Voters overwhelmingly back community broadband in Chicago and Denver

https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgzxvz/voters-overwhelmingly-back-community-broadband-in-chicago-and-denver

by danso • 6 years ago

639 229 6 years ago

pushcx• 6 years ago

I can't speak to Denver, but reposting from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25000078 - no, Chicago voters did not do this:

Hi, Chicago voter here. The question wasn't about public utility, it was "Should the City of Chicago act to ensure that all the City's community areas have access to broadband Internet?" which can imply a number of contradictory policies, from Chicago setting up municipal broadband to Chicago giving tax incentives to the existing national broadband providers.

Illinois limits ballots to three referendum questions, and questions chosen by higher-up political entities have precedence over smaller, more local ones. The three questions on the ballot for Chicago are chosen by the Cook County Board of Commissioners. (For these purposes, Cook County is equivalent to the city of Chicago plus a couple neighboring suburbs.)

Background established and into personal opinion: The question is in fact deliberately vague. The Board's goal is not to ask three divisive questions getting at the heart of urgent political matters. It is to fill the ballot with three questions to preclude local, less connected authorities from putting inconvenient, compelling questions on the ballot. Here's a 2018 court case reaffirming that (Calumet City is in Cook County): https://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/daily-southtown/opini...

These questions are deliberately worthless and it's a waste of time to analyze them for policy guidance.

If you're curious, the other two questions this cycle were: * In creating its City-wide plan for continued growth and sustainability, should the City of Chicago place equal focus on the goals of resiliency, equity, and diversity? * Should the State of Illinois restrict the sale or possession of firearms that have been defined as assault weapons or of magazines that can hold more than a certain number of rounds of ammunition?

toddsiegel• 6 years ago

In Denver, 83.5 percent of the city’s electorate cast ballots in favor of question 2H, which asked if the city should be exempt from a 2005 law, backed by local telecom monopolies, restricting Colorado towns and cities from being able to build their own local broadband alternatives.
Colorado is one of nearly two-dozen states that have passed laws, usually directly written by regional telecom monopolies, that hamstring or prevent the creation of such networks.
But in Colorado’s case, the state’s 2005 law included language that allows local towns and cities to opt-out of the restriction if voters agree to do so.

W.r.t. Denver, the headline overstates things a bit, but the contents of the article are accurate.

https://www.denverpost.com/2020/10/08/denver-issue-2h-broadb...

C1sc0cat6• 6 years ago

Reading the words of the motion "Should the City of Chicago act to ensure that all the City's community areas have access to broadband Internet?" Says nothing about the local government running the service

"community areas" so that means just libraries council buildings or does it mean FTC or FTP for all homes?

You right that allowing the executive to cherry pick motions is not democratic.

The one "in creating its City-wide plan for continued growth and sustainability, should the City of Chicago place equal focus on the goals of resiliency, equity, and diversity?" is arguably pious and also does not propose any action.

pgroves• 6 years ago

When I read it on the ballot when I voted I immediately assumed it meant "libraries, etc", but now that you say that I'm worried "community areas" is bureaucrat-speak for "neighborhoods". Much different implications.

Kique• 6 years ago

In Chicago the wards that make up Chicago are called Community Areas, nothing really confusing about it if you live in Chicago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_areas_in_Chicago

spdionis• 6 years ago

Rather "comically useless" than "pious".

Notorious_BLT• 6 years ago

I voted against that proposal re: "resiliency, equity, and diversity", largely because of how pious and hilariously vague it was. Assuming they actually did anything at all, it take the form of Chicago hiring some expensive diversity consulting agency to do nothing and get paid a couple million a year.

throwaway8943458• 6 years ago

I’m also a Chicago voter and I would be surprised if any city would reject the referendum as stated. “Do you want more free stuff or less free stuff?” It doesn’t discuss the downsides, especially the opportunity costs—Chicago is in a budget crisis which has been exacerbated by COVID and maybe that money could be better spent on those who have lost jobs or something, but none of that nuance is represented on the ballot. Note that I’m not actually opposed to this initiative per se, only remarking that the support probably has more to do with the presentation of the initiative than it’s merit.

boomboomsubban2• 6 years ago

Also not on the ballot was any discussion of how Chicago spends it's billions of dollars that led to this budget crisis, though I'm sure there are numerous programs both less profitable and less popular than this one.

adamsea8• 6 years ago

As per the parent posters point, the questions aren’t saying “do you want more free stuff or less stuff”?

They are saying, “how do you feel about this extremely broad and unquantifiable goal which sounds good to most?”

In other words the initiative is so vague that it doesn’t even make sense to begin starting to talk about cost.

