[jcranmer]

I live in a town with municipal power, and the general consensus in the area is that the towns with municipal power are loads better at it than the main private utilities in the area. There's no intrinsic reason why a publicly-owned utility should be better or worse at its job than privately-owned utility.

But to talk about broadband more specifically, one of the main reasons why municipal broadband started becoming a thing was because in many areas, where there is but one (private) broadband provider to choose from, that provider would proceed to refuse to upgrade the infrastructure even when municipalities offered buttloads of cash to pay for the upgrades. So the municipal broadband choice becomes "get municipal broadband at 1 gig, or private company broadband at 25 meg (asymmetric)."

[tptacek]

We flirt with the idea of municipal broadband every couple of years (we built dense fiber connectivity throughout the village a decade or so ago for other reasons). But the economics are brutal; to pencil, you need significant uptake, and you're competing with AT&T and Xfinity, both of which (if you're clear-eyed) are better offerings than the muni can compete with, so you're not going to get that uptake.

The buildout issue is real, and is a reason to explore public-owned broadband in underinvested areas. But even if we had only AT&T here, none of the arguments really work. Even the monopolism concern isn't operative (AT&T and Xfinity don't jack their rates up in places they happen to be the monopoly supplier --- they quote nationally visible rates).

[rayiner]

> There's no intrinsic reason why a publicly-owned utility should be better or worse at its job than privately-owned utility.

At scale, why would utilities be different than other government services, such as schools or transit?

I’m sure there are edge cases in parts of the country that are too poor or sparely populated to support a robust private sector. But I don’t live in a place like that, and most people don’t. I live in the suburbs of Annapolis. And I’ve lived in Chicago, Baltimore, New York City, DC, and Wilmington Delaware. Would I rather have Comcast run my internet, or the governments of any of those cities? More to the point: would I want to live in the counterfactual scenario where the 1996 telecom act had gone in a different direction, and those cities had built broadband networks that were now 30 years old in whatever shape they were after decades of maintained by those cities?

My experience with the municipal services these cities do run says “no.” And that conclusion is counter to my ideology. I like public infrastructure. I structured my life around commuting over the DC Metro and Amtrak for years. But, for example, the DC Metro deferred maintenance to such a degree that the automated train control built in the 1970s had to be shut off in 2009. Headways got longer, the ride got much rougher. It stayed that way for fifteen years until they turned ATO back on last year. So in 2026, the big achievement is that we’re back to the ride smoothness we had in 1980.