That way we once again can have competition like during the time DSL was popular (telcos were required to lease their wires, that's why there was so much choice of ISP for anyone who remembers early 2000)
Some people try to push the "value adds" line, like IPTV and phone service, but I don't see any reason those should be tied to your base internet service. Those arguments smell like the old cable company days, when everything had to be a "bundle".
Negotiating peering, providing customer support, buying routers and modems, maintaining equipment, et cetera isn't a core competency of most municipalities. If municipal broadband scales, we'll likely replace the ISPs with broadband servicing companies. Explicitly privatizing those operations makes it more transparent, while releasing every single municipality from having to acquire a niche skillset.
It could be argued that they don't even provide this adequately in areas where they are a market monopoly.
My local government provides far better customer support. When there is an issue or grievance, there is a place to file it and someone will always respond. As an added bonus, they don't try to sell me additional services every 5 minutes.
> It could be argued that they don't even provide this adequately in areas where they are a market monopoly.
It's almost as if being a monopoly means you don't have to invest in cost centers like customer support...
Really though this is pretty much the core problem. High costs + build-out requirements mean monopolies are granted, whether explicitly or not.
Municipal last mile means the hardest part is done once, and then any ISP is free to compete -- which they can do based on offering the best support, fastest peering, etc. The cost of entering the market is reduced to getting set up in the PoP(s).
Publicly-owned infrastructure rented to private provider-maintainers is a proven model. It isn't a fire-and-forget solution. But by dividing power between the municipality and private operator, it provides a rudimentary balance. Remember, we got here because municipalities gave ISPs local monopolies. I don't get why we suddenly believe they'll now be totally competent and benevolent.
I strongly disagree. Have you ever been to Germany? All the infrastructure we have in the U.S. is shit compared to Germany. The roads, the trains, etc. The one bit of infrastructure in the U.S. that isn't shit in comparison is broadband.
As a Swiss New Yorker, I get where you're coming from. It doesn't lightly occur to me that our subways were almost entirely built by private companies. (With heap loads of public funding, albeit.) We have ISP competition in New York, which is how we get superior service. That isn't the case in much of America; letting municipalities be that competition is, to me, better than letting Comcast et al retain their monopolies.
Blanket statements like this are pointless. I lived in Austin for a few years and had multiple fiber ISPs to choose from and was able to get 1 gbps for $70/mo.
IPv6, support for static IPs, etc all depend on much more than the wire. I'm not confident municipalities have any motivation to do more than the bare minimum when it comes to managing all of this stuff beyond the physical infrastructure.
The issue is city, users, ISPs can't afford to have a separate wire per ISP per house. It's extremely expensive and wasteful, because most of the time most houses will use at most a single ISP.
What I'm saying is that city should be responsible for providing the physical connectivity, think of it like roads. It would be crazy to think that every store, office etc would have to build their own roads to every house.
All what's needed is a fiber between your house and POP. What's plugged in on both ends is up to ISP. The city only needs to worry that fiber is there and it works. Same as the city needs to worry there is a road and it is usable. The city then can lease that fiber to ISP for a fee to cover the maintenance.
Off topic: I don't want to ISP to do QoS for me so if we could chose between different ISPs I would shop for ones that don't do it. I know better which traffic is more important to me than my ISP.
Even if laying fiber would cost $0, it is still not a good idea to do it. The way things are currently if there are 10 competitors one would have 10 have then fiber cables go to their house, or every time one would change an ISP you will have to wait for new wire to be laid, potentially coordinating with neighbors, if it would have to go through their property.
Most people will only need a single fiber.
This model is used in data centers where a single company is selected by the owner of the building and they are responsible for all the wiring (it would be very expensive and a lot of redundant wiring if multiple companies could do that), but selecting an ISP is a matter of just using a short patch panel in exchange room. You can easily switch ISPs or use several of them.
Currently when ISPs own the last mile they are only motivated to have speed that's marginally faster (typically DSL) and cheaper (typically wireless). There's no motivation to improve especially after FCC killed net neutrality, since slow speed can actually make them money by prioritizing traffic.
If last mile is separate, ISPs always will be motivated to be fastest and cheapest because the customer can easily switch between them.
The last mile is primarily responsible for laying fiber cable and do repairs if it is broken. If they won't do their job, both ISP and users won't be happy and they might end up being replaced by someone else.
