City-Owned Internet Services Offer Cheaper and More Transparent Pricing, Says Harvard Study (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Municipal broadband networks generally offer cheaper entry-level prices than private Internet providers, and the city-run networks also make it easier for customers to find out the real price of service, a new study from Harvard University researchers found. Researchers collected advertised prices for entry-level broadband plans -- those meeting the federal standard of at least 25Mbps download and 3Mbps upload speeds -- offered by 40 community-owned ISPs and compared them to advertised prices from private competitors. The report by researchers at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard doesn't provide a complete picture of municipal vs. private pricing. But that's largely because data about private ISPs' prices is often more difficult to get than information about municipal network pricing, the report says. In cases where the researchers were able to compare municipal prices to private ISP prices, the city-run networks almost always offered lower prices. This may help explain why the broadband industry has repeatedly fought against the expansion of municipal broadband networks.

Comments

Public vs private funding models

[Valacosa]

Funny to see this today, given today's news up here in Canada.

"Private enterprise is more efficient!" go the cries of the free-market absolutists. The question is, more efficient at what, though. Because here it seems telecoms are optimized to extract maximum dollars from the population, which is not something the citizenry wants out of basic infrastructure.

Re:Public vs private funding models

[alvinrod]

Free market absolutists would be quick to point out that when the government grants companies legal monopolies and competition is barred from competing, you don't have much of a free market. Government would have far fewer problems to solve if it weren't creating so many of them to begin with. When you don't have to worry about outside competition taking your business, is it any wonder that a company can devote maximum effort to rent seeking behavior like this?

Re:And I predict this study

[Actually, I do RTFA]

I'm so confused why people are concerned about government censorship if it's nationalized. Comcast, AT&T, etc are legally required to censor if it's in the shareholder's benefit. The government is legally prohibited from censoring.

I mean, we could just regulate net neutrality, but that seems like a stopgap that's better handled by nationalizing wires. There's a place for competition, but it doesn't seem like stringing wires is where we want to rely on the free market.