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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.
He could talk in something APPROACHING soundbites, like most politicians do.
Not to say that everything needs to be a "soundbite" but, DAMN, look at those full page paragraphs...one after another
There are DEFINITELY thing that need to be explained in infinite detail, but come on, not EVERYTHING
---"What did I say that sounded like 'Tell me about your day?'"---
I was an employee of a company that ran fiber throughout several blocks of the downtown city (if you could call it a city) area and connected quite a few locations directly. The problem turned out to be need. People could already get cable modem or DSL, and even though the prices were incredible (I think it was $40 for a 10mb 2-way connection), nobody saw the need for that kind of speed.
Granted, Lock Haven, PA is hardly the technological Mecca that some other places in the country are, but you'd think that for $40 a month, with no download or upload cap, and no monitoring of any kind, someone would want it... but as it turns out, not so much. It's still successful enough to keep the company from going under, but it's hardly the money-maker they anticipated it would be.
The project itself was called Lock Haven Electronic Village, and was started by KCnet (Keystone Community Network). They're an educationally oriented ISP that was started by the school district and gets grants from the government for education-based projects. If memory serves, they did the first phase for around $250,000.
"It's better to have a gun and not need it than need a gun and not have it." ~ Christian Slater, True Romance
But see-riously, wasn't one goal of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 to increase access in rural areas? Needless to say, that's not what happened. Baller's comparison of broadband access to the situation when the Rural Electrification Act was passed is valid. But telcos & electric companies are going where they get the biggest return for the least investment. Even "rural" EPAs tend to concentrate on small towns & suburbs these days -- services in the really rural areas are not much better than they were 40 years ago.
The high-tech redneck,
"Obviously, I'm not an IBM computer any more than I'm an ashtray" (Bob Dylan)
JakCrow asks: Why aren't the phone and cable companies addressing the reasons for the municipal push? Municipal broadband is developing because people are tired of the bad service, high prices, and lousy coverage, yet the phone and cablecos would rather spend money using propaganda to fight municipal projects than fix their own problems.
Jim Baller: I believe that there are many good people working for cable and telephone companies who would like to deliver good products at reasonable prices and also offer good service. Consider, for example, an article in the Tacoma News Tribune on May 19, 2003, in which Comcast spokesman Steve Kipp said that competition with Tacoma's Click! Network was a good thing for all concerned, including Comcast. Specifically, Mr. Kipp was quoted as saying that: "It's that competition that has really spurred the additional investment in cable and customer service." (link). Think of where we would be if Comcast, as a whole company, acted as though it really believes this. Unfortunately, as a company, it does not.
Explain to me how Comcast has competition? DSL is NOT competition for Comcast Internet services (this is not an arguable point BTW). Comcast is THE only option for broadband where I live (no DSL and wireless access is cost prohibitive). They took over ATTBI and immediately raised the rates (which have yet to take effect but I am sure that (based on previous practices) will be "noticed at a later date" and corrected by charging for the back months in a single bill...)
Competition for Comcast IS good but it doesn't exist. I seriously believe that Muni's that run their own broadband service would actually be helping the community and THEMSELVES.
Force the "natural monopolies" (their words, not mine) to compete instead of taking over and doing what they want.
If you think private telco monopolies are bad, you haven't seen anything yet until you've seen government-owned monopolies.
Our electricity monopoly here is government owned. I am overhauling my house right now, and a friend of ours, who works for the electricity company, mentioned it'd make his job a lot easier if the meter was in a box on the outside of the house, rather than inside (meaning the meter reader can read the meter at his convenience, rather than when I'm available to let him in). I agreed.
The first hurdle was trying to acquire the plastic box to put the meter in. We went to the Manx Electricity Authority shop and asked for one. We were told to fill in a confetti-like shower of forms, and we'd have to wait a couple of weeks for it to show up. The guy behind the desk wouldn't budge. He had them in stock, and available, but no, he couldn't give us one. He terminated the argument by announcing, "Well, we ARE the government, you know".
