As another poster said, would you want Comcast providing water to your neighborhood?
Americans as a whole are horrible at managing money. They don't pay their bills on time, have tons of credit card debt, etc. This isn't my opinion, it's cold hard reality: look at the subprime crisis, debt burden, charge-offs/delinquencies, etc. Frankly, the crowd reading this website is just way out of touch with the reality of the situation.
For municipalities where people are responsible and there's a real sense of community, sure, do municipal broadband. I'm sure it works sometimes, but for my money, I'd rather pay the extra $5-10/month and not have to be a bill collector to my neighbor. I pay $40/month for 50Mbps Comcast and I'm fine with it.
eldavido- can you give some more information about any news stories that cover this happening?
What I'm saying is that, we have large-scale utilities like power and water companies that are able to provide individual, metered service to households over a geographically distributed area. In order to to this, there is a large amount of unpleasant, schleppy work required that most analyses of smaller-scale alternatives conveniently sweep under the rug.
Either we assume (a) another large-scale operator will provide broadband, which will probably be something like Comcast (maybe not), or (b) it will be done at a smaller scale, say, a company for 1000 residences. Does (b) actually exist?
Chattanooga's municipal broadband exists and delivers speeds as fast as any in the U.S. Salisbury, NC has a municipal broadband service that was grandfathered in before the state law banning municipal broadband.
As far as b: I live in a small town that started a municipal wireless service after Wheeler's FCC tried to override the state law banning it. Fast, affordable, symmetric. I didn't attend the meeting but am certain a clear and detailed cost-benefit analysis was presented and voted on (as well as being made available to the public per state law).
I always think of that last point (what else would people do) when people mention how "the Soviet Union had such great math teachers OMG WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE US". The US has SILICON VALLEY, hedge funds, world-class universities, etc. - US primary/secondary ed has to compete with these places for talent and frankly, they often lose.
I have a hard time believing that a small operator could offer anything that stacks up against Comcast product-, service- and price-wise, but I'm willing to be shown I'm wrong about this. Maybe I shouldn't be so cynical ;)
All I'm saying is that, whenever people complain about Comcast, it's inevitably about some problem with either their network, or customer service.
Comcast is a huge, scaled organization that deals with "the public". They deal with people who don't pay. They follow up when bills get lost. They deal with people who forget to return their routers. They provide level-1 tech support for people who accidentally switch their modems off and call to complain. They handle shitty premises wiring problems induced by home DIYers who crimp RG-6 connectors with pliers. They handle support cases where people spill Coke on their routers and complain that it "stopped working".
All I'm saying is, it's just incredibly naive to look at the problem of an ISP as just "network operations". Like, we can build/operate a better network=profit. That's an incredibly naive view that neglects all the ancillary work of premises provisioning, bill/payment management, 24/7 customer support, pretty much the entire "customer" side of running a large-scale retail ISP.
I mean really, what is "community broadband"? Are we just going to magically assume that, because we aren't dealing with Comcast, all of this work will somehow magic itself away? I don't get it.