After Beating Cable Lobby, Colorado City Moves Ahead With Muni Broadband (arstechnica.com)

Last night, the city council in Fort Collins, Colorado, voted to move ahead with a municipal fiber broadband network providing gigabit speeds, two months after the cable industry failed to stop the project. Ars Technica reports: Last night's city council vote came after residents of Fort Collins approved a ballot question that authorized the city to build a broadband network. The ballot question, passed in November, didn't guarantee that the network would be built because city council approval was still required, but that hurdle is now cleared. Residents approved the ballot question despite an anti-municipal broadband lobbying campaign backed by groups funded by Comcast and CenturyLink. The Fort Collins City Council voted 7-0 to approve the broadband-related measures, a city government spokesperson confirmed to Ars today.

While the Federal Communications Commission has voted to eliminate the nation's net neutrality rules, the municipal broadband network will be neutral and without data caps. "The network will deliver a 'net-neutral' competitive unfettered data offering that does not impose caps or usage limits on one use of data over another (i.e., does not limit streaming or charge rates based on type of use)," a new planning document says. "All application providers (data, voice, video, cloud services) are equally able to provide their services, and consumers' access to advanced data opens up the marketplace." The city will also be developing policies to protect consumers' privacy. The city intends to provide gigabit service for $70 a month or less and a cheaper Internet tier.

Comments

Doesn't matter

[sdinfoserv]

Muni-Broadband is just the last mile of pipe. If Netflix or Youtube traverses any one of the cabal members upstream infrastructure (which is highly likely), the traffic can/will be degraded or throttled.
As much as I detest these companies, I don't believe it is the role of local government to compete with private business using public tax dollars and staff with life long benefits again paid by citizens.

Re:Doesn't matter

[PoopJuggler]

You mean like the police and fire departments?

Re:Doesn't matter

[mrun4982]

It's the government's job to step in and provide a solution if the monopolies refuse. Myself and lots of people I know have municipal run gigabit internet and you won't find someone disappointed with it. It's the best service I've ever had and yes, it is very fast. Large games, big updates, etc download orders of magnitude faster than on ordinary broadband.

Re:Doesn't matter

[Kjella]

It's the government's job to step in and provide a solution if the monopolies refuse.

That's the weakest argument you could use. As a general rule of thumb if the market - that is, the users - aren't willing to pay for the service that service should not exist. Otherwise you'd approve of every public, subsidized boondoggle sucking money out of general taxes. Most public services replace or compete private services, like if there was no public fire department or waterworks I'd probably have a private fire department and some sort of well association and you have mixed markets like public/private transport.

The government should step in where there's market failure, usually because it's unfeasible for anyone else to service you and you're being gouged. Like if you don't like your local grocery store could you go to a different one. But if you can't get out of your driveway without being subject to a toll road's prices and terms you don't have a real choice. If the rest of the city district is connected to one sewer system nobody's laying down pipes for a different one. Or a second set of rails and railway stops.

Is the ISP market that bad? Potentially yes. Potentially no, like you got many kinds of networks with huge benefits of scale where there'll never be many competitors like say physical cell phone networks, with leased access you can have many names but it'll all come down to at most 3-4 different sets of infrastructure. That doesn't mean it's a market that is so limited the government has to step in. It's the kind of market you can keep competition open if you regulate it well, but if you don't it'll decent into monopoly abuse.

Major error in your thought

[gurps_npc]

There are certain things that private corporations should not do. Except for the most ardent libertarians, the army is a prime example.

Another is the road system. It is stupid to let a bunch of companies build toll roads. Why? Because 1) everybody needs them. 2) Once a minimum quality level is reached, there is little difference, aside from how much you use it. 3) It is to everyone's benefit that the road system goes everywhere, not just the most high traffic areas. 4) There is minimal innovation, we know how to build this, it isn't hard, there really isn't anything to compete on except for price and capacity. 5) It makes no sense to build multiple road systems side by side - doing so would take up excess space with minimal advantages.

All of these same arguments except the last apply to the internet just as much as it does to car roads. There is one other difference - a state run ISP would be tempted to censor. But the same does not apply to a CITY run ISP, or even a county run ISP.

Basically, private business have ZERO business competing with local government tax dollars on this. They have NO benefit to anyone except themselves and the people they bribed to get monopolies.

Which is the real problem here - you are so upset with the government owned monopolies that you are ignoring the major disadvantages of the government SOLD monopolies.

Corporations are great and wonderful in their place. But they have severe limitations and frankly, running an ISP is a bad idea.

If a corporation can not compete with a local, municipal run ISP, then it has no business existing. They are not owed a business, they must EARN it.

Re:Government overreach at its finest

[K. S. Kyosuke]

What happens when the municipality gets cash strapped and decides to jack rats up by a factor of 10?

Uh...new elections?

Re: Neighboring CIties started this

[Darinbob]

A lot of this oppositions isn't just from corporations, there's a huge libertarian swath that believes no government is the best government, and any municipal services are inherently evil. Thus the libertarian oriented question that implies taxes must have gone up; and if someone had said taxes did go up they would say "Aha! This proves that abusive corporations are far preferable to local governments responding to the will of the people."