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> Come back to this comment and in 10 years.

We don’t have to. Municipal broadband initiatives have been around for more than 10 years.

I’ll pick the first one I find on Google for a search of “2014 municipal broadband install”. The first result I got was Chattanooga, which was installing 1gig in 2014 (https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/30/chattanooga-gi...). Not the fastest thing available, but certainly still quite respectable in 2024. Not many people with a gig today cry that it’s unusably slow.

But, let’s just check on Chattanooga’s current speed.

Apparently, in 2022 they were rolling out 25gig symmetric (https://epb.com/newsroom/epb-news/25-Gbps-internet-service-n...). That’s light-years better than I can get in a suburb outside of Seattle.

Dunno, municipal broadband seems like it can be just fine.

This might be a case of "nobody needs more than 640k of memory", but well deployed fiber has a very very long upgrade path.

As I understand it, switching out optics and equipment on each end for faster versions is relatively simple (vs digging it up and replacing the cable).

If it's active fiber, then you should be able to put 100Gb+ optics and equipment and be good to go.

If it's PON fiber then it might be a little different, but not drastically.

As for the government vs corporate thing... Physical infrastructure is hard to get good competitive environments in. They're pretty rare, and become increasingly so as companies merge or get acquired.

It's very difficult to get new competitors into a market because of how capital and red-tape intense the process is.

Few people are happy with roads and lawns being dug up, existing competitors have a motive to swing legislation to their advantage.

Running physical infrastructure as an open platform that anyone can access is IMO a better approach.

This is a pretty silly comment given the "private" options that could have been at gbps speed for a decade+ are still at DSL and Cable speeds. Blind faith in 'the market' to solve these things after it's failed to do so seems odd.

It has given us starlink. The market makes interesting decisions.

Praise the Market.

Parent's argument wasn't that the existent private market was great, but rather that a public utility monopolizing the market might not be great in the future.

Many of these remote areas are barely being served by companies at the moment because they’re not profitable (enough). Why would anyone object to the people just doing it themselves instead? That way at least they’re not at the mercy of some company that needs to earn a dime.

Objecting to people providing their own infrastructure where private companies have failed to do so, because at some undefined point in the distant future those same companies hypothetically could offer better service is the most worm-brained thing I've read in awhile. If the 10gbps network isn't fast enough in 10 years (already a hilarious premise), the same citizens who voted to invest in muni fiber to begin with could choose to increase their speed/capacity.

Who says they’re monopolizing it?

I’m not aware of any municipal deployment that is a monopoly, and the one in the article is open-access.

> The inter-local agency collaborative venture then set about building an “open access” fiber network that allows any ISP to then come and compete on the shared network.

Comcast et. al can still build all the fiber they want to in these markets.

The market works when there's at least 4-5 competitors. That's enough to make monopolistic backroom deals impractical.

That is what driving me nuts about these threads.

These aren’t free markets. They’re government regulated into being something else entirely, then people stomp their feet and complain about capitalism.

Uh, how did the government forbid there from being more than one ISP in a neighborhood?

The regionalization of ISPs is entirely their own doing to avoid competition.

> The regionalization of ISPs is entirely their own doing to avoid competition.

And what mechanism did they use to do that?

Explicit contracts [1] and implicit collusion [2] [3].

There aren't that many large ISPs in the US. They know that if they compete they have to lower prices and if they don't compete they don't; so rather than compete and all of them accept lower prices (and worse margins) they don't.

[1]: https://www.techdirt.com/2014/08/14/parallel-conduct-how-isp...

[2]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/09/comca...

[3]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/05/chart...

Ok, so charters, regulation, bribery, local laws, and city policies…

None of that sounds like free market to me.

"Free market" ends the moment government starts issuing corporate charters. We can debate what it should look like, but either way it is an artificial construct at that point.

But that seems more like an US issue? In places which actually allow or even encourage free market competition providers tend to be able to keep their infrastructure up to date while still offering reasonably low prices.

The article isn’t talking about a “government run” internet, it’s talking about government forcing ISPs to compete. And UTOPIA has been providing faster-than-corporate-internet for 15 years, as the article mentioned. Why would waiting another 10 change anything?

Points 2 and 3 seem imagined, and points 1 and 3 contradict each other. Either the municipal net is slow and will be replaced by for-profit competition, or it’s fast enough to shut out rent-seeking, but you probably don’t get to claim both.

My understanding is that none of the municipal fiber networks are monopolies, so Comcast and co. still play ball in these markets. If this is truly bad then people will just leave.

In reality I think that enough local governments recognize that high quality Internet is a competitive differentiator when trying to attract business.

