Meanwhile, municipal internet speeds routinely crush what I'm getting from my ISP. No Google Fiber here, and while I do have fiber service, there are no gigabit fiber options here. And we have no say over that. I'd much prefer to be able to vote for gigabit than be angry at a black box that has no reason to make my service better. ISPs don't compete because they don't have to.
Since you made the comparison, I'm quite happy with my city's DMV. The wait hasn't been long in a decade at least, there are 25-30 manned stations, appointments can be made and are kept, and overall it completely bucks the idea that the DMV is absolutely horrible. And this isn't a big city.
I also happen to live in a city with a municipal ISP that provides 1GB/s fiber service to most of our city. It's the best ISP I've ever had in terms of service and even customer service. Establishing my account was painless, the in-home install was free and scheduled right away. The one time I've had to call their customer service, I got to talk to a live competent person right away too. Never had service like that with Comcast. I imagine I'm not alone with this experience.
Government only sucks if you accept it sucking as a foregone conclusion. Hold government accountable and it will stop sucking.
People got very angry when it got privatized. Some people's bills doubled. It wasn't even subsidized.
Internet access is insanely high margin. Once the lines are laid, the cost to provide service is next to nothing. The bulk of the costs come from paying off the loans associated with laying the original lines.
There are probably many cities in the country who could provide free 10Mb symmetrical service to every house, then have tiered monthly charges starting at $10 up to $50 for 50Mb to 1Gb services for those who want it, and turn a profit on internet access.
That’s not exactly true, I believe maintenance costs are non-negligible. It’s not like networks are “set up once and forget forever” - over time shit always hits the fan somewhere: lines degrade, network hardware goes haywire (frequently, in subtle ways), so after monitors (or customer calls) indicate an issue, it all requires dispatching people to check and fix. Ot doesn’t help that a significant fraction of the reported issues are in customer’s systems (poor WiFi reception, pets nibbling on the wires, malware, etc), and lots of issues are sporadic and non-persistent (something failing at random for 10 minutes a day is even worse that a complete outage).
I was a software developer working for a (non-US) ISP, and while I wasn’t working in the field I can say that our line engineers were almost always busy.
If it would be easy to set things up, no one would have crappy Internet. The ISP I was working for had a decent competition - IIRC on average our users had about 4-5 alternatives, so unlike some US monopolists we weren’t able to just ignore the issues.
That's $8 per year per subscriber. Yeah, you need to pay for equipment and such as well. But there's plenty left in the budget for that. Even if equipment costs were as much as salaries, the ISP only needs to charge $1.25 per month to turn a profit.
There's a reason Comcast, et al, are fighting so hard to maintain their monopoly: anyone could seriously undercut them on price and still make buckets of cash.
I should hope so, otherwise you've hired too many line engineers. :) I think an interesting metric would be how many line engineers you had, and how much they cost.
I wish talking to Comcast was as easy as visiting my local government services ...
The first time I went to a competent DMV it kind of blew my mind how efficient it can be when the government decides to make it work well.
Our city services are pretty good. They can handle most business and troubleshooting by email, there's a website to request service. Their goal is clearly to get stuff done. It's so much easier than dealing with my ISP or mobile provider.
If you think local government is inefficient, you should look at the inefficiencies of industries with large barriers to entry and its resulting lack of competition.
The internet here is subpar, though.
A relative of mine runs a few DMVs in my area.
Uh, yes, I do? In more than three decades of life, I've only had my power go out a handful of times, and other utilities (gas, sewage, etc.) have literally never gone out- 100% uptime across decades. By contrast, my internet breaks several times a year. And when my power goes out, I know for a fact that a figurative army is going out to fix it as fast as possible. When my Internet goes out, the response from my ISP is along the lines of, "Eh, it might be back soonish. Or it might not. Fuck you."
So, yeah, I would love for my Internet to behave like a utility. It would be a huge upgrade.
And when there are problems - their board of directors and CEOs are very visible and reachable. Some live in my neighborhood.
Of course, the city government isn't dominated by know-nothing, do-nothing antigovernment types. We try to hire for competence and comittment to mission, not ideology.
Cap the profits at something like 10% which is enough to maintain good operation and provide the city with a good reason to continue service. It might be a good idea to prohibit the muni from selling any portion of the service to a third party.