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Hundreds of Cities Wired With Fiber, But Telecom Lobbying Keeps It Unusable
Jason Koebler writes: 'In light of the ongoing net neutrality battle, many people have begun looking to Google and its promise of high-speed fiber as a potential saving grace from companies that want to create an "internet fast lane." Well, even without Google, many communities and cities throughout the country are already wired with fiber — they just don't let their residents use it. Companies like Comcast, Time Warner Cable, CenturyLink, and Verizon have signed agreements with cities that prohibit local governments from becoming internet service providers and prohibit municipalities from selling or leasing their fiber to local startups who would compete with these huge corporations.'
watch this:
https://plus.google.com/115956...
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
That should be an end-run around those restrictions. The city/locality owns the fiber, but sells access to companies who sell it to end users. (I'm not sure if this counts as "leasing". The locality maintains control of the fiber.)
Google, through it's lobbying contributions to ALEC is a supporter of the current monopoly system.
The core issue is whether a government should be providing a service. But that should not be an issue.
The government should provide the pipes (fibre or copper or whatever) to the houses that it covers. Paid for by taxes.
The pipes terminate at a government facility that the government leases space at to ANY AND ALL companies that want to provide ISP services over those pipes. As cheap as possible but without allowing one company to lease ALL the space.
Then switching between ISP's should be as simple as moving a patch cord.
Your taxes pay for the pipes and their maintenance and the facility and its maintenance (minus the lease revenue).
A private business trying to compete with a tax paid government agency is at a great disadvantage. The tax paid agency has no incentive to not lose money. All they need to do is spend their budget.
Comcast themselves say "Comcast and TWC do not compete against each other in any area" (direct quote).
This collusion clearly violates the ideals of free-market capitalism, but at what point does it violate the law?
(Sorry to anyone who's seen me post this comment before, but I'm still scratching my head over this)
Even if they sub contract out the work, I'd rather not have the government be my ISP. The right way to go is to get local governments to change rules allowing easier permitting for others to run fiber. I want competition, not government ISP. That is where real change can happen.
Personally, I *want* "fast lanes" because they remove popular traffic off the main transit links. The cost of those fast lanes get passed on to customers that subscribe to things like Netflix. For people that don't have Netflix, they get less traffic on the links they care about. Even with cost to Netflix, it may still be cheaper for them than sending bulk data over their own transit links. It is a win-win.
Stop trying to make rules for how the Internet works. Peering, even if it isn't settlement-free, is a good thing. People, use your brains!
My home town, Burbank, CA has metro fiber for businesses. Studios love it. The fiber is actually owned by the cable company. Heh!
The last mile is not amenable to free market solutions. Not unless you want dozens of fibers from dozens of companies all terminated at your doorstep, each alone capable of transmitting the contents of the library of congress before you finish reading the bathroom newspaper. Why would we want this? It's stupid. Get everyone a single fiber to their home, pay for it collectively, and lease the rights to use it to your ISP. Tell me about a better plan.
More cities need to treat internet access as a utility. It's the best way to break the current monopoly.
Screw the consumer. Its how barely regulated (virtual) monopolies, that are out of control, operate.
Break them up, jail the board of directors. Return control to the people.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
needs it
In my view municipally run fiber networks are an inevitable necessity, whether they are open-access or the service is run by the city. Internet access has become a vital utility and becomes all the more so every year; and fiber networks are the only viable way to provide it and grow with future needs. I wish the average person could understand this. Competition doesn't happen partly because building multiple physical network infrastructures in the same place makes no more sense than having multiple electrical or water systems. The only reason there are two hardwired Internet providers in any place to start with is because two completely unrelated infrastructures(cable and phone) were converted to provide service; both of which, ironically, have been made obsolete by the Internet. It worked for a while, but it has been obvious for years that it is time to move on. That is why so much fiber infrastructure was built in the first place. The incumbent ISPs know this, and are terrified by it. Hence why they have gamed the entire system and greased legislators with bribes---excuse me--"lobbying money", and done a very thorough job of it.
Because my city council demands that any new company providing cable TV commit to wire every home and apartment building before getting permission to operate in my town, Nashua, NH, Verizon FIOS was driven out of town. As it happens they sold what fiber they'd laid down to a regional operator, so I can get fiber Internet, but not TV.
I'm not saying that Comcast lobbied hard and spent a lot of money to get this rule enforced, but obviously this kind of barrier to entry benefits Comcast or any incumbent ISP greatly.
Who will invest in the Internet infrastructure that we badly need, indeed, and who will go out of their way to hinder its operation?
