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Municipal Net Access: Unfair Competition?
ruvreve writes: "Net Economy has an article about how Los Angles is attempting to provide the ability for end-users to have a choice between multiple ISPs for high-speed bandwidth access, among other things. The article talks about how a city has an unfair advantage to offer such services. Unfair because the government monitors and regulates the cable and phone company but at the same time wants to compete for their customers. If it gets 100Mbit access to my front door it HAS to be good!" This issue's been raised a few times before, but the article raises some points worth thinking about.
It will be awhile until that drops to something more reasonable. Maybe PON (passive optical networks) will be the breakthrough. I'm not very familiar with that technology -- anyone?? anyone?? Ferris?
If the government is serious about getting people interested in broadband they should subsidise it.
Video Game cheats, hints a
For the most obvious example, you can look at the USPS, vs. Fed Ex and UPS. In that area, it's fairly safe to say that the government version hasn't stifled the private sector interests. Fed Ex gets it there faster, and UPS gets it there better, either cheaper, or if it's heavier, or whatever.
I work for city government, in that other city, on the other side of the country. A city run ISP will be concerned with either value, fair service, or information security, or maybe a combination of the three. This is hardly a bad thing. Cities have a way of wanting to avoid lawsuits, badly.
That being that, private offerings will be able to compete with higher speed, more features, package deals, etc. Like the USPS, a city ISP would offer a baseline of service, and any private ISP that couldn't at least match it would crash and burn, but they'd probably deserve it.
Do you suppose it's possible to say something so hypocritical, so mindbendingly and offensively pointing to one's own guilt, that the speakers' head actually spins 360 degrees Exorcist-style then reseats itself as if nothing had happened?
I mean, the telecom behemoths want to complain about unfair competition after the way Excite, Rhythms, etc were treated?
Good gravy. Since the government created these corporate monsters through deregulation, perhaps the government is the only entity that can compete with them. Note to conspiracy theorists- perhaps this is all a clever ploy to keep the telecom bribes flowing, so the fatcats don't get too comfortable.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
With a few exceptions, the public utility that most americans think least about... Our public road and highway infrastructure, is completely publicly owned. There's just no way to effectively manage an entire system of roads cost-effectively at a profit.
There exist a few turnpikes, toll-roads, and troll bridges out there... (*rimshot*) but for the most part Americans are used to paying for the right to use the system out of tax dollars.
Power is going the same way, as can be evidenced by the collapse of the California power grid. How long will the state pay for the power companies to stay solvent until the state becomes the primary power-provider? Phone will go too, IMHO.
Internet is going to be the next public utility, probably even before the phone system. Already communities all over the country are building 'municipal' internet services. Look for these to become tax-supported in the near future.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
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I bought into that and my pings are not shorter than what I used to have before. Do they mean "fat-pipe" access? If they use high-speed to mean fat-pipe, then how are they gonna call it when they really mean high-speed? (as in light-speed through the Earth's core).
"....it's just so unfair.....I mean....we worked really hard to box in these customers and make them accept our terrible service and with no choice of providers....now the mean bully util's are totally wrecking our whole business model!.....what's capitalism coming to when you have to compete...sounds more like communism to me...."
When the government steps in like this, we should begin to consider the internet access they are offering to be more of a public utility than just a general service. To begin with, this would have the potential to lower prices, increase uptime and public meetings if any real changes in service are going to take place.
Public meetings are already required (in most states) if the electric company wishes to increase rates, or if there will be a loss of service for an extended period of time. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to express your opinion about where the city should increase rates by five dollars if the bandwidth increase is only 128Kbps? If anything, this would allow for more public control over the internet, and how much we pay to recieve it.
DRINK DUFF (responsibly) DRINK DUFF (responsibly) DRINK DUFF
Have a look at the D-Link DFE855 here.
It translates a 100Base-FX fiber optic cable to a normal 100 mbps ethernet card.
The drop can be up to 2 kilometers, and it's not affected by static, radio waves and you don't have to ground it, it's glass/plastic, so 100% pure insulator.
This NANOG presentation talks about Sweden's plans for high-speed access, using 10 Mbps Ethernet (Hint: it's optical to within distance for KAT5-/KAT-6 from the home). It will cost US$75/month, and people will choose between at least 5 operators. Since CAT5/CAT6 cable is run to every house, it will be scalable to 100 Mbps and higher (it's designed to support a yearly doubling of traffic).
Read the article: It says that the city will offer SONET service to the ISPs/CLECs etc. It's just providing the pipe - It's up to the consumer to choose who to buy the upstream access from!
