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Americans Support Letting Cities Build Their Own Broadband Networks, Pew Finds (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Most Americans want to let local governments build out internet service if the internet providers in their area aren't any good, according to the Pew Research Center. In a phone survey of over 4,000 people last month, Pew found that 70 percent of respondents agreed that local governments should have the power to start their own high-speed networks if current offerings are "too expensive or not good enough." The results show an overwhelming support for municipal broadband -- networks that are at least somewhat run by local governments -- at a time when encouraging broadband buildout is a top federal priority. But despite the support, in much of the US, building out municipal networks just isn't possible. More than 20 states have passed laws banning local governments from starting their own broadband service, largely at the behest of internet providers that want to avoid competition at all cost. Though Pew's survey found some positive results for municipal broadband, it found less support for broadband subsidies for low-income homes. Under half of all Americans, 44 percent, said they supported subsidies, while nearly everyone else surveyed said they felt internet service "is affordable enough" that most households should be able to pay for it. (At the same time, nearly half of all people surveyed said they didn't know what speed of internet they received.)
Broadband should be a utility this day and age.
I have been on a municipal fiber network for over 10 years and it's been great. A high bandwidth symmetrical connection with a wide choice in ISPs. Previously I had cable internet through Comcast and the network stability, level of service and price have been like night and day. Internet is pretty crucial to living in modern society, it should be treated as a utility and a basic level of service provided to each home by the government. TV, phone and internet service providers still compete for the customer's business, they just do it on a level playing field.
Enigma
With lower prices, faster speeds and better service, you bet people would want municipal broadband. We've all seen what happens when there is no competition: the U.S. still isn't in the top ten of industrialized nations when it comes to broadband speeds (page 12 of the report).
I distinctly remember when my area got "competition" in broadband providers. Verizon came in and their CEO proudly stated, "We're not going to compete on price. We'll compete on quality." Well gee, thanks. To whom should I bend over for?
If Republicans would stop preventing broadband competition we'd be far better off. And before anyone wants to whine about being partisan, go take a look at the places which have outlawed municipal broadband. See the pattern?
My dream: local governments (or the local power company) run the "last mile" passive fiber to every home. Then any company can apply to come in and start hooking up at the switch boxes. This means new offerings like Google Fiber could hook up quickly, and the old guard can still provide competitive service if they choose to (also dragging them into a fiber-first model). No need to fret over who gets connected at the house level, because you have public oversight at that level, and not having to do the last-mile means there's less incentive to hook up only the rich neighborhoods, because all of them can be done fairly efficiently once you have backhaul. This design also keeps the government from trying to be an ISP, which they aren't really equipped for -- instead they maintain the street-level infrastructure, something they do a lot of already.
Before telecom deregulation I had a small ISP over Verizon's copper, and (for the time) it was great. The ISP of course got killed off as soon as Verizon was allowed to stop sharing the lines. A decade of stagnation followed. I'd love to see the smallest changes on the public side to make private competition viable, and a municipally owned last mile makes a lot of sense.
In other news, monopolies will always be inefficient, provide lousy service and charge more.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
We could permit regulated quasi-governmental utilities, sort of how I get water and electricity here in the Phoenix area. Might be better than the current monopolies.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Well healthcare in the USA is the highest per capita by a VERY large margin. You are paying more, not getting more.
Worse, given the massive costs, tens of millions of Americans do NOT have adequate health care options.
And then it turns out that the infrastructure is also ageing, needing over $1 Trillion to fix it
And China is doing quite well, its now a bigger economy than the USA, its modernising rapidly in all areas.
Communism with corruption is a failure, but then so is capitalism with corruption.
no way any entity (public or private) deals with the last mile. We all know it's going to go wireless - and more likely than not, it will start with 5G and mobile providers. Physical connections are going to terminate at colo providers and not at homes or businesses
Forgot to finish that last thought - then private entities will extend from colos to wireless distribution points. If you don't see this coming, you're blind, dumb, or attached to the past
No. In other news, if capitalism works out pretty great in most sectors of the country but not in telecommunications, maybe something is wrong with that specific market. Strewmen and slippery slope fallacies aside, let local governments deal with that kind of stuff. After all they're responsible for the cities.
is not what it used to be or why otherwise USicans are bent on forbidding a communal arrangement? I guess for the same reason TTIP wanted to ban buying back privatized waterworks etc in Europe. I guess the word 'community' having common root with word 'communism' causes blood of USican to boil in matter of seconds. Strange. I wonder why is this even possible? As long as people are ready to pay for it with fees and if that is not enough with subsidies this is their decision to make. Or is somehow democracy being lesser good compared to free market? This is a q. that should actually be asked in legislatures where such things are illegal even before a q. whether in this area a free market at all exists.