Finally, we get the box. I did all the work myself to install it (cut the hole in the wall, secured and set it in the wall, concreted the hole etc.) at my expense. All we needed was to have the MEA move the meter from its present position to the new box. We fill in yet another form to tell them what we want to do.
A couple of weeks later their guy shows up and says, "Nah, I can't do that, you need a jointer to do that. And you need to fill out these forms".
Yet more forms. We had already told them exactly what needed doing, and they sent the wrong type of person out.
"Oh, you're on a six-week waiting list for a jointer" they then said, after filling out yet more forms. I escalated the matter, and had a long debate with a guy about it and told him all our woes. He tried to wriggle out of it.
"What electrician's qualifications do you have to do the installation?" he asked, trying to pry open an "excuse hole" he could exploit.
"It's a plastic box set in a wall. You are telling me you have to be a qualified electrician to cut a hole in a wall, put a plastic box in, screw in the supplied screws, and re-render around the hole?"
"Well, what about all the cabling?"
"There _IS_ no cabling! That's the point! This is why we've been filling out a confetti-like shower of forms to get your guy to come out, move the meter, and recable!"
Finally, sensing he was on a loser (and about to receive a LARTing) he gave up on that tack.
We first asked for the meter box in January. It is now late May, and the meter STILL hasn't been moved. We are only doing this to benefit the municipal electricity company, and at our expense. I keep explaining this to them but it doesn't seem to make any difference.
Even Texas-New Mexico Power was never that bad.
Government is almost NEVER the answer. A government monopoly is orders of magnitudes worse than a private one in my experience.
Manx Telecom (the private telecom monopoly we have) despite their faults are a joy to work with by comparison. They have even acquired a clue when it comes to running an ADSL network. We did a similar job relocating the telephone line, to have it run underground. No forms to fill out - we just asked them to lay a new cable and they did it when they said they'd do it - no waiting lists and no bullshit.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
and bandwidth will be just another amenity, much like electricity, or gas, or telephones are now
Yeah, right.
Ever since so-called "deregulation" of gas and electric in Michigan (where I live), all of these have gone up. In the case of gas, wwaaaaayyyyy up. My broadband (cable) is $45/month and I only get one provider to choose from. When it becomes another "amenity", it may go up to $60.
Please pardon my skepticism, but it seems to me we will always be paying inflated prices for the sins (one of which is greed) of the telcoms, utilites, and Lord knows what else.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
That one day, all houses will be made with fibre straight to the door,
why?
a single fiber serving 4 square blocks is plenty, then split off to a technology that is easier to terminate and cheaper to work with.
Have you ever put a connector on a Fiber? using the cheap route it's a major pain in the ass and takes quite a bit of skill. the easy way is to cut a jumper and fusion splice it on to the incoming fiber.. the fusion splicer is a cheap $35,000.00US and can be destroyed easily.
fiber into the home? dont want it.
Municipal Infrastructure? ok, I'll take that. if your local city owns the fiber on the poles, the nodes and the drop to your home. THEN your dream might be possible. but even then it is very unprobable. you will simply see that infrastructure multiplied on the pole 3-5 times... one for each company.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
then you don't live in an area controlled by broadband monopoly.
I moved from NW Ohio to Burnsville, MN in November (I am now 15-20 mins out of downtown Minneapolis). I moved from an area that offered a steady 300kB/s cable pipe (TimeWarner RR) to an area that offered a 1.5mbs pipe (about 220kB/s steady with ATTBI)...
Comcast recently took over the entire region and raised my Internet rates (without CATV) to 60.95 from 46.95... Not only that but now I have download speeds in the 180kB/s range.
More money, slower speeds, and the same crap customer service...
*raises hand*
My family owns a few buildings... we don't pay rent, we GET rent. We're not a company, we're not swimming in cash and we're not worried about it either.
Rent increases are legislated in our country, so even if we were greedy bastards there would be nothing we could do to squeeze more money out of our tenants.
But heck, they're our neighbours, we get along fine with them and wouldn't want to screw them over anyway.
The whole point of this lengthy story is that businesses were originally intended to be friendly neighborhood shops and offices, while anything demanding more money and larger enterprises was always meant to be state-sponsored and government-controlled.
