Ziply Fiber is another ISP that I can wholeheartedly recommend. They have service all over the north west states of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho (though still not _everywhere_). Like Sonic.net, their quality of service is excellent. No congestion, very limited downtime, no bandwidth caps. They’ve even posted pictures of the accidents that have caused downtime. Most recently that was damaged battery banks that released enough hydrogen gas to shut down and evacuate a central office. Before that it was a drill that took out a fiber bundle; cue pictures of the engineers splicing all the individual fibers back together.
We need more local ISPs, municipal or otherwise.
When Democratic Party controlled the federal government, they tried to. It is generally hard to do because it requires funding and passing laws. Another difficulty is that voters don’t reward Democratic Party for their efforts.
It is very easy for Republican Party to revert the changes. Moreover their donors reward the republican politicians for their efforts and their voters don’t punish them for their efforts.
It is worth noting that the Biden admin passed a $42B package of broadband rollout funds in 2021, and then connected ZERO people over the next few years.
This is because special interest groups saddled it with environmental, union, and DEI requirements that were so onerous that nobody was able to actually get/use the funds.
Yes, Democrats plan to do the right thing, but frankly they should be penalized for boondoggles like this. Until the party can sideline its special interest groups to get things done, it's not as simple as "Democrats good, GOP bad."
[1] https://www.washingtonpolicy.org/publications/detail/the-42-...
Trump administration illegally impounded the funding. This has been disallowed for decades but sadly the republican political appointees at the supreme court is allowing him.
My point is that democrats don’t get credit and votes for improving internet for rural areas and republicans don’t get punished for destroying progress. The fact that you are criticizing democrats so harsh and think trump breaking the laws doesn’t matter just prove my points.
> When states use the federal subsidy to provide access in areas without internet, they no longer have incentives to confirm if the technology being deployed is appropriate for the area or if the customer base needs and wants what is being provided.
It's actually the opposite. When states use federal subsidies they have the freedom to consider the technology that is actually best for the area instead of just what is cheap enough for the state to afford without better help.
When they are limited to whatever is cheapest now they may have to pick something that meets the present needs of rural areas but will be inadequate in a few years.
Even when it was created, Starlink was obviously the best option for quickly linking rural America to the Internet. That's obvious because that's EXACTLY HOW rural America has actually been linking itself to the Internet, despite it not being covered by the program. In ten years, that's probably still how they'll get online.
I am a Democrat, have been since I could vote, and refuse to vote red for as long as MAGA owns the GOP. It's still exhausting to watch my party flounder and give in to its worst instincts.
Ref: https://youtu.be/NcZxaFfxloo?t=990
When you have tons of paperwork and ZERO deployments (not exaggerating), there's nothing to revert.. just a lot to be disappointed by.
Delaware, Louisiana, and Nevada had selected contractors and passed final federal review and were ready to start construction as soon as the funds were disbursed.
Another 40 had contractors selected and were just waiting for final federal review to complete and funds to be disbursed. If the program had not been changed by the Trump administration most of them would have had construction starting this year.
All large efforts like this take a few years to go from initial passing of the law that enables them to construction actually starting.
Another good quote: “It’s almost as if they had designed this machine to make sure that people in rural areas _never_ get broadband…”
Ooh, Ezra: “This is the Biden administration’s process for it’s own bill. They wanted this to happen. This is how liberal government works now.”
Many other billions have the same issues - I think no one knows how to actually hoover this the way the big co's do?
We've had much faster broadband happening because of commercial competition from scrappy startups and WISPS and fiber folks (think sonic)
I think something like 94% of RDOF/BEAD locations in california were defaulted (ie, awarded but customer actually never got service)?
It's crazy given the 100+ billion or so spent on USF / RDOF / BEAD / etc that they couldn't do $5b - $10b for something like starlink which at least in rural areas is able to serve folks pretty quickly and push hard on that for a bit. The unsubsidized commercial starklink services is already outcompeting the insanely subsidized buildouts (that cost insane amounts per person). Starlink was awarded the funds but then they were revoked.
A popular one is 'density', and, okay, maybe this is somewhat true if you're talking about, say, Wyoming (though I think not as true as people often think), but California, for instance, has an only slightly lower population density than _France_, and at that point "we can't have proper transport/telecoms/whatever because density" is just an excuse, and not a convincing one.
I like to point stuff like this out whenever someone compares an entire EU country to some US state.
note: i edited the france density, as i did accidentally transcribe the wrong value. France is slightly denser per sqkm.
It seems like you're mixing density units.
France has 66M people for 547k km^2, which is 122/km^2 , California has 39M for 403k km^2, which is 97/km^2.
I have a 5gbit down, 900mbit up connection with 200 tv channels a d a landline for 30€ over fiber. And I'm not even in a big city
In the US I had spectrum at 80$ a month for just internet at like 20mbit down or something...
So imagine if France couldn't go into debt - only the EU can. France wants a giga-train suddenly, so they ask for it. The current leader of the EU isn't a fan of more trains, so he turns it down. France goes back to its people and says "we can build the giga-train if we do XYZ", and people vote based on whether or not they want XYZ or the giga-train more.
