> Chattanooga has the largest high-speed internet service in the US, offering customers access to speeds of 1 gigabit per second – about 50 times faster than the US average. The service, provided by municipally owned EPB, has sparked a tech boom in the city and attracted international attention. EPB is now petitioning the FCC to expand its territory. Comcast and others have previously sued unsuccessfully to stop EPB’s fibre optic roll out.
I did a quick search to see pricing for EPB's internet service and wow is it cheap[1]. The two plans listed on the site are 100 Mbps for $57.99/mo or 1Gpbs $69.99/mo. Oh and both plans are symmetric so you get that for upload as well.
I don't know of any city where the local cable co offers anything like that, let alone at those price points. No wonder they want to block this through legislation; competing in the market would not be pleasant for them.
Bandwidth is insanely cheap compared to last-mile infrastructure. Bandwidth caps are basically just a way to soak the customers who use the service more and are, hence, willing to pay more.
Well if you have a lot of contention in your last-mile infrastructure bandwidth caps make sense. This applies to shared infrastructure like a coax cable network, or the connection up to a DSLAM.
Yeah, there's no contention AT ALL up to the DSLAM. DSLAM is DSL Access Module. Every DSL customer has their own dedicated copper pair from the DSLAM to their house--- it's their phone line. There may be congestion between the Central Office where the DSLAM lives and the rest of the internet, but in practice that rarely happens. The big limit on DSL is getting reasonable speeds a mile down the line over ancient copper pairs that were never intended for the purpose. Don't people remember the old Cable vs. DSL commercials, where the DSL companies were showing cable customers furiously calling each other bandwidth hogs and telling them "log off!"
Cable could easily offer these rates by using the bandwidth currently occupied by their tv channels. If comcast had a unified digital backbone it wouldn't be a problem. It is only because they have monopoly power. I find it completely distasteful the number of laws that prevent other entities from passing laws in certain domains. Washington state has a law that prevents cities from legislating any form of rent control.
> I find it completely distasteful the number of laws that prevent other entities from passing laws in certain domains. Washington state has a law that prevents cities from legislating any form of rent control.
Are you serious? Rent control laws are awful, destroy the incentive to maintain housing stock or build new housing stock, and ultimately raise rents for everyone except the lucky few who can get rent controlled apartments.
Municipalities are just organs of the state, and state legislatures are entirely justified in preventing them from enacting myopic legislation.
I'm with you on rent control, but states banning municipalities from owning their own broadband networks is at least as myopic. Thea rgument is that publicly owned utilities crowd out competition, but we have abundant evidence for the argument that (unlike typical residential rent markets) utility markets are dominated by oligopolies who are easily able to engage in anti-competitive behaviors without having to form a cartel. Sure, in theory Comcast and AT&T might offer such competitive discounts/service upgrades that they cross some threshold and trigger an all-out price war that would be good for consumers, but I'd put the odds on that actually happening at close to zero.
Now I'm not such a big fan of municipal legislation - as a European, I think American democracy may be too decentralized and exacerbate the public choice problem, but I don't see a clear organizing principle that will only prevent economically bad legislation while allowing economically good legislation. The proposals to ban municipal or county internet services in North Carolina are just as mypopic as rent control laws in many Californian cities.
> Now I'm not such a big fan of municipal legislation - as a European, I think American democracy may be too decentralized and exacerbate the public choice problem, but I don't see a clear organizing principle that will only prevent economically bad legislation while allowing economically good legislation.
Operating utilities (especially last mile internet) at the municipal level makes much better sense than federalizing it. The transit market is sufficiently competitive that there is no need for the last mile operator to own a national network. Meanwhile with a national network operator, if the service is unusually terrible in a specific city there is nothing that city's residents can do about it because even when they're all in agreement they don't have enough votes to move the needle at the federal level.
And then you can have laboratories of democracy: If one city funds their network entirely through subscription fees and another funds it entirely through property taxes then maybe we discover that one works much better and other cities can start doing that.
Honestly I think you're way off base on rent control. I'd love to know what experiences you've had with rent control that have led you to such a negative POV? Perhaps living in Philly, as you profile mentions, has blunted you to some of the benefits of RC in housing-crunched cities.
The biggest fallacy I hear from people who don't live in one of these housing-crunched cities is the line.. everyone except the lucky few who can get rent controlled apartments. Rent control laws in SF, for example, are very inclusive. I mean, RC apartments can't be both rare AND pervasive enough to "destroy the incentive" to invest in housing, right? And every RC law I know of (which is only a few) has exemptions for new construction. In SF it's anything built after ~1980. In NYC I know it's back much further than that. So it doesn't do anything specifically to depress new construction.
