[toofy]

this is a great example of where the government should step in and say “welp, you took too long, we’re now funding municiple fiber and we’ll give it to everyone cheap. sorry.”

i truly do believe competition can often drivr things forward but we have countless examples where executives get comfortable and decide their best course of action for profits is to do little to nothing.

if a community has been screaming for fiber internet for years and the service companies cry “oh it’s just too expensive” when we know that isn’t true, then the people who pay the taxes should say “ok, apparently you’re not up to the job, you and/or your business model is clearly a failure, we’ll do it and provide it cheaper than you would have anyway.”

maybe this would force the competition we know can often work. if they can’t figure out a way to do it without subsidies, then we’ll do it ourselves. you can call it “spooky government” all you want, but that’s just another term for “us”

something to the effect of: ok, this thing has become integral to society. ceos, you have 5 years to compete and prove that you’re up to the task by delivering A, B, and C for $N. can’t do it? not up to it? no worries, thanks for trying.

[troyvit]

> this is a great example of where the government should step in and say “welp, you took too long, we’re now funding municiple fiber and we’ll give it to everyone cheap. sorry.”

That's what my town (Longmont, CO) did! We had laid a fiber loop around the city back in the '90s for traffic signal coordination. Over the years the town would engage different private companies to try to get them to lay fiber (or even directional wifi) to the door. None of them took off, so the city decided to do it themselves. Xfinity tried to sue us and ran a weak attempt at astroturfing, but after about five years of concerted back-hoeing most of the town has gigabit. It isn't 25 gigabit by any means but it works.

Bonus: you call a 303 number for support and somebody who lives here picks up like "What can I do for ya, hun?" (I exaggerate, but not by much). Half an hour later your problem is solved.

Edit: It's $50/month for that.

[toomuchtodo]

https://communitynets.org/content/community-network-map

https://communitynetworks.org/content/municipal-ftth-network...

How to Build a Fiber Network on a Small-City Budget [video] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUhtdBZbOMc

Getting Fiber to My Town [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24424910 - September 2020 (126 comments)

[JumpCrisscross]

> where the government should step in and say “welp, you took too long, we’re now funding municiple fiber and we’ll give it to everyone cheap

Thereby accruing not only a capital expenditure but ongoing operational obligation? How is this better than scaring the cable company into fronting the cash to get the same outcome?

[AshamedCaptain]

In which way this is a viable strategy that you can repeat more than once?

[lazide]

If the outcome is you need to pay the next time, but not the first time…. Doesn’t it at least save you from having to pay for it the first time?

[JumpCrisscross]

> In which way this is a viable strategy that you can repeat more than once?

I’m not saying commit to bluffing. But after the other guy has folded, continuing with your threat just to be petty is kind of dumb.

[fn-mote]

> after the other guy has folded, continuing with your threat just to be petty is kind of dumb

Your community is still going to be paying whatever the cable company wants to charge for the service. There's definitely a reason to run it yourself.

[AshamedCaptain]

Or not if you want the threat to work a next time.

[JumpCrisscross]

> not if you want the threat to work a next time

You don’t care if it works next time. It worked this time. If it doesn’t work next time, build it next time.

[therealpygon]

Cool, but isn’t this “the next time”, after “the next time”, after “the next time” already? These companies have been threatened, sued, and incentivized in numerous ways over many years, which has yet to be successful, and yet it seems like you are suggesting “just one more time” will be the impetus for change…this time…you swear…probably?

Note: I don’t disagree or agree, rather, I’m pointing out how flawed the logic is that just one more time will be what it takes.

[kaelwd]

Australia did that but also paid out the telecom companies a gazillion dollars for infrastructure that had only been privatised like a decade earlier.

[red-iron-pine]

they voted a conservative government who did what conservative governments do.

what did people think abbot and turnbull were selling? wasn't better service for users, it was servicing telstra and murdoch.

[glitchc]

> this is a great example of where the government should step in and say “welp, you took too long, we’re now funding municiple fiber and we’ll give it to everyone cheap. sorry.”

In the US, this would likely end with ISPs suing the government, tying the case up in court for years.

[DiscourseFan]

Isn't this the Chinese system? Using state corporations to spur competition.

[fragmede]

That's nice in theory, but look at how much money has gone to Verizon in the name of rural broadband, and how much they (haven't) delivered. And the consequences.

[deaux]

What does giving money to Verizon have to do with municipal (i.e. operated by the municipality) broadband?

[mikkupikku]

Municipalities don't know anything about the job and few have the resources and personnel to become sufficiently experienced. I know every other poster on HN has a story where they personally stepped in and saw their local government through the process for incredibly cheap, hey that's great, but how is some random municipality without an elder tech god living with them supposed to get "municipal" internet without contracting with an ISP who actually knows how to get that work done?

We're talking rural broadband. These municipality don't have great human capital for this kind of stuff. Hell, they struggle to just fill potholes.

[VorpalWay]

That is not how it works here. Municipality owned fiber is common here in Sweden (called stadsnät). Often several smaller municipalities join together and co-own the venture.