Government builds and maintains common use roads with private sector contractors and funds them with public money.
Fiber pulled to neighborhood central offices could be handled the exact same way. Private companies can build and maintain the infrastructure and private companies can install their head-end fiber termination equipment in the central offices.
This would allow maximum competition for delivered services while eliminating the natural monopoly that is the last mile.
No one owns the roads, yet everyone benefits from their existence. Optical fiber should be the same.
Most of those laws require a private corporation to own and operate the broadband network. So, get everyone in the neighborhood to put up a certain amount of money to form a corporation. Said corporation then builds and operates the broadband network.
I found it more interesting that half did not know how fast their internet is. I doubt the average person knows, or cares, enough about community internet to work. I went to city hall several years ago, and asked about municipal broadband. They had no idea what I was talking about.
In short, the public generally doesn't care.
I know it goes against the internet argument playbook, but there IS a middle ground between free market supported monopolies and the eastern bloc socialist paradise. Don't go to bat for the team that threatens to hit you with one every month just because they put the fear of Lenin into you.
Our broadband suppliers are abusing every possible loophole in the system and some shady shit on top of it. It isn't a big human rights abuse and people aren't dying over it sure, but that doesn't mean it isn't important. Either regulate it or provide a necessary infrastructure, both of them are direct responsibilities of the government and either one makes your community better.
These posts are always about individuals and families, but fail to mention small businesses. I live in Boulder, CO, and a lot of new small and medium businesses are opting to move ten miles North to Longmont because they have municipal fiber. (It's certainly cheaper to live or operate a business in Longmont, but many have pointed to the availability of high-speed synchronous fiber as the driving factor.)
wow you are insane and also comparing apples (broadband provider) to submarines (healthcare), please try a common frame of reference instead of baseless idiotic ranting about things you don't understand and also can't afford
Thank God for the Constitution, which prohibits government entering into competition with private enterprise. Municipal broadband is bad for innovation, it is bad for jobs, it is bad for progress, and it is un-American.
Being wary of the government is a hallmark of republicans. I think that tends to materialize as being very susceptible to propaganda from business. It was the same for health care, before Obama was elected, Americans seemed to generally like the idea of single payer healthcare depending on how you phrased it. That support evaporated overnight when it started to look like a remote possibility. A the mention of "death panels" a good number of people were suddenly ready to die to protect insurance companies from the evil government.
Asking people if they like municipal broadband you're going to get yes. Asking them after comcast says "THE GOVERNMENT WILL BE SPYING ON YOU" with "like we do" in fine print? There will be a ton of morons instantly declaring it's an anti-american idea.
I personally can't fathom why someone would fear the government they can vote in but love corporations they can't even sue, but I've been accused of being an out-of-touch liberal...
It doesn't matter what America wants. The people you keep re-electing don't have to listen to you. they respond to those who pay them the money for their vote.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Americans also support "in God we trust" as our national motto, so there's not much credibility here.
All of them fail when it comes to respective the privacy of their users, and all of them are now empowered to collect and resale your browsing history.
Municipal ISPs, however, won't happen either: Government has been captured at all levels by corporations.
The USA has inaccurate and dishonest homilies like 'private enterprise can do it better' (other enterprises are effective too), 'reward wealth creators' (so they're wealthy and rewarded), 'government must be a silent partner' (shut-up and pay what private enterprise demands) being shoved down citizen's throats via main-stream media and politicians. Yet, people are ignoring the neo-liberal propaganda: Is that because they recognize that digital communications has the status of infrastructure and is thus, the domain of government; or are they admitting the current market (which is a monopoly in many places) isn't working? Or, some combination of the two?
In addition to speed and price, I'd like to see a large municipality promise not to sell any user data and respect the users privacy. Then we will see Verizon and Comcast cry as their users clamor for a fair alternative.
Pew found that 70 percent of respondents agreed that local governments should have the power to start their own high-speed networks if current offerings are “too expensive or not good enough...
Under half of all Americans, 44 percent, said they supported subsidies, while nearly everyone else surveyed said they felt internet service “is affordable enough” that most households should be able to pay for it. (At the same time, nearly half of all people surveyed said they didn’t know what speed of internet they received.)”
Read the headline carefully. The survey did not find that most people think their municipality should provide the service. What it did find is that people think that under certain circumstances a municipality should be allowed to provide the service.
But the fucking scumbags that lobbied to make company profits more important stopped us. Community WIFI was a thing and was growing in a LOT of cities until scumbags like Comcast worked hard to make it illegal.