Fundamentally, the question is do tenants have rights or are they at the mercy of the property rights of the building owner? In SF we believe tenants DO have rights. And you know what? RE investors here, where a rent controlled 2br apartment will set you back at least $3k a month in the city, are doing quite alright. They don't seem too desperately in need of expanded protections under the law.
everyone except the lucky few who can get
rent controlled apartments
No, that's not the problem. As you say, rent control can't be both pervasive and rare at the same time. The real problems with rent control are:
* It's hard to move. Say you change jobs and now work in a different part of the city, or your kids move out, or you'd like to move in with a partner. Normally one of the benefits of renting is that you can move, but with rent control that means switching to a place that's much more expensive.
* Landlords benefit from having their long-time tenants leave. Without rent control landlords love long term tenants because they're reliable and they mean less work finding people for the apartment. Rent control reverses this, and the landlord loses the incentive to upgrade the apartment and otherwise keep the tenant happy. Yes, the landlord is being a jerk when they do it, but sometimes the best fix for widespread jerk-ness is changing the incentives.
* It keeps out outsiders. People who want to live in your city enough that they're willing to give up their existing local connections and start over in your city are really valuable, and rent control means they pay a lot more than people who've lived in the city longer.
* It depresses new construction. Yes, I know new buildings aren't subject to rent control, but in a place where everything is already built out you can't put up a new building without taking down an old one. Rent control means you either have legal restrictions saying you can't replace buildings, or you have protests against people doing this and displacing existing tenants. But in a growing city, without new construction housing is going to get more and more expensive.
* Rent control puts off dealing with the problem of housing costs. If everyone in SF rented, and everyone had to pay market rates, then there would be the political backing for changes that would make housing more affordable. Rent control means that the long-time community members who would be best at this political change don't really feel much urgency because they have nice cheap places with rents set a decade or two ago. (But to be fair, homeownership is also a problem here, because rents and property values move together and homeowners want their property to become more valuable.)
RE investors here, where a rent controlled 2br apartment
will set you back at least $3k a month in the city, are
doing quite alright. They don't seem too desperately in
need of expanded protections under the law.
Rent control hurts renters. I don't care about real estate investors. That $3k isn't why we need rent control, it's because we have rent control.
Rent control reverses this, and the landlord loses the
incentive to upgrade the apartment and otherwise keep the
tenant happy.
I'll stop you right there; while that may be what happens in theory, it certainly hasn't seemed that way to me in practice.
Perhaps in a market where there is sufficient supply for demand, but in a market where demand is sufficiently high, many property owners don't do more than what is legally required and keep raising their rents.
You would not believe some of the dumps I've been shown by smiling realtors or owners that wanted thousands of dollars per month -- I'm talking about $2500+ a month for a two-bedroom apartment with boarded-over holes in Windows, holes in walls, a terrible smell and carpet that looks like it was last replaced decades ago.
Time after time, the pattern I've seen from experience in the Bay Area has been that owners will do whatever the market will bear -- in a market with severely constrained supply, the market is forced to bear quite a bit.
If everyone in SF rented, and everyone had to pay market rates, then there
would be the political backing for changes that would make housing more
affordable.
This is demonstrably not true in London where rent just keeps on going up and hardly any new housing is being built. For example, an MP has just resigned his £130k+ (total remuneration, that's $215'000) job because he can't afford to rent a 4 bedroom house anywhere near Westminster [1].
Sometimes the state just needs to step in and actually help people (by directly building high quality housing and selling it to people below market value). Currently if you buy a new build in London it is priced so high that you can expect it to be under water for a few years (the builders provide special mortgages because banks refuse to do them directly in many cases - the flats are not worth what they are being sold for).
You've clearly given this a lot of thought, but we are at odds with one another. I hate point-by-point refutation, but just a few thoughts I have...
All of your points are predicated on the notion that rents would decline if you eliminated RC. I think that's... hopeful. I mean, in some places you seem to suggest that landlords are beset by low rents (not improving the place because of it, hoping their longstanding renters move out). So certainly all of those landlords would raise rents. And non-RC units will, what? Reduce their prices to equalize the market? I doubt that. And now you have higher rents all over the city. And that's good for people? Because it might spur more development? But development is slow and favors up-market construction.
And blaming lack of development on the tenant-displacement laws that are part of rent control? And suggesting that rent control is the problem is a farce. If it's these laws that are the problem, why not write a post assailing THEM? And rent control laws are the reason people protest these developments? Really?
Being hard to move... ok... so go tell the family that you're raising their rent so that they'll get used to paying market rate. That way they'll be able to move anywhere they want! What a great deal for them!
I know for some reason you think rents will go down. That developers will build new buildings at high expense in this seismic-zone and then undercut the existing market (of old buildings with tiny rooms and few modern amenities), ignoring the fact that if they build up-market they can write leases at $50/sqft and have no trouble renting out the entire building well before it's finished.
Finally, if you actually read rent control laws, you'll see that they are not these cartoonish works of absurd leftist ideology, they do make carve-outs and exceptions for capital improvements and other large expenses to be passed-thru as bigger rent increases to the tenants. They are surely not perfect but property owners are a very powerful bloc and their voices are heard in the law IMO.
