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Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

Governments already charge ISPs to use said infrastructure:

https://www.fcc.gov/sites/default/files/ad-hoc-commitee-surv...

So for those poles running down the street in front of your house, ISPs are already paying ~$20 per pole per year. Places like NYC probably also take a cut of the revenue on top. In some regions, this is the primary gatekeeper against competition!

It's really hard to argue that this is a subsidy - if anything it's the municipalities using the power of their natural monopoly.

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The revenue cut for use of public streets is known as the "franchise fee." For the legacy cable companies, this was fixed by federal law in the 1980s at 5% of total revenue from cable television. For legacy phone companies, it varies by locality, but it's based on landline phone revenue.

There's a federal law from the 1990s banning any such taxes or fees from being charged on internet service, so cities don't collect anything based on that.

This may vary based on municipality, but franchise fees are usually in addition to specific pole attachment fees.

Your franchise fee, for example, could buy permission to build your own poles. But it would not pay for you to put lines up on city-owned poles.

> $20 per pole per year

So low? That's approximately 0% of what the ISP makes from the homes served by that pole. I figured it would be more.

I think you are exaggerating a bit. I have a pole in front of my house that just serves me and my neighbor. I pay $480 a year for Comcast, my neighbor gets CenturyLink.

So the cost for the pole rental works out to about 5% of Comcast's service cost to me.

Keep in mind some poles cost more than others (up to $250 according to the report), and that there are also hookup costs for the pole are ~$1000.

I'm not saying ISPs are suffering here, but cities are not providing this infrastructure at a loss.

> I have a pole in front of my house that just serves me and my neighbor

Hah. We live in veeeeery different housing densities I guess. I was thinking this was NYC, which would be closer to mine. If it's the whole state then probably somewhere in between.

Some reasonable sources [0] put the number of telephone poles in the US (175m) a little above the number of households (125m).

[0] https://www.srperspective.com/post/telephone-poles-a-high-wi...

Check out this fun map curtesy of NYC who do a pretty good job exposing a lot of these type of data https://maps.nyc.gov/sandbox/poletop-finder/

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