Tacoma Goes All In To Support Municipal Fiber

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday December 17, 2015 @03:00PM from the greased-lightning dept.

Peterus7 writes: The Tacoma city council just voted unanimously to invest and upgrade their Click! fiber network as a municipal ISP, which likely means gigabit speeds. This decision was made in light of a proposal from Wave Broadband, which wanted to lease the municipal fiber backbone for 40 years initially, then 5. This vote came after the Tacoma Public Utility board passed both resolutions, to lease and go all in as a city run ISP. Now that the proposal has gone through to allow the city to sell service as an ISP, Tacoma will be added to the growing number of cities with municipal fiber.

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Sounds awesome. by TsuruchiBrian · 2015-12-17 15:25 · Score: 4, Interesting

I wish more cities would do this. It never made sense to me why we would allow private companies own the telecommunications infrastructure. Sure you get the benefit of not having to pay for the installation (through taxes), but then the customers are stuck dealing with a for-profit monopoly. It just seems like a giveaway to a a private sector entity whose interests don't totally align with the those of the public.