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Comment by slashink | Hacker News Reader

Genuinly interested in understanding your viewpoint. If you have some time, please elaborate. I have always been under the impression that municipal fiber to consumers has the best benefits in the long run but I might have missed something.

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Municipal Fiber is a solution looking for a problem. The overwhelming trend is toward mobile. Many people, particularly lower income people, have a smart phone but no computer. At the same time, municipal Fiber is incredibly expensive. Chatanooga spent $330 million plus on their network, to wire up about 71,000 subscribers. Plus, maintenance of that infrastructure is very expensive. Given that most states and municipalities are broke, and have neglected crucial electric and water infrastructure that already exists, they can't afford to take on the cost of a Fiber network.

> Municipal Fiber is a solution looking for a problem.

No the cable monopolies are a real problem.

> The overwhelming trend is toward mobile.

Yes but wired internet is never going away (largely due to physics).

The wireless technologies we have today don't deliver anywhere close to the throughput of fiber. There's no way municipal WiFi will support every household running a couple of Netflix streams at the same time in the evening, something that's (occasionally) possible on cable infrastructure. We've already seen from dense apartment buildings that WiFi does not deal well with more than a handful of active users at close range, even on separate SSIDs.

Some form of radio communication might be the answer, but there is very little unallocated bandwidth and it's bandwidth that we need.

If we're going to spend limited public resources on building network infrastructure, the target use case shouldn't be households watching a couple of Netflix streams in the evening on their iPads. We should instead build the technologies that can deliver the broadest connectivity at the lowest cost, so people can apply for jobs, kids can do homework, send pictures to their friends or parents, etc. Wireless wins big on flexibility, and can be deployed at a cost that might allow cash-strapped municipalities to offer it as a free service. You'll never achieve that with high-cost and high-maintenance wired infrastructure.

Every New Yorker can already get good enough internet to apply for jobs and do homework, both from an ISP and a local public library. That need is already well served by current infrastructure; there's no point in duplicating it. If current options are too expensive, than subsidies would seem much simpler than new infrastructure.

Municipal fiber is not proposed in places that lack internet service, it's proposed in places that lack good internet service. People are upset that aging and oversubscribed cable company infrastructure isn't good enough for their media consumption desires, and municipal fiber is the solution.

Where we have problems getting people online at all is in rural areas, where 1) there are no municipalities and 2) distances are far too long for WiFi. There, the best option is low-cost point-to-point antennae on high ground. The hard part for rural Wireless ISPs has been finding someone to sell them transit at a fair price.

I've got better internet in rural New Mexico, due to a subsidy to a local ISP to put in fiber, than I do in a town in Massachusetts that is full of people in the tech industry.

In the case of LUSFiber, part of the process included voting on a bond issue. It passed, and the build began. The effort has been successful enough to create a profit, which has been put back into the build, allowing them to reach more homes and businesses than originally planned, pay the bond off early, etc. (Source: Talking to a half-dozen of their business and residential customers in April, 2015).

LUSFiber is, lacking a better term, solvent.

Which cash strapped municipalities using public funds are you referring to?

The CISCO Wifi Certifications says 10 hosts per AP as a rule of thumb - you can probably push it to 15 or so but you would have to limit the connection speed.

Things work great with LUSFiber in Lafayette, LA. Municipal Fiber is a solution to the problem of communication services monopolies. Which is why ISP lobbyists throw a lot of effort to get states to pass laws prohibiting municipal service.

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