https://www.publicintegrity.org/2014/08/28/15404/how-big-tel...
Can't they just do the same thing in Colorado?
Colorado has a state law requiring municipalities to hold referendums before they can provide cable, telecom, or broadband service. Yesterday, voters in Eagle County and Boulder County authorized their local governments to build broadband networks, "bringing the total number of Colorado counties that have rejected the state law to 31—nearly half of the state's 64 counties," Motherboard wrote today.
As far as I know, there have been attempts to make it impossible for a community to opt-out, but nothing's been successful yet. In fact, most recently, it looks like the tide has been turning in favor of repealing the ban state-wide (which wouldn't be surprising considering the 31 counties that have already opted out). Here's a bit more info:
I mean, really - how dare they?
Are you saying that as a Comcast shareholder? If so, bravo. I wish more of them thought the same way.
gotta admire a great Simpsons reference when I see one
Another way to describe municipal broadband: state-run media pipeline. Allowing the government to control the last mile of the Internet. Port all those fears you have about Comcast violating net neutrality, stifling competition, spying on users.. Now, increase the power from "firm that can put other firms out of business" to "group of people who can put other people in jail."
1). Don't most places that do this set up a company? As in, it's a company that happens to have one of it's owners as the city.
2). Does anyone honestly think that if such a thing were to happen, that private ISPs like Comcast would somehow, magically be exempt? That the government official would be like a Scooby Doo villan, saying, "Curses! I'd have gotten away with the censorship and spying if it wasn't for you meddling private ISPs!"
I have similar concerns but I think municipal would win out:
1) The First Amendment protects us against government interference with free speech. It does not apply to private companies like Comcast - they face no such constraints. This is especially true with the current FCC, where they're considering excluding internet utilities from common carrier rules. It's far more likely that Comcast would be granted monopoly or duopoly status by a local government, and then use that privileged position to control or censor speech or net traffic it unilaterally deems unacceptable, with no recourse or restraint that the First Amendment provides.
2) With municipal broadband citizens can always go to the ballot box and elect new leadership to increase transparency, accountability, and service level. What rights does the citizenry have to monitor and audit Comcast's decision making process? Zero. It's a private company beholden to shareholders - a situation that's often orthogonal to free speech and individual rights.
3) The public utility models works extraordinarily well for gas, electricity, water, sewage, garbage, streets, and other essentials for our modern life. Internet access can also thrive under this model, as like other utilities it is a natural monopoly.
There is a matter of unfair competition, as the state can run any service at a loss forever.
That said, municipal governments are not sovereign entities, they derive all their authority from the state. States get to decide, as a general matter, what to make a public service and what to leave to the private market. Moreover, municipal governments do lots of stupid short sighted things. Remember, they’re the ones who are responsible for giving companies monopolies in the first place, which Congress had to step in an fix in the Cable Act of 1994.
There is also another matter of politics to consider. Municipal services are heavily unionized. Telecom services are also pretty heavily unionized, but less so. By shifting telecom from a private service into a public one, you’re giving more power to public unions. That’s not a good reason to oppose municipal broadband, but its undoubtedly a major consideration.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15570559#up_15573817
What's more interesting to me is the effect on rural access. Plenty of lake-side cabins in the woods with fiber available. One ISP has taken to putting up poles with Ubiquiti airFiber antennas, creating a mesh network that extends beyond the already large fiber coverage. In Chelan and Douglas counties you can get a 35/2 connection nearly anywhere over this extended wireless network, even way up some lonesome canyon.
It's amazing what a little competition does to the ISP market...
Edit: Hmm, looks like Fort Collins will use contractors for installs and hire 10 to 38 people over five years (p. 39 - Personnel Requirements): https://www.fcgov.com/broadband/pdf/7.27.17%20Broadband%20Bu...
However, this is excluding developers for things like customer portals. Maybe that will get contracted out as well.
Seems light to run an ISP, even for FC's size.
I'm guessing word-of-mouth helped defeat incumbents' efforts to kill this, as much as anything. It's almost become a standard conversation piece around here: "I'm from Longmont." "Oh, you have decent internet, then? Jealous!"
it's like that all the time now. Never been down for longer than 15 minutes and I've never been on hold trying to get assistance. All that for $50/mo :)
Citizens have a more direct effect on local governments than they do state or federal.
Boulder is still in an earlier phase -- the vote was to allow the city to start the planning process. Greeley also voted in favor of something similar.