Yep totally serious. Cite your claims if you have them. Municipalities have plenty of competing laws to dis/incentivize housing stock. We have buildings that haven't been updated in 30-50 years raising the rate of a studio apartment from 850 to 1250 in the span of a month.
Libertarian nerds aren't the only people in society.
> Cable could easily offer these rates by using the bandwidth currently occupied by their tv channels.
Not exactly. It's true that a coax cable can, over distances of hundreds of metres, carry up to a frequency of 850 MHz at a fairly low attenuation and, at greater attenuation and/or ideal circumstances, up to 1.2 GHz in a useful capacity. This may translate, as per Shannon-Hartley and QAM into a raw bandwidth of multiple Gbps.
However, the topology of most FTTLA deployments doesn't imply that any individual customer is guaranteed this speed. In many deployments the LA - last amplifier - will be shared among hundreds of customers. In some cases, it may be only dozens. In some, it may be in the low thousands.
While the TV multiplexes are always going to take up a huge amount of space, depending on the deployment easily more than the majority, it's also becoming more common, for example, to dynamically switch multiplexes onto the spectrum on demand only.
If you have a healthy contention ratio, quality coax, few people on your LA, it's a good time of the day and you have a sensible provider then yes, it's possible to get a Gbps over coax. But the stars need to align to get that magical moment when with GPON or especially 10GPON it's basically a guaranteed thing.
Comcast isn't rolling out Gbps speeds because they have a monopoly power and want to artificially constrain total bandwidth (well, they kind of are but in a different way), but because it would imply rebuilding their FTTLA deployments deep into the field to basically take them halfway to FTTP/FTTH.
They're not offering Gbps because they're a monopoly and hate selling bandwidth first, they're not offering it because they're a monopoly and hate investing money in infrastructure. After that, it's definitely the hating bandwidth thing.
If it was the former, they'd be able do a far better job competing against municipal broadband deployments and Google Fiber than they are in everyone's mindshare.
So we pretty much agree then. They might not get to 1Gbps but the 50 Mbps I currently get (latency is horrible) is derived from a handful of channels. There is at least 600Mhz of more bandwidth sitting there. They could uncap the local network and allow other providers to tap into their last mile for a fee.
Comcast has their network reliably built out to 750 MHz. If you think there are 600 MHz unused on that, you're left with 150 MHz. Which is about enough space for about 20 NTSC channels and the FM band. I can assure you that there's basically no HFC/CATV provider in the world, never mind the US, with 600 MHz unused just sitting there.
I use the term "sitting there" very loosely, meaning TV channels that no-one in my neighborhood is watching. From my completely unscientific poll of people on my block that I interact with (selection bias) most do not use the channels, Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime, torrents, etc. The only person I know that actually uses a TV does so with terrestrial signals, but she is 5 std dev away from normal.
My ISP in Seattle is similarly equipped/price and it's awesome. No contract, no data caps, no problems. Support is great too, a real person who knows their stuff answers instead of a machine. I got set up in about 2 minutes from hello to loading my first web page.
My opinion of those companies is so poor at this point that my knee jerk reaction is to assume that whatever they want is the opposite of what's good for me.
I think by now it's hard to deny that Comcast & friends are stifling the progress of the US economy. The US is 31st worldwide on bandwidth speed (which really can't be explained by the US's size alone), consumers and businesses are complaining across the board about high pricing, bad service, and lack of options.
These companies do the country and its inhabitants a big disservice. I think the only reasonable option for the FCC and the government would be to increase competition, and remove existing roadblocks.
> The US is 31st worldwide on bandwidth speed (which really can't be explained by the US's size alone)
By what measure? Certainly not Akamai's (http://www.akamai.com/dl/akamai/akamai-soti-q114.pdf?WT.mc_i...). The top 10 U.S. states (much of which are in the Northeast and are Comcast territory), would appear comfortably in the top 10 of the global rankings (compare page 14-15 with page 18).
On Ookla's ranking, the U.S. is quite comparable to other big western countries (France, Germany, UK): http://www.netindex.com/download/allcountries. Compare the U.K., at 29 mbps, with comparably-dense northeastern states like New York (35 mbps), Massachusetts (33 mbps), etc.
Indeed, if you look at Ookla's rankings, you can see that density/wealth is a driver of internet speeds: http://www.netindex.com/download/2,1/United-States. Sparsely populated or poor states like Wyoming or West Virginia are down in the 15-20 mbps range. Rich, dense states like New York and New Jersey are at 35+. The U.K. and Germany are ~600 people per square mile, somewhere between New York State and Connecticut in density. The U.S. as a whole is only 90 people per square mile, and states like Wyoming are less than 10 people per square mile.
