32 Cities Want To Challenge Big Telecom, Build Their Own Gigabit Networks 175
Jason Koebler writes: More than two dozen cities in 19 states announced today that they're sick of big telecom skipping them over for internet infrastructure upgrades and would like to build gigabit fiber networks themselves and help other cities follow their lead. The Next Century Cities coalition, which includes a couple cities that already have gigabit fiber internet for their residents, was devised to help communities who want to build their own broadband networks navigate logistical and legal challenges to doing so.
'Bout time (Score:5, Insightful)
Fuck Comcast, Time Warner, and AT&T
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Don't blame them. Blame the people who take their money. You have a chance to vote them out very soon. Go for it...
Re:'Bout time (Score:4, Interesting)
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The problem is that third parties do not represent the majority of the country and likely a minority of any given area.
I used to think the problem with third parties was that they do not run for local offices and only focus on national offices unlesd it is a plant designed to siphon votes from a particular canditate in order to let a less desirable one get elected. But after looking around a bit, i have concluded that the honest reality is that third parties simply do not have much support. I tend to disagr
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The problem is that third parties do not represent the majority of the country and likely a minority of any given area.
That's not the problem. Neither do the other two parties and they do fine.
I used to think the problem with third parties was that they do not run for local offices and only focus on national offices unlesd it is a plant designed to siphon votes from a particular canditate in order to let a less desirable one get elected. But after looking around a bit, i have concluded that the honest reality is that third parties simply do not have much support. I tend to disagree with less on issues from a candidate with a big party than i disagree with on with the closest counter part third party. Many people feel the same at least on a local level and a third party is a waste on the national level because they will have to either caucus with a big party or fight both of them and end up being ignored.
Third parties simply are not big tent parties and are likely better off running as one of the big parties through the primary process. An example of this is the tea parties (yes, there are more than one).
Now if you disagree, before replying, think about how the tea party republicans have been treated and explain how any third party trying to do something without even partial support of a big party would do any better.
The problem is that you're (and the rest of us) voting for the two candidates that the "Lesters [lessig.org]" have picked for us to vote on. The game is rigged.
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Actually, the two parties do represent the people and they do it quite well. They mostly do it on the local and state level. There are 108 republicans and 55 democrats in office in Ohio without even getting into the county and city data. The vast exposure most people have with the two parties is on the state and loca
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Well... while I'm not one for hate and vitriol like most of the politically oriented people out there (it seems), I sit back and watch and: 1) I agree with the other response that neither of the two major parties actually represent a majority of anybody but politicians and businesses, and 2) I thought the tea party was an interesting idea until they became right wing on steroids. I thought they were interesting until they started campaigning against abortion, and inviting people like Sarah Pailin to speak
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There are a lot more offices than the federal ones. When you start looking at the state and local ones, you see where they do actually represent the people. But the third parties seem to just grab a handful of attention here a
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Not true.
There are Republicans and Democrats in the primaries that are not in pockets. Difficult for them to win though, as those pockets are where the majority of campaign funds are. Pretty much the same as you point out for third parties.
Your chances of getting a good guy (or gal) elected, are better for one of the two real parties in the primaries, rather than a third party in the general election.
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Of course not. He's blaming the cheaters for rigging the game.
and the cities are... (Score:5, Informative)
for those who are curious, the cities are:
Ammon, ID
Auburn, IN
Austin, TX
Boston, MA
Centennial, CO
Champaign, IL
Chattanooga, TN
Clarksville, TN
Jackson, TN
Kansas City, KS
Kansas City, MO
Lafayette, LA
Leverett, MA
Louisville, KY
Montrose, CO
Morristown, TN
Mount Vernon, WA
Palo Alto, CA
Ponca City, OK
Portland, OR
Raleigh, NC
Rockport, ME
San Antonio, TX
Sandy, OR
Santa Cruz County, CA
Santa Monica, CA
South Portland, ME
Urbana, IL
Westminster, MD
Wilson, NC
Winthrop, MN
Re:and the cities are... (Score:5, Insightful)
WARNING. WARNING. Make sure ISPs get classified as common carriers before your city takes over as your ISP.