By "infrastructure" I mean last-mile fiber buried/strung throughout neighborhoods and into peoples' homes. It's expensive to build such infrastructure, due to varieties of local laws, right-of-way access, and for the same reasons leaf nodes are most numerous in typical tree data structures.
So, Comcast's approach is to extract as much money as they can from existing infrastructure which they've built, acquired, or gained exclusive rights to, while directing minimal resources to building new such.
Along with that, they expend a lot of effort lobbying to protect that infrastructure from encroachment or competition by other entities, like other private ISPs, unbundling laws, municipal broadband, and the like.
It's not about the Internet specifically. It's just that every law or public spending is a shitty thing for those who don't want it, but have to pay for it anyway, or play by some rules they can't opt out of. In every other situation, we would consider such things shitty behaviour, so I think it makes sense to acknowledge that consequence and only do it if we really must.
Your financial viability as an infrastructure provider is do, instead by your uptake rate. Most of your cost is in passing each house. Your cost per customer is thus driven by your uptake ratio (subscribers divided by houses passed). Fiber deployments struggle to get to 0.4 or so, meaning you have to pass 2.5 houses for each paying customer. Forcing build out in all neighborhoods tanks your uptake ratio by forcing you to build in lots of places where people can’t necessarily afford your service.
https://consumerist.com/2014/05/10/why-starting-a-competitor...
https://consumerist.com/2014/03/07/heres-what-lack-of-broadb...
Kushnick, B., $300 Billion Broadband Scandal [2009] http://www.teletruth.org/docs/broadbandscandalfree.pdf
https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/sb17-042
That particular bill ultimately failed, but it was on the right track.
Probably the #1 problem is the ignorance of how bad the telecom monopoly is in the US, that there even are alternatives, and that this is the problem domain government needs to approach in the same way they approach electric access or roads.
amusingly, boulder county, which passed this same thing, tried for years to get out of maintaining my neighborhood's roads. (and our electric service is privately provided.)
1. Building more than one version of given infrastructure is often called an "overbuild" and it tends to be bad. Like you don't have two different electric, gas or water companies running a whole set of wires, poles, pipes or whatever to your house. The capex cost of any such network is massive so paying that cost 2, 3 or 4 times for the same number of customers is clearly going to more costly for consumers overall.
2. Utilities, which aren't duplicated, are heavily regulated to avoid monopolistic behaviour as this is the only rational choice. I believe in the US this is Title II for telecommunications at least (which covers landline service). The FCC under the Obama administration did follow through with a promise to apply Title II to ISPs as well, something Comcat, TWC and the like were deadset against as it would obviously impact profits.
The real problem here is that Internet at this point is really the fourth utility and it should be legislated and regulated as such but Comcat et al don't just want to be "dumb pipes".
This factors into the whole net neutrality argument too. Imagine PG&E said that you could only use electricity for Whirlpool branded washers and dryers or if you used anything else the electricity would cost you more. Well, that kind of discrimination is what US ISPs want to be able to do (sadly) and we've already seen this with, say, Verizon throttling Netflix traffic.
3. ISPs have unfortunately been much better at framing these public debates than the other side. For example, in the aforementioned net neutrality debates, ISPs framed this as the likes of Netflix pushing data onto their network for free and they argued they should get paid for that.
The reality is of course that Netflix doesn't push anything. Consumers are pulling data from Netflix. ISPs are getting paid for this too... by the consumers. The ISPs are simply trying to double-dip and get paid at both ends. What's more, stiffling services like Netflix has nothing to do with any notion of fairness. It's just a backhanded way of cable companies propping up their declining TV businesses.
4. Various other models have been tried around the world to solve the overbuild problem. In Australia, for example, the government has tried a strategy where a single entity would own the wires and ISPs could rent those lines to provide services to consumers. To make this work, the entity owning the wires has to charge the same price to everyone, no matter how big or small.
Unfortunately, for a bunch of complicated reasons to NBN (so-called "next generation" broadband network) is going to end up only guaranteeing 12Mbps to each household... in 2017 for probably A$60-70B for a country of ~24M.
5. Building any sort of netowrk like this is what I like to call a national hyperlocal business and the entrenched players are very good at it. To give some examples:
- Getting access to poles varies from city to city and can be hugely complicated;
- Digging trenches can be just as complicated and you might have to deal with a bunch of different stuff in the ground (eg one area has a ton of limestone in the soil).