We would need a specific, actionable proposal to begin assessing cost.

DoctorNick• 6 years ago

Maybe they could take some money from the police budget. I recall some protests to that effect.

ClumsyPilot7• 6 years ago

I don't think it is talking about free stuff.

Like many farms have no access to decent broadband, as in you can't readily buy it for any money. I am not sure what's the deal in Chicago.

x87678r4• 6 years ago

Chicago will get a big slush fund to pay for some unspecified infrastructure down the road? What could go wrong.

rayiner2• 6 years ago

And even if the referendum had included a call for the city to build broadband, there was no price tag listed. People love programs that are free and don’t involve trade-offs with things that cost money.

tzs• 6 years ago

Most municipal broadband projects I've heard about have either ended up quite a bit cheaper/faster than the commercial broadband that was already in the area, or have been in smaller towns or rural areas where there wasn't any commercial broadband.

sumtechguy• 6 years ago

I instinctively do not vote for things that show me the price tag and duration. Do XYZ for X years from a bond of Y paid at Z percentage rate for blah years to be financed from a increase in taxes of somenumber percent for X years.

If that is not on there that is an open ended contract to waste everyone's time and money.

danso2• 6 years ago

It's true that the Chicago referendum is non-binding, but worthwhile context is that Chicago this past June has already made moves to develop free high-speed internet for public school students [0]. The success of even this palliative referendum will, ostensibly, give them political cover to push for additional initiatives and referendums:

CHICAGO – Mayor Lori E. Lightfoot today announced the launch of ‘Chicago Connected,’ a groundbreaking program that will provide free high-speed internet service to approximately 100,000 Chicago Public Schools (CPS) students in their households. This first-of-its-kind program will be one of the largest and longest-term efforts in the nation to provide free, high-speed internet over the course of four years to dramatically increase internet accessibility for students and help build a permanent public support system for families in Chicago.

[0] https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/mayor/press_room/press...

snarf21• 6 years ago

Interesting. That really stinks that Cook County can block. It seems like there needs to be a change where the 3 referendum with the most signatures is what is on the ballot.

throwaway2011032• 6 years ago

In Chicago, it means that ISPs will need to pay off the aldermen to be the "preferred" provider of public broadband in each ward.

robswc2• 6 years ago

I tend to avoid politics but I really can't believe such a question was asked to voters.

With how vague that question is, its almost entirely useless. Like another poster said, it essentially could be boiled down to "do you want good thing or not?"

I feel like something that vague has no business being "voted" on.

flaque• 6 years ago

These read like essay prompts

Fiveplus• 6 years ago

How's the internet service in Chicago these days? Is it AT&T? If not, who's running the show?

l33r• 6 years ago

It depends on where you live. In my condo, I pay $20 a month for gigabit fiber.

cure• 6 years ago

Wow, that's very cheap. Is this symmetric gigabit? Usage caps? Who is providing it?

OldHand20186• 6 years ago

That's a better deal than in my condo. Our condo board keeps getting offers from other providers, but is too lazy to look into them.

x87678r4• 6 years ago

Does the HOA run that? I'm curious.

OldHand20186• 6 years ago

Nobody runs the show.

AT&T, Xfinity, RCN, etc are all here, competing with each other. If you live in a dense part of the city, you've got half a dozen other providers to choose from as well. Google-owned WebPass can put a microwave dish on your roof and offer 100+ mb/sec for $50 or less per apartment. Mine is a local company that runs a huge fiber line direct from the nearest exchange center and puts a managed switch in the basement, with each unit having a cat5 line direct to the switch. It's $25 per month for 250 mb/sec symmetrical with direct peering to Amazon, Netflix, Apple, and a few others, and all the common areas like the pool deck and gym have free wifi running at those speeds. I can upgrade to gigabit for an extra $25 per month, which I did for the first few year. But it works so well that I don't bother anymore.

ppod• 6 years ago

What's it like in the kind of places that don't have pool decks?

selectodude2• 6 years ago

AT&T has pretty much abandoned their fiber rollout here. Everybody can get Comcast, some can get other smaller ISPs depending on neighborhood.

Signed- lucky person who pays $57 for symmetric gigabit in west town.

fastball• 6 years ago

This is good.

Vital infrastructure should be handled by government, and internet is obviously vital at this point. Municipalities build out the last mile, state governments connect municipalities, the federal government connects states (as with our highway system).

