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Municipal ISP Makes 10Gbps Available To All Residents
An anonymous reader writes: Five years ago, the city of Salisbury, North Carolina began a project to roll out fiber across its territory. They decided to do so because the private ISPs in the area weren't willing to invest more in the local infrastructure. Now, Salisbury has announced that it's ready to make 10 Gbps internet available to all of the city's residents. While they don't expect many homeowners to have a use for the $400/month 10 Gbps plan, they expect to have some business customers. "This is really geared toward attracting businesses that need this type of bandwidth and have it anywhere they want in the city." Normal residents can get 50 Mbps upstream and downstream for $45/month. A similar service was rolled out for a rural section of Vermont in June. Hopefully these cities will serve as blueprints for other locations that aren't able to get a decent fiber system from private ISPs.
Do you have reason to believe they don't have static IPs? We sure have a lot of reason to believe they do probably have static IPs, since they claim the main reason for so much seeming excess capacity is that they're trying to keep it usable for future businesses (i.e. servers).
The car analogy here is that someone announced cheap car fuel, and you're saying, "but if it's going to go into cars without front windows so that you can't see where you're going, then this fuel is useless." True, but irrelevant and kind of stupid.
Go on, tell us some more of your ideas for hypothetical wastes of time. No, wait. I think I am even more creative than you. Let me try.
If this network can only route to odd-numbered addresses, then it's a waste of time.
If web pages fetched over this network can only have titles starting with the letter F, then it's a waste of time.
If the 10GBps service has a data cap of 5 Megabytes per month, then it's a waste of time.
Hey, you're right. It is kind of fun to say this stupid shit.
So, doubling what you're getting now for the same price is just "OK"?
While I mostly think this is great, I wonder if they should be in the "business" of supplying actual layer-3 connectivity or whether they should just be maintaining the fiber plant and selling access to it to other companies willing to provide actual IP connectivity?
Maybe a purely internal municipal ISP makes sense for supplying IP connectivity to municipal offices, schools or other parts of the government.
The part that makes me kind of leery is the fact that the government is the ISP and this creates a certain conflict. Does the fact that the municipality runs it mean that the police have greater access to monitor the network or some increased motivation to use municipal control to go after "evildoers"?
It's not hard to see how this could also morph into the kind of local political control that those in power use to stay in power.
Salisbury's solution to this problem is on the right track but it's not the correct solution. If companies sue for unfair competition, they'll win. Governments should not be ISPs or content providers.
The correct solution to this, which is also the correct solution for the last mile problem, is for the city government to own and maintain the infrastructure that exists in public rights of way, and create a new utility just like most cities have for their water and sewer systems. Then, run all the fiber to a "connection point" where any number of private providers can bring their content and any house or building may connect through the public fiber utility. Of course, any number of ISPs, telephone companies, and other content providers may bring their stuff to the city's connection point, and thus our capitalist free enterprise system is allowed to function unimpeded by the government. End consumers can freely choose between providers, and that will be the end of the bullshit shoveled by Comcast, Time Warner, Wave Cable, et al.
I really don't understand why governments don't jump at the chance to do this. A brand new public utility is a WHOLE NEW INCOME STREAM, where the government gets to send out bills and collect money. All the have to do is hire a contractor to maintain the infrastructure, buy insurance to protect from natural disasters, and then collect money from everyone FOREVER.
For the record, I'm a conservative, and I'm very much pro capitalism and against excessive government. However, unlike the anarchists and other extremists to the right of me, I recognize that we need government to provide certain basic minimum functions for the public good. So before I get accused of being a pro-government communist, I humbly submit that providing utilities to all the city's homes and businesses is one of those necessary functions.
Capitalism will keep all the private providers in check. There's no way Comcast and it's ilk would behave the way they do if they had to compete for your business. If the voters become unhappy with the prices they're charged by the fiber utility, it's their responsibility to vote the bums out and elect representatives who will change maintenance contractors, change insurance companies, and do whatever else is necessary to keep prices low. Therefore, on both public and private fronts, all the power lies in the hands of the people. It's exactly that kind of individual empowerment that conservatives stand for.
With so much money hanging in the balance and knowing the government has no actual work to perform, why doesn't every municipal government jump on the bandwagon and solve the last mile problem once and for all? ...and use the same solution to provide service to towns like Salisbury?