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.
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".