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

No shit Sherlock!

[youngone]

What the publicly owned ISP's don't offer is campaign contributions, which is why there are state laws against them, which is as it should be.
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.

Re:No shit Sherlock!

[Lunix Nutcase]

Lazy trolling is lazy.

Your bill would be a part of your property taxes

Bullshit. Municipal broadband is floated by bonds and then kept afloat by subscriber fees.

can't drop it, and go to jail if you don't pay it.

Also false.

Oh, and don't like your speeds? Take it up with the Sheriff, mister. Fuck that noise.

Or you just stop subscribing since it's a voluntary service?

And I predict this study

[rsilvergun]

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.

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?

Right of way for cables

[Karmashock]

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.

Re:No shit; wealth redistribution schemes do that

[DeSigna]

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.