Slashdot Mirror
Municipal Fiber Network Will Let Customers Switch ISPs In Seconds (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader shares an Ars Technica report: Most cities and towns that build their own broadband networks do so to solve a single problem: that residents and businesses aren't being adequately served by private cable companies and telcos. But there's more than one way to create a network and offer service, and the city of Ammon, Idaho, is deploying a model that's worth examining. Ammon has built an open access network that lets multiple private ISPs offer service to customers over city-owned fiber. The wholesale model in itself isn't unprecedented, but Ammon has also built a system in which residents will be able to sign up for an ISP -- or switch ISPs if they are dissatisfied -- almost instantly, just by visiting a city-operated website and without changing any equipment. Ammon has completed a pilot project involving 12 homes and is getting ready for construction to another 200 homes. Eventually, the city wants to wire up all of its 4,500 homes and apartment buildings, city Technology Director Bruce Patterson told Ars. Ammon has already deployed fiber to businesses in the city, and it did so without raising everybody's taxes.
I have to admit ignorance in this as well. I know of 3 things which are required to connect a home to the internet.
1. Last mile, connecting the users to the network
2. Edge interconnect, which routes traffic to/from end users and the backbone
3. Backbone, which connects all the ISPs
1 and 2 constitute what we colloquially refer to as the ISP. If 1 is a municipal fiber network, then that means an ISP is just an interconnect between the fiber network and the backbone?
This is how internet service used to be! The current generation growing up just naively assumes that your local telecom company is your ISP, and can't even wrap their head around this idea that you could choose an ISP separately from the company that shows up to your front door to wire it.
This is the market solution to Network Neutrality. The "golden age" of the internet was back when the telephone companies just provided the wires, and people could sign-up for whatever ISP they wanted. Then, when telecom companies bought out the ISPs, and the two markets combined into a single vertical slice, is when the problems started. With monopoly came DNS servers that redirect you to ads, paid prioritization of traffic, no more static IP addresses, no more allowing people to run servers, etc. Network Neutrality is so much a battle about restoring the internet to the way it was. I fear it won't be successful unless we restore competition to the ISP market again.