Slashdot Mirror
Big Telecoms Strangling Municipal Broadband, FCC Intervention May Provide Relief
MojoKid writes: With limited choice and often dismal upstream speeds, it's no wonder many people are excited to hear that newcomers like Google Fiber are expanding super-fast gigabit internet across the country. But some Americans also have access to other high-speed fiber internet options that compete with the big guys like Comcast and Time Warner Cable: municipal internet. In the case of the small town of Wilson, NC, town officials first approached Time Warner Cable and Embarq, requesting faster Internet access for their residents and businesses. Both companies, likely not seeing a need to "waste" resources on a town of just 47,000 residents, rebuffed their demands. So what did Wilson do? It spent $28 million dollars to build its own high-speed Internet network, Greenlight, for its residents, offering faster speeds and lower prices than what the big guys could offer. And wouldn't you know it; that finally got the big telecoms to respond.
However, the response wasn't to build-out infrastructure in Wilson or compete on price; it was to try and kill municipal broadband efforts altogether in NC, citing unfair competition. NC's governor at the time, Bev Perdue, had the opportunity to veto the House bill that was introduced, but instead allowed it to become law. However, a new report indicates that the FCC is prepared to side with these smaller towns that ran into roadblocks deploying and maintaining their own high-speed Internet networks. The two towns in question include aforementioned Wilson, and Chattanooga, TN. Action by the FCC would effectively strike down the laws — like those that strangle Greenlight in Wilson — which prevent cities from undercutting established players on price. The FCC is also expected to propose regulating internet service as a utility later this week.
However, the response wasn't to build-out infrastructure in Wilson or compete on price; it was to try and kill municipal broadband efforts altogether in NC, citing unfair competition. NC's governor at the time, Bev Perdue, had the opportunity to veto the House bill that was introduced, but instead allowed it to become law. However, a new report indicates that the FCC is prepared to side with these smaller towns that ran into roadblocks deploying and maintaining their own high-speed Internet networks. The two towns in question include aforementioned Wilson, and Chattanooga, TN. Action by the FCC would effectively strike down the laws — like those that strangle Greenlight in Wilson — which prevent cities from undercutting established players on price. The FCC is also expected to propose regulating internet service as a utility later this week.
It's not just the small towns that get rebuffed. Bob Blumenfield's famous RFP for a broadband plan for Los Angeles was met with deafening silence.
We the Government of the corporations, by the corporations, for the corporations, will not allow the democratic process to interfere with the rights of business to dictate monopolistic and oligopolistic solutions to citize ... erh, customers.
In particular, you have no right to competition nor to form any "more perfect union" that reeks of socialism or even just consumers rights.
Business must be allowed perfect freedom. All other freedoms are coincidental.
Signed.
Your governor.
I am anarch of all I survey.
I'm all for high speed Internet but this town spent $1500 per household for gigabit Internet. This town has a mean income of 36K and one out of four residents lives below the poverty line. The service has only achieved a 33% penetration rate in the town.
People think that ultra high speed Internet is a magic elixir for all of economic problems of an area but that isn't true. It is no different when they rushed to put computers in every school to bridge the so-called "digital divide". Computers are just tools that allow good students to do better the same as can be said for a faster Internet connection. They can also be used to waste classroom time and distract weaker students from concentrating on their studies.
Given the cheap high speed Internet the town now offers you would expect employers to flock to this area, wouldn't you? Isn't that one of the selling points behind this? Have any new technology companies moved in? No, because they understand that having great tools is meaningless if you don't have the people who can use them to great advantage.
The $28 million was the original estimate. The cost at the moment is about $38 million.
There are about 5,400 subscribers of the broadband service giving a debt of about $6,300 per subscriber.
Wow! $6,300 per subscriber is a lot!
That's... let's see here... $525 per subscriber per month.
Yikes! That's Huuuuuuge!
That's... let's see here... $52.50 per month for 10 years.
That's... not unreasonable.
Okay, internet access is more than the build-out cost, let's suppose it's equally distributed 50% amortization and 50% ongoing costs (bandwidth, maintenance, power, &c).
That's... let's see here... roughly $100 per month for 10 years.
How long is the system expected to last? Amortization is usually over a 20 year period.
That's... let's see here... roughly $50 per month for 20 years.
