I was briefly and directly involved with the Google Fiber rollout here in Austin. Here's the thing: anyone with firsthand information is unlikely to drop in to set things straight in a way that gives away any amount of detail, purely because in the professional world it would be unbecoming to say the kinds of things that would necessarily come out.
I don't expect that local government intervention and red-tape could be called the major contributing factor here.
From someone involved at the end I was working from, dbg31415's comments are exactly what I would expect the other end to feel like.
The thing you have to understand is this: generally speaking, the people involved with the labor on this kind of project inhabit a completely different world than the one that you or I or the rest of a site like HN lives in. That applies to the boys in the field doing the work, to the boys in the office shuffling paperwork and signing off on their checks.
It's unsurprising to me to hear that the labor costs are out of control, and to hear that Google was halting expansion to other cities this past fall was like hearing someone say that they smashed their fingers in the door and it hurt.
6d11e0a226cb3b6b24dc05bd96ebb7b176c29b587512fae370d5c825ff5a08bf742152134a1e75c9104b8944fbae2b4640757e2533b41f44ceefbb04be602103
I'll bite, what's this? Couldn't b64 decode it.
Seems a bit short though.
This, for example, is a throwaway account. Perhaps there's something in the message that'll let them prove they left that message at a later date, if they desire to.
I can call absolute, first-hand-knowledge, bullshit to this assessment for the city of Alameda, California...
Plus, common.net has recently started service (I am a customer) but:
I spoke with the Mayor of Alameda, and they said specifically that they sold the communal rights to comcast (I can only assume it was a bribe) and this is the reason we have poor choices available to us
Hah, what an interesting bit of synchronicity. I'm originally from Brunswick County, NC, just a hair north of you. We are served by Atlantic Telephone Membership Cooperative and Brunswick Electric Membership Corporation.
some might call that government
Most of the problems with modern government can be understood as a case of severe feature creep.
If that statement stopped holding true (as it sometimes does in the real world, with block associations that are compulsory) then yes I'd say it's equivalent to government in all the important ways.
That generally doesn't work out very well. If the incumbent keeps half the customers, the cooperative then has almost all of the same expenses but half as much revenue. And so does the incumbent. So costs per customer are double until one of them goes out of business.
This is what's happening now in the areas that have a legacy telephone company and a legacy cable company. The telephone companies have essentially given up on upgrading their infrastructure and are just milking what already exists until the cable companies put them out of business, because coax can carry more traffic than telephone wire. And neither of them is interested in installing fiber while the other still exists, because it would force the other to either do the same or slash prices, either of which is worse for both of them than the status quo.
So, the coop actually has a pretty unfair advantage, but as long as it's local communities, I'm mostly okay with it. And as to local communities, larger cities are more disconnected than smaller towns. So there's some difference there. The coop doesn't have to be setup to recover initial outlay... it depends on the structure and how it's setup with the local municipality. As to the incumbents, they were also largely funded via tax dollars for initial outlay, and instead of planning for reinvestment/growth, they've chosen not to do so, and deserve to see upstarts encroaching on them.
But it's more complicated than that because the more local a government is, the easier it is to walk away from and the less crap it can do without strong negative feedback. It is more like a co-op, albeit it one that can change the rules on you after you've made a sizable investment. And one where people who've invested nothing have the same amount of say that you do!
Are member-owned and worker-owned just variations on a theme?
https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-at-Work-Cure-Capitalism/dp/...
In gold rush area along Highway 49 in Califnornia you have two prominent Coop/Local solutions .. Plumas Sierra Telecom who provides service to Plumas, Sierra and (I believe) Lassen county with different broadband options... PSREC has been adding fiber options.
Down towards Volcano/Sonora/Hwy 88, you have Volcano Communications.
In each case, rural communities stepping up where AT&T/Comcast and others step aside. These are endeavors I happily support.
They've been bringing fiber slowly up from Reno to communities along Highways 70 and 89. The condo I just bought, PSREC installed fiber to the unit. I hope to help find ways to invigorate the adoption in the community and maybe some more tech up here. Reno is about an hour away.
Coops and small rural companies are the ones investing in infrastructure (in the town I am in, the cable company folded and the telecom stepped up) rather than the big telecoms which are trying to disinvest from things.
Interesting local article: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/01/today...
The same kind that provide telephone, cable and electric service
Cable: deeply unregulated.
Electric: deeply regulated.
There's an odd-man-out here.
* Water / Sewer: Regulated OR 'off grid' (EG: well + septic field)
* Roads: Local roads always regulated (taxpayer provided)
* Hospital: Many areas only have one, denser areas may have a small handful; in an emergency you don't choose.
* Electricity: Regulated (Possibly a choice of generation providers, usually never a choice of 'line transmission' providers.)
* Natural Gas: Regulated, one provider.
* Schools: Regulated, there's a basic default option.
* Police: Regulated, there's a basic default option.
* Fire: Regulated, there's a basic default option.
* 'Emergency': Your 911 call goes to one place* (for a source area)
* Data: Many municipalities have //regulated// a monopoly (sometimes a duopoly)
Yet they don't regulate the performance of that monopoly sufficiently.That was my plan, too. It's already proven out by one rural ISP doing something like that. You also have the angle of people willing to pay extra or sacrifice some features for a good the community owns. There's also a pride aspect that can happen.
Government is the source of all wealth. So says Reagan's conservative economist, Kevin Phillips.
Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich
Belief in Freedom Markets™ is faith-, not reality-based.
By all means bring up Phillip's ideas, I agree with some of Phillips' critiques, but it is wrong to portray him as some sort of conservative insider. This is how Jacob Weisberg described him:
Phillips long ago left behind both obscurity and conservatism, becoming one of our most ubiquitous political commentators and one of the most left-wing. His biennial books have become illogical, dizzying screeds. And his diagnoses, predictions, and advice to Democrats have been consistently, embarrassingly wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Phillips_(political_comm...
That's an interesting assertion, but not supported by any evidence that I can see. And OTOH, there is direct contradictory evidence suggesting that there is another viable business model for building this kind of infrastructure: non-profit member-owned cooperatives. The same kind that provide telephone, cable and electric service all over the country[1].
Note that I'm not saying that cooperatives are a panacea, but their existence is evidence that other options are available. And before somebody screams "but aren't they all subsidized by the government", I would argue that if the kind long-term stable returns that the author of TFA speaks of are really available, then there's no reason to think that a coop couldn't get a loan (or equity investment) from private institutions.
My guess is that the biggest thing preventing this kind of thing from happening more often is exactly the amount of red-tape and government regulation involved.
[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_cooperative