City council will vote to fuck you over if they're not required to be common carriers.
e.g. "Woah. We can add $10 billion to the annual city budget if we inject ads and block encryption. All in favor? ... Passed by unanimous vote."
At least (Score:2)
At least if your City does that however, presumably that would go towards the tax base, and would help them manage their taxes better or be able to lower them, rather than just going to some faceless corporate coffers.
Which is to say, it isn't ideal, but presumably at least the local users might reap some benefit out of it at least.
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"who they treat as a virtual enemy, every time Stanford wants to build *anything*"
As someone who lives in University City, MO home of Washington University I can understand the ire placed on universities.
They are non profit organizations that makes massive profits and buy up all the land and houses that would be taxed and then remove them from the tax pool. In University City over 15% of the land is owned by a university that makes 2.1 billion dollars a year in profit, but refuses to pay taxes which strang
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Bah, none in my areas. :(
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"I'm not fat. I'm big boned."
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Aren't there a lot of rules and laws to to make this difficult these days though?
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Champaign and Urbana are the same system, working also with the University of Illinois.
They have the core network in place, City, schools, some businesses, and some under-served neighborhoods (using a federal grant), but progress in connecting other neighborhoods has been very slow. They're now working with another area company to install neighborhoods, but no good indication of how fast it will go. They've made some commitments, but only if enough houses in each neighborhood sign up.
The biggest problem I
So Sad (Score:2)
Santa Cruz was one of the earlier cities on the internet, thanks to UCSC. Today, access is ass. And they have one of the highest costs of living in the nation. It's often been one of the most-connected cities in the USA, for example it was part of Cricket territory. But today it's ass.
Too bad they couldn't give a rat's ass while I still lived there. The local ISPs are mostly awful. Even the ones that don't suck are slow, slow, slow.
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Have fun running fiber to someone in Bonny Doon, Corralitos or the Aptos hills.
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Well, it isn't SC, It's SC County...
Have fun running fiber to someone in Bonny Doon, Corralitos or the Aptos hills.
Yeah well, nobody should expect 100% coverage.
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Really. That is exactly what people expect. We turned our health care insurance on its head because 90-96% coverage was inadequate.
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We turned our health care insurance on its head because 90-96% coverage was inadequate.
My pre-obamacare insurance was useless. There were zero providers in my area accepting new patients. I had 0% coverage. So if I have useless coverage now, at least nothing is worse.
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Santa Cruz was one of the earlier cities on the internet, thanks to UCSC. Today, access is ass. And they have one of the highest costs of living in the nation. It's often been one of the most-connected cities in the USA, for example it was part of Cricket territory. But today it's ass.
Too bad they couldn't give a rat's ass while I still lived there. The local ISPs are mostly awful. Even the ones that don't suck are slow, slow, slow.
What do you have against ass?
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Kansas City? The ones that already have Google Fiber? I can't even imagine one provider at Gigabit speeds where I'm at. Competitors at that speed? Unbelievable.
Re:and the cities are... (Score:5, Informative)
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It is interesting to note that the EPB (which runs "the Gig") can be as corrupt as any of the telecom/cable monopolists in their own little way.
Citation (or explanation) please?
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There really are valid reasons not to vote, first getting registered to vote is a matter of public record, so every whacko can get your address, not good for people who have been stalked, testified in some trials or are controversial public figures.
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Re:'Bout time (Score:5, Insightful)
These cities should build the infrastructure, focus on the infrastructure and then allow service providers to compete with each other for service. Essentially, government deals with infrastructure since they are generally good with that and private business on the sevice, since they are generally good with that when there is healthy competition.
Re:'Bout time (Score:5, Insightful)
I love it, private business has fucked you guys so bad that a social enterprise has cropped up to fix the problem. And the first thing you think of is to give that social enterprise back to the same businesses that just completely fucked you.