That's... not unreasonable.
And doing this will bring employment for a couple of people in the town, and having fast internet access might bring a business or two to the town to generate more tax revenue.
[...] giving a debt of about $6,300 per subscriber.
I love emotionally framed arguments. It forces me to stop and analyze the real situation.
Dude, at least RTFS.
That's what Wilson NC did. They asked the inumbents to build out and give a quote.
The big boys told them to go to hell. At which point, they decided to build out their own.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
The act is "Broadband Network Companies Act 2011" so you can't really blame it for the ageing infrastructure. If you want to blame anyone for the ageing infrastructure blame the ISP's that failed to invest in new technologies.
This two decade old paper shows Telstra's plans for FTTH in 1994 INT94b.PDF. Telstra failed to act on this for two decades. The introduction of the NBN is a reaction to that failure to act and a recognition that the costs are such that you needed a longer term outlook than next quarter's earnings. The NBN also got caught up in partisan politics which hasn't helped.
I spent over 90 minutes on the phone with CenturyLink today, the 4th call I had to make to try and get them to just give me the service they sold me for the price we agreed to when I signed. They added extra services and billed me for them and it has been hell to try and get them to just give me the original offer. I easily listened to 60min+ today of 'Your call is important to us... we have the highest customer satisfaction in the industry' all while I am fuming at their inability to do fairly basic things.
I actually had a brief moment of thought about Comcast today. But that quickly vanished. Too bad they are the only other provider in the area.
We need competition BADLY.
Wait, towns that protect incumbents, then want to throw those incumbents out to run their own service...huh?
How about this: government is the provider of last resort (it kinda works this way already for a bunch of other services). If the local telcos or ISPs thought it was profitable, then they would have already done it. But they didn't. So it's up to the local government to step in and work to improve their community. One of the reasons we're in the house (and town) we're in now was because back in 1998 there was Cable Internet service available. These days I'm fairly certain that a house without access to high speed Internet service will sell for far less than a house that does have access to it. Higher house prices equals higher taxes. It's in their interest to make the tax base as wide and high as possible.
I know that if and when I move next, one of my primary considerations will be "What kind of internet access is available here, and who is the provider". When I last did in 2008, that was a major consideration in buying in the current town (Cox/Fios both available) as opposed to the next county (Comcast only).
I wonder why the city council thought they were so much better qualified to make these projections than the people who run ISPs for a living.
Their reasons are irrelevant. The decision to employ public funds to this end was made by the people. If the ISPs insist the weight of their opinion must be greater than that of the people those ISPs should be dismantled as they're a threat to democracy.
Probably because the people at the ISP's don't give a shit what services the people there need/want?
I briefly tried to take a blog on technology issues into the domain of a youtube channel. However my internet is a 20/1 connection, at 1 mbps it takes me 3-4 hours to upload one ~40 minute segment. While I'm uploading I can't even use the internet for anything else. I need much faster up, but those big companies don't give a rats ass what I need. My best option for internet is what I have now. No business options even exist beyond what I have for residential service (a 3x bill just gets me 24/7 support and a change of name to 'business service').
These companies want to milk existing infrastructure for their own profit with no benefit to their customers. The other big businesses and financial services who own their stock get a good return though.
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
Look at the comparison between people in the US who have electricity provided by a commercial for-profit entity and those who have it provided by a co-op/municipal entity. All the evidence I can find suggests that the municipal systems are better for the community than the commercial operators.
I cant find any suggestions that people living in areas where the electricity is provided by a municipal monopoly are unhappy with the service or wish they had a commercial operator running things.
And there is nothing to suggest that municipal broadband is going to be anywhere near as crap as the current offerings. Its likely to be high speed fiber links (so already it will be faster in the real world than the crappy speeds most cable and DSL operators currently give you) and there is no real reason for the municipality to try and pull tricks to protect TV revenues (since the municipalities generally dont have skin in the TV game in the way the current monopolies do)
Qualification is not the issue, goals are. The city council has a different set of priorities than outside ISPs. It still might have been a bad idea, but looking to the calculations run by people with different objectives in mind is of limited utility.
