Comment by cogman10 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cogman10 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> Municipalities only care about cost cutting - so there was no investment in wiring infrastructure or customer service.

Well, there's two aspects at play here.

For starters, you do need to be a certain size as an ISP to really offer cheap services. Imagine, for example, being a town of 500 with a municipal ISP. You'd end up with a lot of equipment to store and maintain and to really be effective, you'd have to employ a bunch of people that spend most of their time doing nothing. (After all, how often would the customer service rep for a small town ACTUALLY be answering any calls?).

That's why a state, county, or national? run ISP would probably make more sense, especially in more rural locations.

That being said, in the UK with BT and the line rentals I described earlier those worked unreasonably well. ISPs could complain to BT to fix problems which ultimately left the various ISPs in a region to compete on tech and price. That was a win for the customer.

This was not at all a small public ISP. And it was managed by the city power company, so it had the economies of scale already.

There's a lot of nitty gritty policy weeds of what went wrong. But the main one was that after the public ISP incorporated in the 90s as a complimentary service to a public cable network, the state passed a legislation regulating public utility rates. Good for power/water/sewer/cable customers. But it meant that the city could not charge customers differently even with wildly different internet speeds.

Going into the 90s, as the internet aspects became more important, they couldn't keep up with upgrading the lines, especially given the costs would be born by all customers regardless of what speed they were getting.

So the issue was poor government regulation and not public ownership of the infrastructure?

That was 30 years ago (sorry for the reminder) but don't you think times changed how something like that would be deployed?

It could be!

But I think one lesson is that internet and other utilities are not quite as functionally comparable as people claim. Per capita consumption of water has not quadruped in the last 10 years, but home internet has! So the case for internet as a public utility will be stronger when the need for constantly upgrading infrastructure plateaus.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com