I can only hope they would make it all run on IPv6.... which brings another question to mind, if they start it out on IPv6 (duh) how will addresses be assigned? I could imagine the city giving out 10.X.X.X and selling public routable addys, it just makes one wonder.
Was really surprised by the slant of this article. Are we supposed to feel sorry for the cable companies? Here's a couple sentences from the article that make it seem like the cable companies are being handed a raw deal.
Not only must they compete with the city, they must obey regulations from this same entity. A kind of double burden.
The whole reason that cable is regulated is because it's inherently a monopolistic product, in that multiple cable providers can't cost-effectively run multiple cables to every house in a city. So these companies should be constantly under the gun in every way possible. Otherwise, there would be all kinds of pricing abuse.
As I see it, one of the primary advantaes of living in a city is that you should be able to get broadband for far less than you can in the country. If you couldn't, something is be terribly wrong. It's nice to see that LA's Dept. of Water & Power is keeping the cable companies scrambling to provide the best possible deal to consumers. That the cable companies are griping is merely a sign than government is doing its job
.I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
I guess that opening the (deregulated) (customer-gouging) (proprietary) (won't let me run any servers) broadband industry to government competition would be like when FDR created the TVA and opened up the private companies to government competition. I'm happy with the energy we get here. They offer competitive, renewable options. Much better than some of its competitors, like the nearby incenerator which provides power but is going to be shut down because it's incredibly toxic.
As long as there remains private competition, this is a good thing.
The only way it becomes unfair is if the regulation gets mixed in with the competition; ie. the local government puts regulations into effect that directly limits how each company can do business. So long as the regulation serves only to ensure compliance with anti-trust laws, and the government's competitive companies do not themselves violate anti-trust laws, I can't see how this is the least bit unfair. I think oversight is a must, obviously, but this shows excellent potential for a model of how the rest of the country could push broadband to each person's doorstep at an affordable price. Real competition has always forced each company involved to push forward as hard and fast as possible. Look at the difference in browser quality when M$ had competition from Netscape. IE 2 -> IE 3, and up through 5. I like 5 very much, but with no competition anymore from Netscape, 6 is nothing more than 5 with teletubby icons.
Right now, the broadband field had a few, large dominating companies. Verizon and Comcast are huge. Their service sucks, but what other choice is there? 56k modem? I make my living using computers and the internet, and I can't do that effectively on a modem. I hope and pray for something like what Los Angeles is doing to come to my area. Perhaps then my Comcast cable modem wouldn't go down for 2 minutes at a time 20 times a day. Right now it's (high quality | high speed | low cost) -- pick two.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Nobody seriously believes that our entire road system should be turned over to toll roads, with the obvious congestion and complication this would cause with every burrough, county, city, state and the federal government collecting payments every few miles.
Why must we live with oligopolies that "compete" against each other to provide these services. Somehow, the cable companies always seem to show up within months of the DSL offerings in an area with roughly the same service offering at roughly the same price. Yeah, the free market will bring us the best result, sure.
The US Founding Fathers knew the value of a free people freely communicating. They established the post office to ensure that people could easily communicate over great distances, without regard to their economic status or resources.
These days, this means Internet, and tomorrow, it'll mean broadband. Every aspect of society benefits from cheap and available broadband. Schools, industry, small business, homes, everybody. I'm surprised that local and state governments aren't more involved in making sure that their area has the best broadband service.
Hey, I'm all in favor of the telecommunications industry and the cable industry profiting from providing good service, if they would just get off the dime and do it.
It's time that government, at all levels, makes sure that all of that unused fiber capacity that's supposedly lying around gets lighted up and serving the people. If we leave this to the oligopolies, that fiber won't get used until it's already obsolete.
I'm pretty conservative most of the time, but what's happening now must be some kind of market distortion that the government should work to correct. If there's all this unused capacity and lots of demand but not at the current price point, then the markets need a little prod to close the gap.
Let's do it. Nobody would wait for competing water, sewer or electric services to come hook up your neighborhood. Seeing as Internet can enhance everbody's life in important ways (eGovernment anybody?), we shouldn't have to wait for Broadband either.
But I would be perfectly happy if the city offered these services. Hell, I'd be happy if they took over completely and the private businesses couldn't compete.
Why? Because at the end of the day, all I want is for it to work, and it to work well. Lets be honest, we've all probably had our isp go offline, the dsl go down, slow down, whatever. But aside from something big, how often does the power (talking L.A. here, with L.A. DWP) actually go out? I can remember a combined total of 1 blackout in the past 3 years. So obviously the city does something right.