BTW: this is how it was with DSL. Title II has this provision, and telco companies were required to lease their lines to ISPs at a "reasonable fee" which was up to FCC to decide (this was so they wouldn't charge ridiculous prices to kill their competitors).
When Title II was reinstated, Wheeler actually excluded this provision, that's why nothing changed in terms of monopoly.
Public telcomms were the norm in most of the world (sans US) until the 80s-90s. It wasn't good.
What an ISP is is customer support & infrastructure. These sorts of ideas make ISPs less infrastructure, more customer facing services.
Btw, this is not some untested theory. It's been done a bunch of times. Work's well enough, done right.
competitive market > govt control > uncompetitive market
to be more realistic, there's overlap at the ends of these - you can find some local govts that outperformed competitive markets and some uncompetitive markets that outperform local govts, but on average, the above generalization works.
The real pain is that all the incentives that make capitalism work well ALSO incentivize finding ways to break the market, so a competitive market won't stay competitive forever just by existing.
Certainly. If we consider "competitive market" under the same rubric that you proposed: "areas where occasional failure and/or occasional required provider changes are tolerable", it clearly fails that test. So we can probably say that ensuring a stable, competitive market may be a government's responsibility.
DSL competition never happened in the area under question. Covad (a CLEC) deployed gear in Springfield, but Westfield (40k people) was only ever served by Verizon.
I'm nervous about how thoughtlessly we're embracing public ISP ownership. Local governments are notoriously corrupt, in both politics and police. These referenda expand their power without rebalancing any checks or balances. We just happen to have something breathlessly more broken in the monopoly ISPs.
Going forward, it would be nice to see cities re-open their networks to private management. The city would continue to own the infrastructure. But subpoenas, et cetera would be served to the private operator.
Don't worry-- states like North Carolina have actually outlawed municipal broadband.
> Local governments are notoriously corrupt, in both politics and police.
There was municipal wireless in my town after the FCC overruled these state broadband bans, and before the the court ruled against the FCC. Symmetric speeds. Prices prorated according to what the actual speed was instead of the advertised speed. Pretty decent support.
I witnessed these symmetric speeds directly. I also talked directly to the town manager about the program as it was being implemented. The plan was public and presented at a town board meeting. If there was notorious corruption going on it still hasn't affect speed, pricing, or support response for their service.
Very curious to read your references about notorious corruption of local governments.
> But subpoenas, et cetera would be served to the private operator.
Which is exactly what my town has done to be in compliance with the court ruling allowing state-wide municipal broadban bans.
Same speeds. Same prices. Same support. Possibly even some of the same people, but I'd have to look it up to make sure.
What is the point you are trying to make?
Edit: Keep in mind I wrote "pretty decent support" against a baseline of what I think support ought to be in a first world country. If I measured against Comcast I'd call it "support so amazing it may make you cry."
My point is that's a terrible baseline to settle for. If our metric for "should we do it" is solely "is it better than Comcast," we've got a problem. My specific concern is around local police having expanded access to locals' internet activity.
Where were you when all of these private companies built-in backdoors for law enforcement anyways.
Even better, anything they found without a warrant would be thrown out, unlike if Comcast volunteers to give up data about you.
Municipality builds and owns the infrastructure; competitively leases it to private operators for fixed periods of time.
Me too. And I think municipal broadband is the right first step--I'm lobbying for it in New York. But as it scales, we'll move from competent municipalities to incompetent one to evil ones. I'd prefer we figure out the balance of power before Ferguson, Missouri rolls out municipal broadband. (Or before they turn into new Port Authorities and BARTs.)
By this token this describes basically all public infrastructure then. It's not like roads were built with the idea that only public employees would use them.
> then intentionally introducing inefficiencies
Compared to the inefficiency of having ISPs have to build multiple separate physical networks? This service can be provided to ISPs at zero cost if it really worries you.
> I'm guessing after customers pay more taxes and still have the same internet bill.
Well duh, internet is priced based on how much people value it, not how much it costs to provide. Even in a world where the infrastructure is publicly owned no ISP would dare kill the golden calf by significantly cutting prices. ISPs typically compete in the other direction by providing better service at a given price.
> public internet is a failure
This wouldn't be 'public internet' by any reasonable definition, this would be local loop unbundling. It provides the means for an ISP to enter the market without significant construction costs. Any promise that this will reduce prices or lead to better service is purely speculative.
