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Cleveland launches plan to provide cheap broadband

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71–80 of 86 posts

Re: Cleveland launches plan to provide cheap broadband

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember that and did contact Everstream for internet service. It was 1000/1000, but they wanted $500 for running the lines from across the street and then $500 per month after that. Insane.

$500 for running the lines under a street isn't too far out of the ordinary (I paid $300 for a longer run, but there was nothing to go under, so the job was easy). That said, $500/month for service is insane.

That sounds like pricing for a "business-class" Dedicated Internet Access service, with meaningful SLAs and no oversubscription.

Re: Cleveland launches plan to provide cheap broadband

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 aff…

I currently live in Toledo and it’s amazing. They feed me well and there are no beatings.

Re: Cleveland launches plan to provide cheap broadband

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maybe puritans would have objected to the poor using the internet to get their rocks off in 2007. However, in 2023 - I cannot imagine anyone applying for a job without using the internet in some fashion. Could one discover job openings in a newspaper and mail their resume by post and wait for a phone call? Perhaps, but even McJobs have QR codes now. I have no doubt that anyone in the US who doesn't have internet acce…

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Re: Cleveland launches plan to provide cheap broadband

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 aff…

If you're into music, they also have one of the best orchestras in the country.

Re: Cleveland launches plan to provide cheap broadband

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 aff…

> The food is much better than comparable midwestern cities.

whew that's a low bar :-P

Re: Cleveland launches plan to provide cheap broadband

#76
post #38
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…

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.

I mean where the ISP that was shutdown during the Arab spring state owned?

Also having one municipal network doesn't prevent others from building their own infrastructure.

Re: Cleveland launches plan to provide cheap broadband

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 aff…

I just visited a few days for a surgery and this seems pretty accurate.

The food weirdly was the same at every restaurant, regardless of the cuisine: super oiled up. Usually mayonnaise and something pickled on top. Like preparing me to go to a factory for 14 hours.

Nearly every Uber had a sports station on.

Everyone seemed pretty gloomy there. "What's a must-do before we leave?" "Umm...yeah it's too cold for a Brown's game, so not much. Yeah."

A strange obsession with Taylor Swift "bringing money into the city" because of the sports guy she's dating now from Cleveland.

Re: Cleveland launches plan to provide cheap broadband

#78
I'd love it if Baltimore City could get it together. 90% of Baltimore has only one wired broadband provider, Cocmast -- who charges like 50% more for the same service than in markets with competition.

(Some tiny portion of Baltimore has verizon fiber available. Some growing portion has the new T-mobile 5G wireless home internet; apparently not enough to get Comcast to reduce prices to what they charge in markets with competition)

Re: Cleveland launches plan to provide cheap broadband

#79
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://us.openinfra.com/ seems available in various parts of Texas. I wonder if they'll expand to other states?

Edit: it looks like there are other "open access fiber" deployments, e.g. Utopia, SiFi, and Gigapower.

Re: Cleveland launches plan to provide cheap broadband

#80
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…

As a general rule of thumb utilities is a mode of market failure for capitalism. No one's going to run multiple power/water/communication/sewer lines to your house and compete. At the very least they'll want to share poles/pipes.

Anyway the solution is easy and exactly as you suggested. No idea why people find this hard to comprehend.

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