If we did that then we'd all still be stuck with DSL. Electric and gas utilities aren't expected to drastically improve performance year over year, but we want that from our telecom providers.
US broadband is a horrible. 50mb up down is DSL with today's tech. It's 5% the speed of what many company's roll out for ~60$ / month.
As to density arguments, you don't need to cover every square foot of the US with fiber only where people actually live. We build Roads to just about every house which cost 50+ times what broadband does. (2-3 million per mile in rural areas per mile vs ~50k per mile for fiber.)
>Electric and gas utilities aren't expected to drastically improve performance year over year
There's a reason for that. We have enough electricity to power our things. We have enough gas pressure to create a flame. Delivery, price, performance, etc are all pretty good. They're solved problems.
Not too long ago Edison was running filthy coal plants in downtown city centers and running thick-gauge DC wires to businesses. That's where we are today with the mish-mash of cable and copper for last-mile internet. Half-assed, but profitable, efforts by players incentivized by the wrong things.
The last mile problem is largely solved via municipal fiber. The real question is do we have the political will to socialize/monopolize these things like we did in the past. It seems that we don't. We have the innovations and we know how to fix this. Its getting there politically that is the problem.
This sketch of a sketch of an argument that you have laid out it a total non sequitur. It seems to me that you're pointing to the Flint water crisis as proof either that all municipal infrastructure efforts are disastrous, or that enough of them are that the public utility alternative is essentially dead. If that is the "argument," then the easiest way to defeat this is just to say, "Flint was news because it represented a rare and egregious failure."
That's it. That's all we need to say to rebut that in its entirety.
If we stop there, however, we miss the opportunity to point out the converse: It's not news when customers get gouged for sub-par service, because corrupt and monopolistic practices are rampant within capitalist institutions, especially around lock-in. Cable companies. Phone companies. Privatized utilities. Airlines after deregulation. Military suppliers. It's just not news.
We'd also miss the opportunity to point out that the tactic of pointing to one criminal failure of a civic organization as proof positive that private industry is universally better is a favorite tactic of a certain obnoxious kind of 20-something free-market fanboy set.
HN is better off when that set either stays home or ups its game.
Flint is an extreme example, but almost all municipal water systems are a disaster. In Atlanta, the sewer system dumps raw sewage in the Chattahoochee when it rains. In Chicago, old lead pipes are poisoning kids. It happens because rates are set by elected boards, not by markets, and because municipalities are not forced to bear the external costs of poor infrastructure.
U.S. broadband speed and cost lag other industrialized nations too. The only general lesson here is that the U.S. is big and infrastructure is expensive.
Flint is an extreme example, but underinvestment in infrastructure is not rare. It's endemic. Governments across the country are underinvesting in infrastructure at all levels. It's not just me who's saying this. It's been a major talking point of the democratic party for years.
And that's for infrastructure like roads and water delivery where technology is largely static. The problem would likely only be worse for more dynamic infrastructure like broadband.
In large part because the wealthy, and corporations, have entirely shirked their taxpaying obligations. That is: paying for the services which enabled them to become wealthy in the first place.
It is for now; come back in 10 years and lets see. Keeping fibre in the ground working in the face of storms, other people digging it up and tech churn (ok, what is after 10Gbe ? How are you going to run that round the mainstreet?) isn't rocket science, but it is a technical maintenance task and new build infrastructures have a great upfront advantage. For a while.
Buried fiber works just fine regardless of storms. Aerial fiber is a different matter. Patching up fiber cables after a cut is no big deal. Tech churn, i.e. what active equipment to use, is just run of the mill stuff. You can upgrade the optics to 100G if you need it, but if you don't nobody is forcing you to move past 10G.
I've built and ran fiber networks for over 10 years and operations and maintenance is no big issue.
Because the incompetence of municipal governments (in most of the US) is in overbuilding infrastructure to serve unproductive areas so that maintenance obligations come to consume ever larger portions of the budget unless they can achieve the Ponzi scheme of paying for it with the taxes from new growth. That would be terrifying to compete with.
