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Comment by bpicolo | Hacker News Reader

Good. Municipal broadband is only a thing because Comcast services are terribly below par

Some communities aren't profitable to serve with broadband. The first municipal broadband efforts I was aware of were created because no commercial ISPs wanted to compete in an area.

Broadband, like water and electricity, is a natural monopoly - there's only so much room on the poles, and there's significant economies of scale by having everyone in a neighborhood connected to the same infrastructure.

I hope that Municipal broadband becomes more available and more common. On average, the service provided by the municipalities is much better, and much cheaper than the commercial alternatives.

Yup, this ars article about Orcas Island a while back[1] perfectly illustrates that you can build a good local service that out performs and is cheaper if you aren't chasing a profit motive.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/11/how-a...

I've never understood this. If you have a real or de-facto monopoly, why would you jeopardize it by providing poor service/overpricing your product? That just draws attention to the situation. Keep things reasonable and it's a lot harder for people to make noise because the majority will be fine with the way things are.

When you have a real or de-facto monopoly you just assume you can get away with poor/overpriced service. Most corporate bean counters making such decisions don't take into account the second-order effects you describe, until they materialize into a real problem.

At which point they choose lobbying to double down on monopolyship over caring.

Call up your representatives and tell them that you won’t vote to re-elect them unless they turn down the lobbying efforts. I get that this sucks but this is literally why companies like Comcast are allowed to continue their shenanigans.

And how long have they been milking that for? Boss says “make us the most money you can figure out how to”, finance people optimize for the most short-term profits because they’re required to.

We must also consider the legal frameworks which allow such companies to operate in these ways. I don’t have my energy company sending me emails and mailers urging me to get PG

Because they don't serve the customer, they serve the investor. In the short term (quarter to quarter), you'll make the investor happier which means more money (or at least not a drop in share price.) You can deal with the loss of any customers by slowly raising prices and charging extra made-up fees.

Just about every internet provider has shitty service. Time Warner Cable - the only option in many parts of New York City - is the bane of our existence.

Literally, literally every time we move, we've tried to cancel the internet at our old apartment and set it up at our new apartment - and had them end up canceling the internet at the new place. (What happens with the old internet is different every time; either it gets cancelled as well, or it remains an active account that we get billed for, or some other egregious customer service failure.)

Do you then have to pay the "installation fee" of $50 so a guy in a truck and a polo shirt can come out to your house and enter the numbers from the back of your modem into a cellphone?

Nah, we paid the self installation fee, so that guy doesn't track dirt all over our apartment and try to drill a hole through a wall because he doesn't notice the coax cable we already plugged into the modem.

Everyone without competition. I live in a neighborhood with 3 ISPs offering gigabit service. I use RCN since they're contract-free and cheaper and their service is great (entirely available over Twitter DM, I might add).

The trick is that Comcast and Verizon are also apparently good in my neighborhood. According to multiple neighbors who've moved around the area, service is notably better when you're in the competitive neighborhoods — someone who moved just a few blocks south reported a big difference since they were in the Comcast-and-slow-DSL area. Not surprising since I've heard at least one former employee say that one of the prominent bits of information show onscreen with support calls is the competition level of the caller's address.

> Just about every internet provider has shitty service.

ISP operations are very locally run, so the service quality is pretty random. I've had Verizon FiOS for four years, and it's been rock solid. I had one outage a few years ago, and they sent a tech out the same day to replace the failing ONT. And except for some recent growing pains with gigabit, I've gotten 10% over my rated speed at all times of day.

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