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The city of Ashland in southern Oregon also offers 10mbps fiber to everyone in the city, but they don't run their own ISP - instead, they allow competing ISPs to offer service through their fiber network. Each ISP sets their own pricing, and they pay AFN for the connectivity.

Here was a price comparison from 2005.

I'm not sure I agree with you. Not sure I disagree, either. One point of note: Where I live, the city utility built out it's own set of fiber loops, which you can then either gain acces to directly (if you gots the dough), or buy secondhand through a local ISP, which hits your door via DOCSYS cable modem. Still and all, I get 5mbps download for under thirty dollars a month, and ain't complaining. One point of note, though: we still get our outbound via Qwest, who, as most everyone knows, are a bunch of faragin bastiches!

Moral of this story? If your city is at all together, they can do really neat stuff with fiber, but it will cost a buttload of initial startup cost, and will still rely upon a monopolistic juggernaut with monopolistic partners.

In Ashland, Oregon the city is running a broadband access network (with cable modems) and faster fiber optic connections for those who want to pay up.

We certainly didn't mind, as it spurred Charter (cable company) to speed up their service deployment so we actually have competition for cable service - what an interesting concept.

On the other hand, the City of Ashland also owns the water and electric utilities... and has put the "telecommunications" (the internet & tv business) as a part of the electric utility... check out the Ashland Fiber Network, and the City of Ashland.

If overclocking was that simple, then there wouldn't be websites dedicated to it.

While I'm not saying that overclocking is trivial, don't use websites as a measure of a task's complexity! Many simple tasks have elaborate instructions on the web...

60 seconds on Google turned up these few...
How to use an extension cord safely
How to comb and wash your hair (many of these)
How to sort, store, and use Lego

With that much bandwidth, Ashland is definitely worth moving to. Beautiful town too, with a shakespearean festival every year and some great white water rafting on the rogue -- also Mt. Ashland to ski/snowboard on.

There's a great example of open broadband net (and even CATV) here in my home town ( Ashland, OR)

The city decided it wasn't going to wait for the big broadband 'net-access carriers to get around to servicing this area, so they're laying Fiber Gigabit Ethernet throughout the whole town! (It's called the Ashland Fiber Network)

What they've got going with the local ISP's is this:

• The city provides the bandwith, but dosen't want to have to deal with the more labor intensive parts of the ISP biz, like tech support for computer neophytes, or keeping email servers running, so, they only deal directly with big users, like businesses, and uber-users. For them, they just bring the gigabit fiber to the door, tap off a 10 or 100Mbps Ethernet connection, and are more-or-less done with it.
• the 'regular' user population goes thru the ISPs. They basicaly just re-sell the city's bandwidth, and add services like webspace, email servers, and, importantly, tech support. (the 'normal' net users get a little lower bandwidth, as they bring that service to the door over a 5Mbps coax cable, using a standard cablemodem (presumably to save costs by reusing existing cables) Unlike regular cablemodem systems, tho, the coax only goes from your door to the curb, where it gets tied to the fiber, so yer not sharing it with your 100 closest neighbors)

There is another local broadband net provider around here, the local cable co, Falcon, has a internet service. It's interesting to note that the City competes w/ Falcon doubly. Falcon has it's Cable-TV infrastructure, which they also offer net service over, and the City has it's Internet infrastructure, which they also offer digital cable TV over.

So, we have both, the ISP's competing w/ each other and sharing the City's cables, and the City and Falcon competing with each other, each with their own cables.

The entire city of Ashland Oregon is already being wired for 10/100mbs Internet access with your choice of ISP's.

http://www.ashland.or.us/AFN/AFNArticl es.asp

Quoted:
"WHAT IS AFN?
AFN is a fiber optic ring that weaves through the city's neighborhoods. The fiber originates from the "Head End" - which is the brains of the system. The Head End receives digital television signals from our satellite feed, and provides the connection for high speed internet and data. After traveling through the fiber optic ring, this information and technology will be delivered through a fiber or coaxial cable connected directly to customers' homes or businesses.

AFN Internet and AFN Data users will be connected to the world wide web through the region's Point-of-Presence (POP) router - which will allow you to surf the web and use the internet to connect to the local or national ISP (Internet Service Provider) of your choice."