Someone else pointed out that private services could still survive, like FedEx survives with the USPS. That is also a good thought. If the city can offer a nice good basic service, that just works when you want it to and is there to use (liek the psot office) and other businesses can provide better (faster, whatever) service, then that is also a good thing in my book.
Politics suck. Whoever runs things will do some stuff right and some stuff wrong. I just want it to work and be affordable.
If the government can do a better job in providing these services, why should we put up with private companies?
And by the way, it's not like private companies aren't allow to compete, they just have to pull their socks and stop treating consumers like they used to in a virtual monopolistic way.
geek page at KY speaks
I work for a Public Utility Department in the State of Washington. We have built a fiber optic system through out the county which we provide open access to for whoever want to provide services be it internet, video, or phone. I myself benefit from this with what is basically a 100MB link to the internet and a public IP address for only $45 a month. Until this project was undertaken, Qwest refused to run phone lines to some of the more remote residents of the county. Now that phone services are provided via fiber, what a surprise Qwest was out there running phone lines. Television via cable is still limited to 30 some channels while customer with fiber can access over 150+ channels. This is an idea whose time has come.
I live near Tacoma and about everyone is that doesn't live there is jealous because they have their own city run Cable and Broadband company run by the city ( http://www.click-network.com/ .) It took a while for them to get it up and running, but once they did it seems to have worked out great, haven't heard much of a bad thing about it other than aparently a few burrocrats had a few shady deals going on with it, but when don't you have that happening.
matguy(.com)
Lets pretend for a second, that a referendum requesting permission to spend the surplus electric/water revenue on Network Infrastructure was brought to the citizens. Lets also pretend that the citizens voted the referendum up. In that situation, I can't see anything wrong with a city spending that surplus money, to provide a service the citizens obviously want 'they voted on it'.
In many cities, the cable companies and telcos have a 'mini-monopoly' on broadband (as well as other markets). I think a little competition from the city may keep these companies a bit more honest.
I understand that there is a possibility for the city to abuse it's power in the marketplace (it can levy rules and taxes on it's competitors). As long as the same rules that apply to commercial companies, concerning predatory business practice, are applied to the city, I don't understand what the problem is.
I only ship software by UPS, I HATE having hardware shipped by them. I have NEVER had a computer or monitor delivered that didn't have damage to the outside box and packing material.
Fortunately, most people realise that UPS tends to drop things, over and over and over and over, so they use extra packing material, but it's not the solution.
Of course, lots of my software that UPS ships tends to wind up in New Jersey for several days. (This was early last year, so it might have changed by now, but I doubt it). I had a game that was supposed to be shipped to me in 3 days take 2 months. No, I'm not kidding, they said the package was lost, and the shipper sent another. 2 Months later, it arrived, the company I bought it from was out of business and the game was only $19.99, so I have an extra copy of scrabble now.
Last time UPS was on strike, I was so happy, everything came in from FedEx.
... but they started out with buying out a bankrupt cable television service. As you would expect, AT&T (the only other cable provider for the area) threw a fit and complained about unfair competition. These complaints took the form of full length commercials on cable TV (their network, of course) telling people to go complain to city hall about how bad it is for the government to get involved in the private sector. I went to the meetings just to "attaboy" the council members. I seriously got flashbacks to the town meeting when I read that article, all the same points got made. The council members told AT&T where they could file their complaints (hint: not in the city office), and I went away happy.
The city recently divested itself of the operational aspects of the cable service, but retained ownership of the wires. The company that bought the management contract pays rent to the city for the line space, and is required in their contract to allow ISPs to use the line also - they don't have exclusive access.
Eventually, the city will start running fiber optic cable throughout the city and will offer the same deal to new ISPs: rent bandwidth, and resell it to your customers. No exclusive contracts. AT&T (the only viable cable internet provider in the area as well) is no doubt throwing another tantrum, probably in cooperation with Qwest DSL (the only significant DSL sevice in the area, partnered with MSN internet, for your convenience). I'll proabably miss the City council meeting, though, since I cancelled my cable contract and AT&T won't get a chance to invite me to oppose them again.
I'd love it if every city in the country followed the examples of these cities, it's about time that internet became an expected utility, just like water, gas, and electricity.
Oh, this is Provo, Utah, in case anyone cares.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
Man, what I wouldn't give to be able to have a few choices when it comes to high-speed internet. The cable company I go through basically has a monopoly on the high speed net service around here, and it doesn't look like that's going to change anytime soon... :(
My fear when dealing with a government run internet utility would be government regulation. Not that it can't happen with private providers, but somehow I can't help but be more worried about the government...