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Private industries continual shift of the service goal posts. Originally government, booked to the hour, sometimes a little early or late and everyone complained. Private industry takes over, booked to within two hours, people complained louder. That soon changed booked morning or afternoon and people complained even louder. Then it went to booked for sometime on a day, a bit of the old, ' screw you', to the complainers and then spend up big on advertising saying how great service is, so much better than t
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I love it, private business has fucked you guys so bad that a social enterprise has cropped up to fix the problem. And the first thing you think of is to give that social enterprise back to the same businesses that just completely fucked you.
What country are you in? The system he described is basically the one used in Australia and I'm pretty sure several parts of Europe.
You have a wholesaler who is either government owned or is a government regulated monopoly with legislated fixed prices which sells access to ISPs who use the infrastructure to provide competing services; the competition keeps prices low, stops them from fucking with the service (fast lane bullshit) and provides a variety of 'value-adds' to choose from without having to go and
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No, the telcoms infrastructure is privately owned in Australia, mainly telstra, with crap HFC from Optus. I'd like to saw we have 3rd world broadband with 1st world pricing, but in reality a lot of third world countries have much better broadband and our picing is some of the most expensive in the world.
You might be thinking of our energy grid, which in most states is publically owned, with private companies reselling it. Thats been a resounduing success with record profits for the shareholders and power bi
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The answer to extremism is rarely extremism in the opposite direction.
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Not "give back", "allow access". I have no problem with the cable company offering their services. My problem is with nobody else being able to offer services because they can't afford to run a new set of wires. Imho, the times when the incumbent wire-owner has been required to allow other folks to supply services and charge reasonable rates (dial up ISPs and non-fastlaned broadband are the prime examples) were the heyday of the internet.
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No need for the anti-capitalism rant.
In general the parent is right. The governments generally are better for Infrastructure based jobs, Because an infrastructure benefits all people. Corporations when left to do infrastructure are not as good as it, because they need to be large enough to maintain a wide area, and having remote areas being far more expensive to maintain. Meaning less dense area get extremely expensive.
The government getting funding via Taxes means everyone is a customer so everyone is pay
It's the city streets model (Score:2)
The city builds the streets but for the most part doesn't provide the services that use the streets.
I don't see why municipal networks need to be any different -- they can let third parties sell networking services from Internet to TV to site-site connectivity. They could even let out bids for infrastructure management of the physical network.
Since government is government, you'll end up with something like public transportation, a low-cost subsidized Internet access but I would think that would be just a
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Private companies wouldn't be using it for free. They would need to lease out usage, but that wouldn't be an exclusive lease. When people were still using dial-up modems there was more competition, so this would be an attempt to recreate something that allows for this. Line sharing is really necessary for something healthy and focusing on innovation. BTW always jealous of France's http://free.fr/ [free.fr]
What we have now is broken, so it is time to come up with a model that will help foster competition.
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Re:'Bout time (Score:4, Interesting)
Irrelevant since these big private companies already do that.
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Comcast, Time Warner, and AT&T had nothing to do with ensuring it failed.
Verizon is far more evil than Comcast or Time Warner. They've been at it longer and are more entrenched and subtle. They're the phone company after all.
Everyone loves to hate the cable company. The phone company is so good at fucking you over, most have no idea how badly they've been screwed.
I'll take Comcast any day over Verizon. I caught Verizon padd
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+5 "User mentions Public Utility Commission when posting grievances about local utility"
It's a new option for mods
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Old news. 15 years ago Philadelphia was trying to build out public WiFi.
Comcast, Time Warner, and AT&T had nothing to do with ensuring it failed.
Verizon is far more evil than Comcast or Time Warner. They've been at it longer and are more entrenched and subtle. They're the phone company after all.
"We don't care, we don't have to. We're The Phone Company." [youtube.com]
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Boston (Score:2)
Re:Boston (Score:5, Informative)
It gets better as sections of Boston get FIOS from Verizon. but for reasons known only to monopolies Verzion stopped rolling out new FIOS in Boston. I guess the market isn't big enough for them.
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I live in an apartment complex outside of Boston. FIOS is already wired down the street I live on. When I asked Verizon about FIOS, they told me that in order to offer it in my building, the building owners would have to pay to wire it and they'd have to get half the units in the building to sign up ahead of time.