Community Wifi is also targeted with this. My experience was from Comcast targeting the one community WiFi project we had running and was shut down.
we were illegally providing internet service for free without paying franchise fees to the local government to the tune of $10K a month.
It's a fucking Mobster kickback is what it is...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Provo, Utah tried this approach: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IProvo. Unfortunately, it didn't work out too well, and Google had to come save the day...
The ISP's WANT net neutrality, and they want the FCC to regulate them.
That would put the final nail in the competition coffin.
Could you imagine what would happen if you had, let's say, 33 ISP's to choose from in your area?
I'm moving and my new place has 200Mbps down/100Mbps up fiber, so that's an upgrade from the 100Mbps I've had for about 15 years. And the price is going down to about US$38/month. Not bad, huh? I could choose 1 Gbps, since everywhere has been upgraded with it for years now, but it would only be useful for content inside the country. The infrastructure is far more advanced than the U.S.
Of course there are no caps and no provider-conspired speed throttling. I've never had a provider-caused outage in 20 years of internet service.
That's that service level and pricing that competition has created over time in Japan. I'm in a small town, so don't even think about the "U.S. is too big" reply. Every time I go the U.S. I'm shocked at the level of service. You are really under the thumb of the internet provider mafia.
You need to vote in representatives that will actually to start representing you. I don't see any hope for you without that.
Again with this one-sided uninformed bullshit. Why did the city sign those agreements? A gift to the telecom? It's a joke. City after city trys to install their own network and gets their ass sued by their local telecom. And they lose... every time. Why? Because it's breach of contract.
Those telecoms agreed to maintain the cities aging copper network in exchange for no direct competition for teleco services. Maintaining that network is hugely expensive. The city comes in and plans to install fiber which will clearly be a direct competitor to the old copper network. Does the city want to release the telco from their obligation to maintain the copper? If they were I'd pretty damned sure the telco would jump at the chance. But they're not. They want the telephone company to continue to maintain a dieing network while the city installs fiber to only the most profitable areas, in direct competition with the telco.
No city is required to sign these agreements. They are up for renewal all over the country every day of the year. Yet, they all sign. They could maintain the network themselves, but they don't. If it was such a profit rich venture why don't we see cities doing this all over? Because it's not very profitable. They city could certainly buy out the contract, even in the middle of the contract and take over the network any time they wanted. But then they would have to maintain that network... the WHOLE network. Not just that business park where they wanted the fiber.
What I'd suggest, is if the cities want more control over this sort of thing. They should buy the network, not sign any more contracts and then install fiber conduit only. Lease conduit to vendors. They you have competition. Any vendor can come in, blow a new fiber through the conduit, and get going. When they dont need it anymore they pull their fiber, and viola. The governments not providing your intenet and you have real competition. This will require the city to maintain the phonelines however. No phone company is going to touch them if they're losing the most profitable part of town, they'll lose money.
Actually one "polices" them rather than "regulating" them. It's called the "police power of the state", and refers to a lot more than the cops. Anything that gets you dragged in front of a magistrate or board who can punish you is policing
Regulation is a technical term for bylaw-like legislation, is misleading as heck, and historically is a term that lots of people in the 'States and Canada viscerally hate.
davecb@spamcop.net
The physical infrastructure---dark fiber---is a natural monopoly, and could be supplied and owned by government.
The service itself, equipment to transport information on and off, and policies would be privately owned and maintained, and competition required.
It's little different than rails or roads which have cars and service operated by competing carriers on the same transport infrastructure.
What are you talking about? Comcast, Verizon, and others are not backbone providers that would be places like Level 3 Communications
The scary thing is that Verizon is a Tier 1 provider. When they bought MCI several years ago, they got UUNET too.
But Telecom Lobbying Keeps It Unusable.
Of course they do.
Corporations are Evil.
no exceptions.
Capitalism is reptilian.
And all of your points are ???
Dog eat dog?
No. Dogs work in packs - socialism.
Capitalism is reptilian.
Reptilians eat their children because they can't make it on their own.
The American Way.
Sucks to be you if you can't.
they want to get rid of copper and replace it with 4g/lte with low caps and $10 a gig for going over.
Don't you have a vote for city council?
It won't be me paying for the last mile. I gave the last $10 I had to your mom last night for a quick anal fuck.
Good grief, shut your shill asshole up already.
But I guess the NSA is piping everything through their basement already, so maybe it doesn't matter...
You people make me sick. :eyeroll:
I've been caught in the telecom's shenanigans before. Go ask the early directors of the e-NC program in N Carolina around 2003 about the tricks Sprint pulled to halt potential competition at the taxpayers expense..
Keep voting for candidates financed by ANY big money interest and keep expecting them to care about your poor asses. Nooooo.... y'all aren't insane.....