And I'd also worry about quality, given the level of service that one often gets from underpaid and unmotivated civil servants. Private ISPs have enough trouble getting and keeping good techs and customer service people, it would seem to be really tough on government pay scales.
As you seem to have no sig I humbly suggest the above. It's a great line.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
In the US, censorship by a government carrier is much less likely. Such censorship can (and probably will be) challenged in court. Private entities (Blockbuster, Wal-Mart) can and do censor content.
These cities hand out welfare all the time... free food to these homeless bums, foodstamps to pregnant dropouts, etc. And then they have the nerve to regulate food? These poor commercial food companies have to sell unreasonably clean food, raising the cost! If it weren't for this unfair competition in customers, plus restrictive legislation, these food companies could probably provide food to the homeless, at a price they could afford. Who cares if its not quite up to standards?
I AM NOT A CONSUMER. If you think that my only reason for existence, is to buy your crud, and fill the coporate coffers, fuck off. If the goverment, which I pay for in taxes, happens to have a clue, and want to build infrastructure (one of its main purposes), then what right do they have to complain? They had their chance. My god, if you can't move faster than our goverment (which is ALWAYS 20 years too slow), then you DESERVE to go broke. I have no sympathies for any of these companies, that are still trying to do business as if its 1975.
I've never worked on the Quality assurance side of an ISP, but I'd like this answered.
When I pick up my phone, theres a dialtone, and other then some rare occasions, I place a call, I get through.
I turn on a light switch, there is always power. I turn on the stove and the gas is flowing. I turn on the tap, and water comes out.
So why can't my ISP have this quality? My guess is they just hav'nt had the same amount of time other utilities have had to work out all the bugs.
This may be a simple question with a difficult answer, but I'd like to know why.
The Internet is generally stupid
We live about 100 yards from the Mulholland Drive mentioned at the end of the article, right in the middle of Los Angeles. Interestingly, and frustratingly, even though this part of Bel Air and Beverly Hills is full of people who would desparately like to have broadband access, there is none. No DSL, no cable modems. ATT has pulled out its fixed-wireless system. Metricom of course went belly-up.
Adelphia would be our cable modem provider. They've been busily laying cable for the last year, and have all but completed their network. Now I read in this story, Adelpha claims that it being crippled by DWP, because they can't get power to their network.
I wonder if the Department of Water and Power sees Adelphia as competition, and is inhibiting them in the obvious way. Or, this might be another case where you shouldn't attribute to malice what can equally be explained as bumbling by a cable company.
It will be interesting. Adelphia claims that they'll light up the fibers here within the next month or so. I can't wait.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
I can see vaccinations, I can see schools, I can see libraries, hell I can even see internet access. But is broadband internet access really in that category of things everyone really needs for society to be better? For just getting information dial-up is adequate -- I used it for years. And if you want streaming video, it'd make more sense to subsidize buying people TVs so they can watch the nightly news rather than subsidizing broadband.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
This is the funniest article i have read on
This article really drives home the point that corporations feel that it is their god-given right to profit off of the sheep. But, when the sheep stand up and do shit for themselves, they whine and cry about how unfair it is that they were cheated out of a profit. IMO, a profit they have neither earned or deserved.
This joke will laugh me into my fucking grave. If nobody understands that all human organizations are in existence for the purpose of bettering the condition of the whole human race, then we are lost.
There's no room for fucking the next guy over. Capitalism, in its true sense, is about making the most efficient use of our resources as a people. If the Microsofts and Bells and Monsantos can't get with the program, then they are the ones that will be put to rest. Their employees will find more useful jobs to do. Their executives can sleep on the streets. They have shown the rest of humanity the same courtesy. Let them bear the fruit of their labor.
To summarize the corporate representatives in the article: "We don't care if everyone has access to the net. All we care about is whether we are allowed to profit from the few that we bestow that access upon."
Well, I tried, but I don't think I could have come up with a better set of quotes to summarize the uncaring greedy corporate attitude than the set of quotes found in this article.
. Suck on my cock you poor corporate bastards. If you're hurtin, it's because you lost all touch with basic human values a long long time ago.
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When did people start believing that the purpose of the government is to ensure that someone makes a profit instead of to serve the public interest? "We need the DMCA because what improves the lives of millions of electronics consumers infringes on our right to make money." "We need absurd patent laws because the free exchange of ideas among the people impedes our ability to make money." "Giving everyone cheap broadband makes us less money!"
