Slashdot Mirror
Why Municipal Broadband is Good
batageek writes "An excellent interview with Jim Baller (muni-telco-lawyer) concerning the growth and efforts of municipal broadband providers and the fights they go through with the incumbent providers and state legislatures." If you're wondering why you don't have fiber-to-the-home yet, read this.
The article is kind of long and boring, but here's the key paragraph:
FTTH [fiber to the home] networks are a good case in point. At present, cable can make more money selling relatively modest cable modem services over their Hybrid Fiber Coaxial (HFC) networks, and telephone companies can make more money selling DSL over their copper-based networks, than they can make by investing huge sums in FTTH networks that would allow them to offer substantially more robust broadband services. To wring every last dollar out of their existing systems, the cable and telephone companies are also working hard to persuade Congress, state legislatures and the FCC to allow them to close their systems to Internet Service Providers, CLECs and other potential competitors. Until these conditions change, the cable and telephone companies will simply not invest in FTTH networks. Instead, they will continue to try to convince us that we really don't need more bandwidth than they're offering. At the same time, they will try to block municipalities from building FTTH systems that could disprove these claims.
So it's the usual story. Corporations looking out for their bottom line. Using money and power to prevent competition from organizations that might act in the public interest (and thereby cut into corporate profits).
"If I could live to be several hundred
I could take a walk and really wander, really wonder."
I work for a city govt in Texas, and if anyone in our public utilities customer service positions treated someone that way, they'd be fired in short order... but only if you actually bothered to prepare a formal complaint to the department. If the complaint is factual, well documented and is not a lunatic ranting, it is taken *very* seriously here. We've even had citizens bring their complaints (well prepared and "educated") before the city council as initial complaints, not going thru the normal departmental channels first, and let me tell you doing that usually gets investigative results FAST. It is a municipal employee's worst nightmare for a citizen to voice their complaint first to the council, so we make it well known at the service counters that if someone has a valid issue with a city utility, that they get priority attention from us, the staff.
The best example is the electric power generation and distribution in Québec (Canada). Since the early 1960's, electric power generation has been nationalized in Québec, and the result is the lowest electricity rates in the world, all the while paying-off the northern native communities on whose land the dams have been erected so well that, on the whole continent, they are the better-off natives (that's "indians" for you non-PC types).
Even with all this, it manages to pour billions of dollars in the government's coffers (that's so much taxes we won't have to pay).
Much of the revenue is made through exportation, and this is thanks to the hydroelectric nature of the generation system: unlike a thermic or nuclear power plant, a dam can be turned-off during off-peak times. So, during the night, we close the dams, and buy surplus power from the US at 2, while during the day, we open the whole shebang and sell our surplus at 4...
By contrast, Hydro-Ontario (which had been owned by the province for a century) has been privatized and the market "opened-up", just like in California. The result is a complete fiasco, as small businesses face 500% electric power cost increases (for electoral reasons, consumers have been guaranteed - at government expense - a lower fixed rate).
Come have a look up here, and whenever someone says that government-ownership is bad, you can safely answer back "bullshit", and then ask him why the roads and highways aren't owned by private entreprise to see him bumble...
This quote about "ultra-rural" Grant County PUD is somewhat misleading:
"In fact, in ultra-rural Grant County, WA, where users of the County's FTTH system have affordable access to speeds of 100 Mbps in both directions, bandwidth usage has jumped more than 600 percent and upstream usage actually exceeds downstream usage. Why? The County believes that small businesses are sending substantially more information to the Internet than they are downloading, and gamers are vastly increasing their real-time usage."
While it's true that the users are getting 100mbps access, they are *paying* for only 1mbps access. The PUD is simply too lazy (or incompetent) to limit the actual rates. Now that the PUD is running out of cash to continue rolling out the program they are still fighting any efforts on the part of service providers to actually rate-limit connections and use that to provide quality of service (and enough cash-flow to the PUD to pay for the program).
The other problems with public power doing broadband is their bureaucratic nature. These are not business people but salaried workers who are accustomed to a business model that does not include competition or the risk of going bankrupt. They have been tutored in a regulated monopoly environment in which the "bottom line" can often be whatever they want it to be. Here in Grant County they have apparently (it's hard to get a straight answer) raised the electric power rates to help cover the fiber rollout costs. This has enraged the agricultural interests who feel, with some justification, that those who will benefit most from fiber should pay the most to roll it out.
Additionally, the PUD here has entered into questionable contracts with favored service providers. There is at the present time an investigation into these dealings being undertaken by an "independent" Seattle-area lawyer. The word "independent" is in quotes because the attorney doing the investigation told me he is acting as the attorney for the PUD Commissioners with all the secrecy a client-attorney relationship can imply. Whether the results of this investigation, which could be politically damaging, will be released to the public is "entirely up to the PUD Commissioners", he said.
The Grant County PUD is hardly a shining example of local-control broadband. The PUD controls two hydroelectric dams on the Columbia River and will spend something over $200 million in their fiber project (no one yet knows the real costs). This is big money no matter how you look at it and allegations of sweetheart deals to special interests abound.
Broadband is expensive no matter who does it and no matter what a high-power lawyer in Washington, DC says. Trying to do it with a community effort might be successful or it might not be. There are many pitfalls and with so much money involved there is always the possibility of corruption and waste.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!