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Comcast Rejected by Small Town -- Residents Vote For Municipal Fiber Instead (arstechnica.com)
A small Massachusetts town has rejected an offer from Comcast and instead plans to build a municipal fiber broadband network. From a report: Comcast offered to bring cable Internet to up to 96 percent of households in Charlemont in exchange for the town paying $462,123 plus interest toward infrastructure costs over 15 years. But Charlemont residents rejected the Comcast offer in a vote at a special town meeting Thursday. "The Comcast proposal would have saved the town about $1 million, but it would not be a town-owned broadband network," the Greenfield Recorder reported Friday.
"The defeated measure means that Charlemont will likely go forward with a $1.4 million municipal town network, as was approved by annual town meeting voters in 2015." About 160 residents voted, with 56 percent rejecting the Comcast offer, according to news reports.
"The defeated measure means that Charlemont will likely go forward with a $1.4 million municipal town network, as was approved by annual town meeting voters in 2015." About 160 residents voted, with 56 percent rejecting the Comcast offer, according to news reports.
Iâ(TM)ll take Comcast any day. I have never had more reliable service from any other ISP.
You're a moron any day. My comcast internet went out as recently as 2 weeks ago for the entire weekend. The fourth time this year. And I'm in a major metropolitan tech city. Their shit goes down constantly.
Their streaming TV is shit quality and constantly throwing compression errors. Sometimes it blinks for 3 seconds before it catches up. Even on-demand is jerky AF, and I have GIGABIT INTERNET. Netflix, ZERO issues.
Anyone apologizing for anything Comcast does is a fucking moron, period.
Expect Comcast to go to the state legislature to thwart this.
That might work in Alabama, but not in Massachusetts. Comcast is in bed with the Republican Party.
The 20 states with bans or roadblocks to municipal broadband are mostly Red.
Hi!
You've just committed a "false dilemma" fallacy. A city hall can outsource technical support to a private company that operates in multiple cities. Example: http://www.insitesupport.com/i...
Moreover, this company can also be used to service the infrastructure. These days the costs of running a fiber network are well-known.
I'm old enough to remember when we used to make fun of "European socialism", but now that those countries are kicking our asses
They are not "kicking our asses". The only European countries ahead of America on either median income or per capita GPD are Norway, Luxembourg, and Switzerland.
Norway has a small population and plenty of off-shore oil. Luxembourg and Switzerland have tax shelters and international banking.
It should be well known at this point that the higher per median capita income of the U.S. is largely due to a few things.
The most important is the Americans work longer hours than any other advanced economy. This is largely not voluntary, try taking extra time off from your job and see how that goes for you, career-wise.
The other is that the U.S. has an extremely unequal distribution in income, approaching third world kleptocracy levels. Thus a good chunk of that "median income" is in the hands of very high income people.
And finally the EU spends 9.5% of its GDP on health care. The U.S. spends 17.9%, with no better results (in many cases worse). So about 8.4% of the "higher" median income is being sucked down a black hole of corporate inefficiency.
When you take all of these things together it turns out that average American's standard of living is below that of much of the EU, have shorter lifespans, poorer educational outcomes, and less chance of moving up socially and economically.
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