[iamnotlarry]

I visited a location this week where there were 2-4 houses per mile along country roads. The residents had a choice of ISPs. The house I visited had dialtone from a VOIP service.

Yes, it costs money to build out last-mile infrastructure. But even in very low density areas, it can pay off. Recurring revenues of $50-100/month per customer can in fact pay for the initial investment. Especially if the investment was a wifi tower. It's the kind of thing one motivated local can pull off.

Building a worldwide network of peers who all respect NN is much much more difficult. Even if you could set up some organization like EFF to define some "Bill of Rights" and then certify conformant ISPs with a cool logo of approval, customers will not choose ISPs based on that logo. Average American consumers will not demand NN.

So your local ISP--even a well-intentioned one--will do as you suggest: "Simply purchase transit bandwidth from the big guys." There ends NN.

[amorphid]

A relative of mine lives in a rural area of Washington State, USA. He has fiber internet through ToledoTel...

http://www.toledotel.com/our-services/internet/

...it's expensive, but he has it. Every time I hear someone say we can't have blazing fast Internet in San Francisco, it's never phrased as a question like "would you be willing to pay $MONTHLY_PRICE for 1gps fiber?" So far, I've only heard "Building fiber in San Francisco isn't possible because of $UNAMBITIOUS_EXCUSE."

[Spooky23]

That stuff was all part of the Obama era stimulus bills. Many folks with the ability to lay fiber did so with substantial capitalization from the Feds. Many municipal governments and counties built fiber rings as well.

The result was mostly institutional connectivity. Rural prisons, hospitals, government, factories, and schools got connected. But local franchise agreements make the last mile pretty much impossible.

[gwright]

Huh. ToledoTel is the telco it its service area. It isn't competing with the local telco. I don't think this is an example of municipal networking.

[Spooky23]

Sorry for the confusion in my response. I didn’t mean to imply that.

Rural telcos had access to this money for sure.

Municipal government really benefited as well — for its own purposes, not municipal broadband.

[gwright]

It looks like ToledoTel is a "Local Exchange Carrier" (LEC). These entities have existed for a long time and are effectively the local incumbent telco and are quite common in more rural areas.

Purchasing IP connectivity from ToledoTel is the same thing as purchasing IP connectivity from Verizon -- they are both the incumbent telco in their respective geographic areas.

[gwright]

Perhaps I should have said "analogous to" and not "the same thing as". I'm not trying to put forth an opinion here, just trying to point out that ToledoTel is the phone company in its service area.

[gwright]

I'd be interested in knowing who was really providing the layer-2 connectivity. In most places your options are the local telco and the local cable company. What were the other options here?

It is possible in some places to get IP transit from someone other than the telco or cable company but almost always that is happening using the layer-2 infrastructure from the telco. I've never heard of that happening via cable but I suppose it is possible.

I've been out of this for a while, but in Connecticut it used to be possible to lease layer-2 connectivity from the telco and then provide the IP services on top of that. This was done via DSL to the end-user with the layer-2 traffic aggregated and backhauled via ATM virtual circuits to the ISPs router in some data center. It was still difficult to compete with the local telco -- who also was selling IP transit of course via the same methodology. Mainly the problem was the economies of scale. The pricing favored high-volume which is hard for a small company competing against the market visibility of the local telco.