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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 $1.4 million municipal town network, as was approved by annual town meeting voters in 2015." About 160 residents voted, with 56 percent rejecting the Comcast offer, according to news reports.
Comcast would have been a bad deal.
Comcast will sue and ironically claim anti-competitive / anti-free market behavior on the part of the town. They will seek to add hundreds of thousands in legal fees before this is settled, win or lose. That is what they do.
There are 1266 people in that town as of the last census. This contract was supposed to be for 15 years. Assuming the interest cost for both infrastructures was the same, there was a cost difference of ~940K. Averaging that cost per month over 15 years amongst the 1266 people yields a monthly cost of 4.12$. I find it hard to believe that comcast was going to provide service cheaper than the municipal would. And I find it very easy to believe they can do it for less than 5$ a month cheaper than comcast.
Expect Comcast to go to the state legislature to thwart this.
Every small town and city should be like this.
Very soon.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Location, location, location..
Comcast may work just fine in some places and not in others, work for some folks and not others. To each their own.
Personally, I'm LUCKY. We actually have two totally different infrastructures to get internet service from where I live. We have the old Cable TV, coax in the street to the house and a totally fiber to the house. I've had both at various times over the last 15 years since they put in the fiber. However, in my experience, the fiber system is way more stable than the coax based one. I suppose it's because the fiber is about 15 years younger, but they both work acceptably for the most part.
I've had outages that lasted weeks on both systems, been driven to distraction trying to discuss it with customer service and technical support AND I've had trouble free service for years too. Fiber is better, generally is less subject to operational hiccups and having to manually restart stuff, but your mileage may vary.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I don't understand why Comcast would expect the town to pay them? Is that common?
I thought that the cost of infrastructure was a cost of doing business that Comcast would recoup through subscription fees, why do they need a subsidy?
Comcast may work just fine in some places
[Citation needed]
You need better local government. While my local muni can't seem to keep their website up for crap, they are exceedingly efficient at providing water/sewage/trash pickup, and at a cheaper price than the private county competitors. If you don't like the way your munis are running, go to a city council meeting and get the ball rolling on fixing them. You are your muni's shareholder, use your power.
Comcast tried to kill Utah's UTOPIA fiber project. They failed and now even a town with less than 1000 people has a 10G fiber option (most go with 1G).
The hell with Comcast.
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
Ah yes, Slashdot where alt right useless cunts mod down a simple statement of fact.
Then they cherry pick Venezuela to whine about. Yawn.
They are certainly kicking your asses in life expectancy, education and public health. I know it’s hard for a seppo to comprehend, but money isn’t everything.
That a town can legally offer a commercial service of their own is bad enough. That a government is in a position to deny a business a right to operate there is an outrage.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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.
You think Comcast will send a guy out at midnight to fix your line? That's hilarious.
Municipal water and sewage systems are in fact quite complicated. Systems don't have to be comprised of racks of components with blinking lights to be complex.
We are talking about maintaining network infrastructure, wiring, fiber, power plus managing accounts and billing for service, customer equipment, shutting off those who don't pay and setting up new service for customers as they move in.
I work for a government institution that does all of that. It's not that hard. Yes, you have to hire some competent people. Beats getting bent over by Comcast.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Funny, nearly every place that has tried it has had good results. The key, of course, is to do it correctly. First, the city comes in and installs the lines. Then, they contract out service to local ISPs. ISPs compete with each other to provide service over the existing infrastructure, which means that the cost for a new ISP to join the mix is negligible, leading to a highly competitive market even in low-population areas. And the only thing the municipality has to do is maintain the infrastructure, which, it turns out, is something that government does pretty well.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
The difference is that pizzerias aren't a natural monopoly the same ways that ISPs tend to be in small towns.
If you have to chose between a corporate monopoly and a government monopoly, you are better off with the government monopoly since there is less of a motive for them to squeeze their customers for more money than they need to. plus you can vote out the people in charge if they get abusive. When dealing with a corporate monopoly, you have no choice but to keep paying whatever they ask.
In this country (US) are numerous forces in play to take away more and more rights from the general population through various tricks and manipulations to get it to a much smaller section of folks living in the same country.
Not allowing municipalities to supply their own Internet service is one of many attempts, please see:
https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadblocks/
I am happy to live in a municipality who made it and provides this type of service. After getting rid of ComCast, whose manner in getting out of their claws and get my right required a small claims court case, it just feels better to now "own" it better in some way.
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The day is not far distant when humanity will realize that biologically it is faced with a choice between suicide and adoration.
-- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin † 10. April 10, 1955
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.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Venezuela is an example of corrupt populism (pitting the people against each other), especially the corruption part.
For this thread, a good example of socialism would be co-ops running the local infrastructure. Can't get much more socialist then a co-op..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
You left out Ireland for per capita GDP. Anyways a better measure is happiness, something that lots of money does not produce, but rather enough to not worry and have some spare. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... the US ranks 18th with many of the higher scoring countries being ones that Americans call socialist.
Personally, I'd rather live with slightly less per capita GDP, but not worrying about healthcare, having a longer life expectancy, easier social mobility, some rights in the workplace including being able to take a vacation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Thus a good chunk of that "median income" is in the hands of very high income people.
I see that you have absolutely no idea what "median" means.
Try reading this: Median.