I have exactly one ( 1 ) option available to me in term of internet provider. It’s cox, and it’s sucks.

And I live in a real city (Does New Orleans qualify ? Let’s say yes. )

Where is the free market in my situation ? I would throw money at anything else than cox.

It does exists in other part of the city. Not where I live. I’m within city limit, in a relatively affluent neighborhood.

It’s just weird.

These complaints can be levelled against private net companies as well, particularly in the USA it seems.

> Come back to this comment and in 10 years. See what speed competitive markets are at and compare to municipal and non-competitive markets.

The sleight of hand here is amazing - "See what speed competitive markets are at" - the US doesn't really have competitive markets, it has monopolistic markets, and they seem to be a prime cause of the very issues you're concerned about. The article you've replied to is talking about encouraging competitive markets by opening up locally-owned last-mile infrastructure to ISP competition.

I think the core problem is that these markets often aren't truly competitive. Last-mile wiring is expensive to do so you typically find whole neighborhoods/towns with a single provider.

I don’t think we need to wait 10 years. There are already countless examples of private providers with out of date speeds, unreasonable bandwidth caps, etc and no competitor to place any kind of meaningful challenge.

> (2) Government run internet is bound to eventually be lobbied to be safe

This would be a clear cut first amendment violation. These kinds of things would be less likely to be restricted by a government ISP than a private party ISP.

You mean a 1A violation like the government pressuring media companies to push their narratives?

Because we have seen this year no one seems to care enough.

If you are unable to exercise your first amendment rights, you sue, and you win. This happens over and over again. Media companies push whatever narratives they want to.

Ok, who was sued over the twitter files?

Twitter can do what they want on their platform. If they thought the government was infringing their rights, they would sue the government. If you think your rights were infringed, then you would sue the government.

Tell me you haven’t read the article without telling me you haven’t read the article.

This article is talking about something that was created 15 years ago. So your “come back to me in 10 years” comment is 5 years too late.

And turns out if it wasn’t late it would have been dead wrong.

You have fully failed to understand the concept that is described here, which is still private internet service, with the government simply providing the open access infrastructure.

Also, thanks to the open access concept the customers have a choice between what appears to be 18 different ISPs. I doubt there’s a single other area in the U.S. that provides that much choice.

As I understand it, the fiber would be capable of much higher bandwidth in the future, it's the devices at the end that are the bottleneck. They'll be able to keep upgrading for a long time without replacing the fiber that was laid down.

Sorry homie, utopia is ten years old. Check the date. People freaking love it. Still.

> I know people disagree with me about this. I certainly hate it that governments gave local monopolies to companies like Comcast

They didn’t do that. Exclusive franchises have been illegal under federal law for over 30 years: https://www.congress.gov/bill/102nd-congress/senate-bill/12 (“Prohibits a cable television franchising authority from granting an exclusive franchise or unreasonably refusing to award additional cable television franchises.”).

> Come back to this comment and in 10 years. See what speed competitive markets are at

The promised Utopia which for one reason or another will never come to be. This world where monopolies are not a thing anymore and all that’s there is pure clean competition is, just a dream.

Wouldn't (1) create an opening for competitors to enter, thereby negating (3)?

Lol, wow, I'd put 90% of my net worth into a bet against this take if I could. I don't even know where to start, gestures around, reality is here, now.

The top end of residential internet right now is a 2.5G GPON link split 32 ways and sold as 1G which in practice gets you about 300-600M.

10G symmetric being common even oversubscribed to hell is 20+ years out from most metro areas with entrenched IPSs. And for $150/mo is baffling, we could have done this the whole time? There has to be a catch, right? Folks outside the nice areas still don't get better than 100M advertised.

> compared to actually competitive markets, not local monopolies

...and I want a pony!

Last-mile infrastructure tends towards monopoly unless you provide it through the government or regulate it so heavily you might as well have. There is too much cost in redundant buildout to support competition and it's too difficult to tell dumping from price discovery to just fix it with antitrust. Not to mention for the last 40 years the USA has pursued antitrust with less enthusiasm than a decaffinated sloth, so leaning on antitrust would be an idea so terrible that only a corporate lobbyist should ever propose such a thing (and we shouldn't allow that either, but let's talk about one evil at a time).

Last-mile was the "network effects" before "network effects" -- the game theoretic cheat code for capitalism that all the rich investors dreamed about owning. There's a reason why we don't let the free market provide roads or utilities, and that same reason absolutely applies to internet service. This has been proven again and again and again across the nation by letting the game play out and seeing the inevitable result. Why do you think the game will end differently on the 4,952nd playthrough?