This would be like NYC building a road exclusively for Uber and Lyft, who can then charge you whatever for access via their transport. NYC loses because it then becomes dependent on ride sharing companies to justify its investment, so these companies can negotiate leases toward zero with the constant threat of pulling out.
> ...internet is priced based on how much people value it...
Yes, and it should absolutely not be. It's literally a series of ~~tubes~~ low-voltage power lines.
> Any promise that this will reduce prices...
Which is why it's a terrible idea. Residents should not be footing the bill for infrastructure that exists to create an artificial marketplace of identical (or worse, artificially differentiated) services. Being an ISP is not mysticism and is easily achievable by local government precisely because the majority of being an ISP is owning the wires. It also gives residents the ability to democratically determine what their own priorities are and adjust local QoS based on their own needs.
My local community owning my roads, sidewalks, water, sewer (storm AND human waste), fire hydrant infrastructure, as well as fire and police services has worked out a-ok. And while I take issue with Florida politics, EVERYTHING is open records. If my local police are corrupt and obtaining data illegally from my muni ISP, I can involve my state's attorney or other legal oversight bodies.
So! The overreaching issue isn't "this is about local internet infra", it's about local governance and self-reliance, which I find it difficult to argue against. Concentrated power corrupts, distributed power empowers.
Obligatory Muni/Startup ISP links: https://muninetworks.org/communitymap | https://startyourownisp.com/
As evil as Comcast is, their scale and need to operate in markets across all political/cultural spectrum makes me more confident that they won’t be messing with my browsing for petty reasons—they just want my wallet.
If Billy Bob the municipal broadband administrator is “sharing his list of fags” with his hillbilly friends, you can FOIA logs, emails, records, and come after the city for their transgression. You can vote local government representatives out of office. If Comcast does this, you have no recourse (and they would even be within their right to sell this data to the highest bidder).
Private operators are far more "notoriously corrupt" than local government. At large scale, government representation starts to break down and the will of the majority can become distorted. But at a local level, this is absolutely the better alternative to private ownership of what should be considered a fundamental human right.
And yet on the whole they are probably still far less corrupt and corrosive than monopolistic ISPs such Comcast, Verizon and Time Warner(or whatever their calling themselves these days.)
I would argue they are more accessible and accountable as well.
Cable companies were originally granted charters or franchise agreements in the 1970s and 1980s in the US. At that time cable companies were very much local and regional[1]. Also at that time television was delivered over the air and the monopoly was Ma Bell. Twenty years of consolidation happened at the national level. The victims of this hyper-consolidation were local.
Furthermore these municipal franchise agreements given to cable companies/ISPs are generally non-exclusive which is why there are some areas that actually have a duopoly instead of just a monopoly.
Municipalities will generally grant right away access to other interested parties which is why some places have both Verizon and Comcast or Comcast and Uverse etc. In fact the franchise fees collected by municipalities are a great source of revenue. I don't think there's a city in the US that isn't interested in collecting more money.
NYC recently sued Verizon for failing to fulfill its obligations of providing full coverage(and an alternative to the incumbent) to residents of the city[2]. So no local governments are not to blame for the corrosive and corrupt culture of these ISPs. Certainly not in any appreciable manner.
[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/02/14/chart-of-the...
[2] https://www.wired.com/story/new-york-city-verizon-internet/
You could think of a system by which multiple ISPs could sell service over the same city-owned infrastructure, but there's no real benefit to that. (And I say this as someone living in a country where that essentially happens.)
I mean I suppose you could ask the people that voted for it.
>The solution should be raising competitiveness of the market.
Networks like internet providership are notoriously hard to get competitive markets in. Even removing the regulatory barriers to entry there are still natural barriers to entry (high start up cost) and huge returns to scale. The natural state of this market is monopoly or oligopoly.
But even beyond this, this is raising the competitiveness of the market. Internet has become so integrated into the fabric of modern life that many feel compelled to purchase it from the one or maybe two providers in their area. That lowers competitiveness. Demonstrating that municipalities have ways of 'opting out' should force Comcast and other providers to compete with the hypothetical 'public ISP' that citizens can always vote in.
I would personally believe that if there are issues with quality of service or price or whatnot, this governance style allows for a much better opportunity of addressing issues. Versus being run by a very large monopoly that honestly may not care that much about the ongoing needs of a 1200 population town (read: small revenue source) in the future.
A competitive environment would be better if possible, but failing that, I personally would take a municipal broadband system with a good degree of accountability built into the town governance over an oligopoly.