- Existing buildings once had single-vendor agreements that prohibited new players from providing service there. At one point these were ruled illegal. They've since been replaced by exclusive marketing agreements where, say, a condo building will only ever tell you about one provider.
- Once you've built past a lot of houses it still requires a lot of efforts to connect a new house (we're talking hours). There is a huge manpower component in this. To be already connected to an existing provider is a huge advantage to that existing provider.
6. No discussion of cable companies in the US is complete without touching on the issue of franchise agreements. A franchise agreement is where a cable company agreed to build in a given city and to alleviate the expense they were offered a number of benefits. These could be exclusive rights, ownership of the poles and so on. But to provide TV service, the company usually ended up paying the town. These sums could be significant to the budgets of the towns or counties in which they applied. These fees also discouraged the municipality from being friendly to any newcomer as any such newcomer may mean a budget hit.
Disclaimer: I used to work on Google Fiber.
http://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=56288307&itype=CMSI...
Unfortunately, Boulder city has been trying to go municipal with energy as well, which appears to be failing badly, and that's taking most of their time.
You won't be able to build a network in more than a few cities at first because anything else would cost astronomical amounts of money.
That means that the current monopolist in those cities can afford to lower prices, making your investment unprofitable.
In Canada, in my youth - the entire telelphone network was socialized - it was a byzantine mess.
You had to buy your telephone from the government (i.e. Bell, state owned).
In Saskatchewan, it's still the same.
Imagine if the networks were run like the DMV.
Even worse - with massive, bloated government subsidies and 'guaranteed revenue stream' through taxation - they can make it impossible to compete.
Pay workers way above market wages (the 'change collectors' on the Toronto Subway often earn more than $100K a year, even though the jobs should not even exist anymore).
So it's probably a good idea right now maybe to force some innovation in the sector ...
But is there any evidence that American wireless carriers are operating in an oligarchic manner?
Here in Canada - we pay through the roof for wireless service due to very powerfully entrenched entities - we envy the US rates, which are relatively competitive.
Anyhow - it's maybe a good move but it needs to be watched both for successful opportunities (if it works well it could be a shake up), but also for creeping and bloated bureaucracy.
The free market is one way of efficiently incorporating user preferences. Responsive democratic government is another. It might be slower to adapt, but it compensates by having less perverse incentives.
It's also rather obvious how byzantine most operational aspects of government are:
Ex: The DMV is the entity that would not send me an email or SMS to inform me about specific events at least when I lived in Cali. Even though every other company on planet earth can do that.
Ex: The Government of Ontario issues three different kinds of ID. The 'Health Care' ID cannot be used as valid ID anywhere else, only within health. There are huge bureaucracies dedicated to each form of ID. Why not issue one ID, and all of the agencies can use that? Answer: unions and job protectionism. I personally know the former CEO of 'Services Ontario' - he has no interest in increasing quality of service - there is absolutely zero incentive for him. Moreover - the Unions would make it quite impossible. Why would he even consider automating tasks when it reduces headcount? The union will put up a stink and it could get him fired. Moreover, he loses budget and power. So the incentives are completely upside down for most government agencies.
Ex: The TTC (Toronto Public Transit) pays many of it's staff quite a lot. Toronto really needs Subway extensions, which are massively expensive to the point we can't afford them = yet we are still paying people to collect change - as I mentioned above, some of them earn over $100K.
Ex: try visiting stats Canada right now:
https://www.statcan.gc.ca/eng/start
try making sense of that mess - there's tons and tons of data, most of it poorly organized, de-facto unsearchable. Very poorly presented when it is. Moreover - it's 2017 and up until a month ago NONE of the data was available via API (!!!). Just one month ago, they made some of it available. Of course, most of the data is not useful, they're not collecting some of the most relevant information that we need - specifically demographic information by postal code etc..
Can you imagine if Google quality engineers were responsible for the search and presentation of that data?
Ex: the Ontario Police (OPP) made a deal with the government such that they had to be the 'highest paid police' in the Province. So a local village, called 'Shelburne' Ontario, with 2 cops, for some reason of local dispute, decide to pay their 2 guys massively over the regular wage for a cop. Guess what: OPP unions take the government to task for insanely high wages. Meanwhile, there are budget cuts everywhere.