A common variation is that they just provide the physical infrastructure and you can then select which ISP to use on top of the fiber, from a list of about 15 or so usually. This seems to work fine in rural Sweden, so I don't see why it wouldn't work elsewhere.

As to potholes, that is not a big problem? It is usually a larger problem in the cities than out in the countryside.

[toofy]

i was only using fiber as just one example. but in the case of fiber, there are plenty of non rural areas that still can’t get it and are stuck with terrible options.

even so, even in rural areas, nothing at all stops them from hiring people the same way they hire a weatherman or a police man or a fireman or a city accountant. there are educated intelligent people in rural areas…

[alsetmusic]

I guess we have different versions of HN cause the one I read has headlines on the front page pretty regularly about people (collectives, not individuals) doing their own broadband successfully. There's a reason right-wingers and lobbyists are against this and try to pass laws preventing it. It's because it works and undermines their position as rent-seekers who don't invest in their infrastructure.

[ididieicueu]

> There's a reason right-wingers and lobbyists are against this and try to pass laws preventing it.

There’s a reason POLITICIANS are against this and try to pass laws preventing it.

There, fixed it for you.

Let’s not pretend this is a red or blue problem. It’s a big boot hovering over your head problem. It’s a politician problem.

It doesn’t matter if their colour underwear matches yours. This is about people in power doing what they can to stay in power while guaranteeing their easy money.

[KetoManx64]

The only "right wingers" that are backing things like this are the ones that get paid by the ISP lobbies.

[red-iron-pine]

lol he thinks big ISPs upgrade their infra or care.

[mikkupikku]

Did I say that? No, you made it up. Why you chose to make that up, I can only imagine (or should I make things up too?)

Also everybody else responding to me is ignoring the point that most rural municipalities can barely afford keep their roads marginally flat, let alone tear up the roads, lay fiber, then repair those roads. Municipal fiber is a pipe dream in most scenarios, but workable in reasonably high density regions that have a tax base to work with.

[imtringued]

Road infrastructure is extremely expensive compared to a little bit of glass fiber.

You also usually don't need to tear up the road. Maybe the pavement, but not the road.

[alsetmusic]

That's the opposite of what was proposed above. Stop paying them altogether and replace them in the places where they aren't competing. I think that was the message.

[philipallstar]

Counterpoint: rural fibre is unbelievably expensive and starlink is solving it in a better way.

[toofy]

i’m sorry, but no, starlink is not comparable to fiber.

better than dsl? i mean, sure? but absolutely not even close to better than fiber. there’s a reason data centers in rural areas run fiber for miles and miles to their centers and aren’t on … starlink.

[axus]

My charitable interpretation: adding a turn-key competitor is a better way to incentive the incumbents than a long fight to add a government competitor.

[JumpCrisscross]

> starlink is not comparable to fiber

Straw man. It doesn’t need to comparable. Just sufficient. If a rich rural community wants to pay to lay fiber into the boonies, they can still do that. But it shouldn’t be a shared cost across society. (I live in a rural community.)

[hakfoo]

What exactly made it possible to get copper wire into effectively every house in the country?

We didn't say "if a rich rural community wants telephones or electricity in the boonies..."

Maybe we need a new Ma Bell that's Uncle Fibre. Give them a very tightly bordered but lucrative monopoly in exchange for mandates to actually build and maintain the network. Perhaps some sort of scheme where consumers actually pay the regulator instead of the service provider, so they can hold payments hostage in the event expansion and QoS goals are not met, giving it real teeth.

It might end up being the same ~USD75-100 per month for 1Gb that many of us are paying for cable now, at least initially, but the cost would be funding making sure people in rural counties are getting modern infrastructure, and gradually ticking up speeds as more and more infra is paid down, rather than on yachts.

[JumpCrisscross]

> What exactly made it possible to get copper wire into effectively every house in the country?

Subsidies.

> making sure people in rural counties are getting modern infrastructure

Sure. This is inefficient when an alternative is more than sufficient.

Again, I live in a rich rural community. I have gigabit fiber to my home. I have neighbors ditching wired internet for Starlink because it’s cheaper and good enough and they can also put it on their truck when they travel.

My property value does well from the subsidy. But it’s inefficient.

[miki123211]

If people truly want something and it can be done profitably, just start a company and do it yourselves.

If you need subsidies, that means the people who don't want that think are paying for it, just so people who do want it can have it cheaper.

With subsidies, the cost is still there, it's just hidden in some tax or other.

[AnthonyMouse]

> If people truly want something and it can be done profitably, just start a company and do it yourselves.

There is a specific problem with last mile services: It costs approximately the same amount to install fiber down every street whether you have 5% of the customers or 95%.

So you have an incumbent with no competitors and therefore no incentive to invest in infrastructure instead of just charging the monopoly price for the existing bad service forever. If no one new enters the market, that never changes.

However, if there is a new entrant that installs fiber, the incumbent has to do the same thing or they're going to lose all their customers. So then they do it.