Needless to say, I'm still on Comcast.
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Re:Boston (Score:5, Interesting)
I met the VP in charge of FIOS. I point blank asked him. It came from above his pay grade. The irony is he gets AT&T DSL at his house and they have no plans to expand uverse there.
Until the current top CEO is gone FIOS is dead in the water. He came up thru the ranks of Verizon wireless and thinks charging people more for less service is a totally awesome idea. They are busy reneging on every deal they made with every municipality they promised to roll it out to. Your politicians (on both sides of the isle) are all well bought and paid for and there is not a thing you can do about it.
Re:Boston (Score:5, Insightful)
Verizon isn't seeing the return on capital for FIOS; that is well known. They think they can increase subscriber rates in areas they have covered and recover the capital that way.
What they completely miss is the fact that the use-cases that will drive more valuable service plans only exist when ~gigabit networks are available everywhere.
The problem I see with either approach is that business internet costs aren't going down fast enough to push that evolution. You get better speeds for less in a co-lo, but that doesn't help enough if you use a single office location.
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Deploying in a market is more likely a 20-year payback, and incremental customers are a 2-year payback. The benefit to Verizon is in deprecating copper infrastructure, which has high maintenance costs due to age, but overlaying new fiber pathways on the existing copper pathways is expensive.
They want to hit markets where they can have an incremental income from FIOS, and where the chances of competition are low. That means prioritizing affluent communities that have the wherewithal to create alternatives
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Presumed non-compete agreement (Score:2)
Just for reference, here's an interesting bit of news from a few years ago that never seemed to get much notice, but which I think may have something to do with FIOS seemingly grinding to a halt: https://gigaom.com/2011/12/02/... [gigaom.com]
Basically, it seems to basically boil down to a secret non-compete agreement between the established wireless and wired internet providers to not invade each others markets with new competition.
Re:Where is the list? (Score:4, Informative)
Right here [nextcenturycities.org], the list is located on the side of that page. I have JavaScript disabled as well, but I still found it in the menu at the top of each page.
Anyway, the full list:
Ammon, ID
Auburn, IN
Austin, TX
Boston, MA
Centennial, CO
Champaign, IL
Chattanooga, TN
Clarksville, TN
Jackson, TN
Kansas City, KS
Kansas City, MO
Lafayette, LA
Leverett, MA
Louisville, KY
Montrose, CO
Morristown, TN
Mount Vernon, WA
Palo Alto, CA
Ponca City, OK
Portland, OR
Raleigh, NC
Rockport, ME
San Antonio, TX
Sandy, OR
Santa Cruz County, CA
Santa Monica, CA
South Portland, ME
Urbana, IL
Westminster, MD
Wilson, NC
Winthrop, MN
Hey Verizon, can you hear us NOW! (Score:5, Insightful)
Nice to see cities stepping up to build better network infrastructure
And if we can hold onto Net Neutrality, even better.
the plan (Score:2)
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True that it won't be the 1st time something like that has happened but at least the damn thing will get built and there's a chance that clauses on the sale can be used to make sure that whichever company ends up owning it must provide minimum levels of service, periodic upgrades, etc or it reverts to the public for a set price.
Re:Hey Verizon, can you hear us NOW! (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmm, well sometimes you need a little socialism to keep the capitalists in line.
Re: Hey Verizon, can you hear us NOW! (Score:2, Insightful)
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Re:Hey Verizon, can you hear us NOW! (Score:5, Informative)
It's already socialism, because the big Telcos and cable providers have a government-protected monopoly.
I like the "socialism" where the cities build some public infrastructure a little better. As long as they aren't going to start attempting to regulate content.
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Good point about the content regulation. I suspect some of the "think of the children" crowd will push for that.
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It's already socialism, because the big Telcos and cable providers have a government-protected monopoly.
No. That is closer to Fascism.
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Can someone explain how either of these scenarios are capitalist?
