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Comment by gregmac | Hacker News Reader

I think a good model would be splitting it up so the physical plant and internet uplink are run by separate entities.

Local government would run the fibre network and terminate everything to a central POP (or several). They're responsible to maintain the physical network and ensure every connection can obtain the minimum speed and latency standard. This could even be cable/DSL/wireless, so long as the minimum speed is hit. They can contract this out, but it's largely irrelevant to the consumer.

At the POP is where ISPs take over and provide the upstream connection to the actual internet, and this is who the consumer pays. The ISPs can compete based on whatever combination of price, speed, transfer limits and/or add-on services they choose.

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Internet is probably least compelling natural monopoly out there. First, running more lines and multiple systems doesn't require the same impact as running two plumbing or gas systems, and secondly most of the natural monopolies in internet access I have seen are due to the government causing them not preventing them!

The scariest thing you can say to me is "we're the government and we're going to run your fiber" when almost all of my local municipally run services are barely functioning.

In my city, we have wooden sewers in some place over a hundred years old, gas pipes blowing up city blocks, streets which collapse into sink holes, and now you say "oh the government should surely get involved?". Preposterous.

I still laugh when I see this – although I'm not really sure where you live.

Where I live (Montgomery County, MD), the county municipal services are far, far superior to what the private folks do, whether it's refuse collection, leaf removal, or snow removal. I can't speak to their efficiency though since I haven't scrutinized the budgets.

I live in a city where I can't count all the council members who have been arrested for corruption in my lifetime on two hands.

MoCo is one of the most affluent and highly taxed counties in the entire country - a suburb of DC filled with lobbyists, lawyers, and doctors. Greenwich, CT has pretty good snow removal too, but that example doesn't help at all in Detroit.

Regulating delivery telecom as an open utility doesn't necessarily mean it is operated by the government.

If you want another big-city infrastructure example from the US, look at Empire City Subway. This is a company which has exclusive franchise from NYC to maintain a network of underground conduit in Manhattan, which they can use for their parent company (Verizon) but must also sell access to any other carrier who needs it.

I could imagine a similar approach that actually extends to the residential consumer. I live in a building which has FiOS in the street, but the landlord doesn't care to provide access to Verizon to wire the building, so I'm stuck with the legacy cable provider (which is far worse). If by law all buildings connected to a common utility-scale fiber network and I was simply buying transit from my ISP, I'd be much happier.

> but the landlord doesn't care to provide access to Verizon

Very generous words. I lived in a building once where the landlord flat out told me that we can only have Comcast because they paid him. Obviously, YMMV. In my experience it was more malicious than simply not caring.

Some years ago I would have agreed with you, but now I've got gigabit muni fiber for $80/mo with no caps. I never need to call them, because the service just works. Evidently most people feel the same way, as they haven't had the need to "optimize" the costs of providing support by outsourcing.

The problems of speed, transfer limits, and add on services are wholly created by incumbent ISPs, and no, we don't need the dinosaur business model competing to perpetuate them.

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