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Yep, like Cedar Falls Utilities (which Obama visited last week) which has been doing this since 1995.

http://blog.cfu.net/2015/01/th...

I live in Cedar Falls Iowa, where we have two cable TV/Internet providers. One is the local utilities company CFU http://www.cfu.net/, and Mediacom http://www.mediacomcc.com/. CFU is municipally owned. Now here is the problem, and from what I have heard it's not an uncommon one, Mediacom can't seem to get it's records straight on who provides cable to any certain household, and on a number of occasions has CUT (physically) cable that CFU is providing to customers due to non-payment status in their systems. Now can it get much worse then that?

I live in Cedar Falls Iowa, a small town of about 35,000.The local util company was the first to start competing with a large cable company in Cable internet, in the USA, and has already run the fiber lines through out the city. This actually brought in Target to build one of there wharehouses on the outskirts of town. Plus another local company is building a datacenter, which is a first for Iowa.
you can find out more about Cedar Falls Utilites at http://www.cfu.net/ and the company building the datacenter here locally at http://www.teamnet.net/
Oh, and Mediacom (the large company that CFU compets with) tried getting a law passed to stop CFU, but lost the battle. Oddly enough, Mediacom is actually owned by AT&T, which is one of the providers CFU uses for there connections.
Oh, and we are home to one of Iowas universities, http://www.uni.edu/

What I think would be pretty cool is to stay with slashdotters along the way and document the heck out of your trip and let us all know how it went and who you met when you get back home.

if you ever stop by milwaukee for oh, I dunno, a tour of miller brewery or any one of about a bazillon other breweries here, you can stay with me! and you'll be about an hour and a half from the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry which I consider to be a must-see!

cheers!

In a word. Yes. I work in a city that has done just that. Cedar Falls I live in the city next door, Waterloo, that has MediaCom as their cable internet provider. It hasn't given me problems yet, but their support sucks compared to CFU (Hi Joe!). There's really something about getting support for a service from people that actually live in the community....

Of course now the Bells and Cable providers are trying to legislate muninet providers out of existance.

The company that I work for, Cedar Falls Utilities was a 3 service utility (gas, water, and electric) that started to provide communications services (cable tv, high speed data, and dedicated facilities) in 1997. Broadband Bob has a report from Jan of 1997 here.

I don't live in a Tech Mecca either, Cedar Falls, Iowa, to be exact, but we've got awesome and cheap cable service from CFU, our municipal utility company.

I had $30/month residential service, which was about 1300kbps/down 192kbps/up. But, I just upgraded to the business class service for $25/month more ($55 total), and that gives me 4000kbps/down and 1400kbps/up. Extra IP addresses are $5/month, not sure what static IP addresses cost yet, I think it's another $20 a month for one of those, but it removes the ban on ports 80 and 23 too. The best part is that they have a 100Mbit bridge between the ISP and the University where I work, it's great for sending stuff to and from my servers.

I'm looking at buying a house right now, and even though I can cross the river into Waterloo and get a house cheaper, I won't buy one outside the Cedar Falls city limits, so I can keep my CFU, it's that good compared to Mediacom. I've had two outages in a year, one was for 5 minutes, the other was when my modem died. I noticed that the modem was out at 6:50 p.m., and they had a guy to my house and me back online by 7:30 p.m. Now that's customer service!

I used to work at that very ISP while in college, Cedar Falls Utilities. They offer cable modem access on an entirely Linux system, along w/ the traditional utilities services. Props to my old boss/sysadmin that got me into Linux.

I have been a customer of both MediaComm/AT&T/@Home and Cedar Falls Utilities Cybernet (Cedar Falls, IA). My MediaComm service has been marginal at best; bad modems, crappy bandwidth, and work arounds to account to allow for my operating system of choice. :) My service from CFU was a much better experience. Better technical support, when needed, OS freedom, and best of all, no 128kbs upstream cap. I think having a local service rather than a national broadband mass of companies has several advantages both its customers and the internet in general. Small localize services can better control the amount of spam running through thier networks, do some preventative virus blocking and security checks while still providing all the web, mail, news, and IRC that you could hope for. And in my case, it's all put together in just one bill along with my water, tv, electric, etc. A small, but definatly side effect. Now, if only my landlord had not signed a bulk contract for all his units to use AT&T. cfu.net @home

Competition does wonderful things for broadband access. I live in Cedar Falls, Iowa, which runs its own cable and broadband company, they offer cable modem service for $30 a month. AT&T also provides service in the area, and that's who I had for the last two years, until I finally moved to an area serviced by both companies. The difference in service is remarkable.

With AT&T, my connection went down daily for months at a time, and if you ever did have a problem, they wanted you to wait two weeks for them to roll a truck to your house.

I've had one outage in the three months I've had CFU, and that was due to my modem failing. I noticed the problem at 7:10 p.m., called it in, and I was back online at 7:40 p.m. after one of their techs brought a new modem to my house and installed it for me. Try getting that kind of service out of AT&T.

Their lower price has forced AT&T to keep their prices low, as well. AT&T only charges $30 for service here, which often confuses their customer service reps, as we're one of the very few places that have service offered at that price.

It's much easier to get good service out of small local companies than out of the big conglomerates, and it's convenient having my internet access come on the same bill as my water, power, gas, etc.