I don't see this as that different from a municipal water system. The town, through it's elected officials, chose to implement this plan. Perhaps the citizens voted for this system knowing that initially it wouldn't break even but think that it was good for the town as a whole. Much as I might vote for a municipal water system even though I get my water from a well and don't want to subscribe to the water system. I realize that it's good for the town and therefore good for me indirectly even if I don't directly take advantage of it. I support bond measures for schools even though I don't have children and don't plan too and so do some who send their children to private schools. Who are we, not part of the town, to question their wisdom and judgement from afar. Perhaps the town made the judgement that as the internet grows and government services migrate to the net, more people will sign up and it will be revenue neutral or even make them money down the road. I support the idea the local government is the best and I see no reason to over turn their judgement here.
I've been wondering how long it would be before internet access began to be regarded as a utility. It has a lot in common with water and electricity in the 21st century - important to everyday life, high capital investment to put in infrastructure, commoditized once that infrastructure is in place. The parallel with electricity is especially close - different providers all use (or in theory can use) the same wires.
Of course, internet access is not as important as electricity and water in a fundamental survival sense, but the key is whether access to it is regarded as a norm of civilized life. 150 years ago access to electricity was rare and not part of day to day life - arguably, electrical infrastructure is not critical for survival or even for civilized living. Yet, today, living without electricity is not something most of us would care to contemplate. I suspect over the next 50 years "information infrastructure" will come to be regarded much the same way - theoretically we could make do without it, but the normal functioning of society and people's interactions with that society will require it.
Whether tha'ts a good thing is of course another question, but to me regulating the internet as a utility is in 2015 a no brainer.
For somebody making such a claim, you offer surprisingly few citations. Zero to be precise.
I certainly am unhappy with our electricity-provider — our wires hang on the poles, which makes them vulnerable to even light snow and wind. We routinely lose power for a few minutes here, which is just insane — back in USSR (for all its other faults) I don't remember such nonsense like ever. Cables must be buried underground, but, facing no competition the local utility is not in any hurry to do that.
You really want to go into particulars, huh? Ok, first question is, how long after the first mommy makes a complaint, will the municipal network allow access to porno-sites and bomb-making material — and just who will be maintaining the black list of disallowed sites? Second question: how much will the maintenance cost? Third question: will the technical support be any better than those professionals working for Comcasts et al. — what do the good folks in that know, that Comcast does not about troubleshooting Internet connectivity? Fourth question: how will the network deal with hijacked computers connected to it? Should I go on?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Sure. And a pink elephant could materialize out of thin air. Fortunately, we don't need to guess — the City of Brotherly Love tried municipal WiFi (much cheaper than running actual cables) years ago. By 2008 the system was shut down. Earthlink actually wanted to hand it off to the city's government, but found no interest...
Seattle's municipal WiFi went dark in 2012. Other examples abound.
Yes, not only is government competing with private sector illegal — it is also a bad idea.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
If the majority can decide to force me at gunpoint to pay for something I did not want, then the "democracy" must be dismantled as not a mere threat, but actual impediment to freedom.
As a white person I have to say only another white boy would say something this ridiculous.
Every government ever has forced people to pay for things they didn't want. Pacifists funded the revolution at the exact same rate as Patriots. You couldn't get out of paying for the war that conquered the Indians of Ohio by claiming you had a principled disagreement with the policy of Indian Removal to West of the Mississippi.
BTW, the policy of Indian Removal probably would not have worked if the Native Americans had real governments that could do things like insist that the Oglala Lakota of what is now South Dakota send 1,500 number of warriors to a rally point in Green Bay to join the Unified Native Resistance Army. Since they didn't we got to fight each nation thirteen-on-one, with some very rare exceptions (i.e.: Tecumseh), and even those exceptions typically didn't have the political power to enforce taxation or military service. Which meant that when they lost a battle they lost the war.
I agree - CenturyLink is pure shit. Thankfully we have a smaller regional cable internet company that still gives at least half a shit about its customers (Midcontinent). I live in terror of the day that Comcast / TW / whoever comes in an buys them out.
Century Link has always worked great for me. And unlike Comcast and all the other major players Century Link isn't a member of the ISP group that has actively volunteered to go out of their way to tell on you to RIAA and MPAA etc for any questionable downloads. So far they just mind their own business and let you use the connection you are paying for.
They are in an extreme minority in that regard and have earned me as a customer because of it. F' Comcast...