All these corporations need to remember that the reason we happen to have a free market economy is that we've determined that incentivized competition is the best way to serve the public good, not as an endin and of itself. It's the job of the government to serve the people, and the responsibility of private enterprise to figure out how to make money anyway. I mean, if a magical fairy flew down tomorrow and promised to turn the earth into a paradise, giving everyone as much material comfort as they wanted, all the corporations would be screaming about how it's unfair and going to cost them money.
And yes, I do realize that the "public" is comprised partly by exactly those corporations and people who have a stake in them, but tell that to me again when 1% of the population stops owning 50% of the stocks and bonds.
You sound like the typical Jew - always obsessed with money. Don't you people ever realize that there is more to life than material pleasures?
I'm for privatizing everything, including the sidewalks. And the best way to ensure complete sidewalk construction is through forced adoption of a standard sidewalk shoe, which you can buy from AT&T/TW for $400/pair. Laces are extra.
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.
Well... You could get off your rich asses and pitch in on a T1 or T3 that you then split via wire or wireless to each contributors home. But, apparently you are just going to wait for the man to give you the access that you want..
Call your local Baby Bell and get yourself wired. Share your connection with your neighbors for a fee. Is capitalism to advanced a concept for you to grasp?
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blah, somebody needs to pull me over for a PUI, posting under the influence
You can't get much more local than city government. We're not talking about behemoth state governments or the federal government here. And yet here we are debading whether it's unfair for one of the smallest units of government, one of the entities closest to the people who elected it, to offer us services for our taxes.
The privatization of government services seems to have gone so far that we now seriously consider almost every city government function replaceable by private contractors (security services, health services, and so on), yet for local government to "intrude" into an arena now dominated by huge for-profit entities is somehow taboo.
Government is often painfully inefficient - I say that because I've worked in government. But it baffles me that when the people from our own neighborhoods whom we elected to help our cities run better actually offer something superior to what private industry can offer, we run screaming that the free markets are being sabotaged.
Ah, how far we have come.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
They also used the fiber to provide cheaper, better digital cable for everyone in the city as well. Future plans included adding 802.11b to the whole city so cable modem users could be online anywhere in the city for one low fee. For a town of 20,000 people in Southern Oregon that only has a Shakespeare Festival and a University, it's a pretty amazing network. The city also has their own power company, so you can get everything locally, it costs less (when their was a power shortage, the city was still fine), the city gets all the profits from it, parks and roads improve, and there is high bandwidth everywhere. Almost makes me wish I was still going to college there instead of living in Seattle where my DSL line the same speed costs almost $100 a month.
My town has had 100Mbps Fibre Optic for several years now, the pricing is about NZ$2200 (about US$1k) per month at the top rate.
Slashdot had a story on Wellington, NZ a couple of months ago. Just ignore the badly written ZDNET article if you find it, power doesn't go down fibre optic.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
While AFN was started on a good premise (city installs, owns the fiber, and anyone can resell service on it), this particular network design is flawed.
The way AFN is designed it caters WAY too much toward delivery of analogue cable television. Yep, analogue cable broadcasts. Over fiber. They are pissing bandwidth away needlessly on crappy analogue, when it could all be high quality digital. Theyre using fiber as a substitute for coaxial analogue cable.
Also AFN's data resale pricing structure is a bit silly, and as a result they have not generated the projected revenue. They may run into a cash crunch soon, how they address this problem is going to be very interesting. Will the fiber go dark, or will the public pony up more dough? Stay tuned.
In any case, in a democracy, it is up to the people to decide how public rights-of-way and public airwaves are allocated. We have made a decision in many places to have public utilities, and we can do the same thing with Internet access if we think it serves our needs better.
Competition = good.
Government = bad.
Competition/government = ???
So does Anonymous Coward have good karma?
as for your sig, I had a box once where I had renamed that "Bill's Computer". :)
SSL Certificate
"If it gets 100Mbit access to my front door it HAS to be good!"
I would worship satan if that would bring 100 mbit any closer to my door step.
Insightful? Government owning the roadways information travels on? I don't think so. Next thing you know they'll be owning the roadways cars travel...oh.
Sorry. Carry on.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
Reading this brings back up a thought I have been having for a while now. What do we do when our hard drives become the next bottleneck?
Network throughput seems to be increasing faster than physical hard drives. Not that this is surprising since hard drives are battling physics on two fronts and NIC's on one.
I wonder how long before we see RAM based hard drives become affordable and practical.