EDIT: I don't normally get annoyed at down votes, but I point these facts out every time someone repeats the trope "the U.S. lags in broadband speed!" but I never get a real answer, just down votes. The narrative that the U.S. lags behind in broadband speeds seems pretty central to criticisms of U.S. broadband policy, but the surveys I've seen that measure actual speeds (as opposed to advertised speeds), contradicts the assertion that the U.S. lags behind its counterparts. Can someone explain why they disagree with this analysis?
I have challenged you about this topic several times and backed it up.
I still think the best public data is the FCC international broadband survey and report which I have previously referenced. The Ookla "promise" figures can be used to validate the advertised speeds in that dataset versus actual speeds.
The issue is not merely of availability of very high speed (>25mbps) connections but its price, an area in which the FCC study demonstrates the US is not competitive. [This information cannot be obtained from the data sets you mentioned].
Moreover, most people, certainly most people here, don't care about nation-wide or even state-wide averages, and they distort the figures, in favor of the US no less (rural Wyoming probably has better access than rural Romania, nobody cares about either). What are the figures for the main urban centers? As a datapoint, based on the FCC data I don't think there is a major US city which is competitive with Warsaw, Poland except possibly for Austin due to Google Fiber.
What would help settle this issue is if someone like Netflix , Google or Dropbox incorporated a speed test (they don't seem to test beyond their stream rates currently) and made the granular data public.
Finally, it is anecdotal but I have found those who have lived in Scandinavia (or Eastern Europe) and the US say pretty consistently that the broadband is much worse in the latter.
I think the problem is that you compare population densities without comparing population distributions. The comparison with the Scandinavian countries is less unfair than you claim: "almost everyone lives on the coasts, unlike in the U.S." Over 50% of the US population lives in the largest 20 cities, and > 75% live in cities, mostly near coasts and rivers and the great lakes. The centers of population in the US are just as dense as the centers of population in Europe; the difference being that much of the interior of the US is almost empty as you mention.
The point is, there is not a legitimate "population density" excuse for NYC or LA or Dallas or Seattle or SF or any other major metropolitan area to have much slower internet speeds than cities like Seoul or Tokyo, or nations like Israel or Singapore.
Comparing population distributions makes the distinctions even more stark. 80% of the U.S. population lives in an "urban area" but that definition includes towns of 2,500 people. My friend in rural Georgia that has to drive several hours to get to an international airport technically lives in an "urban area" according to the Census Bureau.
The population of the 20 largest cities (New York down to Memphis) is 33 million, or about 10% of the U.S. population. 9% of Sweden's population lives in Stockholm, and the next 10% lives in the three largest cities after that.
Half the population might live in the 20 largest metro areas, but American metro areas are structured very differently than European cities. Stockholm's 900,000 people anchors a metro area of about 2.2 million people. That 40-50% ratio is typical of European cities, but atypical here in the U.S. Out of the largest 20 metro areas in the U.S., only San Diego has more than 40% of the overall metro population in the core city.
The population distribution in the U.S. is very different than in Europe, even if you restrict your attention to large metro areas. In the U.S., much more of the population lives in sprawling suburbs.
I live in Germany, 1.5h from the nearest International Airport – and I can get 200mbps for 80$ everywhere here, in some areas even more. And these speeds are provided by for-profit companies, not by municipalities.
The easy way to account for problems with the non-uniform definition of urban area is to consider population density. As I said in another comment there are several cities in the US that have a larger density (for whatever defined area) and larger population.
1) What's internet services like in the U.S. at large levels of granularity?
2) What's internet service like in the U.S. in specific cities?
Re: 1, I think the available data shows that, at a large granularity, we can say that, e.g. the average speeds in big European countries like the U.K. and Germany, factoring in their rural and urban areas together, are comparable to U.S. cities that have similar density, like New York or Connecticut. I think that shows that the overall structure of our telecom market is not inferior to that in the U.K. or Germany or France.
Re: 2, the question is why certain European cities have much faster internet than comparably dense U.S. cities. And I think the answer to that is the same as the answer to: why do certain European cities have much better public transit than comparably dense U.S. cities?
The status of Stockholm within the political structure of Sweden, or the status of Warsaw within the political structure of Poland is very different than the status of New York or Chicago within the political structure of the U.S. Large U.S. cities don't have the political pull to get national-level infrastructure investment.
I've never been to Sweden, but I'm familiar with Bangladesh, where Dhaka (10% of the national population), is the center of political life. I imagine Sweden similarly views the infrastructure of Stockholm as a point of national competitiveness. That's not at all true of American cities. The bulk of the polity of the U.S. views our large cities with skepticism and derision. Instead of viewing investment into urban infrastructure as a point of competitiveness, the heavily-suburban American polity views it as a boondoggle to get poor urban votes.
I guess part of it is that there's the idea here in the US that everyone should have access to certain things like power, water, telephone, etc. There are a lot of universal service laws about these utilities and the internet is fast becoming another utility.
