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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.
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!
"....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.
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!
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?
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 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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.