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by wtbob
3677 days ago
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> I'd wager that the short term (~10 years) consequences would be vastly superior service for every day citizens. In the long term, not certain I think that you'd see the same phenomenon as in any country which socialised an industry: at first things are — as you guess — much the same, because the same people keep coming to work in the same buildings, operating the same machines according to the same processes &c. But the rate of innovation lowers, and eventually you get the equivalent of a Soviet grocery store (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOBFMMbUFI8): something much better than what you had before, but nowhere near as good as you could have had. So after a decade or two of municipal broadband, you can expect that you'll have better broadband than when you started, but far, far, far worse broadband than where there is competition. Now, if the debate is between a public and a private monopoly, I honestly don't know which is worse. Possibly the public monopoly, because its employees are unfireable, but — I don't know. |
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Infrastructure has massive capital costs. If roads were owned by car dealerships and only permitted cars of their associated brands to drive on them that would be somewhat analogous to having multiple communication providers lay duplicate fiber (and just as wasteful).
Cable and ILECs are acting perfectly rationally by not competing with each other; there is little to gain when you can just squeeze your captive customer base for more money.
Fiber is fiber. The government could setup a public benefit corporation tasked with delivering fiber broadband last-mile infrastructure and keeping up with the latest innovations. If they fail to follow through, the courts can force them to follow the PBC charter.
If you want to leave maximum room for innovation (with resulting higher costs) the PBC could only be responsible for terminating fiber on both ends and any ISP who wants to compete would have to install an ONT on the customer site and light the fiber at the exchange. Then the ISP can replace equipment to wring faster and faster speeds out of the fiber if they want.
You can go the other way and task the PBC with lighting the fiber and delivering packets. It makes the process of starting an ISP much easier but you're reliant on the PBC to keep up with potential 10GB upgrades in the future. That sure would be a nice problem to have though...