The Washington state legislature has voted to end limits on municipal broadband

Re:The Washington state legislature has voted to end limits ... by walrus01 on Thursday April 15, 2021 @09:16PM (#26828218)

The big thing that differentiates those counties is they already operate the last mile electrical grid as a PUD (public utility district). So they already have bucket trucks, crews of linemen, flaggers, reel trailers, other aerial fiber/cable construction resources on staff and trained. Other parts of WA state have privately owned last mile grid operators like Puget power and Avista.

Washington state viewed from a whole-state colored map perspective is a wild patchwork quilt of different last mile telco operators (mostly centurylink or ziply now, but others exist, like how the ellensburg valley is neither), and mottled variety of different types of electrical grid operator. Or different types of combination aerial/underground cable operator (comcast or charter, mostly, but by no means all).

It will be somewhat more time consuming, costly and difficulty for a county that is not also a PUD to set up their own fiber construction enterprise.

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Re:The Washington state legislature has voted to end limits ... by mtnGoat on Thursday April 15, 2021 @11:53PM (#26829252)

In chelan and Douglas counties, the PUD essentially owns the fiber networks as well as the power networks, but they are only allowed to sell power directly. For broadband I have to go through another provider, I’ve always thought this was silly. A few of those providers have done quite well financially, in leveraging this situation. All they do is customer service, and hook up from the pole to the house, and lease routers. the infrastructure investment was prepaid by the public.

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Re:The Washington state legislature has voted to end limits ... by CameronNemo on Friday April 16, 2021 @02:08AM (#26830138)

I don't see why that is such a terrible situation. Sure some providers are profiting off of people's naïveté, but other providers could easily undercut them with minimal investment. And let's face it, govt orgs have a bad reputation in the customer service area.

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Re:The Washington state legislature has voted to end limits ... by mtnGoat on Friday April 16, 2021 @11:16AM (#26834903)

Except in this case the PUD are not for profit and do not have a monopoly. So they are forced to compete. Sad that so many public utilities have screwed up so bad and ruined the idea for the rest. The customer service at the local PUDs are quite simply amazing. They pay and treat their employees incredibly well also.

In this case I think the PUD can actually undercut the existing providers as they already have support staff in place, linemen, etc. but aren’t allowed to take a profit.

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Re:The Washington state legislature has voted to end limits ... by avs733 on Friday April 16, 2021 @08:30AM (#26833052)

So do telcos

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Re:The Washington state legislature has voted to end limits ... by coryrc on Thursday April 15, 2021 @09:40PM (#26828390)

Also, they generate way more electricity than they use, so they use the extra money selling it to subsidize local efforts.

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