>. Probably because the people at the ISP's don't give a shit what services the people there need/want?
> Probably because the people at the ISP's don't give a shit what services the people there need/want?
"Town of 47,000 residents ... 5,400 subscribers".
5,400 people want the service, enough to pay $50/ month for it. 47,000 people are being forced to pay for it. It seems to me the city council doesn't care what the overwhelming majority of the people want. If the majority wanted the service, ISPs would provide the service, because it would be profitable. That's what businesses do - provide what people want. If they provide something people don't want, like Windows Phone, they're punished in the marketplace while those who provide what people want win.
There should be procedure in place to allow for a municipal build-out if the municipality can document either a a rebuff from major local providers or total lack of response to multiple requests with a 60 day waiting period between request and assumed "rebuff".
If providers flat out decline to provide for the area, they should have no say in the area providing for itself.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
What are the implications for NSA? Warrantless wiretapping? I'm not sure I want the government to be my ISP, even if it means better, faster internet.
There are 47,000 people in the city (who are on the hook for the bill).
Of those 47,000, only 5,400 have chosen to get the service.
The remaining people, who chose not to get the service, are the overwhelming majority.
You don't have to read minds, you can read TFA. Most citizens have chosen not to get the service.
ISPs, like other companies, seek to make money. You don't have to read their minds to know, that's one of their primary goals. They might also be environmentally conscience, care for their employees, etc., but definitely they want to make a profit. In business, profit is measured by Return On Investment, or ROI. If you spend $10 million and 10 years later you get your $10,000 back, but no profit, that's a return. If you spend $1 million and get $10 million back, that's a 1,000% ROI - very good. Businesses do things that they think will have a high ROI, and don't do things that have a low or negative ROI (with some exceptions like Apple's solar panels).
In this particular business, if you get back your investment in two to three years, then be profiting from it after that, that's a good project - one that makes plenty enough money. If you can spend $30 million, and in the first three years get back $30 million in sales, then in the fourth year have $10 million in profit, and $10 million profit every year thereafter, you do it.
So let's look at the arithmetic cable and phone companies do to make money. They look at this project and estimate the cost to build it (their investment), and the number of likely subscribers multiplied by the price each subscriber will pay - the company's expected return. They'll do the arithmetic for several price points, like these:
Cost to build 100 Mbps service: $30 million / 3 year recup = $10 / million per year.
So if they expect to sell $10 million per year, that's profitable and they'll do it if they can.
10,000 subscribers X $75/month X 12 months = $9,000,000
15,000 subscribers X $60/month X 12 months = $10,800,000
Of 47,000 residents, if 10,000 of them will buy at $75/month, it's reasonably profitable, but not insanely profitable. They might build there, if they don't have somewhere better to build this month.
If 15,000 want to buy the service, the company brings in over $10 million per year on the $30 million investment and that's a winner. You definitely build there.
The actual numbers for this town are that 5,400 were willing to $50:
5400 X $50/month X 12 months = $3,240,000
Not a good deal. It takes ten years just to get your money back, except you've been paying (or foregoing) interest the whole time, so even after ten years you've lost money. Anyone who passed Business Management 101 will avoid this for sure.
For somebody making such a claim, you offer surprisingly few citations. Zero to be precise.
During the Enron Induced Electricity Crisis in southern California I lived in the City of Pasadena. Pasadena has its own municipal water and power service, and did a very good job of managing costs so that I didn't see rate increases at all, while customers of SoCal Edison were paying enormous amounts of money for power when they had it, and had plenty of brownouts/rolling blackouts while I had stable service. The City of Los Angeles did even better - DWP had done a very good job of planning and prepurchasing power and had excess available that they could sell at a profit, lowering the cost for their own municipal subscribers. Most municipal systems did similarly well during the summer of Enron, while private electricity was a disaster.
I now live in unincorporated LA county and am served by SoCal Edison. When we had a huge windstorm that took out power for about 1 million households across multiple power providers, Pasadena had nearly everybody back up in a day (they've spent a great deal of effort moving a lot of the supply underground and on reliability in general). I was driving across LA during the first full day after the storm and every hour or so the radio would report that another 100,000 of LA DWP customers were back up, but no change in SCE. Nearly all of about 400K City of LA customers were back up in 2 days, while SCE took as long as a week for many customers (they had something like 500K customers out), and was essentially incapable of even estimating how much they had to fix or when they could do it. SCE has had absolutely terrible service for most of the time that I've been in their service area, and I would gladly pay Pasadena prices for their reliability.