Worse is that with the internet you have to be hooked up to the central grid or else it's useless. A farmer in a rural part of Kansas who's tired of not getting enough electricity from the electricity company (not a fast enough connection) and paying power overages (bandwidth caps) has alternatives like solar, or buying a generator or whatever.
But when your internet isn't fast enough you can't just install 10gig copper in your house and solve the problem. Install your 10gig until you've got terabits of bandwidth all over your farm; you still can't use it in what most people would call a meaningful way to interact with the rest of the world.
The idea that some states have good broadband and others have terrible broadband and that this is acceptable is an oft-argued point especially once you take population density into account. And it's not a bad argument. The economics are completely real.
But once you try and make an analogy to power or water or telephone it gets a little easier to see why some folks might be up in arms.
Without the internet you cannot function well in the economy - many many deals (including those for utility companies as well as retailers) are only available either online, or if you found them online and then mentioned them in the shop/on the phone.
The internet is an information network that gives consumers nearly perfect information about price; which translates to a much more ideal market (in economic jargon,) which is much more efficient. It is essentially a utility, if people without it are at a significant economic disadvantage like that.
You conveniently left out the words "high speed." Everything you talk about can be done just fine even on the mediocre broadband speeds that people in this thread are complaining about.
Let's see north east US, Main = 14 MBPS or 0.1 MBPS faster than Mongolia woot!
Comparing nations to states is ridiculous. However, if you read the report it's damming with faint praise. "the average connection speeds
seen in the United States and Mexico remained more than
twice as fast as the next fastest country"
Sure, if you discount everyone that's better than you then you can call yourself #1 at anything.
PS: Note this is of course average bandwidth which radically distorts the picture. One person nominally at 1GBPS and 10 people at 1MBPS is not the same as 11 people at 90+MBPS. For a more realistic vew you would average the square roots of bandwidth, but that makes US look bad.
Maine has a population density of 43 people per square mile, less than 1/10th the density of the U.K. or Germany. Maine is just Northeast's version of Montana.
Please stop bringing up this kind of measurement as if it were an excuse.
Sweden's population density is 21 inhabitants/km2 -- about 54/sq.mile. Finland's population density is lower. Both countries have much better, and cheaper Internet connections on offer than the US.
Agreed. However, having gone down that rabbit hole too often, the arguments devolve. One particularly puzzling exchange devolved from my position of "Japan and Korea has ultra high speed Internet, why doesn't the US?" to "population density" on the other side, then to this same argument about Sweden's density, then to "cultural homogeneity" on the other.
That made me pause. "Cultural homogeneity?" I asked. And, the debate devolved into how there are too many minorities in the US and because of that, no one in any position of power wanted to allow everyone universal access because minorities (which I assumed to be Blacks, Mexicans, Asians, etc.) would need too many handouts to get the same speed, which no one would want to pay for. But if it were all-white like Sweden or all-Japanese, etc. it would be fine because it's "for the good of the people".
I just kinda tuned out after that argument. That debate did make strike a nerve, though. I wonder how much "cultural heterogeneity" actually _does_ come into play rather than the tired "population density" argument.
Sweden and Finland are only sparsely populated on paper. Nearly 75% of Sweden lives along the coast, compared to only 40% of the U.S. 18% of Swedes live in the country's four largest cities, versus only 5% of Americans.
Let's see, Washington DC has a population density ~10 times that of Japan. Guess which has the faster Internet speeds? As an independent state that have no need to subsidize anyone in low population areas yet the Internet is just not that fast.
Population density is something of a misnomer as for example parks significantly lower population density but there basicly irrelevant when building a network.
You can't compare an urban city with a whole country. Japan's landmass includes farm land, mountains and shit.
Washington, DC isn't very dense for the core of a city. There aren't any high rises. Most of the city is single family homes and 3 story walk up apartments.
I live in Arlington, VA which used to be part of DC. I get Verizon Fios. I get 75/75 and cable tv for 80 a month. It's not the dark ages.
I can't think of any place that I've lived in the US which has consistently worse broadband performance than DC and Northern Virginia. This is especially sad given Northern Virginia's density of large tech companies and history as 'internet alley'[1].
Ookla lists the US as #26. Akamai does not rank the US as a country.
But stifling the economy is not only a matter of speed. It's also a matter of how much you pay for that speed. Let me explain. I am a Comcast customer. When I look at a Netflix movie, Comcast gets money from three sources for that movie: my monthly subscription, the 200% overage fee that I pay, because - basically - I watch Neflix instead of one of the crappy channels that come with my subscription, and from Neflix.
The fact that Comcast gets paid three times makes internet pretty expensive for me. Because Netflix will have no choice but increasing their subscription costs.
A single "average" value can be misleading, the options in the UK have quite big speed jumps once you go beyond ADSL+, the figure you quote will be made up of x number of customers on ~40 mbps and y number on ~80 mbps.
