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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.
The American people should just continue to pay for the private infrastructure of the monopoly providers and give up on this pointless dream of cheap, fast internet access.
It sounds positively Socialist shudder.
will be buried in a landslide of counter studies by various pro-industry think tanks. A while back Comcast admitted in their SEC filing what it actually cost to provide internet access. It was about $9 bucks. That includes the tech support. Of course, don't you dare suggest we nationalize it. Here in America we privatize the profits and nationalize the losses, so it all balances out.
Oh, and if you're scared of the gov't censoring you when it's nationalized just cast your eyes to China. They don't _need_ to take control of it to censor. The mega-corps are happy to play ball.
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And business that is permitted to run at a loss indefinitely can undercut a normal business anytime they want...
Who paid for those nice pipes those businesses sell you access to?
I'll give you a clue: Not Comcast or AT&T.
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.
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
I don't want to hear about any of this NN or Socialized ISP crap until we grant right of way to cables and conduits for third parties.
Its a giant shit show with monopolists of different types arguing for their monopoly.
Every article is "wahhh, monopolies that no one is allowed to compete with are behaving badly" or "waaah, government built ISPs which are even more monopolistic are even better!"...
How about no monopoly?
To which one of you knuckleheads will say "but then there will be too many cables and that will be ugly!"... This discussion is increasingly an argument against democracy if only because people are allowing themselves to be manipulated into taking positions because they're being told to adopt that position.
Think for yourselves or stop presuming to have an opinion.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Government granted monopolies is about the biggest possible way to interfere with a free market outside of making the sale and purchase of something illegal.
Also, if a city wants to set up their own local service to compete I don't see any problems with it as long as they don't bar anyone else from business or give themselves the same kind of monopolistic advantages that were being sold to individual cable companies. Also, these measures typically come about as a result of ballot measures by that city rather than as a result of concentrated government power (I don't recall everyone in town voting to give Comcast a monopoly) so it's far more democratic as well.
Equating municipal broadband services with wealth redistribution schemes is missing the mark by quite a bit. Also, having the government punish companies that benefited from the government's bad actions well after the fact is stupid and will only lead to prolonged court battles that the government won't win. Quit worrying about trying to make everything even and fair and just get rid of the rules that keep perpetuating a shitty situation.
Here is evidence that sometimes government does things better than private industry: Chattanooga Was a Typical Postindustrial City. Then It Began Offering Municipal Broadband.
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.
Building a fiber network is expensive - much more expensive than running it for couple years. The first two municipal fiber projects I looked up cost the taxpayers an average of $3,200 per household to build. Whether you want it or not, every resident had to pay to build it and that's the bulk of the cost.
The monthly subscription fees which cover the cost of maintaining it after it's built are a small portion of the cost. Rather than listing a muni such as Lake County as $40/month, if the "study" were intellectually honest they'd list it as "$3,200 up front, plus $40/month". That's the actual cost to residents.
Promoters of these schemes hope that one day subscription revenue might pay back the cost of building the network, but that's never happened yet, to my knowledge.
For *some* projects, bonds are used in such a way that taxpayers will only have to pay the shortfall, the difference between what subscription fees bring in, minus expenses vs the cost to build it and financing costs for that cost. They hope that shortfall might be zero, but often it's thousands of dollars per household.
Most often it's a mixture of bonds, where taxpayers pay the shortfall, and direct tax dollars. For example Lake County was promoted as "financed by bonds, won't cost the taxpayer a dime", but in fact they've spent $15 million in local tax money $1,400 for every man, woman and child in the county, whether they get the service or not, plus state and federal tax dollars.
Chattanooga is probably the biggest "success" hyped by muni fans, and with good reason - it's not losing millions of dollars a year like some are. In fact, it's just started to make payments toward maybe eventually paying back some of the $97 million of taxes used to build the network. That's the big success they point to - so far taxpayers are only out $90 million and it's not getting worse at the moment.
It occurs to me my post was a tad negative, a reaction to yet another misleading propaganda piece on Slashdot. I'm not saying that muni can never work, some might work out okay - just be honest about the numbers. Honest numbers might be something like "on average, muni customers pay $10 less and are responsible for $3,000/household in debt used to build the network". If we'd use honest numbers we could have a rational discussion rather than a propaganda war.