The ILEC's (Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier) need competition. I work in an area only a few thousand feet from fiber. After Frontier bought that piece of Verizon land (many years ago) they stopped all FiOS deployments. The only landline access available to my main office is T1, currently $650/mo. That's 1.5Mbps up/down to the lowest bidder with Frontier providing the local loop. I was paying $2,600/mo for four T1's to get 6Mbps. The lines went down continuously. Customer service was a joke. I lived in this hell for almost ten years until the neighboring city started providing internet access. We were able to get a point-to-point 5.8GHz solution for less than $1,000 setup and 400/month that provides 30Mbps up/down and has near 100% uptime, better than anything provided by the the local telephone (err, data transport) companies.
Cables must be buried underground, but, facing no competition the local utility is not in any hurry to do that.
Fine. Then vote to spend 10x - 100x (depending on terrain) as much to run the cables, and raise the rates to pay for the ***HUGE*** bond issue required to implement it.
If the local telcos or ISPs thought it was profitable, then they would have already done it.
This is a common fallacy, if the ISPs thought they could make a higher return on their investment providing crappy service (particularly if they have no competition) then there is no incentive for them to provide good service (particularly if it means they will have competition).
The town (presumably) would not be profit focused and therefore be more concerned with the quality of the service than the return on investment. There are some things socialism does better than capitalism, and vice-versa.
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
"which prevent cities from undercutting established players on price"
Now, how come that the most "free" country in the world has laws for that? Shenanigans. If the "ruling" lobbyists can make laws they want, then it's not a free country and it's not a free market, just state and accept that, and quit whining about how things stand.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
I am appalled that taxes are used for the people to be used for faster bandwidth. What they should do is give money to the ISPs who then in turn will provide faster internet.
Why has nobody done that in the past? What? Oh! (I only see a submit button, not a cancel button. Darn. Too late.)
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
That's what businesses do - provide what people want.
No, no they don't. They provide the subset of what people what that they can make the maximum profit on. Occasionally, for the good of the people, we force them to do more. It's still profitable activity overall, but there's less profit than if they did only what they wanted to, and not what we actually want them to do. The obvious example is the penetration of the POTS network. We forced the telcos to connect people that they didn't want to connect, even though they wanted to be connected. We did it for the good of the nation, which we felt would be better and stronger with rapid communications for all of our citizens — at least, those who we could reasonably and feasibly connect. Now the question is being asked whether we want to extend the equivalent modern benefits to all of our citizens, and many of us seem to be saying no.
However, most of those people have been deliberately hoodwinked into making bad decisions by entrenched monopolies who have control of a disproportionate portion of mindshare as a result of their monopoly positions through the use of outright falsehoods, also known as fraud for financial gain. Their ISP and/or their cable company, which as you know are these days typically the same thing, is telling them that if they get world-class internet access (being the first country to have the internet and being sixteenth in internet access is horribly pathetic, and not at all worthy of any nation which would like to call itself the greatest as we so commonly do) that it will actually impede their ability to consume the media that they so love to slurp down. That's right, less choice means more choice! WAR IS PEACE! DOWN WITH UP!
TL;DR: People do want what they will get more of from high-speed internet access than they do from what they're consuming now, and when they realize that it's the best way to get it, they'll come around. Until then, there's lies, damned lies, and cable company lies.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Average household size in North Carolina is 2.51. I had looked it up so I could do the conversion correctly.
5,400 get service, of the 18,801 households who have to pay for it.
I don't think I'll ever understand why people make wild guesses and post them as though they were facts.
As much as people complain about its occasionally byzantine bureaucracy and its sometimes lapses into small-time corruption (such as giving open terms to the politically powerful), Memphis Light, Gas, and Water (MLGW) serves over 400k subscribers, rapidly fixes outages in a major metropolitan area prone to thunderstorm damage, repeatedly wins awards for reliability of service and water quality, and has a AA bond rating. It offers extremely favorable terms and payment programs for low-income subscribers. Oh, yeah, and it also has .
