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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.
I agree it's more the monopolies that bring things down. Government run departments and organisations are as prone as big monolithic corporations to seizing up and resisting change. Everything's great when they're new and fresh, the hard part is keeping the mindset and attitudes that way in the long term.
I'm in Australia, and I remember very well how bad broadband was under Telecom and Telstra. Even our dial-up internet was pretty poor, which is all we really had back then - the rest of the world was already rolling out cable and DSL. Telstra, as a largely government-owned "privatised" telco had no incentive to innovate, increase service levels or offer new products, were first forced to wholesale their retail access products to competitors and as the competition matured, forced to offer access to their physical plant (eg, copper pairs, exchange space, tower space) on a reasonable costing model. We had a huge, vibrant ecosystem of access providers offering fibre, wireless, DSL, etc up until ~2008, when everyone stopped investing and started waiting for the NBN to appear.
Now we have this NBN, which was designed completely contrary to the way it was marketed from the beginning (protecting the largest incumbent telcos' and NBN lead contractors' primary revenue streams) and has been built as a monolithic system with no competitive access to physical plant. Services that the NBN can't deliver aren't possible, successive governments have made the design worse (eg, the "MTM") and legislation prevents access providers from building competing retail networks over holes in coverage. To make it worse, the build-out contractors seem to be paid based on premises on-network rather than successfully connected, so up until late 2017 they've just been smashing out abysmal builds as quickly as possible and going back months later to fix the problems - the repair teams are a fraction of the size of the build teams, and repairing already requires more effort than doing it properly the first time.
This long rant (believe me, I've got a lot more and could go for a while) is just an example of a government network infrastructure project gone poorly. Contractors and design partners were chosen from existing large network operators and had a vested interest in not killing their biggest cash cows. Technology was chosen that would least impact their services and allow them to manoeuvre for competitive advantage down the track. Later governments took the remaining good parts of the design and returned it to the old Telstra model of using whatever can be scraped up, but this time we don't have competitors able to deploy their own equipment to underserviced areas or to supply missing features.
These successful municipal American ISPs have the right mindset (they've been created to fix problems and service customers) and are hopefully small enough to keep it. It doesn't really matter that they're associated with government.