Transact has something similar now - VDSL. Rollout started in the affulent, well to do suburbs, and the other commoners may get it in a years time, with VOD.
If the private sector cannot or will not provide a public utility at a reasonable rate and with a reasonable level of facility, then the public sector not only should, but must step in and rectify the situation.
The telco's and the cable companies have used deregulation to set themselves up as governing bodies over access to communications, trumping municipal, state or even national mandates with corporate mandates that serve to disenfranchise citizens from a reasonable level of service. No servers on broadband, no broadband to remote or "unprofitable" (read: low income, or worse, black) neigborhoods, long delays for install or repair, recurring technical problems that are deliberately ignored, no choice in providers, etc, etc, etc.
Screw 'em. They have been using the free market to wrangle quasi-monopolies and dictatorial cartels, obviating the entire purpose of a free market. The municipal government must step in, and provide services vital to the growth and prosperity to a community... this means municipal networks, even at the cost of breaking the priovate sector's back.
It's the private sector's own damn fault. They were given a fair chance, and they frittered it away. Now they get to shape up, or loose revenue.
SoupIsGood Food
http://www.smartwinnipeg.mb.ca/Municipal_Fibre.
Now that I've gotten that of my chest, I do believe that cities should be careful about funding (not using municipal bonds, for instance) and do a few other things to insure they are fair. I have written about the movement in the article Echo of the TVA Comes Over Municipal Data Networks. There have been several court cases brought in various states by telephone and cable companies; they've been resolved in different directions and the whole legal ground is unclear.
I work for a city currently providing 100mbit service to many groups in our area. The equipment isn't cheap, but it's not that expensive: We run 100FX Single mode, the Tx-Fx converters cost about $450 on each side.
Thats a big upfront cost, but no worse then a router for a T1.
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In any case, in a democracy, it is up to the people to decide how public rights-of-way and public airwaves are allocated. We have made a decision in many places to have public utilities, and we can do the same thing with Internet access if we think it serves our needs better.
But we are not in a Democracy. It is a constitutional republic.
Mod parent down, please.
Ever see a cost-efficient government service? They'd lose money charging $100 a month.
I work for city government, in that other city, on the other side of the country. A city run ISP will be concerned with either value, fair service, or information security, or maybe a combination of the three. This is hardly a bad thing. Cities have a way of wanting to avoid lawsuits, badly.
I'm the network administrator for a mid-sized city government in the southern part of the US. We've thought about providing broadband access throughout our city too as a municipal service, not only just because the phone company and the cable TV franchise have been too lazy to offer such services in a timely manner to our citizens, but because the cost of construction of all the fiberoptics to help connect our various city offices, fire stations, warehouses and other remote locations will become blended in with the overall project, which will ultimately become a revenue source instead of a cost center.
Here's the biggest thing you should be worrying about with a municipal owned and operated broadband ISP: There exists a strong law enforcement desire in our city to be able to monitor _ALL_ traffic on this proposed network, primarily for the purpose of finding drug users and dealers, but also for any other crimes such as child porn and even illegal software, music and video piracy. A significant of the proposed funding for this project will be coming from a federal law enforcement grant. If we accept that grant, you can bet your sweet hiney that not only will there be snoopware devices on this proposed network, but the network will be designed foremost with snooping as one of its primary goals.
The municipality has a monopoly over the right of way, they own it.
This to me is no different than the paved roads and sewer system, or utility poles the electric company leases land for from the municipality.
The only difference I see is that they are cutting out the middle man, phone and cable companies, who have both purchased monopolies from the municipality.
Good for the consumer and municipal taxpayer.
These bastards have got to stop trying to compete. Time Warner/AOL is the one true data monopoly and any attempts to change that should be squashed. Unfair advantage...
I have to disagree with you here. Satellite TV is a fantastic competitor for cable TV, but that's because ping rates aren't all that important. While satellite technologies can deliver great bandwidth for internet use, they often have lousy latency, which makes everyday web surfing about as pleasant as going through dialup. Cable or DSL is really the only way to go, especially if you are an Unreal Tournament fanatic ;)
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
LADWP wants to provide "carrier's carrier" service. My interpretation of this is such - LADWP provides residents with a connection which allows them to choose which carrier they want to use (the article lists "MCI, Telseon and smaller ISPs like MediaNet", for example).
This is analogous to energy deregulation - consumers are given the option to choose who generates their power, and the utility delivers it. This is why there are two parts to your electric bill - cost of energy generation (which the consumer can shop for), and cost of energy transmission (which is what the utility company charges the consumer to deliver the power that they bought).
