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Removing incentives to come in and compete is of no consequence when no one is doing that anyway. Gigabit fibre to the home has been all over the world for years (more than a decade?) and the vast majority of Americans are sitting here being treated like shit by Comcast/AT&T with connections that work barely or not at all at peak streaming time.

The free market has had its chance; we've gotten nothing but the token effort from Google Fibre in a tiny handful of markets.

I'm not sure public WiFi is the answer. I'd much rather see municipal fibre from homes to PoPs where consumers can ask to be patched to various ISPs. But competition just isn't doing it.

The U.S. market is smothered by local monopolies[1] and a global duopoly. Your argument would hold water if the free market has been given chance at all.

[1] http://imgur.com/a/8ckIn

> Your argument would hold water if the free market has been given chance at all.

The largely-unregulated market was given a chance. It created local monopolies and duopolies.

It's long past time to try something else.

What kind of market has it been?

Local monopolies were granted by municipalities, certain officials and not the prospective end users. The very first winning bid from a cable company carried the monopoly clause. Once the monopolies had been granted, the market was no longer free; basically the market was (and is) no more.

I'd argue that a free market for cable / broadband access never ever existed.

> I'd argue that a free market for cable / broadband access never ever existed.

I agree. This is because that market was never regulated. A free market for POTS/DSL access did exist (and to a large extent still exists). Federally regulated mandatory line sharing made it happen.

It does not benefit the public good to run multiple, competing sets of infrastructure to carry commodities.

However, -as we see in things as disparate as Instant Messaging networks, remote-controlled lightbulbs, and wired Internet access- private business places far more value on capturing and walling in sections of the population than they do helping to facilitate a vibrant, competitive marketplace that promotes customer choice. From a business perspective, this lock-in makes sense. This isn't the best thing for society, though.

I think GP is thinking further back to ol' Ma Bell. If Bell hadn't been broken up, and competition-promoting regulations put in place, there would have been no need for municipal exclusivity agreements--Bell would have been the only carrier out there in the first place.

It's possible that Cable could eventually have grown to compete technologically, but in a world where Bell was still a single unregulated entity, it strikes me as unlikely that cable could have survived independently.

The free market gives us those monopolies. Other companies could emerge and get the funding to build another set of infrastructure, but they don't.

As far as I know in many markets they can't, the monopolies were granted by cities. Comcast even sued some cities trying to build infrastructure: http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/1/8530403/chattanooga-comcast...

In a sense, yes. I would argue that the cabled infrastructure is not a natural monopoly at this stage of technology development, but the pre-existing regulatory framework and the local municipalities treated it as such. The effect was a market where local monopolies were bought and sold. Which leads to no free market for buying and selling last mile Internet access.

To build a parallel tax-funded infrastructure like the fine article says, would be just silly in those monopoly markets (instead of enabling commercial competition first; not sure if New York in particular has any meaningful competition, so this may not apply there).

Local Loop Unbundeling is the answer.

I honestly don't care about fast public wifi. I will be happy if NYC (where I currently reside) has reliable 5 or 10mbps wifi. Fast enough to read websites - but not to watch movies or download massive size files.

This will actually address your point about private competition. City might offer free 10mbps wifi - whereas private companies will offer paid 50 - 5000mbps.

> The need for water per individual hasn't changed much in 80 years? 100years? more?

Unlikely. 100 years ago we didn't have nearly as much water infrastructure and appliances. It's difficult to find data on past years though but when looking at other countries that have less amenities than the United States the water usage is staggeringly different [1].

I would be shocked if, per person, the water usage hasn't gone up by double since 1915. Don't forget the infrastructure also has to handle a far denser population as well.

> The need for electricity has gone up a little since say 1940.

Define little. Almost everything we do today involves electricity whereas in the 1940s that was far from true plus the population has grown significantly since then. WorldBank seems to indicate it's been increasing (they have data since 1989) [2].

