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32 Cities Want To Challenge Big Telecom, Build Their Own Gigabit Networks
Jason Koebler writes: More than two dozen cities in 19 states announced today that they're sick of big telecom skipping them over for internet infrastructure upgrades and would like to build gigabit fiber networks themselves and help other cities follow their lead. The Next Century Cities coalition, which includes a couple cities that already have gigabit fiber internet for their residents, was devised to help communities who want to build their own broadband networks navigate logistical and legal challenges to doing so.
Indeed, I'm mostly a libertarian and I view this as not really any different than a neighborhood, town, or city getting together and forming a cooperative. My reaction is 'good on them! Fie on established businesses that are failing to meet demands'.
I don't read AC A human right
I met the VP in charge of FIOS. I point blank asked him. It came from above his pay grade. The irony is he gets AT&T DSL at his house and they have no plans to expand uverse there.
Until the current top CEO is gone FIOS is dead in the water. He came up thru the ranks of Verizon wireless and thinks charging people more for less service is a totally awesome idea. They are busy reneging on every deal they made with every municipality they promised to roll it out to. Your politicians (on both sides of the isle) are all well bought and paid for and there is not a thing you can do about it.
Republicans in the right pocket and Democrats in the left pocket. Third party candidates don't have a chance. Your vote doesn't count for shit. Until people start seriously voting for third parties the gov't is bought and paid for.
The last mile is really a logistical problem. The current US system is quite problematic. In many cases whoever owns the last mile provides the service and you basically have no choice.
In contrast, I like the German system. Whoever owns the last mile, is forced by law to lease it at a reasonable price. The result is that you have real competition with dozen of telephone, internet, cable, gas and electricity providers. This is an almost perfect win-win system. The people owning the last mile infrastructure have an incentive to keep it running and upgrading it or else they will lose their income (penalties, incensed fees for better service, government subsidies) and the service providers can reach a large volume of people. This only mildly fails for rural areas, but here subsides are used to alleviate the problem. The other mild problem that established players (e.g. Deutsche Telekom) can rest on their laurels of existing infrastructure and provide crappy and overpriced service, but fixes itself in the long run.