I need an internet connection just to get a job. I can't even apply for McDonalds without one. Nearly every job that doesn't pay cash is this way around here. Want customer support? Near instant online, but 30min wait on the phone. Want to manage your 401k? Need to schedule a time to come in person, and pay for the 1-on-1 consultation or free online. I can keep going on.
FDR would have stuck up his cane in the telco monopolies' asses.
He was a monster, but it took monstrous impetus to break the robber barons.
I'm highly conflicted on this idea now. On one hand, YES, PLEASE, SOMETHING OTHER THAN GREEDY FUCKING CORRUPT AS SHIT ORGANIZATIONS PLEASE RUN OUR INTERNET.
On the other hand, I live in Tacoma, a city that has had government municipal internet since the 90's, and I was on it from then up until a year ago. The problem? The government agencies involved with the local internet is just as fucking corrupt at this point. It wasnt that way when it was built out initially. But now it is also horribly mismanaged and falling further and further behind corporate options. I switched to a symmetrical gigabit fiber connection, because right now the government board is too busy arguing if they should implement gigabit DOCSIS or not (with shit upload still, something I require). Nobody wants to take responsibility for bad accounting and mismanagement of services, while attempting to make back room deals without the public involvement, despite it being a public utility company in charge.
Oh, an in case anyone who ever reads this is actually involved with TPU... Customer account passwords are stored and emailed in plain text. I attempted to file a complaint about this as soon as I found out, and was given a "NOT OUR PROBLEM" attitude.
There are lots of ways to broadcast your ignorance, but not too many as effective as "I am against community broadband."
Like, seriously. :)
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Um. No. Wireless will never beat wired. I can pump only so much through the air before that link is saturated. Worse yet, I have to share it with everyone. Not only is there a tradegy of the commons scenario, there's also increased security and privacy concerns as well. With wired, I can keep adding wires. You can't keep adding wireless channels.
Unless corrupt politicians, lobbyists, and cable company wankers all decide that cities should be able to build their own networks, cities won't be building their own networks. What "Americans" think is only tangentially related.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
From Wikipedia "A cooperative (also known as co-operative, co-op, or coop) is an autonomous association of people united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly owned and democratically controlled business."
I wonder if a state could successfully outlaw a cooperative corporation? IANAL but it seems to me that if they tried they would fail if the co-op had enough public support. And what would the courts say? Now, admittedly, my state of Maryland is bluer than a B.B. King discography. It turns out to have what appears to be a vibrant broadband co-op. which is taking broadband to Southern Maryland. S. Maryland was very rural when I was a boy, but it is now an X-Urb. It seems to me that with some leadership a locality that wanted broadband badly enough could form a co-op if the voters were on board. Anybody have any experience with this?
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
Wireless beats wired in one significant area: Cost. Not having to obtain right-of-ways (which is not always easy nor cheap) and not having to lay, monitor and maintain hundreds or thousands of miles of cable is an enormous savings. Throw in portability advantage and wireless is a pretty easy sell over wired.
Sure if you're extremely security conscious, you probably don't want wireless (but then you probably don't want to be using a public ISP at all..) For the rest of us, as long as the data isn't being transmitted raw we're probably safe enough (the ISP and the government can just pull the data from their end anyway.. they don't need to hack the airwaves.)
As for the bandwidth.. yes its a finite resource, but we're nowhere near exhausting it yet. There's lots of bandwidth out there that's assigned to stupid things from decades ago that could easily be repurposed if the owners relinquished their claims (whether voluntarily or by the government simply confiscating it.) We've seen a few blocks go up on auction in the past several years and there's plenty more out there waiting to be used when the demand starts justifying the cost of going through the repurposing procedures.
And of course bandwidth is also a shared resource from a geographic perspective. That is, you only need enough to satisfy the most densely populated area.
Being wary of the government is a hallmark of republicans.
No it isn't, being wary of government is supposed to be the hallmark of Republicans, but they have shown a great fondness for big government. This is especially true when it allows them to use public funds to buy votes, pokbarrel large defense contracts, shield their friends' businesses from unwanted competition, gerrymandering districts to keep themselves in power, ... , the list goes on. Now, I'm not suggesting Democrats are any better. Just thought I'd get that out there eventhough we are not discussing Dems. and their failings just to preempt the inevitable snowflakes who'd otherwise fill in the gap and accuse me of claiming Dems. are angels of virtue.
monopolies ... they are failures of capitalism and one of the few justified purposes of government on a capitalist market is to (strongly) restrain monopolies. The other is to strongly restrain externalities.
The problem with both of those, very apparent in modern proliferation of monopoly and externality, is the presence of bribery. The company with the monopoly has the motive to pay the representative to NOT do their job. And it is apparent that they haven't.
If there were an ocean of small towns where the local officials could work against the monopoly, then either the scope of bribery would reach epiphany, or some of the "little people" like you and me, could get actual government service from actual democracy.