Now if we could only do the same for high-speed rail!

coldpie• 6 years ago

I know many HN commenters have a strong anti-public-service bent, but consider this angle: if the government is providing your Internet service, then your service is protected by the constitution. The bar for restricting what you can access, and for what reasons your service can be cancelled, becomes much higher when it's governed by the constitution instead of the whims of a private media company with a massive conflict of interest.

jtdev• 6 years ago

How does the constitution come into play here? The government doesn’t really have a great track record for being worthy of blind trust.

mrkstu• 6 years ago

They cannot drop you as a customer for what you 'say' digitally (or IRL.) You cannot be 'cancelled.'

Not sure if that has happened previously on the individual level, vs the organizational/corporate level though.

Technically, though, if they offer commercial service, the organizational/business orgs taking it up would be protected completely in any of their speech (other than things like child porn.)

jballer• 6 years ago

TL;DR because the Constitution was written to protect us from the government, there is a lower bar to sue and win under both federal law and constitutional challenges.

For example, the Fourteenth Amendment protects against discrimination by States, not private actors: https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/amendment-14/...

And note 1338 calls out that the federal laws prohibiting businesses from discriminating against individuals are instead rooted in Congress's broad latitude to regulate interstate commerce.

And here's another similar reference:

As a general rule, the Constitution does not give power to the federal government to pass laws to protect people against private actions. For example, the Equal Protection Clause guarantees equal protection for all – it protects against discrimination. Under this protection, the federal government may pass laws to enforce this guarantee. However, while Congress may pass a law to regulate states or other public actors, it may not pass a law to regulate private citizens. Your police department cannot discriminate against you on account of your race. However, your neighbor in the house down the block can be as bigoted as he so desires.

https://constitutionallawreporter.com/amendment-14-01/the-qu...

giantg29• 6 years ago

That's a bit of a leap. Rights can be infringed regardless of whether the government or another entity is involved, if it's done the right way (Edit). In this case, the constitution does not mention any right to broadband internet. It does guarentee rights under the first amendment which could be applicable here. The same way that corporations could restrict that right would likely be used by the government - contract law and a service agreement. This is similar to the government placing restrictions on people when they sign up for the military (Edit). The government also has a conflict of interest when it comes to things like surveillance.

jessaustin2• 6 years ago

The Constitution mentions no right to drive cars. Nevertheless, attempts to limit drivers' licences by arbitrary criteria would receive a cold reception in the courts. The government is required to treat everyone with due process.

zerocrates• 6 years ago

If the constitution protects a right, it does so regardless of whether the government or another entity is involved.

Most rights guaranteed or actions forbidden by the Constitution only restrict the government. The First Amendment is one of those.

dragonwriter2• 6 years ago

If the constitution protects a right, it does so regardless of whether the government or another entity is involved

That's blatantly false. The Constitution only protects against government action. Until the civil war amendments, it did so almost exclusively for the federal government; it now also does so for state governments, but it doesn't extend beyond that.

dantheman• 6 years ago

Has anyone who's been violating the constitution with regards to NSA, DEA, FBI metadata collection and hacking been punished? Have the programs been stopped - how can we know/verify?

Has James Clapper been punished for lying under oath to congress? Is he paraded around as an example of what happens when those in senior leadership have violated the rights of millions or is still acceptable to interview on TV or have politicians reference?

dragontamer• 6 years ago

Except this is community broadband.

There's basically no way a city could create the NSA on their own. If you think a city is violating your constitutional rights, you sue the city (which is way easier than suing the State or National Government).

With luck, you can get national forces on your side. If anything, if the city is violating civil rights, you might be able to get FBI on your side (Department of Justice after all) to leverage the heavy-lifting.

11235813212• 6 years ago

Municipal governments are subject to the same cost-consistency-performance tradeoffs as a private company. In a situation where a private ISP would not have been able to meet its obligations, the cost to force a government ISP to meet them would not obtain a meaningfully better outcome.

Additionally, there is no constitutional right to municipal utility services.

ClumsyPilot7• 6 years ago

This argument does not apply if the re is no competition, local telcos have a comfy monopoly / duopoly and collect the same fees without making any further investments

mastax• 6 years ago

This made me wonder if the bill of rights applies to state, local governments. According to Wikipedia, yes. A series of court decisions in the 1920s (re-)interpreted the 14th amendment as applying the bill of rights to state governments.

gwright• 6 years ago

This is the "incorporation doctrine". It has evolved over time for individual elements of the Bill of Rights.

Here is a nice timeline: https://billofrightsinstitute.org/educate/educator-resources...

rayiner2• 6 years ago

Except my provider isn’t doing any of those things. (I have fiber via Comcast but I’ve also got Verizon available.)