>The US is 31st worldwide on bandwidth speed (which really can't be explained by the US's size alone)
So? That's like saying the US is 31st on average car speed. Very few people need a car that goes more than 70mph, just like very few people need an internet connection that goes faster than "can stream HD video".
It's only when you see a side-by-side comparison daily does it resonate how slow our interwebs are.
Example, every time I log into VPN I barf a little knowing that for various reason I need to use US servers, but that practically every random smaller nation is blowing us away...
This is a really good example of how lobbying works. On one hand, these telecom companies have a clear interest in not having to "compete" with cheap, publicly funded broadband. On the other hand, their position just happens to tie in with a broader political debate: states and municipalities are on the verge of bankruptcy, and municipal infrastructure projects are a disaster outside a few well-managed cities like NYC. The telcos aren't incorrect in saying that these sorts of projects often turn into boondoggles, or disproportionately benefit parts of the population,[1] or cost too much and end up underfunded and poorly maintained in the future.
With these lobbying measures, the telcos can tie something that benefits them to a position (municipal infrastructure projects), that many people oppose for entirely different reasons.
[1] It is worth noting that only 1/3 of adults 65+ subscribe to broadband at home, and that many poor people access the internet through libraries or cellular phones instead of home computers.
Yeah, but what does that have to do with their right to build out these projects according to the FCC? The central issue is that the telecoms are lobbying the telecom regulator to prevent municipalities from directly competing because it would be bad for the telecoms.
I don't see the relevance of arguing that the FCC should prevent municipal broadband projects on the grounds that they are a financial boondoggle for the municipalities involved. Plenty of companies in regulated industries fail to generate enough cash flow to stay open yet a company's balance sheet remains unregulated. To suggest that the FCC has any responsibility for a municipality's balance sheet would be quite an expansion of regulatory jurisdiction, to say the least.
I certainly hope that someone at the FCC reads the fiscal arguments in the same way, or else we're really screwed.
Honest question, does your repeated support of the cable companies' excuses have anything to do with your living in Philadelphia (per your profile) near Comcast HQ?
I was in Philadelphia for a one year appointment to work for the federal court here. I have no personal affiliation with Comcast. As for my views favoring cable companies, it's because I'm a disgruntled urbanist. If you think Verizon or Comcast are bad, wait till your internet service becomes the subject of the absolute batshit insanity of American municipal politics.
> or disproportionately benefit parts of the population
Wouldn't more people be able to afford internet access under this municipal connection's pricing than under Comcast/Verizon/Time Warner/etc? I have trouble understanding how that would be a disproportionate benefit.
It disproportionately benefits those who have and use home computers. Almost everyone has a cell phone, but many poor or older people don't have home computers.
Why do you oppose federalism so? If the rustic uneducated hicks of Chattanooga want to handle internet service differently than the brilliant elites of Philadelphia, in this system they're supposed to be free to do so. Perhaps eventually it will be more clear that Chattanooga has better ideas and policies than the geniuses in the telcos' pocket have. Even then, a federalist would not suggest laws enforcing the new consensus.
The American Society of Civil Engineers says that U.S. infrastructure is underfunded to the tune of $3.6 trillion: http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org. People like to compare municipal broadband to municipal water, but the ASCE gives our water and wastewater systems a grade of 'D'.
I defend NYC because as corrupt as it may be, over the last 20-30 years it has a pretty good record of getting municipal projects done. It has functioning subway, regional rail, etc. It has invested in protecting its water sources, etc.
Most American cities have not done as well as NYC in that regard. E.g. Atlanta's ancient sewer system dumps untreated waste into the city's main river after every heavy rain, and the city's water supply is entirely at the mercy of the water levels in Lake Lanier. After a drought a few years ago, the city came this close to running out of water.
This is not voodoo economics. In the absence of profit motive, you need social consensus and a forward-looking bureaucracy to ensure that public infrastructure receives adequate funding. Most American cities do not have either.
> you need social consensus and a forward-looking bureaucracy to ensure that public infrastructure receives adequate funding. Most American cities do not have either.
Absolutely, because it's trivially easy for a somewhat small minority to simply stand around and say "nope, nope, nope, not gonna do any of that" and then retort "why are all of our bridges falling down around our ears?" 10 years hasn't changed anybody's mind, so why not build some Internet connectivity to let people work from home?
Poorly-planned infrastructure can lead to a lot of red ink, but it seems to me that the leading cause of bleeding municipal balance sheets is underfunded pension obligations.
> “The success of public broadband is a mixed record, with numerous examples of failures,” USTelecom said in a blog post. “With state taxpayers on the financial hook when a municipal broadband network goes under, it is entirely reasonable for state legislatures to be cautious in limiting or even prohibiting that activity.”
That's the cable companies for you - always looking out for the consumer. It's almost as if they see themselves as a public utility.
