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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.
Why not buy up one 10Gbps line and sell 50Mbps lines for $30/mo while making a nice profit?
Municipal broadband is outlawed in my state, and most others too. Ironically, even with Chattanooga, one of the most famous of the municipal broadband cities, the rest of Tennessee can't get it because it's been outlawed in the rest of the state.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Because cable companies (which became cable ISPs) weren't originally something you could call a public utility. When they started, nobody knew what was the best way to rig up houses, or allocate bandwidth. When they started offering Internet service, that increased the complexity because now each home needed to be able to transmit data back to the cable company. These were all complex problems with a plethora of possible solutions. The "myth of capitalist efficiency" is precisely what filtered out the bad solutions over three decades, leaving only the efficient ones.
If cable had been made a public utility from the onset, we'd probably still be stuck with analog broadcasts and a few dozen channels. Just like government-imposed GSM would've been stuck with approx 50 kbps data speeds if the U.S. hadn't allowed CDMA to compete against it. (Orthogonal multiplexing like CDMA and OFDMA are what allows the high speed data rates. With the original GSM TDMA spec, each phone would take up part of the data bandwidth even if it didn't use it. On the other hand, CDMA distributed bandwidth according to how much each phone was using. Eventually, nearly every GSM phone ended up using wideband CDMA for data. That's why they can talk and use data at the same time - they had a TDMA radio for voice, and a CDMA radio for data. CDMA phones only had one radio for both. That's right, CDMA won the GSM vs CDMA war.)
Once you've arrived at what seems to be the optimal solution, then you can think about turning it into a public utility. That's what happened with electricity - AC and DC networks were allowed to compete, until it became economically obvious that long distance AC transmission was better. Then it got turned into a public utility. But it'd be remiss to think you could get to where we are today without the private capitalism stage - it's what allowed us to find the optimal solution in the first place. (And in fact the current state of electricity as a public utility is impeding efforts to explore if long-distance DC transmission might in fact be better with the modern high-efficiency DC converters that weren't available during the original AC vs DC war.)