The thing is the bulk of the cost is pulling wires. Fiber optic cables have an almost unlimited theoretical bandwidth. You just need to upgrade the hardware on both sides, which is getting cheaper by the minute.

A lot of the cost is pulling wires, but the equipment on both sides is also a major expense. FiOS scaled up from 75 mbps to 1 gbps over the same passive infrastructure, but the cost of upgrades was substantial. BPON line cards were upgraded to GPON linecards, and an upgrade to NGPON2 is in the works. As bandwidth went up, the number of customers per line card had to go down. 1G router ports had to be upgraded to 10G router ports. Etc.

I mean, just do a traceroute and see how many hops there are before you get to a peering node. In a municipal system, that's all infrastructure that the government has to pay to upgrade.

> I mean, just do a traceroute and see how many hops there are before you get to a peering node

Most carrier equipment operates below layer 3, and so is invisible to traceroute. But since you referenced it:

    traceroute to 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
     1  192.189.29.1 (192.189.29.1)  4.120 ms  4.267 ms  4.427 ms
     2  172.17.1.85 (172.17.1.85)  4.021 ms  4.077 ms  4.100 ms
     3  h252.63.131.40.static.ip.windstream.net (40.131.63.252)  10.661 ms  10.613 ms  10.600 ms

Why would it cost the government more to do that than Verizon?

Half joking: is it because the government gave Verizon billions of dollars?

Exactly. We're getting municipal 10 gigabit in my town currently. I can't see myself being unsatisfied with 10 gigabit fiber for a long long time.

But I have read that some researcher pushed consumer fiber optic to over 1tbps. So even when every wall of your house will be streaming 8k video 24/7, you might not reach the limit of the pipe.

“almost unlimited” doesn’t mean anything.

> We have some towns on the eastern shore of MD that did municipal cable, back when that was the state of the art. Those systems are lagging far behind Comcast now because nobody wants to raise rates to generate cash for upgrades.

It seems like the best solution would be to do both. Have a municipal network that serves everybody so that you don't need build out requirements for anyone else, then stop having them.

Then if the municipal network is not providing competitive price/performance in a particular area, other small providers can spring up. Meanwhile if you're in a farmhouse in the countryside, your options will be slower and more expensive than someone in a skyscraper in the city, but you'll still be guaranteed to at least have one.

I think it's important to have internet access as a safety net, but building a whole municipal network for that seems like a waste of public money. It would be much cheaper to subsidize commercial 5G service for those folks who can't get wired broadband.

There isn't any reason a municipal network couldn't reach rural customers using wireless.

The trouble with subsidies is, what happens if there is nothing to subsidize? In sufficiently rural areas there may be zero existing providers, and still be zero providers even if you offer a modest subsidy. But if you offer a large subsidy then the costs quickly get out of control as less rural areas that needed some but not that much end up claiming more subsidy than was actually necessary, and regulatory capture encourages the government to shovel more public money to private providers.

You also have trouble with suburban areas that can justify fiber but not twice. If there is only going to be one provider with no competition, better the municipality than Comcast.

A properly designed dark architecture for fiber, with small neighborhood powered nodes, can have a 50+ year life... It's the electronics that are going to need replacing. Same whether you build for 1 strand active Ethernet to each CPE or a 1x16 split gpon.

And who in the government of a small town is competent to design such an architecture? Who is competent to hire a competent company to design such an architecture? In the case of my town the answer is nobody. Our municipal internet project has been a boondoggle of incompetence, false starts, and mismanagement. Going on a decade. Meanwhile the people using Comcast or AT&T generally have usable service. I'm not a fan of either company, but at least they're getting the job done.

I don't see the problem here. The government doesn't need to be competent to design anything; the job of government is to control the funding and legalities, and contract with companies that can do the work. If the government isn't competent to hire a competent company, that's the government's fault, and by extension, the voters'. If the voters can't elect competent people to run their government, that's really OK: they're getting the government they deserve. If they're not competent enough to vote for decent government officials, they're not going to be competent enough to purchase service from good companies themselves either.

>If the government isn't competent to hire a competent company

In a small town, there may just not be anyone with the necessary knowledge and expertise. You can't vote for someone who doesn't exist.

In theory this should be simple:

1. find a similar town that has good municipal internet 2. ask them who did it for them 3. hire those people

If everybody knows they are ignorant, you're probably OK. The big problem is in the towns where people think they have the expertise but don't.

The town has a government comprised of the people from that town. If there isn't anyone in the town smart enough to run for government who, as the other responder pointed out simply needs to look for other towns that did something similar and ask them how they did it and who they contracted with, then obviously the town is full of utter morons, and by definition, the democracy in that town is working as designed: the people are getting what they deserve.

In the case of Charlemont, they're working with Westfield Gas & Electric, which has already designed and installed municipal fiber for its own town (Whip City Fiber) and has designed fiber installations for several other cities in Western MA.

Charlemont has studied the issue for years and are working with an organization that took the time over years to test out municipal fiber in the own community by creating "fiberhoods" and now is covering 70% of Westfield.

The obvious solution seems to be a public entity at federal level. They would be big enough to have the relevant expertise without the misaligned incentives of the big corporate companies.

> public entity at federal level

> without the misaligned incentives of the big corporate companies

There's plenty of misaligned incentives at any Nth level of government. They're just more diverse. Some are political instead of financial.

However, there are plenty of example of government organisation successfully managing broadband infrastructure projects.

"nobody wants to raise rates to generate cash for upgrades."

So maybe we change that mindset, rayiner.

FiOS... Multiple times .... meanwhile, in Silicon Valley... sigh

Was it debt-financed? Interesting. I like the Stockholm model.

Yes.

> Verizon has upgraded the FiOS network several times since 2005

The what network?

Your comment is reasonable in the abstract, but I'm sorry to say that in the specific context it's ridiculous. There is little functional difference between a municipal network that has trouble convincing residents to spring for an upgrade, and a company that will never see a profit in it.

Except that municipal network is currently offering 1Gb/1Gb with a possible future difficulty, while the Verizon network is offering 3Mb/384kb and hasn't been touched since it was deployed two decades ago.