Meanwhile, our other public services kinda suck. I used to ride the Metro to work before pandemic hit. It was designed in the 1970s to be a fully automated system, but the equipment was allowed to deteriorate so much that the automation was turned off permanently in 2009. What used to be a smooth, fast ride when I grew up in DC in the 1990s is now a slow, jerky one. Trip times are also 20-25% longer than they used to be. What used to be 6 minute headways is now 8, because it was too hard to keep up 6 with the manual system. And DC is a very well funded system.

Government Internet would be built by basically the same people. Why would I expect it to be any better?

Eridrus• 6 years ago

I think the evidence points to municipal internet being far better managed than transit infrastructure. Not all government projects are doomed to failure and IMO we should learn more from those that are because the government having no capacity to actually do anything is not good for us since the demands for governments to do things are not going to go away.

_greim_3• 6 years ago

The bar for restricting what you can access, and for what reasons your service can be cancelled, becomes much higher when it's governed by the constitution instead of the whims of a private media company with a massive conflict of interest.

Just to note: the government has whims and conflicts of interest also, as demonstrated over the last decade or two with recent wild swings in high-level elected office and shifts in the courts.

grecy• 6 years ago

Sure, but irrelevant of who or which party is in charge, they can't mess with the constitution.

dfxm12• 6 years ago

That doesn't really follow.

People vote for who is in elected office and for some judges. Elected officials also have to re-earn their job every 2-6 years, or thereabouts.

People have no say in who runs a private media company or how.

DaniloDias2• 6 years ago

Do you want the local government to have a direct tap into where you spend your time online?

adamsea8• 6 years ago

As opposed to AT&T / Comcast?

Whoever it is I would like their behavior to be meaningfully regulated under the law.

closeparen• 6 years ago

Federal funding for internet connections at schools and libraries specifically requires content filtering.

They can get away with it because it's for children. I would not be surprised if you see something similar to what was tried in the UK - block pornography by default and require an embarrasing support phone call to lift the block.

Shivetya2• 6 years ago

On top of that there have been more than a few stories of over zealous school systems who have demands of computers used to access online content. So one would expect that a similar entry point would be uses to restrict content if not sites.

The real threat is tracking that will exist but "wink wink" protected under the rule of requiring a court order to reveal; or if your in the political arena just someone who doesn't like you and leaks it.

At least with a private provider there is a remote possibility of suing them or using the government against them. Against the government there are just too many barriers and would require very robust legislation to protect us.

JumpCrisscross• 6 years ago

if the government is providing your Internet service, then your service is protected by the constitution

I don’t know how convincing this argument is. Certainly local law enforcement will, on average, have an easier time accessing these data.

A better argument is this is a temporary measure. Broadband is expensive to build out. Once built, it is cheaper to operate. I imagine these municipal operations will be built well and privatised when the next municipal finance downturn rears its head.

robertlagrant3• 6 years ago

I know many HN commenters have a strong anti-public-service bent

Welcome to a community that powers a lot of open source software, which powers a lot of the world.

if the government is providing your Internet service, then your service is protected by the constitution

Nope. Did you know the constitution is a document, and not "stuff the government currently pays for"?

ClumsyPilot7• 6 years ago

Welcome to a community that powers a lot of open source software, which powers a lot of the world.

Is that actually accurate? My impression is intersectuon between tech entrepreneurs and folks that maintain linux kernel is not that high.

supercoffee• 6 years ago

I can totally understand people’s reluctance to government run internet. The biggest argument I see is that the government can compete unfairly against private companies because they don’t have to make a profit. Usually when this debate about government run internet comes up, there’s two discrete options: the private sector ISP and the government run ISP. However, there’s an option that rarely gets mentioned: the public infrastructure + private ISP model.

I used to live in middle-of-nowhere central WA, and they had fiber internet all the way back in mid 2000’s. This was a town of <20k people. Other smaller towns around the region also had access to fiber as well. Basically it worked like this: the county public utilities district was responsible for laying the fiber and connecting it to the building. Once the fiber is hooked up, you can call any one of a dozen or so ISPs to provide you with service.

As a side note, because of this relationship between the ISPs and the public utilities district, some ISPs also operated point-to-point wireless networks to reach customers outside of the fiber network. The ISPs would typically place a tower with several radios at an existing customer’s site, in exchange for free service. These tower sites were usually connected directly to fiber for minimal latency. I mention this because I don’t see how these wireless networks would have been viable without a public fiber network backing them.

vkou6• 6 years ago

Why would I, as a citizen, give two figs about fair competition?

All I want is good service, on the cheap.

If the government can provide good service, and have zero-profit margin, that's fantastic. That's actually the best possible outcome. If the government service sucks, then their zero-profit margin should not be a significant enough competitive advantage to drive out competitors.

