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Cities Building Own Fiber Networks
cmburns69 writes "It's been posted before that some municipalities have plans for building their own networks (such as Utah's UTOPIA). There are many people who don't want that to happen. But despite that, CNET News has coverage of some success stories regarding 'a growing number of municipalities, state and county agencies, and local governments that are building their own networks.'"
I'm not sure which is worse...the government having control of my line or the cable companies having control...
Why not use (buy) all the Dark Fiber everyone cries about from the Telecom Boom in the 90's?
How can a company compete when the playing field is not level?
I hadn't truely thought about it in this context, but why shouldn't all houses/apt's/condo's etc get net connections like a water line or a sewage line(yeah, that analogy isn't lost on me either). It should just be. You would then get actual services(mail, web, etc) through external providers. Seems to me like this is really how it should be.
dimes
I hope we see more of this kind of thing in the future.
This could be a good thing, this could be a bad thing, one thing it requires is the public pay attention to who runs these things and what decisions (arbitrary or what) they exercise over them.
From the article:
That's struck a nerve among incumbent carriers, like the regional Bell operators, that are serving these areas. Not only do these carriers lose customers when people decide to build networks themselves, but many local governments, municipalities and educational institutions that build networks for their own use wind up selling services as well, thus becoming competitors to the regional operators.
Where the municipality is a competitor... Wasn't this the sort of thing that have some depression era things struck down ERA/WPA/CCC because effectively private companies taxes could be funding the government to compete with them? A shame, really, as some of these structures and works still pay off 70 years later, guess we shouldn't let that happen again.
Running a telecommunications network is not a sure thing, as many private competitive providers have already discovered.
Particularly where executives overstating profit and taking huge compensation are concerned.
Where I worked we were quoted a few times, massive amounts for running a fibre network and finally elected to do it ourselves, despite dire warnings of us not having the properly skilled people and tools to do it ("Too delicate, too sahn-se-tahv") We did it anyway for about 10% what we were quoted and it worked fine.
lastly, I've always favored the municipality putting in these kinds of infrastructre, then leasing it out to the phone/cable/internet/CCTV, what have you. More competitors make for a better market, right? But where I live there's only one company for high speed internet and one company for cable, forget any other choices. Having the public involved, assuming good people are overseeing it (and you don't usually know they aren't good people until it's too late) can guarrantee far better service than the private sector (milk every last cent you can out of that copper, baby!) can really do.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Is it the role of Government to build a wholesale fiber network?
Yes, I believe it is infrastructure, similar to Roads. It does not make sense for each private service provider(FedEx, UPS, etc) to build it's own road to you house or company. Instead Government provides the road allowing the citizens to have cost effective access to private services.
Having the government provide a wholesale fiber network will allow for more companies to compete without the overhead of building a network. This will reduce prices, at the same time as improving what is available.
I agree that this is a good thing at the moment, but city governments often don't act much better than commercial companies when they set themselves up as a monopoly. Eventually the tendency will be for those local utilities to compare their prices and services to other monopolies rather than the bottom line.
A competitive and free market is still the best way to insure the best value for the best service over the long term. With telephone pole space limited, it seems unlikely that wired communications will ever truly be competitive, so perhaps government sponsored utilities are the way to go, but remember when ATT ran the show on behalf of the government... they wouldn't even let someone connect their own phone to the network let alone a computer. Government sponsorship often means government regulation of content and use. If this model became popular, then how long till those restrictions that are found in a Comcast customer contract, like not hooking up any "servers" or not having multiple computers behind a firewall, suddenly have the force of criminal law rather than just contract law. It is one thing when a company can stop doing busines with you, but quite another when they can throw you in jail.
In theory, I support the idea of municipalities developing networks in the hopes that subsidizing the costs will lower the current "barriers for entry" for non-profits, schools, etc. However, my fear is that a network managed by the government will have standards of use dictated by the government that will eliminate the social benefit it could provide.
Consider the radio airwaves ... a public, shared resource managed by the government. The FCC has guidelines for the content that can be broadcast over those airwaves in order to "protect" the public from content that they believe the majority of the citizens do not consider an appropriate use of that shared resource. A shared network infrastructure could be a significantly different beast, but only because the resource both is less scarce and more hidden from the general public. I can view the contents of a website without my neighbor knowing how I'm using their tax dollars. However, a concerned citizen could argue that they don't want their money used to support the viewing of certain types of web sites, and therefore that those sites should not be available over the municipal network. A similar argument has been made to coerce libraries into installing net nannies on their public computers.
These arguments are natural whenever the government is providing or subsidizing resources; if this resource is "owned" by the collective, then it should be managed according to their will. Fortunately, the free economy guarantees that if people want a network unfettered by government regulation, they will pay for it (see satellite radio and cable TV). However, in that case, the social benefits of a municipal network are lost. That means the only remaining benefit of a public network is to provide competition with the incumbent corporations ... and breaking the monopolies seems a much more cost-effective way to do that.