It is sad that though we (USA) claim to be one, the hegemony maintains a cloud of monopolies, and we are neither governed by the people, for the people, or by the people, nor are we free.
The burgoise are very lucky that we are too stupid to recognize our exploitation, or we would have a revisit the ways of the French in the late 18th century.
it has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the majority of Americans have zero choices in the broadband market as it exists today.
( We're pretty tired of paying $$$$ for mediocre service due, in total, to the monopoly status granted by existing laws )
If you want a decent internet connection, you'll have exactly one possible choice to go with and it's very much their way or the highway.
( Note I said the majority of us. Some of you lucky bastards have Google Fiber or what's left of Fios as competition in your area. The truly
unlucky ones will have a piss poor DSL connection over an aging copper plant the Telco doesn't even want to maintain anymore. )
Basically, since our politicians are bought and paid for by the various industries ( in this case, the Cable and Telco lobbies ) our only
recourse is to try and get enough new folks in place to make some common sense changes before the Lobby Vampires get too cozy.
Where I live I have three providers. I have a 4 Mbs Centurylink connection that I can't upgrade. Then Comcast provides service in my town, but not my neighborhood even though they have the rights to serve my place. Then our town has Baja, but they won't run a wire because I live in Comcast territory. So the company that has a right to build won't, the one that doesn't can't, and the one that did has no reason to upgrade.
So my question is, why is Comcast allowed to upgrade some parts of it's network to faster speed before it has finished providing any service to those it has agreed to cover? Isn't splitting land by Baja and Comcast anti competitive?
Oh, and by town, I mean we have 150000 people. It's not MY, but it's not rural either.
How much of your monthly budget is for a virtual item ?
$70 cell phone
$80 dish tv
$50 internet
That's $200 a month, Now look at the NEW car advertisments
How nice of a car could you buy for that amount ?
Did you want a NEW motorcycle ?
Add that to your existing car payment, how much sooner could you pay it off ?
How much nicer car could you have gotten ?
When meshing wifi routers have the range & ease of management,
I am going to blanket my small town with wifi anonymously...
And hopefully with the support of a few good citizens, we can keep it free/donations only..
I live in a town with a municipal ISP. Our town has a municipal light and power, and it's a part of it.
Pluses: Price, speed, support are good. Certainly better than I experienced other other commercial ISPs. By extension, our power rates are also very low compared to the rates of other towns that use commercial power providers. They also provide VOIP phone for a decent price. Reliability has been decent. You can unbundle or bundle cable TV, phone and Internet as you like with no significant penalty. A lot of the employees live in town so they are quite literally your neighbors.
Minuses: We still don't have more than one provider in town. ISP support hours are not 24/7, they are "business hours" only. The electric side of the organization does respond quickly to outages.
So supposedly some survey says Americans support municipal broadband. And then those Americans go out and elect politicians who outlaw municipal broadband.
Surveys say Americans support a higher minimum wage. And then those Americans go out and elect politicians who will fight any minimum wage increase.
Surveys say Americans support the individual aspects of the Affordable Care Act (when asked about the actual policies and not just about "Obamacare"). And then those Americans go out and elect politicians who will repeal the ACA.
Surveys says Americans value clean air and water. And then those Americans go out and elect politicians who will defund and eventually destroy the EPA.
Either these surveys are full of shit, or Americans are.
I'm guess the truth lie somewhere in "all of the above" territory.
largely at the behest of internet providers that want to avoid competition at all cost.
Well no, the problem is that they want to avoid competition at minimum cost, and it's cheaper to bribe, er, lobby politicians than it is to build out better infrastructure and lower their rates.
all most certainly will support this.... so they don't need to use their hacking tools to get at what user do, to bypass corporate blocks. if there are any...
Why are laws making municipal broadband illegal a thing? Do we have laws banning municipalities from, I don't know, fixing vehicles? Providing financial advice? Manufacturing clothes?
Seems pretty clear that the ISPs are running scared and not themselves providing a competitive service. There would be literally zero interest in municipal broadband if the private sector offerings were halfway decent.
This is a regulatory strategy to lock out competitors from the ISPs gravy train. Nothing more, nothing less.
I'm okay with cities building broadband networks with some exceptions, and by building those networks, those cities are excepting these terms.
1. There will never be an attempt by the city to corner the market or drive out or restrict competition.
2. There will never be a requirement for anybody to pay tax dollars for such a service. it can collect fees for use only.
3. There will never be a requirement for anybody to use such a service in any capacity.
4. There will be no attempt by a city, or other local government to use such a network to assert control or ownership over a person or data.
By building and/or implementing such a network, you agree to these terms and conditions.