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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.
If the government is serious about getting people interested in broadband they should subsidise it.
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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.
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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.
I realize that it already IS a problem for these people to get access, but by making it a government utility does it take it from "unavailable" to "never available"? It could work out ok, but there has to be a committment to provide quality service to EVERY citizen in this country.
I think the next 5 years or so are going to be important in this regard. Think about the state of computers 5-7 years ago....ie, 1995 or so. If I recall right the web browser really took off in 1994 (or thats when I encountered it, as a part of Prodigy). We've come so far, so I really hope in the next 5 years or so corporations that sell broadband can make it as widespread as the PC. And I hope that government regulations can enable real competition as it happens as well....
Indeed....campus here is all fiber to the desktop (and everywhere else...except this lab, for whatever reason), with little media converters they give out each fall. They didn't seem to be that big a deal...after all, they were willing to hand them out to every freshman and liberal-artist with a social security number and student ID.
They couldn't have been terribly expensive (especially when you buy them in the thousands...), since the fine to replace one wasn't high enough to be impressive over the 1.5 years since I've lived on campus and needed one.
The government's ISP could buy them in huge volume for three pittances plus tax and rent them to the users, with the cost spread over time.
"These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined" --Homer re:
... 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
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