Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

1300 residents? How many individual premises? That is a rather small scan gpon project. Hope they hire someone with a clue and experience to build and run it, there is not a lot of Venn diagram overlap between municipal managers and network engineers.

I do hope they realize that if they want to do everything themselves, they'll still need transport links to the nearest major IX point, and IP transit upstreams. I don't know of many small towns, sub 5000 population, that have successfully become their own "real" ISP (ARIN AS, their own IP space, presence at an ix with a bgp speaking router, all of the typical ISP back-end operational support software). In addition to all of the costs of being a wholly facilities based ISP at layer 1 in the OSI model.

Another way to do it is for the town to simply build dark fiber, and rent it to interested ISPs. Or to build a layer 2 gpon transport network and do nothing at L3, and no individual customer service, and let different ISPs compete for business with the town running the gpon OLTs only.

Good points, but it's worth noting that Charlemont has fiber deployed through the main (rural) highway as part of the Massachusetts broadband act and MBI(Massachusetts broadband institute). https://broadband.masstech.org/about-mbi https://broadband.masstech.org/news-and-updates/map-gallery/... This should make it substantially easier to get connected and serviced.

I'm one town over from Charlemont and I can look out my window and see a (dark) fiber termination at a town owned building courtesy of MBI. It will probably never carry traffic as we are "fully served" by Comcast with plans that deliver 1/8 the download speed and 1/200 the upload speed at the same cost Charlemont will pay.

Sounds like they need to hire you. Your third option sounds pretty smart.

It's not a totally uncommon network architecture, look at Douglas county and Grant county public utility districts in WA state for instance. Their fiber networks provide L2 transport and different ISPs sell service over it. For bigger business customers they offer dedicated transport and dark options.

But they are also electrical grid operators and share common expenses for lineman crews, bucket trucks, etc between power and fiber. A town of 1300 people is in a very different position.

The second and third options are relatively common in the industry. Sibling comment gave an example, but happy to dig up more.

It's common to question why small villages like this even exist. "To enable reasonable internet connection" is one of the best reasons I've seen so far.

I assure you that small rural towns can be pretty hard to get broadband in from anyone, Comcast included. These towns exist for the most part because people want space and relative quiet.

I'd also note that about 10% of the people in the town participated in the vote and the final vote was fairly close. Hopefully it works out because options aren't great if you can't get Verizon or Comcast in much of the Northeast. (My dad in Maine has about a 0.5Mbit/sec connection.)

Perhaps I wasn't clear. It's obvious that some people simply prefer to live in areas of relatively sparse population. What is in question are the benefits of imposing cumbersome governance structures on situations that don't require them. In a rural USA context, basic health and safety minimums are adequately enforced by the county. In some locations there might be a sewer & water district with part-time local administration. Other areas get by fine with private wells and septic tanks. Neither situation requires a city hall, police chief, etc.

On its face, a fiber district also doesn't require a city hall, but maybe that's what it takes to fend off predators like Comcast. Of course you're right that some areas would like to attract any provider at all, but that's FCC's fault for the constant delays and roadblocks it imposes on WISPs.

FCC has been coopted by industry, so I don't think that excuse flies anymore.

As if that's a recent thing? It was "coopted" from its creation. It was created to protect Ma Bell (later the "daughters bell" ATT, VZN) and that's all it has ever done. ILECs don't want small WISPs to succeed, so FCC works against small WISPs. (I'm not talking about MNOs, because of course all the FCC protection allowed ATT and VZN to buy and steal their way into that.)

Here are a couple of reasons for town government:

1. Massachusetts got rid of county government in Western Mass in the late 1990s. There are some quasi-county offices like the sheriff and a regional cooperative to handle some planning and permitting but everything else is handled at the town or state level. More info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_counties_in_Massachuse...

2. Town meeting, an annual event where everyone has a chance to speak and vote, is deeply ingrained in civic life. Its the last vestige of direct democracy and a good way to end a long winter. Every dollar that the town will spend for the year is voted on and any resident can speak on any item (warrant article) presented.

I live one town to the east of the town in the article btw and I was able to speak and help vote down a warrant article at the last town meeting to add town regulations for WISPs.

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