The modern rise of the megacorp is anathema. It corrupts the very fabric of capitalism and democracy through bribery of ellected officials and collusion into monopolist "Associations".
No single person or corporation should be allowed to accumulate the money and power required to interfere with government affairs.
The government should always be the ultimate arbiter, exempt from lobbyist and "political action" pressure groups. Just vote them into office and let them do their job undisturbed.
Internet service should be viewed as a utility, and should have a private and a strong public component. In addition, as the article points out, most of us are getting screwed on uploads by the ISP industry. We need fatter upload pipes, and being able to run Apache type servers from your home ( with some limit on bandwidth) is desperately needed. Allowing fatter uploads where anyone can cheaply setup a modest, personal web server would dramatically improve the internet for the majority of the people. Anytime an essential public service is controlled by a tiny number of companies, the pure capitalist model breaks down and needs wise government regulation. What would we pay for water, electricity, telephone, etc if there were no regulation. We would work all day just to pay those bills. PS, to Slashdot, it was nice to see a LONG ARTICLE full of information instead of short attention span theater bites!!!!
HenryJamesFeltus.com
What is so Americo-centric about an idea that goes back to ancient times?
"Ancient civilizations occasionally planned new cities or major additions to existing settlements. The most widespread plan was a rectangular or grid street pattern that allowed considerable flexibility in the size of blocks while maintaining a clear visual order. Noteworthy examples of this type of city plan include Kahun (Egypt, c.1890 BC), whose workers' quarter is separated by an internal wall from the wealthier districts;" - From Google's cache of the University of Melbourne's History of Urban Planning
Or Roman planned cities?
Or the Hampden Gurney School in London?
"Block" is not an Americo-centric term. Granted, many of our cities are layed out in a grid pattern, but a block is not a standard size from city to city - try defining a block in the heavily Spanish and French influenced layout of New Orleans or the sometimes quirky layout of Washington, DC.
As far as city-centric. So fucking what? I live in the country. There's nothing offense about someone expressing an idea in term of a relation to a block. It's a commonly understood *idea*. And if 'block' isn't a familiar word, then look it up. Several definitions I found used a quote from the London Quarterly Review as example usage.
South Korea doesn't have FTTH, but it does have a very extensive braodband infrastucture. The government spent a lot of time and money investing in it and building it. The result of that is that S Korea is the most online community per capita in the world, above the US and Japan even.
You can usually choose between 6 different broadband providers there. Since there is so much competion, rates are cheap, and there are NO upload or download limits. When I try to explain the download caps we have here, my friends in Korea shake their heads and ask me why people stand for it.
Governments need to take bold steps like this because nothing will change if they don't. South Korea did it, and now they are reaping the benefits of great internet infrastructure.
Greets all,
I'm actually one of those lucky folks in Tacoma who gets their internet access from the City owned cable utility. That's right, here in Tacoma we can get high-speed internet from our municipal power company. Both the price and performance beat Comcast's product by a mile. I pay $29 a month (+$5 for an extra IP address) and get 1M down, usually clocks at around 1.5M, and 128K up. If I wanted to spend another $20 a month I could get 2M down and 256K up, static IP, and the right to run my own servers over the connection. A friend uses the higher capacity service for his computer gaming parlor. He's never complained of a lack of bandwidth.
It was interesting, before our power utility proposed building a City owned cable system. The then franchisee TCI was projecting that Tacoma would be one of the last of their cities to get upgraded to digital cable. At that time at least five years away. It was funny to watch all the spin that TCI's flacks and lobbyists put out trying to convince the voters of Tacoma that a Municiple cable system would bankrupt our power utility in short order. Well, the system has cost us more than was originally projected, but everyone agrees that Click! is the only reason that TCI moved Tacoma to the top of the upgrade schedule. The article somepody else referred to that quoted the Comcast exec is the only time I've ever heard something from TCI/ATT/ComCast that was different than their standard CLick! will bankrupt Tacoma.
-- Bob Honan I stand by the truth, which is why I never stand by Republicans.