Maybe the LADWP is onto something - that will bring them more money. Residents will most likely end up paying for "bandwidth delivery" and also "internet access" on the same bill, from LADWP with a line item for their chosen ISP.
I feel this will result in the end user paying more for internet access. If this access is faster and more reliable, then great. But why does the price go up? A quick google search returns this pdf from the Southern California Gas Company - 3040.pdf. Looking through SoCalGas' website, this document is a rejected advice letter, but the contents are still interesting. This document introduces a new SoCalGas rate schedule, Schedule No. G-FIG, "Fiber Optic Cable in Gas Pipelines" and is asking the Public Utilities Commission of the State of California to authorize SoCalGas to "place fiber optic cable in SoCalGas' active gas pipelines under tarrified rates, terms and conditions under new Schedule No. G-FIG." This document also informs the Commission how SoCalGas will finance this service that it plans on providing. SoCalGas would charge the carriers (ISPs) for access to place fiber in the pipelines. The carrier would be charged for this access, as well as for the fiber and the installation of the fiber. No doubt the carrier will pass these charges on to the consumer, like the phone and cable companies do when their costs go up (either by market activity or regulation). I leave speculation as to increased quality and reliability of Internet Service to the reader.
*Conspiracy Theory Alert*
Another interesting document on the SoCalGas website is their "List of Service Providers - Pursuant to Rule IV.C.2". One Provider listed has the name AOL Utility Corp. The California Public Utilities Commission describes them as an electric service provider. The Customer Service Contact has a yahoo.com email address.
*End Conspiracy Theory Alert*
BLOCK STRUCTURE breathing apparatus required for special maneuvers!!
I understand a general dislike for the cable company, but come on. What is your cable company motivated by? Profit. Profit is the lifeblood of any company. They didn't spend all that money laying cable so that it could just sit there. They want customers to use it. I find it highly unlikely that your cable company is holding it up on purpose once they've already laid the infrastructure. Their claims regarding DWP are entirely believable.
I don't know that I would attribute it to malice, there's no real need for them to worry about competition, as they are a govt entity, but I think it's quite likely DWP's typical slow-moving-government status is the problem.
"No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
--James Madison
An unfair advantage (repeat several times)
So friggin what.
It's about time the people had an unfair advanatge
over some freaking Corporation.
The point of competition is to get consumers the
best goods and services at the best prices. If
municipalities can provide internet service cheaper
and more effectively than private industry, then
they ought to do it.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
The U.S. constitution doesn't really guarantee a coroeration's right to make a profit. I don't believe that we should continue to make public policy decisions based on how it might effect some corperations' profit margin.
Look at what this sort of policy has done to health care and the insurance industry. Do we really want to see the same sort of effect on the flow of information?
\Drew National Data Director, John Edwards for President
Our local government run ISP (www.win.org) is very popular. Dialup service for $7/month. Granted, it sucks compared to a decent ISP that charges $15-$20 month. They give you a two hour block at a time (disconnects and you have to dial right back up) they have a limited number of modems so you can get busy signals. They also have poor reputation for booting people randomly.
But for $7/month, a lot of local people can deal with it! Senior citizens get a discount and teachers/city workers get free access.
Anyone can get free text based dial-in access (lynx) and email (pine).
I think it would be great to see them compete in the broadband area, that way when the phone company (Southwestern Bell around here) starts screwing with them the way they screw with their other customers (savvis, rythms, covad, Northpoint), the government can do something about it. Since they'll have to keep the playing field level, all the other companies will benefit from any leveling they do to the phone company.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
The reason that companies are bitching about
government competition is that all companies
wish to, some day, be the next microsoft.
Can't buy the competition (as easily) if
the competition is the government!
It will take an extremely long time to get universal coverage of broadband in the US without government intervention. The reason is simple. Companies do not give a damn about you, just your money. They do a quick calculation. How much money does it cost to install/provide broadband? How much money will we get in return? Then they all provide services to the urban areas with high population density and existing infrastructure, and away from rural and poor areas.
How the heck was my original posting overrated?
Some moderators are jerks!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
What more is there to say?
So I'll say it again.
Censorship, however, is a real danger.
It's always bad, but when somebody has a monopoly, as a government would be likely to, it's much worse.
Of course, the problem also exists if somebody besides the government is the monopoly.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Guys one thing to remember if things go well the Internet or at least the last mile pipes will REPLACE cable and telephone in my lifetime for a good chunk of the population. Thats what there concerned about a little IP Multicasting and some DRM and you turn a nice wide broadband pipe into the new cable company. I've allready set this up in businesses and getting CNNfn to every desktop in a trading company is a great thing now getting 500 channels of content not looping movies that only gets moved around when it's being used is even better.
