It's a false equivalence to compare working in a company to have the same scaling problems as implementing policies to set up broadband infrastructure.

Not really at all.

Taking politics out of it. If you wanted to start a 25gbps project today, who do you think could get it done quicker. A small local municipality with a few network engineers. Or getting a Federal agency to do it?

My money is on the municipality.

I agree that a smaller municipality would be more successful, but not because they are smaller.

The municipality is a more concentrated interest, and more motivated to deliver on a solution that works for their constituents.

Compare that to the federal government needing to execute a national “Interstate Highway for broadband” mega-project. The federal government can and has executed these kinds of projects, but it needs to consider different things than the municipalities.

Extending the highway metaphor, a smaller municipality can pave local roads just as quickly as the federal government can build highways.

Efficiency is not a perfect function of government size.

So why don't you have ISPs that focus on one state or one geographical area. We have that all over in Europe.

To some extent there are, but in many cases it's because the law prohibits that. It imposes build out requirements so that if you want to offer service in the higher density area you also have to provide service over a wide area that includes a bunch of farmland or similar.

In theory this is supposed to be to make sure someone is serving rural areas but in practice it's because the incumbents don't want new challengers showing up to provide better service in the areas where it's profitable to build a competing network and so lobby the government to saddle them with a huge barrier to entry.

They get bought out.

The wonderful Minneapolis-local fiber ISP US Internet recently got bought out by T-Mobile (Deutsche Telekom) for example.

Wave Broadband in the bay area got bought by private equity.

All around the country you'll find local or municipal cable companies that got sold to the big players, Mediacom, Comcast, etc.

Indeed. But also some things that were harder at the small company were easier at the large one. You have processes in place, were things in the small company are all done ‘by hand’.

So I think it is hard to compare small and big. For one company things are easy that are hard for the other and vice-versa.

Do you imagine an infrastructure project in ANY country is managed like a project in a small company?

> Were things that were easy at small companies much harder at large ones?

I don't know about anyone else, but I have *never* found this to be the case.

Dealing with a larger company you've got a far greater selection of people you can get to say "uh, yeah, I guess, why not? It's not really my department..." which you can take as a yes.

In a smaller company no matter what you're doing you've got to get it past Old Bob, who's been there since before most of the current management team were born and will argue over everything simply because he can.