Re:Hey Verizon, can you hear us NOW! (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, the last mile tends to be a natural monopoly, as far as municipal planners are concerned. They don't want companies to come in and compete over the easiest to serve neighborhoods, and leave people in less dense areas out of luck. Planners like that often lose votes. So they have to make a company agree to cover everyone, and then make sure no competitor comes in and serves just the easy areas. See? It just ends up being a monopoly.
So rather than have some new private company come in and take over the monopoly, cities are just deciding to provide services themselves. They do it with roads, sewers, water, and other utilities. Why not internet? You need right of ways, permits, etc. But you don't need to be a genius entrepeneur to run fiber and connect people to the Internet.
Re:Hey Verizon, can you hear us NOW! (Score:5, Interesting)
Indeed, I'm mostly a libertarian and I view this as not really any different than a neighborhood, town, or city getting together and forming a cooperative. My reaction is 'good on them! Fie on established businesses that are failing to meet demands'.
Re:Hey Verizon, can you hear us NOW! (Score:5, Interesting)
The last mile is really a logistical problem. The current US system is quite problematic. In many cases whoever owns the last mile provides the service and you basically have no choice.
In contrast, I like the German system. Whoever owns the last mile, is forced by law to lease it at a reasonable price. The result is that you have real competition with dozen of telephone, internet, cable, gas and electricity providers. This is an almost perfect win-win system. The people owning the last mile infrastructure have an incentive to keep it running and upgrading it or else they will lose their income (penalties, incensed fees for better service, government subsidies) and the service providers can reach a large volume of people. This only mildly fails for rural areas, but here subsides are used to alleviate the problem. The other mild problem that established players (e.g. Deutsche Telekom) can rest on their laurels of existing infrastructure and provide crappy and overpriced service, but fixes itself in the long run.
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The US system works exactly like the German system, as long as you are only dealing with voice or T1s. Unfortunately the laws have not been updated to apply to IP, Video, or cable and fiber delivery for that matter.
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It's interesting how it is always "Socialism vs Capitalism", with most people divided into two camps, and very few saying that one or the other migh be better depending on circumstances.
I like capitalism when there's a natural way that businesses can compete. For example, adjacent coffee shops might compete on a number of parameters like price, quality, speed of service, etc. It is possible to establish a new coffee shop in an area that already has one, if you can compete on at least one of theres parameter
Really pisses me off! (Score:5, Insightful)
Even with my tiny less then 6mb connection AT&T continues to threaten to charge me more for exceeding their 150gb bandwidth limit. They are already sucking over $100 a month from me, yet they still want more. It is way past due for the entire U.S. to consider cruising the internet as neceassary as cruising the roads. This is required infrastructure as necessary to survive today as highways were 30 years ago. So many mundane tasks such as keeping up with current events and even paying your bills necisatate using the internet that considering it a luxory is really out of synch with the current reality. The internet as become necessary for everyone to have, so the internet must be free for everyone to access.
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Next time they threaten you, shove the Telecommunications Act of 1996 in their face and go "I can take you to court over this, if you want to talk about some billing issues, assholes. We gave you billions in taxpayer dollars for a product you didn't deliver. Guess who owes who right now?"
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Next time they threaten you, shove the Telecommunications Act of 1996 in their face and go "I can take you to court over this, if you want to talk about some billing issues, assholes. We gave you billions in taxpayer dollars for a product you didn't deliver. Guess who owes who right now?"
Oh, you mean the same Telecommunciations Act that promised to ensure that CLECs would actually be able to thrive and compete?
Yeah, uh where are they now? Oh yeah, I forgot, even the LECs own CLECs were driven out of business.
Please knock if off with this bullshit. The time for any individual or even a small group to go against a major carrier is long over with. Threaten all you want.
They will ALWAYS have enough customers no matter how many you might convince to get off their ass and walk away.
They will A
Highway analogy (Score:3)
I'd recommend against pushing that highway analogy. It makes it too easy for them to come back with:
"You don't get to drive 150mph on a highway designed for 70mph."
"We need to make sure overweight trucks don't destroy the road surface for the rest of our drivers."
"If everyone drove as much as you do, the roads would be so jammed that nobody would be able to get anywhere."