In addition to all that, all the criticisms of the zero-profit margin model fall apart in a world where VCs and conglomerates frequently operate local services at a loss, in an effort to capture market share (So that they can later raise prices).

spinningslate• 6 years ago

The biggest argument I see is that the government can compete unfairly against private companies because they don’t have to make a profit.

I've seen this too, and my reaction is always to ask why that's unfair. The "free" market is supposed to be open to competition. Why is it "unfair" for public bodies to compete? Public bodies are, after all, funded by tax payers. Who in this case would be the recipients of the service. So we have individuals desiring of a service, funding said service through a public body. Now, the public body is not set up to pay a dividend to shareholders - instead it implicitly returns all profit to its consumers (presumably through reduced costs/better service/whatever).

Why is that unfair? It's not preventing commercial entities from competing. If their business model is such that they can't do so - e.g. because of the need to pay away dividends - then that's their problem.

Now: I know there's a lot more to it than that, e.g. public bodies accused of being propped up unfairly. And I know Govt in the US is treated very suspiciously by a large cohort of society.

But that notwithstanding, why is it "unfair" if a community-oriented entity decides to compete with a commercial organisation?

stjohnswarts3• 6 years ago

"Unfairness" has to be put in context. How many people benefit by working for the cable company? How many people would benefit by universal access to fiber/internet? I think we all know the answer there.

natchy• 6 years ago

well now I'm hearing more of plans to "begin healing" and to combat hate. I see the government using "hate" as a reason to implement backdoors and monitor citizens, just like the Patriot Act.

Whenever I bring this up, I'm accused of being "for hate", when I really just am a big fan of Snowden and don't people to give up safety for security. Most people would see a measure to combat hate on the internet and vote for it, not realizing its giving the govt the right to monitor all data or crack down on something that isn't even hateful (e.g. Free Palestine, Hong Kong etc).

Give the local "community government" the right to run the internet and now the federal govt will be spidered throughout all local govt ISPs.

The bar for restricting what you can access, and for what reasons your service can be cancelled, becomes much higher when it's governed by the constitution

I wouldn't put it past Biden or Harris to issue and executive order for the sake of "hate speech". I couldn't imagine Sanders or even Trump doing that.

stjohnswarts3• 6 years ago

That's not correct. It's not protected by the Constitution, it is protected by the laws passed. The only way it could be "protected by the constitution" would be a judge saying "this falls under section xyz of the constitution. so shall it be". That would obviously probably be overturned in short order but it's really the only way.

corey_moncure• 6 years ago

A telecommunications monopoly is a strange thing.

There are 725,000 people in Denver. If we naively assume that one sixth of them pay for an internet subscription at $100/mo each, that's $145,000,000 annually that the people could use to fund their own ISP.

The people are held captive by a combination of forces that appear to have nothing to do with economics. If they could all communicate together they could easily fund their own alternative. Appallingly, the place that they are being held captive is a communications network!!

geodel• 6 years ago

True. If enough people put money they can even produce, Movies and TV shows and they no longer have to depend on big bad Hollywood studios for entertainment.

deeeeplearning• 6 years ago

What does a comment like this achieve. We're talking about something thats about as essential as other utilities particularly during Covid. Go lick boots elsewhere.

peapicker3• 6 years ago

That is on the high side for a connection in Denver -- I think you are overestimating costs.

I looked in a poorer neighborhood in Denver (700sq.ft. house), which is clearly close to fiber, and from Centurylink for $65/mo they can get 940Mbps, for $49/mo they can get 100Mbps.

Looks like for $20/month, xfinity will do 25Mbps at the same address.

lotsofpulp11• 6 years ago

Do all or even a meaningful majority of people in Denver have access to Centurylink fiber? Every city I’ve seen it in is usually restricted to small areas or newer developments.

newacct583• 6 years ago

I don't have access to Centurylink billing standards, but in my experience actual dollars billed by Comcast are routinely 30% higher than the sticker price of the service. I assume other services are similar. I don't think your numbers are too far off.

Also that Comcast number at the end is for sure an intro price. Actual cost after the first year will be much, much higher.

milkytron• 6 years ago

Looks like for $20/month, xfinity will do 25Mbps at the same address.

I live in Denver (and a poorer neighborhood at that), I had this plan before coronavirus sent us all home. This is the price for the first year, after that, they charge $60/month. Switched to century link for 1Gbps up/down for $65.

brentsch• 6 years ago

One of the linked articles [1] describes the arguments in favor of pro-ISP restrictions as concerns that municipal broadband would either be a waste of taxpayer money or an "unfair" threat to private-sector ISPs: "'The general rhetoric behind these laws, from the incumbents, is that cities are too incompetent to run their own networks, so it's a risk to taxpayers,' Craig Settles, a broadband consultant who works with cities to create municipal networks told me. 'But then, the other side of it is that cities are so competent that they represent unfair competition.'"