I think it's possible you just might want things different from what others want. That study a while back which showed most Americans want cheap public transit so that everyone else gets off the road and gives them more space lives rent free in my head. Nobody wants these stupid trains.
Not just broadband, but same with healthcare, homelessness, gerrymandering etc. Just copy-paste little by little.
It's not just an american media problem. Plenty of people here calling for municipal broadband ignoring what worked in other countries.
1 Timothy 6:10: "For the love of money is the root of all evil []"
The issue is there's some perverse incentives at play with the grant monies. For brand new neighborhoods you can expect state of the art internet being available. However, after it's installed, you can expect it to be simply locked in place with no upgrades.
A major problem comes down to easements. If there's a utility pole nearby then some federal regulations make it super easy for a utility to just add their line onto the existing pole. There are access guarantees.
However, if no pole exists then you are looking at buried lines. That means each time you want to cross someone's driveway or property you need to reach out to the existing owner to negotiate access. Some people are easy to work with, others will just flat out deny access. (The BLM, for example, is notoriously hard to work with for placing underground utilities. As are a few big churches).
The US, frankly, has the wrong model. Leaving everything up to private companies is what creates all these problems. The companies have absolutely no way to guarantee a route for service and they have little skin in the game to run an update.
At a bare minimum, the better model is to make utilities public (at very least the lines themselves.) That gives the government a powerful ability, the ability to claim eminent domain to cram through any improvement they need. You could still have private ISPs, but you can relegate their roles to just running the equipment (switches, routers, etc) rather than doing all the additional line management work.
I'd say one thing to do is outlaw the contracts that let governments only approve a single provider.
It was Softbank that brought the competition. In 2001 they started offering 1meg connections for $20 a month. The competition cost 10x. Softbank had aggressive marketing too, putting up booths at neighborhood train stations where they could sign you up and hand you a device on your way home.
The competition lowered their prices to match within a couple of months. Softbank doubled the speed to 2meg, same price. The same pattern. The competition matched price within a few weeks. Softbank raised their speed to 8meg. repeat.
AFAICT it all finally settled (25 years later). Currently $40 for 1gig fiber or $60 for 10gig fiber or $50 for https://www.softbank.jp/internet/sbhikari/
And NTT is competitive https://flets.com/
Japan has a population density that is 8 times higher than the lower 48 states.
Back when we had the AT&T monopoly the government forced them to serve rural customers. It was subsided by a small fee on every phone bill. That carried over to the baby Bells because they were local monopolies. The problem is, no one has land lines anymore and no companies are willing to take on the last mile problem without a hefty incentive. Being the broadband monopoly is part of that incentive.
I argued for years that the AT&T breakup was done in the stupidest way possible. Put the natural monopoly - the last mile - on its own and regulate the hell out of it like we did AT&T. Then allow competition to run the service on top of those connections. We started in that direction but lost our way somewhere.
But to get back to the original topic, I was referring specifically to the local monopolies that so many cities have granted to cable companies which exclude not just other cable companies but certain types of internet services as well. I was specifically not talking about rural areas, where that’s not a problem. Not many cities out there in the countryside.
If you want to see fiber installed everywhere, make the FCC annul all of the local monopolies and speed up all of the local permitting processes. Just have the FCC rule that no local permitting process for installing internet service in existing conduits or on existing poles may take longer than a fixed period of time (I dunno, a month or two should suffice), otherwise the permits are automatically granted. If the permit applications don’t meet your local rules then you need to identify the problem and reject the application quickly, not drag things out for years. Something along those lines.
Subsidies to speed up rural deployment of real broadband are a separate topic.
I’m all for getting rid of local monopolies that aren’t municipally owned.
> The US is massive and full of sparsely populated rural areas, all of which will ignored by capitalists. Starlink is then their only option.
Ironically, Elon Musk is a capitalist who is making bank by serving the sparsely populated rural areas. He is certainly not ignoring them. You can get Starlink service in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and if there is any more sparsely populated place on Earth then I don’t know about it.
At least have a coherent argument before you complain that competition can’t solve a problem.
The US population is fairly concentrated. Various metrics to make the point: 40% of the US population lives in coastal counties:
* https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/population.html
About two-thirds of the population lives with-in 100 miles of the border:
* https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone
The top 143 counties (out of 3244) contain half the population:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/County_(United_States)
Hitting the most populous 10% of counties will get you a good way towards universal coverage (LA county alone as >9M people, which would rank #12 as a state population).
In all seriousness, we’ve poured billions of dollars into broadband expansion efforts since the early 2000s. Every single time it’s been largely hoovered up by Big Telecoms, failed to expand broadband/improve speeds/lower prices, and basically just gone right to their bottom line as a subsidy.
The solution all along has been funding municipal broadband as the baseline for private enterprise to compete against and surpass, but lobbyists have all but killed that dead up until the past ten years or so. You can’t treat broadband as a utility in legal language but not in practice, yet the USA seems perfectly fine with their status quo leaving them a laughing stock of the developed world.