.com bust and now have them at home they work great and pretty effective I love that I can connect up via the VPN to work thats a killer app in my oppinion telecommuting and generaly getting rid of toll chrages people should communicate for free we all pay to hook up to the system.
Now take phones I've had a Cisco phone since beta in 99 got some off of a
There should only be four infrastructure links going into your home or apartment: Data, power, water, and sewage. It's pointless to operate and maintain separate feeds for internet, telephone, and cable, and the like when they are all really the same thing - data. It would be far more efficient to maintain a single fiber optic link to the home/complex in terms of cost, lifetime, maintenance (especially of the wires), service addition (especially for novel services), power requirements, billing, and quality of service. In fact, coupled to a wireless network and backup power, it could be far more reliable and flexible in all respects. Why shouldn't the government handle something like that?
I could care less if some greedy cable company gets put out of business - the gov't should be in the business of providing and regulating key services to the public, even if it makes it difficult for private companies. Deal with it.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
Grant County PUD is offering gigabit fiber connnections for $1200 or 100MB for $120/mo ..
A rt icle.asp?ArticleID=2640
A rt icle.asp?ArticleID=2641
:)
Check out these articles
http://thelocalplanet.com/Archives/Cover_Story/
http://thelocalplanet.com/Archives/Cover_Story/
Qworst (qwest) want's 70$/mo for dsl and AT&T want's $50/mo for cable
Makes me want to move...
iF yOu WAnT to C YOUr iP agaIn gAThEr tWO MilLIon dOLLArS IN Non - cONsEcuTivE TweNtY's AnD AWaiT FuRThER iNstrUctIoN
The bottom line is that as a taxpayer I don't want to ever be forced to pay for the water to go to your fancy dancing gold-handled faucets and solid marble Crappers, when all you NEED is a hole and a box over it. And what you propose would do exactly that. Plumbing is definately not a public utility. I mean, Jesus Christ didn't have plumbing, and he created one of the world's most influential religious movements!
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
RAMRaid is HERE
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Your point is also irrelevant. Regardless of what you call the US form of government, the US government at all levels has the right to regulate public utilities and to create and dissolve corporations, and it does so because the people want it to.
As for "mod parent down", apparently your notion of government doesn't even include a free and open discussion. More rightwing tactics. Just crawl back into whatever hole you came out of, please.
Groovy!
While AFN was started on a good premise (city installs, owns the fiber, and anyone can resell service on it), this particular network design is flawed.
The way AFN is designed it caters WAY too much toward delivery of analogue cable television. Yep, analogue cable broadcasts. Over fiber. They are pissing bandwidth away needlessly on crappy analogue, when it could all be high quality digital. Theyre using fiber as a substitute for coaxial analogue cable.
Also AFN's data resale pricing structure is a bit silly, and as a result they have not generated the projected revenue. They may run into a cash crunch soon, how they address this problem is going to be very interesting. Will the fiber go dark, or will the public pony up more dough? Who knows...
If anything, this would allow for more public control over the internet, and how much we pay to recieve it
Firstly, it would give government more excuse to regulate, censor and monitor the internet. Thats *less* control. Secondly, not only would you have no control whatsoever over how much you paid for it, you might not even know how much you are paying for it. Do YOU know how much of YOUR income taxes each month pay for the road system? Thirdly, being government-run, its inherently monopolistic. If the government wanted to charge a lot for it, there would be no competition to go to. Moreover, monopolies, particularly government run monopolies, are extremely inefficient. It typically costs them at least twice as much to provide a service as an efficiently run corporation in a competitive marketplace. Trust me on this, I live in a country where telecomms is a government owned monopoly. A few years ago, it was not unusual to wait three to five months *just to get a telephone installed in your house* - and thats in a major city. Their monopoly is supposed to run out this year, and while they have improved somewhat this last couple of years, they still suck extremely badly (http://www.telkom.co.za/ if you're wondering), they took a month to install my ISDN, and made at least a half dozen mistakes, which I had to take the initiative to have corrected at every step. They charge per-minute for all phone calls, and raised their local call prices this year alone by over 50% (our national inflation rate is around 6% - 8%).
Government ownership is definitely not the way to go.
Gold toilets aren't practical -- they don't run any better than regular porceline toilets. 100Mbps internet access, however, works much better and faster and is therefore practical to subsidize.
[insert witty comment here]