadband in Colorado

#80

Post by matt_wulfeck »

I love to see cities exert their power. In some ways we’ve acquiesced to a powerful central government, whether it be federal or state, but its local governments that should be powerful. After all, they have the best handle on the needs and desires of their citizens.
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