Recall that it costs the same to do that regardless of what percent of the customers you have, but they currently have 100% of the customers. Now no matter what price you charge, if it's enough to recover your costs then it's enough to recover their costs, so they just match your price. Then you're offering the same service or the same price, so there is no benefit to anyone to switch to your service now that they're offering the same thing, and inertia then allows them to keep the majority of the customers. Which means you're now in a price war where you'll be the one to go out of business first because customers will stay with them by default when you both charge the same price. And since this result is predictable, it's hard to get anyone to invest in a company destined to be bankrupted by the incumbent.

Which means that if the customers want someone to compete with the incumbent, they have to invest in it themselves. At which point going bankrupt by forcing the incumbent to install fiber is actually a decent ROI, because you pay the money and then you get fiber. Furthermore, you can even choose to not go bankrupt, by making the basic fiber service "free" (i.e. paid for through local taxes), which then bankrupts the incumbent and prevents the local residents from having to pay the cost of building two fiber networks instead of just one.

[VorpalWay]

There is an elegant way to solve this. Mandate that whoever install the fiber lets other companies run their ISP on top of it (with a small but reasonable cut of the profit presumably). I believe this happens (mandated or not) already for mobile phone networks in the form of MVNOs.

And here in Sweden we have the same for fiber. I don't think it is mandated here, since not every place has multiple options like that, but many do. If you have municipality owned fiber (stadsnät) it always work like that I believe, often you have a choice between 15 or so different ISPs.

[toofy]

why would we do that? not everything has to skim profits to a certain group of people just because they exist. they can use magical competition and build it if they want a piece.

if an area has been waiting for… (what would it be now? around 30 years since the internet took off?) so these companies had 3 decades to build out and have refused, if we the tax payers step in and we pay for it, why should we let them in? they have refused to do anything for literal decades… even worse, many of these companies took billions in subsidies and still did nothing. they’ve refused to be good boot strappin capitalists, for decades.

(i want to reiterate what i said above, i believe competition can often work really really well. but if we dont understand by now that it fails sometimes too, we're not seeing clearly.)

think about how long that is, like some people become grandparents at around 35. someone born in the windows 95 days might have a grandkid and the poor sap still wont be able to get fiber. even in tons of urban and suburban areas.

some of these same ceos have gone on about how perfect the marketplace is, how awful taxes are, how magical the marketplace is… decades later if we have to build it, why should they get a piece?

[AnthonyMouse]

The physical cable that goes to every house is a natural monopoly. Really it's even more like the conduit the cable is installed in. Doing that part more than once is both fairly inefficient and tends to market failure.

The rest of the service isn't. Transit is a fairly competitive market. You may also have providers willing to use more expensive terminating equipment and then offer higher-than-gigabit speeds on the same piece of fiber. You want the competitive market for every aspect of the system where it can work and to keep the monopoly as narrow as possible.

Notice that the point isn't to let just Comcast use the municipal fiber and then get ~100% of the customers again, it's to let this happen with fiber to the home:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_virtual_network...

[VorpalWay]

Having the municipality run the whole thing would be even better sure. I'm not sure why we do that mix here in Sweden, but it worked out OK for us I think.

Also, wouldn't those subsidies come with a legaly enforceable requirement to actually build out infrastructure? If not, I think that is where you went wrong.

[toofy]

im saying we shouldnt give them subsidies at all. if they cant make it work in the marketplace, if they arent up to the task, then the competitive marketplace is a failure in that instance. and thats ok.

no subsidies. if they cant do it, fine, we'll do it and we'll provide cheaper than they ever would have. and in the case of fiber, we know this is the case. there are plenty of municipally owned fiber areas that are solid and cheap af.

its ok to admit that the market doesnt always work. often, absofuckinlutely. always? not at all.

a lack of subsidies would make it obvious where those failures exist so we can just do it ourselves (the spooky government) for cheaper. tell them "you had your chance" and move on with our day.

[EliRivers]

just start a company and do it yourselves.

Do I recall incumbent providers lobbying to ensure that competition be forbidden, so that they can continue to charge a lot for bad service? I think at least a couple of years ago, 16 US states had banned community internet at the behest of Comcast and chums.

I suppose that municipal broadband being banned at the behest of incumbent monopolies and duopolies isn't quite outright banning competition; just making it a lot harder to do.

[sirtaj]

This line of thinking comes up so often, but ignores second order effects. I don't need schools because I have no children, but I will certainly depend on well educated children entering the workforce.

Or, more facetiously, I don't need a subsidised fire service because no building I visit is currently on fire.

[vasco]

Yes but you cannot make up more than about 10-15 examples everyone will agree with, seeing as those are subsidized in practically every country on earth, and then apply the thinking the guy above you gives for everything else.

In my opinion internet access is as fundamental a right now as water access so I think it should be subsidized to a fair degree.

But not for example if it is to supply only a small island of rich people just because they happen to want to live there and force the rest of the state to supply them. There's nuance to these things and we can't just outright subsidized everything and we can't market economy everything either

[sirtaj]

I agree with you. The internet is now important enough that it's required for almost everything past basic sustenance. Governments worldwide are moving services to the internet, so it's not even optional any more.

[Terr_]

As precedent, the framers of the US Constitution specifically authorized the government to run a national service provider of last resort...

In that technological era of horses and handwriting, it became the US Postal Service, but I think if it occurred today it would be the US Networking Service.