Is this a relatively accurate and complete characterization?

[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/qkvn4x/the-21-laws-states-us...

biggermike• 6 years ago

Not as contradictory as the speaker is making it out to be. The organization can be poorly managed but still price out competition via a state subsidized business model that would be unsustainable for anyone else.

cashsterling• 6 years ago

Longmont, CO has municipal broadband and it is awesome. 50 USD per month for symmetric 1Gb service. Service uptime has been outstanding... much better than the service my work gets in Boulder, CO (Comcast).

hesdeadjim• 6 years ago

Meanwhile Boulder voters have approved community broadband six years ago and there has been essentially zero progress.

For a Boulder resident I’m lucky actually, I have access to to 100mbit VDSL and Comcast. So at least I have two shitty choices.

oh_sigh• 6 years ago

They're also trying to municipalize the electricity infrastructure here(boulder).

It's been 10 years, we've spent $30M, and there's been absolutely zero progress on it.

C1sc0cat6• 6 years ago

What's the contention like do you actually get 1Gb sustained or is that just the syc speed.

BTW my BB plus phone is $30 a month in the UK VDSL via local loop unbundling.

lotsofpulp11• 6 years ago

I have Centurylink 1Gbps fiber, and I get 1Gbps up and down sustained. The installer said that my neighborhood had a 10Gbps connection shared between 30 houses.

giantg29• 6 years ago

I pay $50 for 10Mb down 1Mb up. It sucks. They are constantly increasing prices by improving the speed of each plan for free (until they set the prices the next year). This speed increase eliminated some of the lower priced tiers, like 25Mb. The next step up for me is I think 40Mb at $80.

These no competition here since providers are forced to pay a franchise fee to the local government. With lower population towns, it's just uneconomical for a second provider to come in. Seems like the law is anticompetitive.

mnw21cam• 6 years ago

10Mb up 1Mb down

Do you mean the other way round? Because this way is fairly unusual.

deklerk• 6 years ago

Denver voter here: wer'e very excited about this! Our neighbours in Longmonth and Fort Collins both have similar situations, and we're jealous over here. Excited for some competition to ISPs, and excited for our government to be, ya know, building things that help its peoples. =)

fiftyfifty• 6 years ago

Fort Collins just started rolling our broadband out and we voted on it three years ago. It's been a little bit of a boondoggle, behind schedule and over budget, like most of these kind of projects tend to be I guess. It's been just within the last quarter that Fort Collins is finally getting the number of paying customers into the thousands which should help the financials some. They pulled the fiber throughout my neighborhood a couple of months ago but then it seemed to stall. Occasionally I see a work truck doing something at one of the boxes, but we haven't heard anything as far as being able to get hooked up yet. Our cost is $59.95/month for gigabit up and down so there are many of us chomping at the bit. For anyone interested in the rollout of a municipal broadband program, the quarterly financial reports Fort Collins has been releasing during their rollout are kind of interesting:

https://www.fcgov.com/connexion/quarterly-reports

gok• 6 years ago

Ugh Vice... I love that they use the image of people celebrating the presidential election to imply that people are dancing in the streets because of some vague ballot initiative about "ensuring access to broadband internet".

snowwrestler• 6 years ago

The small city where I live has been looking at community-owned fiber and I have enthusiastically supported it because right now it’s Comcast or nothing for broadband.

But a couple weeks ago, a bunch of Verizon trucks were stringing new cables on the poles in my neighborhood. I asked if they were finally bringing FiOS to my neighborhood. They said no, FiOS is being sunset (!) and this new fiber is for 5G residential, which will replace it. They’ll eventually mount antennas on some of the poles and then provide an in-home 5G hardware appliance, analogous to the cable modem. They said speeds should be about the same as FiOS.

All I want is broadband competition. If I can choose between Verizon and Comcast, that competition should help drive down costs, which is the main reason I want community broadband.

x87678r4• 6 years ago

How about Chicago funding some of its underwater pension funds of its old community services, before creating a new community service?

austincheney• 6 years ago

Municipal broadband makes sense in many areas with shitty internet service. Where I live the growth is so absurd fast, possibly the second fastest among major US cities, that we can't get the city improve the highways between housing neighborhoods and freeways or keep up with other basic services. Everything is a struggle for the city to keep up with the growth. In this rarest of cases municipal broadband would probably be a nightmare. Fortunately I have 1gb up and down to the house from my local ISP at $70 per month.

tombert• 6 years ago

Maybe someone who understands FCC laws/regulations can help enlighten me on this point and clear up my understanding.