When the king heard the words of the Book of the Law he tore his robes.2Kings22:11
Its effectively a contract to form monopolies.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
And it has been for ten years. The city water and electric board put it in (we have municipal water and electricity).
Century Link still stuck with DSL at turn of the century speeds.
Comcast will sell some band width but you pay.
Sad
The point was not that the municipal governments should run the ISP out of business but that the municipal government should provide last mile fiber to designated fiber sheds that the ISP then connect to networks ..... wait for it .... FRAND. Then the Big ISPs who have screwed most of the US out of decent costs and services now have local competition from small and medium sized ISP's
My drug of choice is logic - your drug of choice seems to be wilful stupidity.
> It doesn't make sense to install multiple fibers.
In the same way that it doesn't "make sense" to have multiple cell towers covering the same area. Thing is, there used to be one company with cell towers in this area. The company with the towers charged $85 / month. Another company came in and offered unlimited everything for $45 / month. Now there are three or four and I pay $30 / month.
Competition is inefficient in a way, but it's how you go from $85 2G to $30 4G.
It doesn't "make sense" to have multiple grocery stores servicing the same area, the duplication is wasteful. Why have two barbershops servicing Ive neighborhood? It would be more efficient to have one. Theoretically, communism would be more efficient - if people were perfect. If people weren't lazy, if tbthey were perfectly charitable, if people didn't want to earn money to buy nice things, you'd
have one service provider per neighborhood. When dealing with actual humans - well ask the Soviets or the Cubans how well that worked.
Not all cities.
http://www.ci.longmont.co.us/lpc/tc/index.htm
As part of the November 5 election, Longmont's voters approved funding for the full development of the City's fiber optic broadband network. We would like to thank the community for supporting this move toward a future filled with progress and opportunity. As a true gigabit city, we are and will be positioned to be a leader in digital communications and a global information hub. We are lighting tomorrow, today.
> History has proven that privatisation universally results in increase of charges to the individual and major reductions in the provisions of services.
You are far to the left and Al Gore and Bill Clinton on that one. They made a big deal about reducing bureaucratic waste and getting things done faster by hiring the private companies that did the same job for half the price and in half the time. I think Gore even wrote a book about it.
> It is logical, governments attempts to provide the maximum possible service
They better not, not in the US. In the US they are supposed to provide the FAIREST possible service, with the most possible input from the taxpayers who are paying for it. If my (govt service) is better than yours, that's unfair and wrong. If I live in the boonies and are therefore limited to 1 mbps, everyone else should be limited to 1 mbps too.
> Private industry attempts to provide the least possible service for the maximum possible cha rge, for fuck sake they publicly brag about, it's called profit.
Please look up the definitionbof profit. Profit = the value generated minus the cost incurred. Maximum profit, therefore, is when you have the best service (therefore most sales) at the lowest cost.
> PR=B$ types to run around spreading the delusion that corporations love you, the really, really do).
They love your money. They can get your money in either of two ways. A) you choose to give them your money in exchange for their service, because theirs is the best or B) the local government essentially forces you to give them your money because they don't allow you to have any choice. In the US, internet service is mostly b. Thelocal governments grant monopolies to one cable provider and one phone provider. Coincidentally, the same company that government grants monopoly power so they overcharge you also turns around and donates the money they got from you to the politicians. So the politicians force you to give Comcast too much money, then Comcast gives that money to the politicians who helped set the thing up. Here's a great solution - get MORE politicians involved!
There's a good reason not even Net Neutrality, the one piece of cable company fuckery we staved off, didn't last very long after Citizens United.
It's because it "takes a lot of money" to win elections, and government representatives know where their bread is buttered in that regard. If you don't play ball, the money will go to your opponent.
Then when you do get elected, partisan bickery is so bad that both parties (and especially Republicans http://nymag.com/daily/intelli...) demand full loyalty to the party, which consolidates votes around the money winners even more.
Then when you are done as an elected official, you are free to get an even higher paying job as a lobbyist, and you know who they like? That's right, the ones who play ball.
This sounds like a mad conspiracy, but it happens over, and over, and over again.
So no, there will be no voting in representatives who oppose this until we reign in campaign finance and the opportunity to get double your pay later as a lobbyist.
When I first came to America I was very impressed with the idea that America has a government of the people, by the people and for the people
For a kid from a Communist country, I can't tell you how much awe I had for the notion that a government is actually on the side of the people !
But then ... I was naive
It turns out that the government of the United States is not what I imagined to be
The government of China is definitely NOT on the side of the people - and they do not have to be, because they never say that they are a democracy
But in the United States of America, we are supposed to be a Democracy, which means that the government has to rely on the VOTES of the people in order to be formed
So, what the fuck has gone wrong ???
