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.

Comments

Fiber Run Throughout the Town

[Matrix272]

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.

RIAA to dispatch field investigators to Grant Co.?

[djeaux]

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. That's good news for rural communities that are looking for ways to keep their kids from leaving.

No doubt, the RIAA will be moving field investigators into Grant County within the week. Must be a hotbed of P2P ;-)

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,

That is a pipe dream

[blcamp]

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.