Ex: The Toronto Community housing rakes in $200-400 million dollars a year from city taxpayers - and almost 50% of that is spent on overhead and administration! So $100-100M just on staffing and other things. You do realize if this were a charity, it would be considered 'corrupt'? Moreover, the idea that governments should be building homes? Why are they doing that? If we are interested in having low income people live in specific area (one might ask the question why?) - then why wouldn't we just literally subsidize housing for them? Let them live where they please in that area and they will pay landlords/developer just as any other person. Government managers who so inefficiently spend 50% of their charitable budgets on overhead are somehow going to be able to hire contracts and manage building more efficiently than the private sector? No.
Ex: Parole officers in corrections Canada us FAX MACHINES when individuals need to request their various forms of leave. Why? 'Paper Trail'. So they say (And its not due to signatures). But they can't grasp using email, or some kind of portal for this. Because why should they?
What reason do these agencies have to change? Regular voters cannot really vote on these specific things - mostly we don't know they are happening.
If there is no reason for a system to change - or system incentives are set up to create more workers and less efficiency - well - that's what will happen.
It's all just bureaucracy absurdism.
Governments are needed for regulation, and they might need to operate specific things (i.e. roads, the power lines but not power plants, wireless spectrum, military) and of course Health is always a special case.
Teaching is one of those areas public schools can do well - because it's almost impossible to screw up: put a well educated, decent person in a room in front of a class with teaching plans and books and you have a school. It's not like the school can go 500% over budget. And there aren't really many ways to improve on it, as I don't believe that competitive bonuses actually improve teaching quality that much.
But otherwise, no. It's mostly just a massive form of distribution of surpluses.
Also competition is bad. People might get ideas...
When the municipal broadbands fail taxpayers are on the hook for million dollars bail outs. https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickgleason/2014/09/30/munic...
As far as I know, competition is allowed, it just doesn't exist. The market has failed to provide us with broadband options. This vote is not actually for the government to run it themselves, it's just to override a state-level ban on municipal broadband. The next step will be for Comcast to lobby against municipalities actually setting up competing broadband offerings. A few steps after that and Comcast might actually start responding as if they are competing in an actual market, for instance by improving their services and/or lowering their prices. If they clean up their act enough, they might even get to keep their monopoly. But their reputation is already so bad that it seems somewhat unlikely at this point.
I don't see how a local municipality having access is worse than a large corporation. At least municipalities aren't incentivized to extract more revenue by selling data. It seems like regulations and technology are better solutions to privacy issues than keeping ISPs private.
Be careful — government is usually not a great runner of a customer-service focused business.
Maybe, maybe not, but we know Comcast and TWC aren't a great runner of customer-service focused business.
Further, do you really want government (municipal) or otherwise being your ISP? Having access to all of your traffic lines?
No, but I'm assuming they already have access without a warrant now.
I agree, federal government does have the resources to spy, and uses them very effectively. Why make it that much easier for our local governments to do that as well.
Why do people keep bringing this up? They act like government is going to be able to bypass the current laws in place in a way that they couldn't with Comcast.
No one should have to buy something they depend on from Comcast.
Sorry had to let it out.
Sounds like a classic underdog win to me.
Comcast won't cease to exist. Other ISPs can form.
>that can use force
When was the last time your water/electric/gas company "used force" against public interest?
Everyday.
Think of it this way, people that don't want to use the service can't opt out for the tax loss incurred by the state running it.
The DMV spells out what you need online, but people show up and need every little thing explained to them. I'm at the counter for 5 minutes, pay my fees, and walk out the door.
Why was this other goof-ball at the window for 25 minutes? 99% of the time, because they did something wrong.
They also have a online wait-time monitor for offices online, so you can look at neighboring cities for a shorter wait, it could be worth a 15 minutes drive to a more distance office to save 45 minutes of waiting.
The most recent renewal was done with an online system which produced a single page PDF declaration -- the rest of the data was only electronic. I printed it, attached my photos, signed and posted it. The new passport was delivered two days later.
You can see the application process: https://www.gov.uk/apply-renew-passport
I think the same applies for a driving license, but my first still has some years before expiry.
My state's DMV has essentially moved to a mostly online system where you pay online and get documents mailed to you. I think the only reason to ever show up at the DMV is to take or re-take your driving test.
All the renewals are done online. I haven't been to the DMV in almost a decade.
The comments far and wide (except as Ajit sees fit to hide) show a new carrier could not even be competitive at DOCSIS 3.1 levels, and still win.
Comcast has found such impressive execration that the "speed wars" only matter a little bit. It's just that Comcast has neglected their networks for so long that even at the most basic level, i.e. speeds, they regularly fail the previous administration's metric for "high speed internet" at peak times -- you know, the times when people actually use their internet.