Nothing, not even the risk of municipal-infrastructure-shennigans-leading-to-disaster, should stand in the way of more competition entering the ISP market. Google Fiber is awesome and all but they're pretty much the only company big enough to tackle large-scale rollouts nationally. These smaller, municipal efforts have much lower barriers and will ultimately provide the market the kind of competitive landscape it needs to begin improving.
Big telcos lobby for laws to make it illegal, e.g. Louisiana 844.42 [1]:
"To ensure that cable television services and telecommunications and advanced services are provided through fair competition [...]"
Advanced services are defined in 844.43 [2] to mean Internet that's faster than 144 kilobits per second.
This means that the wifi in MSY (New Orlean's airport, a government facility) is utterly unusable.
I can understand the narrative: having government skim the good stuff is a bad deal for corporations since government can do things corporations can't (e.g., taxes, zoning, land use permits, seize land). Presumably, this discourages corporations from providing comprehensive services since they cannot subsidize poorly-performing areas with great performing areas. I'm skeptical that that's a valid reason to have such a law, but c'est la vie.
> I can understand the narrative: having government skim the good stuff is a bad deal for corporations since government can do things corporations can't (e.g., taxes, zoning, land use permits, seize land). Presumably, this discourages corporations from providing comprehensive services since they cannot subsidize poorly-performing areas with great performing areas.
The think I can't understand is why we should care. If the government is providing reliable gigabit fiber at a reasonable price, who cares if Comcast can't profitably offer service in the same geography? If the city is doing a good job then you don't need them. Meanwhile if the city does a poor job then Comcast will have no trouble providing better service and winning all the customers, right?
Its illegal in many states to do this, including north carolina since Wilson, NC turned to be successful. TWC lobbied and got new laws passed to prevent other cities to do the same. Wilson, NC got an exemption because they aleady built the infrastructure.
it may already be too late for your city. often when cable companies wire up a town, they offer free access to gov and school buildings in return for exclusive development rights. no one can compete with them, including the town itself.
That happened in the town where I grew up. My parents still cannot get proper broadband. There is a cable company in the town and they have one of these exclusivity agreements with the county.
However, they refuse to provide broadband access to the entire county. It is quite frustrating.
Law of unintended consequences. Cable giants lobby to abolish net neutrality and for the FCC to not designate Internet service as a common carrier. Consequently other people band together to provide their own service.
Now the cable giants, one pure local geographic monopoly, lobby to control municipal remediation of the crappy service. The hypocrisy is, unfortunately, unsurprising.
there was a website posted to HN a while ago that described the hurdles for municipal fiber in each state, i don't have the link any more, but it seems very relevant to this discussion
I think state sanctioned monopolies are _probably_ ok if regulated well. Natural Gas falls in that category here and I think they do a pretty good job. I'd say Comcast falls into state sanctioned monopoly-power-abuse which is different.
> I think state sanctioned monopolies are _probably_ ok if regulated well. Natural Gas falls in that category here and I think they do a pretty good job.
How would you ever know since they literally have no competition?
Sure it's easy for a municipal ISP to have "cheap" rates when you consider that they are taxing authorities and don't have to run a profit. How exactly would this service be put into place? It would take a massive capital investment by the municipality, full of opportunities for fraud. I live in a fairly small, highly liberal town and yet in the past few years we've had financial scandal after financial scandal, from city staffers abusing credit cards to money losing investments in everything from technology parks to parking garages to outright fraud by contractors with inside partners in the government.
And what does your typical city council know about running an ISP business? Nothing. Where I live, they can't even stay ahead of the pothole repair. It takes a team of a dozen laborers a month to install a block of sidewalk. The incompetence and inefficiency is just staggering. I'm simply unwilling to believe that they would do any better trying to offer internet service. I also don't buy the arugment that municipalites provide better "utility" services than businesses can. My parents lived in a neighborhood with poor water pressure for nearly two decades before the city finally got around to installing a booster pump station that resolved the problem.
I'm not in favor of the status quo either. Regulated monopolies have given us the current mess with indifferent and expensive providers, product packaging that forces you to buy services you don't want, and little competition.
Remove the monopolies. Let providers provide backbone, last mile, or both. Let them buy and sell bandwidth in bulk, and compete over customers from house to house. I don't see anything else that can possibly resolve the problem.
The implication is that the municipals are not just "non profit", but operating at a (significant) loss. Is this "funded by taxes" aspect usually true?
At least for the case of the Sacramento area electrical company, no. PG&E is substantially more expensive, although I don't know how far-flung rural distribution is funded - by all rate payers, or if there is some kind of govt subsidy to encourage rural distribution. (by rural, I don't mean the parts of Yolo and El Dorado counties that are 10 to 15 miles outside of Sacramento county, I mean areas like the Sierra and Siskiyou mountains)
Exactly. Why, as a consumer, do I care that Comcast needs to keep its shareholders satisfied by generating profits? If that need drives them to provide better QoS at lower cost than a municipal option, then great. If it doesn't, then that's their problem.