> Natural gas, and other utilities. Maybe even streets also seem relatively static?

Are you sure? Where are you getting this data? According to the EIA[3] natural gas usage has gone up about 5x since 1949.

> Getting public tech services upgraded at or near the speed that tech accelerates seems highly unlikely. Having public wifi would seem like it would remove a huge incentive for anyone to come in and offer better faster service because competing with free will be hard for a very very long time.

While I agree with you there is also a huge burden on getting around publicly allowed monopolies for the last mile (since the wifi needs some sort of data connection) so I'm not convinced any private companies are going to do this anyway due to that unless the government is going to offer some serious incentives or someone invents a better wireless technology which doesn't require a physical internet connection to the access point.

[1] http://www.data360.org/dsg.aspx?Data_Set_Group_Id=757

[2] http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.ELEC.KH.PC

[3] https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/ng_cons_sum_dcu_nus_a.htm

I believe your parent post was referring to household usage (which determines infrastructure needs in a city), while you are referring to economy-wide usage.

Energy usage per household seems to be essentially flat for the past 40 years according to Residential Energy Consumption Survey[1].

As for water, I can’t find any links at the moment, but I would guess that per capita indoor residential water use is also flat or slowly declining as appliances become more efficient.

[1] http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=6570

Per household is kinda irrelevant for his point, is it not? You need the additional infrastructure to handle a more dense population and his point was regarding the upgrading of utilities.

I'm curious to see what sort of bandwidth "gigabit wifi" translates to in real life. In my experience with public wifi, it isn't a competitor to a wired ISP, its more of an alternative to 3G (and not as good as a 4G data connection). I'd be very surprised if a city government had found a way to make wifi feasible as a primary home or business internet connection when none of the companies working in the space couldn't.

For all the "American ISPs are terrible" rhetoric, they are profit driven and possibly evil but not incompetent. I feel like if NYC actually had a technology here that could put a home ISP out of business, the current ISPs would have bought it up first. NYC's wifi will be great for residents and tourists trying to check their email or do a quick Google search from their phone, but sustained gigabit connections for every client is way too good to be true.

>If NYC actually had a technology here that could put a home ISP out of business, the current ISPs would have bought it up first.

The capital allocation strategy for current ISPs has been to secure legislation prohibiting competition and sue threats out of existence. They might have invested in R&D as a hedge against that strategy not working, but that would seem to defeat the purpose.

> sustained gigabit connections for every client is way too good to be true.

I assumed the hot spots had a gigabit total, not to any one connection. Also, I thought such high wifi rates were only in the lab.

Japan, and South Korea are mature, but China still has a lot of catching up to do.

What I think is needed, instead of passing lots of regulation and competition hurdle, Government should mandate All new housing to have shielded ( CAT8 ? ) Ethernet cables prewired. Much like electricity and water pipes. You dont buy a new flat and expect to rewire all electricity and water system. You pretty much expect them to be there. It is the same thing with telephone wiring.

Then all new home / building will have a central point of connection, ISP will only be required to connect to that point, and doing some config to enable internet.

Doesn't realy allow for competition does it and in the USA and other developed countries people don't all live in massive high rise blocks.

Unfortunately its not uncommon in the UK for developers to forget about providing ducting for telco/cable and also working with Virgin/BT to put in the cabs and last mile.

Other first tier cities have taken on the task of providing free connectivity in public spaces. Think of it as a competitive response.

There is a point, even with bandwidth, where you get reducing benefits to scale. just because we've had an insatiable appetite for faster and faster speeds doesn't mean that will always be the case. honestly is there much you wouldn't be able to do with a symmetrical 1gbps link? eventually we will stop worrying about faster speeds probably once we get to 1/1gbps or maybe 10/10gbps even with all the applications we can dream up it will happen.

err - there are hard limits to what you can do with wifi in terms of no of connected users per access point, bandwidth and power.