[rayiner]

Stockholm and LA are excellent examples. In Stockholm, there is a municipally owned company that builds fiber. It received no government funding, and built the fiber over more than 15 years in a demand driven way (building first to businesses, then to places with highst demand). It leases access to ISPs, and there are no mechanisms to force it to subsidize lower income or disadvantaged people.

Contrast Los Angeles. There, Stokab’s business model would be illegal. Builiding out based on demand might mean that wealthier neighborhoods would get fiber a decade before poorer neighborhoods. Disproportionately, white residents would get fiber before hispanic residents. That would be politically untenable (and would be completely impossible to put the government’s imprimpteur behind such an effoet as with Stokab). For that reason, most US cities make Stokab’s business model illegal.

Los Angeles had a fiber proposal: https://www.wired.com/2013/11/la-fiber. It tried to get companies to build a fiber network. By contrast with Stockholm’s approach, neighborhood income and population density could not be a “factor” in the rollout. That means that any ISP would have to build to new neighborhoods that were not economically justifiable. The ISP moreover would have to provide a minimum level of free access to all residents. It would thus have to recover the cost of that from other residents, driving the price higher and decreasing the competitiveness of the product. Unsurprisingly, nobody took up Los Angeles on that proposal. Nobody would build it, it made no business sense.

In Stockholm, fiber was a simple business proposition, built with private capital. In California, it was a social justice initiative, unattractive to private capital. Which is not necessarily itself a problem, but if you want to do that you need to be willing to build it with public money.