My understanding is that the reason the network/over-the-air TV in the US (e.g. ABC, NBC, Fox) has relatively strict regulations about curse-words and sex-stuff and violence being shown is because there's a risk that a child could be watching, and the airwaves belong to everybody, meaning any kid could go purchase a TV and watch it.

Cable channels like HBO and ShowTime and whatnot get around this because they require a paid membership to get into, and thus the responsibility for the kids watching it falls into the hands of the parents who signed up for the services, not the networks.

Now, if my logic is correct, what's to stop something like this to leading to increased regulations? As of right now, in virtually any network I connect to, it's relatively easy for me to go to pornhub.com, and even if you ban outright porn sites, websites like YouTube and Netflix allow for much more cursing and violence than what the FCC currently allows on network television.

I'm sure I'm misunderstanding something, and I'm not a lawyer, so maybe someone with more training on this kind of compliance can explain my problems.

EDIT: Just to avoid downvotes that are unnecessary, I should make it clear, I don't support the FCC making these regulations, and think these tasks should fall onto the parents. I'm just saying what the current rationale is, or at least my understanding of it.

hashtagmarkup2• 6 years ago

When police departments are requesting access to live video feeds from doorbell cams, what will stop them from requesting access to everything else if the city is directly providing the service?

colinmhayes• 6 years ago

encryption

adamsea8• 6 years ago

Pretty sure police would be able to do this with private companies too.

Certainly the big boys like the NSA (and maybe the FBI?) have.

I think it’s more about what laws are in place to pro Ryder folks, whether it’s for a privately-run service or a government one.

seventytwo3• 6 years ago

The constitution.

You think private companies are bound by the same constraints the federal govt is??

hashtagmarkup2• 6 years ago

The constitution hasn't stopped them in the past from man-in-the-middling private corporation's network traffic to spy on private citizens.

I don't think "community broadband" is the same as "federal broadband", if that's what you're asking.

adamc• 6 years ago

Does anyone have a good explanation of why internet service in much of America is so crappy? What are good ways to change that?

seventytwo3• 6 years ago

Because it’s more cost-effective to lie to the population about their internet quality and hire lobbyists to manipulate politics than it is to actually upgrade the network.

Reason077• 6 years ago

"Colorado is one of nearly two-dozen states that have passed laws, usually directly written by regional telecom monopolies, that hamstring or prevent the creation of such networks."

From a European perspective, this just seems crazy. Regulations should be designed to promote competition, not restrict it. Incumbent networks already enjoy a huge advantage. Why would you want to entrench them even further by writing laws that make it difficult for startups and newcomers to compete?

ajmadesc• 6 years ago

Blatant corruption is why.

robertlagrant3• 6 years ago

Yummy pork.

seventytwo3• 6 years ago

B-b-but nothing bad ever happens in The Free Market (TM), so the problem is therefore somewhere else!

pottertheotter• 6 years ago

Because a lot of people here have been brainwashed to believe that government is bad and companies are good.

rhino3692• 6 years ago

Their argument is that tax payer subsidized "competition" is not true competition.

Municipalities can build a network using government money and then price it below what any competitor could deliver.

Municipalities also get to regulate and tax their competitors.

That's not necessarily a great argument against Municipal fiber. But I don't think municipal fiber can honestly be called promoting competition.

walrus014• 6 years ago

Saying "we want community broadband" is good. The pent up demand is clearly there. And there are a great many mediocre last mile near-monopoly ISPs which are, in my opinion, borderline abusive to their customer base.

ISP perspective: There are physical limitations to how many discrete, independent facilities-based last mile carriers can be built in a city to individual residential premises. In many cities this ends up with being the local telco, and the local cable company running two parallel overlapping networks. For instance, in Seattle, Centurylink (former USWest/Qwest) running a GPON FTTH network, and Comcast or Wave running a hybrid fiber-coaxial DOCSIS3/DOCSIS3.1 cable last mile plant.

This ends up with a defacto duopoly for many consumers. If you are in a less optimal situation you might have something like the terrible choice between 10Mbps ADSL2+ over degraded, long loop length copper POTS wiring, or 100-800Mbps service from Comcast, Charter, RCN or similar. In which case it's not really a choice at all, you effectively have a cable operator monopoly.

Much like how it is impractical and impossible to have more than one last-mile electrical grid operator in a city, it's highly impractical, costly and expensive for more than 2 to 3 maximum facilities-based ISPs to run parallel competing overlapping networks serving end user premises.

