As to density arguments, you don't need to cover every square foot of the US with fiber only where people actually live. We build Roads to just about every house which cost 50+ times what broadband does. (2-3 million per mile in rural areas per mile vs ~50k per mile for fiber.)
There's a reason for that. We have enough electricity to power our things. We have enough gas pressure to create a flame. Delivery, price, performance, etc are all pretty good. They're solved problems.
Not too long ago Edison was running filthy coal plants in downtown city centers and running thick-gauge DC wires to businesses. That's where we are today with the mish-mash of cable and copper for last-mile internet. Half-assed, but profitable, efforts by players incentivized by the wrong things.
The last mile problem is largely solved via municipal fiber. The real question is do we have the political will to socialize/monopolize these things like we did in the past. It seems that we don't. We have the innovations and we know how to fix this. Its getting there politically that is the problem.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_water_crisis
This sketch of a sketch of an argument that you have laid out it a total non sequitur. It seems to me that you're pointing to the Flint water crisis as proof either that all municipal infrastructure efforts are disastrous, or that enough of them are that the public utility alternative is essentially dead. If that is the "argument," then the easiest way to defeat this is just to say, "Flint was news because it represented a rare and egregious failure."
That's it. That's all we need to say to rebut that in its entirety.
If we stop there, however, we miss the opportunity to point out the converse: It's not news when customers get gouged for sub-par service, because corrupt and monopolistic practices are rampant within capitalist institutions, especially around lock-in. Cable companies. Phone companies. Privatized utilities. Airlines after deregulation. Military suppliers. It's just not news.
We'd also miss the opportunity to point out that the tactic of pointing to one criminal failure of a civic organization as proof positive that private industry is universally better is a favorite tactic of a certain obnoxious kind of 20-something free-market fanboy set.
HN is better off when that set either stays home or ups its game.
Flint is an extreme example, but almost all municipal water systems are a disaster. In Atlanta, the sewer system dumps raw sewage in the Chattahoochee when it rains. In Chicago, old lead pipes are poisoning kids. It happens because rates are set by elected boards, not by markets, and because municipalities are not forced to bear the external costs of poor infrastructure.
In Chicago, old lead pipes are actually becoming an issue due to the city replacing the pipes themselves. Can't win 'em all.
I thought it was interesting that for the % of homes with at least 4mbps service, Akamai ranked the U.S. 44th globally at 88%. That's another way to look at infrastructure: how many folks have broadband at all?
Whether these numbers count as "lagging" is in the eye of the beholder, obviously. We're not top ten in any category.
DSL is still the primary broadband technology in the UK, Germany, France, and Spain, while cable is in the US: http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/fast-fiber-optic-broadband-sprea...
And that's for infrastructure like roads and water delivery where technology is largely static. The problem would likely only be worse for more dynamic infrastructure like broadband.
I've built and ran fiber networks for over 10 years and operations and maintenance is no big issue.
On the past 10Gbe point : contention is the killer, there is a rise of "super users" for example video editors shipping to and from the cloud, which drives the need for > backhaul - are you not seeing that?
Also on the bigger points; small providers have to peer, like everyone, but do they get good deals? How about prices on kit? Strategic deals with Huweii / Cisco are hard enough for tier one, do you not think that you'll get squeezed ?
The deeper you put it the safer it is and when we put in fiber we put it in deep. The rate faults that occur are fiber cuts and these fiber cuts are usually the result of some contractor not using call before you dig or being sloppy about it.
Bandwidth usage is always growing, but then again the cost of IP transit is constantly going down too. Heavy users aren't really an issue and end user 10G connections are rather rare. Those that really need dedicated 10G connections buy leased lines or wavelengths and pay accordingly. More bandwidth usage isn't a problem, it's a good thing that drives more business.
Peering is easy and cheap to small and large providers alike. Transit is also so cheap that it often is cheaper to buy more IP transit than to build out more peering capacity.
Access to networking hardware is not a problem and there are products for every need and price point. The largest issues are access to capital, barriers to entry and competition.
The government should lay fiber just like they lay water pipes and pave roads. Anyone can connect on either end of the fiber, providing a nice competitive market for ISPs... just like the original days of dialup ISPs.
Well, played out to the full extent of electric and gas utilities, I doubt few of us actually want telecom to go the same way.
With the utility companies - you often get zero choice of which company services your home. Usually these are government sanctioned monopolies, without competition.
Yes, the government may set the maximum rates, but they can't force a utility company to actually be a "good" company. Customer service, willingness to problem solve, be flexible for customers, provide better service at the same price - let alone reduce rates, etc.
With a telco acting as a utility, over the long term, there's little incentive to provide better service... which essentially is the core issue of the Net Neutrality movement.
What we need instead, is to foster an environment in which every city has 5-6+ telco's capable of servicing every home. We need to get out of the 1-2 telco company system, and create a competitive environment in which consumers have massive choice.
The ability to leave a company and take your business elsewhere is what keeps companies performing and doing better by their customers. They offer cheaper rates, along with better service, etc.
We've seen this working to great effect in the wild. Every city Google Fiber has encroached on, suddenly saw the incumbent telco's massively upgrade service offerings at cheaper rates.
We need more competition - not government sanctioned monopolies.
I can then choose my actual provider who will hook up at the CO (either virtually or physically), and connect me to the internet (or their service) at whatever speed we agree on. The utility part is nothing more than a long cable between me and the provider.
The provider could give me nothing more than a public IP and route to the internet, or they could give something 'value-added' like an e-mail account and content filtering. It could even be a closed non-internet service like Facebook Free Basics[0] or maybe Verizon wants to dust off the old AOL service. The thing is, as a consumer I get the choice.
That works well in theory; in practice, a lot of industries - telcom being a prime example - hacked their way around this. You can't "take your business elsewhere" when a private company owns the last-mile infrastructure your apartment is connected with. Or when your landlord decided to sign an exclusive agreement with one.
When I see residential electric/gas utilities, I see a service that pretty much always works as advertised. A service that does what it's supposed to and nothing more. No deep electromagnetic inspection to offer me "zero charge" electricity for my ACME appliances. No "smell packets" injected into the gas line the way ISP inject ads and bullshit into HTTP connections now. I don't even care much which company logo is present on my monthly bill; the total monthly savings I could make by switching providers are worth around two or three standard Starbucks lattes, at best.
The core issue is that Internet access should be a commodity. Telcos are doing everything in their power to avoid that. Like so many other companies, they forgot about the concept of "honest business", in which a customer pays them money in exchange for a valuable service, no bullshit attached.
To be fair, Verizon is pretty good to me as well, but that's probably because I'm paying $$$ for a high-end business account.
With a telco acting as part of an entrenched duopoly there is also no incentive for the provide better service or better pricing either.
Getting it without many of the tricks advertising uses to extract more money out of customers than the advertised pricing is a struggle though.