There's no need for gas/electricity to drastically improve year over year. But when there is a need, as there is with electric cars, the government steps in and offers tax credits and covers the installation fees for things like home car chargers.
Well private monopolies aren't doing any better so I doubt the government could be worse.
The government should lay fiber just like they lay water pipes and pave roads. Anyone can connect on either end of the fiber, providing a nice competitive market for ISPs... just like the original days of dialup ISPs.
> Telecom companies should be regulated like electric and gas utilities
Well, played out to the full extent of electric and gas utilities, I doubt few of us actually want telecom to go the same way.
With the utility companies - you often get zero choice of which company services your home. Usually these are government sanctioned monopolies, without competition.
Yes, the government may set the maximum rates, but they can't force a utility company to actually be a "good" company. Customer service, willingness to problem solve, be flexible for customers, provide better service at the same price - let alone reduce rates, etc.
With a telco acting as a utility, over the long term, there's little incentive to provide better service... which essentially is the core issue of the Net Neutrality movement.
What we need instead, is to foster an environment in which every city has 5-6+ telco's capable of servicing every home. We need to get out of the 1-2 telco company system, and create a competitive environment in which consumers have massive choice.
The ability to leave a company and take your business elsewhere is what keeps companies performing and doing better by their customers. They offer cheaper rates, along with better service, etc.
We've seen this working to great effect in the wild. Every city Google Fiber has encroached on, suddenly saw the incumbent telco's massively upgrade service offerings at cheaper rates.
We need more competition - not government sanctioned monopolies.
What I'd like to see is the 'utility' part being a connection between my house and a POP/CO, specified as being capable of 1 or 10Gbps (symmetric). The municipality is responsible for ensuring this exists in the same way they do for hydro, water, sewer and gas.
I can then choose my actual provider who will hook up at the CO (either virtually or physically), and connect me to the internet (or their service) at whatever speed we agree on. The utility part is nothing more than a long cable between me and the provider.
The provider could give me nothing more than a public IP and route to the internet, or they could give something 'value-added' like an e-mail account and content filtering. It could even be a closed non-internet service like Facebook Free Basics[0] or maybe Verizon wants to dust off the old AOL service. The thing is, as a consumer I get the choice.
Well right now we get the bad parts of a regulated utility company (zero choice about what company services your home) without the good parts (regulation on price and service).
That's a great point - and really does describe the situation for many of us. However, that doesn't imply we should head down the regulatory path - because once we do, we can't come back (at least history indicates this).
> The ability to leave a company and take your business elsewhere is what keeps companies performing and doing better by their customers. They offer cheaper rates, along with better service, etc.
That works well in theory; in practice, a lot of industries - telcom being a prime example - hacked their way around this. You can't "take your business elsewhere" when a private company owns the last-mile infrastructure your apartment is connected with. Or when your landlord decided to sign an exclusive agreement with one.
When I see residential electric/gas utilities, I see a service that pretty much always works as advertised. A service that does what it's supposed to and nothing more. No deep electromagnetic inspection to offer me "zero charge" electricity for my ACME appliances. No "smell packets" injected into the gas line the way ISP inject ads and bullshit into HTTP connections now. I don't even care much which company logo is present on my monthly bill; the total monthly savings I could make by switching providers are worth around two or three standard Starbucks lattes, at best.
The core issue is that Internet access should be a commodity. Telcos are doing everything in their power to avoid that. Like so many other companies, they forgot about the concept of "honest business", in which a customer pays them money in exchange for a valuable service, no bullshit attached.
My local electric, gas, and water company provide great service. Their stuff Just Works, it's cheap, and on the very rare occasions I have to interact with them, they handle it well. I'd have no qualms signing up for internet service from any of them, if somehow they offered it.
To be fair, Verizon is pretty good to me as well, but that's probably because I'm paying $$$ for a high-end business account.
You can get better pricing if you research how their pricing games work and then fight to win them. My Verizon bill is a fourth of what it used to be on the triple play and about half what it was when I killed the triple play and went Internet only from using the trick of going to the cable company and then returning for prewired new customer pricing.
Getting it without many of the tricks advertising uses to extract more money out of customers than the advertised pricing is a struggle though.