this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2024
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Pretty well every case I've read of municipal owned fiber nets has been a grand success, barring interference by the local carriers. Let the city own the infra and the carriers compete for access. Of course you get the whinging about 'muh free market/choice' but that's the case for any public works really.
The free market cannot solve this because of the requirements for infrastructure both with up front costs and in needing to have easement access on very specific stretches of land. It completely breaks the assumptions economists make to be able to imagine the free market works.
Way different than a federally funded ISP. Note the comment OP is making.
Not so far off, providing infrastructure locally then leaves a lot of the major transit to backbone carriers to make the interconnects. Those providers are largely transparent to the end users. Now nationalizing carriers like that would be a hefty lift, but if we can take the local service out of the ISPs hands it would let the municipal hosts negotiate those peering arrangements in bulk. How many towns are well equipped to handle that might be another matter though.
No. Just have the city run it. Contracted monopolies are still toxic.
Not contracted monopolies or direct city run, but like 'IAAS' seems to work. Much like how you see some small cell companies providing unique offers riding on one of the big carriers networks. Often those small carriers provide better deals, particularly when the carriers they ride on are forced to sell wholesale access at reasonable rates.
The city selling wholesale access funds the infrastructure maintenance and the carriers are better able to compete with each other since all they really have to do is set up a router and pay the city's access rate fees.
I'd only be okay with that if the city provided a basic plan too. The ISPs have fucked around for far too long. It's time for them to find out. Next up, power companies.