But hey, municipal utilities can't do anything right, right?
The problem isn't municipal utilities. The problem is poor process and intentional handicapping. When you have neither of these -- for instance, because your municipal utility is run as an independent organization with elected oversight that has actual skin in the game (after all, if you live in the city and use the utility, you have a good reason to not have it suck) -- the results are positive, and there's some great examples of how this works.
The Freelance Wizard
I cant find any suggestions that people living in areas where the electricity is provided by a municipal monopoly are unhappy with the service or wish they had a commercial operator running things.
Even though I am not within the city limits and cannot vote on city matters, I am still required to use City of Austin electricity.
My last house was also outside the city limits but was not inside the boundaries of the City of Austin electricity.
When I could select my provider, my per-KWH cost of electricity was much lower.
Austin has a very strong green party lobby and a very progressive cost structure for electricity(first 500kwh are less than half the price of the second 500kwh and after that it climbs rapidly, not to mention various fees and such that are tacked on to fund various things I did not get to vote on)
As such I am subsidizing the nearby city of Austin with my power bill and paying for my MUD with my water bill.
I would be more than happy to go back to having a commercial electrical provider were it permitted in my area, my commercial provider was quite happy to adjust my billing cycle to allow me to pay all my bills when I want to, as opposed to City of Austin electric which has refused with some claim about my billing cycle being determined by when the readers are scheduled to be in my area and cannot be adjusted by so much as a single day.
>. Says the person who only made note of the household issue when called on it,
No, the very first post made in the thread, I said how many households.
>. 47K people may be only 9K to 15K households. If all the households have 2 adults and 2.2 kids, 5400 is about half the households in the city
If unicorns farted rainbows ...
It is not the case that all households have two adults and 2.2 children. I've told you twice already, the average household size is 2.51, meaning 18,801 households. Next time read the post you're replying to, m'kay?
You forgot age distribution. About 1/3 of the people in Wilson are under 19.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
It has taken too long already
Guess where kids live? Hint - there is a reason that there are 47,000 people and 18,801 households.
My other posts referred to households, or to population; I didn't realize I had mixed the two in that sentence.
I remember back when my GF and I first got broadband in our house. Some of our friends who had it before we did had gotten in trouble with the cable company for using their own router. The cable company was able to detect this because the modem would report the MAC address of the connected device to the cable company. Our friends were forced to rent and use a supplied router, then charged based on the number of PCs that router reported (or for 2, if the router reported
When our subscription started, after getting the service working using a PC directly connected to the modem, we then set our router's "up stream" MAC address to the same as the PC we used for setup. We still keep that PC for when there is a problem. Just before calling the cable company, we disconnect the router and connect that PC. Otherwise, the person at the cable company will just say "The problem is that you have Windows Firewall turned on. Turn that off and the problem will go away."
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
I love my SnoPUD.org. Will not live in a non-PUD power area again.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
Actually I wish real estate agents would start to include internet services available in their listings, along side access to good schools. Similarly local governments doing property assessments should take into account quality of internet (they'll never do that though as it will hurt tax revenue). Then you'll start to see a lot of political pressure to improve the quality of internet as the housing valuations start to drop.
Local utilities are very often private corporations (with some state level public oversight commission usually). A municipal utility refers to one that's operated by the city itself. Many of these came into effect because the larger utility gave such bad service that the voters decided to dump them.
Of course these are a bit cheaper in that the cities are taking over existing infrastructure rather than building out their own, but they do still need to maintain them. Sometimes it's expensive to improve on the crap that they inherited.
The same thing happened in Monticello MN in 2009 with TDS, the local ISP. The community requested that TDS upgrade their services to make it more attractive for telecommuters working remotely from Twin Cities business; TDS said that 'wasn't on their road map', so the community went ahead to install their own fiber network. TDS found out, sued the town to halt their install while at the same time rolling out their OWN fiber network, and doubled all their subscribers speeds at no additional cost, then claimed that the original municipal plan was 'flawed' because there was now a 'cheap alternative'.
I'm not fond of government, and doubt a municipal fiber system would be perfect, but it sure couldn't be worse than what we have now.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...
The municipality can build a network infrastructure without necessarily providing Internet service. You could wind up with a wider choice of ISPs.
Oh, should I have sugar-coated that?