[ams6110]

Ugh. The answer is not municipally owned ISPs.

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.

[wnevets]

> 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.

why is this a bad thing?

[Roboprog]

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)

[jasonwocky]

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.

[Omniusaspirer]

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.

[ma2rten]

Google Fiber has Gigabit internet for $70.

[sandstrom]

Without contesting the rest of your argument, I'd argue that these rates are not unreasonable or artificially low.

I pay $42 for 100 Mbit (symmetric, fiber), from a large Swedish ISP (without any government/taxpayer funding).

I think the issue in the US is that there is too much monopoly (and oligopoly), with ISPs lobbying [i.e. corruption] instead of competition.