While I don't really disagree with most of your above points, I will say that when it works (Chattanooga) it really is fantastic. Their internet arm is already profitable all on its own and they've apparently leveraged it to MASSIVELY improve the quality of their electric grid as well. If there's a better ISP anywhere else in the US I'd love to hear about them since I currently believe they do not exist.
I remember the day in US when the consumer was king, and its interests were second to all others (govt, big business, etc). Sadly that day has passed. Without getting too political, the root cause is unrestrained campaign giving.
It's interesting that most people (at least around here) point to unrestrained campaign giving, rather than the fact that government even has the regulatory authority to do what it does. Of course, we have both, and stopping either one would in theory stop the other, but it's interesting that people always seem to point exclusively at one or the other. I wonder if there's some correlation between what angle people take and what their broader political leanings are.
I remember 30 years ago in the UK being envious of US telecom regulation. The US had free local calls - unheard of in the UK then and you could connect modems to the phone line. In the UK that was banned as the lines were all owned by the government monopoly and could not be touched so you had to put an acoustic coupler on the phone handset, believe it or not. Now the UK surprisingly seems to have better telecom regs than the US.
Are you sure the handset-suction-cup thing wasn't just the average technology 30 years ago? Because while I was too young to know about that, I distinctly remember seeing it in use here in USA at that time.
Atleast in areas where the laws permit, why isn't a competitor, e.g. Google Fiber, not taking advantage of this clearly prevalent customer dissatisfaction with Comcast/TWC etc?
Also, some people seem to say that laying Fiber/infrastructure has costs which may be the reason. Then what happened to the wireless technologies which were presented as options for covering a city with connectivity? There was so much chatter about Wi-Max and such technologies - why are they are not being researched/refined/pushed? One of the best example of the vast advantage of penetration of wireless vs wired in terms of speed of deployment and impact is in India - especially rural areas where one can't expect clean drinking water but the cellphone signal is strong. Everytime somebody complains that in smaller towns in US that Comcast is the only choice in such places due to their infrastructure, assuming there are no laws prohibiting wireless competition, wireless should be the best option, no? So what am I missing (seriously)?
Well for one thing, there's a big difference between a 9.6kbps cellphone voice call (and thus data channel) and 20 mbps+ data.
Wireless sucks. It is a bad solution to everything except where some much larger problem exists (i.e. you are on a plane).
Wireless seems good in India because the networks are not highly demanded - and are expensive to boot so volume is managed. Wireless seems to grow quickly because you throw up a tower and declare "50,000 people now have access!", and telephone service is still kind of a big deal.
But that's all you get from it. You can't provide a 20mbps pipe to those 50,000 people - not even close.
But India is poverty stricken. The electricity grid is bad. And there's the lawlessness that comes with poverty (heard of copper thieves?). Wireless towers are easy central locations to power and protect. Thousands of miles of copper or fiber is not.
I'm all for people owning their own last mile for all kinds of services, if that's what they wish to do. Cooperatives are a great thing.
And the marketplace where these coops buy their internet access, electricity or water can still be competitive. It would actually be MORE competitive than the monopolies handed out by governments that you cannot easily leave.
And the decision to grant such a monopoly or revoke or allow an increase would not be in hands of the few. It would be in many different collections of hands and be much harder to pay off all those hands for some sweetheart deal.
I'm no expert, but I think it would be a shame if small struggling ISPs get the short end of the stick. It's hard for me to make a judgement on this specifically.
OT: this post is the 4th result in Google. Comment on HN indexed within 35 minutes. Crazy.
It kind of sucks for companies like that, but competition is good.
In an ideal situation you'd have "the people" own the pipes which they then rent at cost to commercial providers. In practice this would usually be via local government, but I'd prefer it via some kind of mutual society (where residents own a share, is open only to residents, and which is sold along with the property).
The UK has a variation of this model, called "local loop unbundling" (http://www.openreach.co.uk/orpg/home/products/llu/llu.do). The infra was originally built by the state telco BT, which was then privatized. To create competition they introduced LLU, which forced BT to allow competition access to the pipes.
Two points - someone has to maintain the network; holes need digging, kit needs buying, upgrading and monitoring. This cannot be free. It could be a government utility, but paying for it would then come out of taxes and the choice would be between paying for that, aircraft carriers or incubators.
Second, networks are designed to deliver different things at different price points. Running a web service at the end of a residential connection does not make economic sense compared to running it in a datacentre connected directly to a peering point on 40gig-e.
I did a quick search to see pricing for EPB's internet service and wow is it cheap[1]. The two plans listed on the site are 100 Mbps for $57.99/mo or 1Gpbs $69.99/mo. Oh and both plans are symmetric so you get that for upload as well.
I don't know of any city where the local cable co offers anything like that, let alone at those price points. No wonder they want to block this through legislation; competing in the market would not be pleasant for them.
[1]: https://epbfi.com/internet/