I said this in another comment, but I don't know why you're holding Google up as an exemplar. They don't even have the attention span to follow through on software projects that bear fruit after a few years. Meanwhile my electric company has been providing electricity for well over a century, with de jure government successfully preventing it from running away with extractive customer-hostile dynamics.
From other comments I believe you live in an area where you have a choice of several competing corporate wired providers. That's fantastic, and I'm glad your own needs are taken care of that way - where a functioning market can exist, we should celebrate it. However, most people don't live in such an area, including even people in dense areas with horror stories about their buildings signing monopoly contracts with a single provider.
Because Google has enormous financial incentives to disrupt the industry and drive down prices. Google delivers their product over infrastructure owned by other companies, and thus has tremendous incentives to commoditize that infrastructure. https://marginalfutility.substack.com/p/11-commoditizing-you...
If Google is complaining that build out requirements make building fiber too expensive, that tells you an important fact about the economics of building fiber.
> Meanwhile my electric company has been providing electricity for well over a century
… over last mile infrastructure that pretty much hasn’t changed in that time. There’s a ton of stuff we built in the 1930s that we simply could not build today because of exponentially higher infrastructure costs.
That also means that public utility infrastructure in this country is a ticking time bomb. For the stuff that does need large scale replacement, like water and sewage pipes, there’s a multi-trillion backlog because public utilities have not invested sufficiently in the infrastructure.
> From other comments I believe you live in an area where you have a choice of several competing corporate wired providers.
Because it’s a county that makes it easy to build stuff. We also have pretty affordable housing, for the same reason.
> However, most people don't live in such an area, including even people in dense areas
It’s especially the people in dense areas that have the most trouble getting broadband. What do these dense urban areas have in common, I wonder.
> What do these dense urban areas have in common
Higher population density such that any activity in the public right of ways affects proportionally more people and thus receives more scrutiny and review?
I honestly don't have any easy prescriptions for facilitating new Internet buildout in dense areas. I do agree that zoning and permits have gotten us to a condition where it would be effectively impossible to rebuild what has already been built (eg the common example of most walkable duplex/triple deckers not conforming to the lots they currently sit on). FWIW this would imply that the incumbent communications companies should continue to be highly regulated due to new entrants being unable to duplicate their existing buildout.
My comments are focused on the not-dense areas where laying/stringing new lines is perfectly straightforward, but there are no incentives for Ma Bell or Ma Coax to lay new infrastructure (aka FTTH) as they're already milking a captive market. There are multiple comments in this thread of people suffering Ma Coax with some ridiculous bills, fiber being promised but not available, etc. Then a newcomer enters the market, whether municipal or private, and then all of sudden Ma Coax snaps to attention and starts competing. As I said, in places that new privately-funded competition actually does enter we should celebrate. But that shouldn't involve municipalities abdicating their own interests (eg mandates to build out the whole city/town) in the hope that it might make competition magically appear, since that's a race to the bottom - especially if we're talking about relaxing requirements for the incumbents, meaning competition still hasn't arrived.
Furthermore for many places (my own included), the needle was only ever going to be moved by the municipality getting involved. Internet access is basically a solved problem for me now, so much so that I have to wonder why I even started commenting in this thread, apart from saying to people who are wondering if pushing for municipal fiber is worthwhile - yes, it really is.
(And as far as electrical lines and infrastructure in general, I certainly have my complaints but overall I feel it's being decently maintained in my area. I often do see lineworkers replacing poles and upgrading lines. And electricity distribution certainly has advanced in 100 years Looking at the overall national statistics, sure I get the trends behind the narrative. But I'm also not going to let those general narratives destroy my faith in my local institutions, because that too is a cause of the problem)
That’s true of most municipalities. And they have higher priorities for infrastructure expenditures. Cities and states need to spend $745 billion just to bring water infrastructure up to existing health and environmental standards. Broadband is way behind lead pipes or crumbling bridges on governments’ list of priorities.
> Regardless of density, infrastructure has an intrinsic capital cost that needs to be accounted on the order of a decade, and moribund dinosaurs based around short term revenue extraction aren't capable of doing that.
I heard this a decade ago, when Google was going to show up the “dinosaurs.” How is that going?