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I have pointed out REPEATEDLY on Slashdot that the "net neutrality" fight is a PHONY one that [1] distracts from the REAL problem of the "last-mile", and [2] is actually VERY dangerous to a "free" (as-in speech) internet... PARTICULARLY when Democrats in the Senate have just proposed a constitutional amendment to limit First Amendment "free speech" rights, equating speech to guns and porn which must "naturally" be restricted for the "common good".
EVERY "Net Neutrality" bill/proposal has introduced new government regulation and authority over the net, eventually eliminating it's wildly-creative "wild west" nature, while doing NOTHING to prevent the eventual "crony capitalist"-"big government" alliance that ALWAYS forms in profitable "mature" areas of human activity where government is given regulatory authority.
The REAL problem we all SAY we want to solve is: lowering the costs to use the net, while increasing performance and access. Who cares if somebody else gets their data moved across the net faster or more-cheaply as long as WE can move ours as quickly as we need and as cheaply as possible? When's the last time any Slashdotter got angry that somebody else got a burger more quickly or for less money at McDonalds??? Nobody argues about costs or speeds when something is cheap-enough and fast-enough to make everybody happy. The IDEAL way to lower costs and improve performance in a free market is by COMPETITION and NOT by government mandates.... and the KEY to that competition on the internet is getting MULTIPLE high-speed providers access to every doorstep. This can be done by getting local governments to own optical fibers to every door and letting service providers negotiate for portions of the bandwidth (making CERTAIN every user has CHOICE), OR it can be done by demanding local governments stop blocking new entrants and stop making monopoly deals with vendors. Huge numbers of cities have made deals with telcos to lock-in their citizens with a single cable TV (and high-speed internet) company - and this ELIMINATES competition. No amount of "net neutrality" legislation will fix this problem, it MUST be adressed locally. "Net Neutrality" that guarantees non-discriminatory data packet handling will NOT improve service, or access, or lower rates for ANYBODY in a place with a monopoly provider.
As long as you keep calling it lobbying instead of what it really is, bribing, you're not going to move forward very much.
Stockholm (among others) has a fiber network built and owned by the city. It is neutral, and various providers can sell services over it.
Selecting and switching service is simple. Moving patchcord is out of fashion, you just reprogram devices to redirect traffic where it should go - no need for physical action.
http://www.investstockholm.com...
This is how this should work. Sadly with various EU laws in effect this model is much harder to replicate now.
...it's not always "their" (the municipalities') fiber. The providers paid for most of the parts/equipment....which is why there were signed agreements...
This is exactly what Australia is trying to do with the National Broadband Network; Telstra - the incumbent last mile monopoly for cable and copper DSL - will eventually phase out their copper network to be replaced with the the government-funded mostly fibre based Nbnco last mile network.
Of course, the project is political dynamite, the rollout is massively delayed, has run over budget, and the current government is trying to change the fibre to the premises network to fibre to the node, but the intention is to provide common "wholesale" last mile connectivity that any ISP can resell to consumers.
The "well off" are able to invest in the private water utility. They are making money from this, or some other, private enterprise. If we make everything public, then no one can make money to pay taxes.
That said, this is really about anti-trust laws. Neither the government nor any company should have exclusive rights to provide a service.
> If you can't see how a physical connection to shared infrastructure is different to two grocery stores or two cell companies you might want to take some time to acquaint yourself with the differences,
Roads are infrastructure, my friend. In my case , one road, called WJB Parkway, connects me to the Kroger grocery store. Another road, hwy 6, connects me to the Walmart store. Yet another, Villa Maria, connects me to the HEB grocery store. It would be more efficient to have one road, going to one store. That store could then sell rotten bananas for $6/pound since there would be no competition.
Seriously, what is needed is to require TIGHT regulations on companies that do this kind of BS. If they make agreements like this, then the feds should tax those companies for those areas. In fact, they should be able to limit the profits from those areas to say no more than 5%/year.
The reason is simple. With competition, each company has incentives to invest to keep customers happy. Without it, and esp. when prevented by those companies, then they have NO incentive to invest. So, by keeping profit for that region to below 5% (if not 3%)/year, then they have a strong incentive to invest to offer more amenities (i.e. more revenue to increase the profits), OR allow competition to come.
Regardless, this kind of BS is killing America. It is disgusting that companies are doing this, but understandable. What is REALLY disgusting, is that cities go along with this BS, and do not put time limits on it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I agree with the +Informative mods, but I'd like to point out that it doesn't follow that public fiber should be outlawed because one city tried and failed.