Each of these points is flawed, but the analogy you posed doesn't do much to help that.
It works (Score:4, Informative)
North State has done this in High Point, NC and the surrounding cities. It works, and OMG it works well. 100 a month for 250 channels, 1 Gig internet, and a landline. Flat rate. No big brother. No filtering. No raping on bills and nickel and diming BS. http://northstate.net/
If other cities can do this or better, then go for it. Having this infrastructure in place free's up money and increases tech production throughout. It's about time people took internet infrastructure as seriously as electric power. Without it, your civilization is a 3rd world ghetto.
When this effort totally fails... (Score:2)
...perhaps then people will finally wake up and realize just how much your government supports the concept of monopolies.
In the meantime, enjoy playing in the kiddie pool while you still can. I'm sure they're already greasing palms to ensure kiddie pools are outlawed soon.
Municipal Internet is Inevitable (hopefully) (Score:3)
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I was sort of thinking the same thing, internet access is a necessity these days almost as much as electric, water, gas and maybe internet should be a public utility.
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As many other countries have already shown!
Sadly the US seems to love capitalism so much that it wants to give companies infinite power, which they then abuse...
Write to your city politicians to get on board (Score:2)
Boulder, CO has a ballot measure (Score:3, Informative)
"If approved, this ballot measure would reestablish city autonomy for investing in community broadband services currently limited by Colorado Senate Bill 152 pdf (SB-152). SB-152 significantly limits the ability of municipal governments to provide broadband services, including potential partnerships with private entities. SB-152 includes a provision allowing Colorado municipal governments to exempt themselves from the law’s provisions via a public vote.
The Boulder community would significantly benefit from more economical, higher-capacity broadband services, given the tech-savvy demographic, readiness for next-generation services, and publicly available fiber-optic infrastructure. Learn more about the benefits pdf.
Although the City of Boulder has no current plans to create a public broadband utility or engage in new public-private partnerships, passing the ballot measure would ensure that the planning and execution of new public initiatives would be unencumbered by significant limitations in state law.
Approved Ballot Question
Affirming the City’s Right to Provide Telecommunication Services Shall the City of Boulder be authorized to provide high-speed Internet services (advanced services), telecommunications services, and/or cable television services to residents, businesses, schools, libraries, nonprofit entities and other users of such services, either directly or indirectly with public or private sector partners, as expressly permitted by 29-27-101 to 304, “Competition in Utility and Entertainment Services,” of the Colorado Revised Statutes, without limiting its home rule authority?"
No wonder (Score:2)
The lack of proper infrastructure can break a city.
In unrelated news (Score:5, Funny)
ATT, Comcast and Verizon just lowered rates and expanded fiber coverage to the same 32 cities.
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ATT, Comcast and Verizon just expanded fiber coverage to the same 32 cities with low introductory rates that will skyrocket once the new local competition is dealt with.
FIFY
Ponca City? (Score:3)
We could, of course, utilize our flood control pathways to install high-strength water-proofed fiber optics all over the city within a few years. Tulsa's flood control system spreads into every area of the city, and a fiber optic system that mimics the natural flow might add an interesting experiment too. We're far too busy tearing our roads up though to bother with anything hi-tech. Every single semi-major street is torn up or at least has construction road signs causing traffic jams; since the 1980's the construction barrel industry has made millions off us taxpayers.
Proposed Rules (Score:2)
1. The service you provide is Internet. Therefore, no screwing with packets, strict network neutrality, no port blocking, no prohibition on uses such as servers. In short, plain bandwidth at a price that does not discriminate between customers.
2. You do not regulate yourselves.
3. There are no barriers to future entrants to the market that do not apply to you.
No, there is hope! (Score:3, Interesting)
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my prediction is that they will build the network get some cash out of subscriptions for a couple of years and then sell it off to one of the big players.
exactly the same happened in my town during the late nineties with cable internet
And despite being AC you can't name the community so that we can check the story for ourselves?
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You could say the same about POTS, electrical line, or plumbing. They are all necessary infrastructure, and the cost is not the main driving factor.