If a city is going to have a 3rd carrier run by the municipality, it needs to be an open access network that sells layer 2 transport to a myriad of independent ISPs. In this arrangement, the city and municipality builds a FTTH network, but only sells wholesale capacity to ISPs.

The city is responsible for the OSI layer 1 outside plant cable, running the drop cable to each house and the termination box, and a basic GPON CPE. Individual ISPs can sell layer 3 (IP) services on top of that and provide the billing, customer support and value-added features like triple-play TV/phone etc. In this arrangement the city ISP runs what is effectively a layer 2 network only, and hands customer traffic in aggregate to an ISP at an NNI.

I have to admit that I am much more skeptical of the concept of cities suddenly developing the deep, long term knowledge base and experience to run last mile access IP networks at a scale of hundreds of thousands of customers. I just can't see many cities successfully getting their own ASN, setting up infrastructure at major IX points, acquiring significant chunks of ARIN ipv4 and ipv6 space, and so forth. Not unless they really throw a lot of money at poaching network engineering talent away from ISPs. If you take a look at peeringdb and pick a random residential last mile broadband specialist ISP with 50-100Gbps+ of traffic, I've literally never seen in my life a city government with the on-staff skill set to successfully implement something like that.

If you want to see how this has been done successfully on the municipality-as-wholesaler end, take a look at Grant and Douglas counties in WA state, which operate 1Gbps FTTH last mile networks much as I described in the above paragraphs. In those two cases, the local county government is also the electrical grid last mile operator. So they already have on staff crews of bucket trucks, pole placing equipment, all of the lineman-related stuff required. Not to mention the support infrastructure like HR/admin/accounting is shared between the county last mile fiber network, and the last mile electrical grid service. There's economies of scale in doing something like that as a combined effort.

iptrans2• 6 years ago

I'm a little bit wary of only providing layer 2 serivices to ISPs. It very easily leads to technology lock-in and other problems.

The preferred solution is to provide dark fiber and layer 2 transport, ISP's choice.

walrus014• 6 years ago

While in an ideal world it would be better to provide dedicated strands of dark fiber from each house, back to a neighborhood traffic aggregation point, that can be considerably more costly than a GPON architecture build.

dalbasal• 6 years ago

There's infinite nuance and meta game to referendums, but that aside...

(1) Referendums seem able to produce highly decisive vote counts on otherwise controversial political issues. Interesting, in itself.

(2) Issues that parties are at odds about aren't necessarily 50-50 issues.

(3) Referendums can (sometimes) produce democratic legitimacy in ways that representative politics cannot.

All interesting, in terms of enabling decision making. Referendums seem to be gaining a little momentum. I think one hidden advantage is the fact that referendums structurally enforce a separation of idea and execution.

lumberingjack• 6 years ago

Let me tell you a story about adelphia cable in 1999. The government paid them to install fiber optic networking in my rural neighborhood we were told we were near a backbone so we were going to be a test bed for extremely fast internet 99. 2001 rolls around these trucks are everywhere installing glass in the ground. 2003ish Adelphia cable goes through a legal battle with the larger cable companies they're accusing them of all kinds of stuff. Adelphia cable is bought out by Time Warner Cable the fiber optic network is never turned on even to this day every once in awhile I'm digging in a flower bed and I un Earth the glass wire that's been there for 20 years. Fastest internet available here is from former TWC which is now spectrum $80 30/10mbps.

grahamburger• 6 years ago

If you are interested in doing something like this I'd love to chat! I run a website about related topics[1]. I'm working now with a few different organizations on a kind of franchised ISP model.

[1] https://startyourownisp.com

jariel• 6 years ago

"they’re fed up with monopolies like Comcast."

Why do they feel a different monopoly will be better?

There's no reason to believe that the local government owned monopoly will be more efficient or more effectively managed.

It could be, but not necessarily.

These 'grass is greener on the other side' type referendums are difficult if they don't really capture the issue.

The 'root cause' is the single point of access and we could all feasibly use more intelligent laws there.

They tried that 20 years ago with the concept of 'CLEC' and there were all sorts of laws put in place, it didn't work out very well. There may be other opportunities.

For example, it may be possible to make the 'last mile' the responsibility of the city or county, to the point wherein they get the wiring to a proper exchange where there's compeitition.

Then if people want fiber to the home, they can pay for it themselves kind of thing.

stjohnswarts3• 6 years ago

They better be ready for the telcos and cable companies to come in and start litigating for years about "unfair competition"

HashThis• 6 years ago

ISP market is rigged. Free market competition would make citizens never interested in this, unless it was rigged. If Google w/Google Fiber can't enter markets, then nobody can. Customers are locked into contracts for no good reason, except breaking competition. Good prices only go to first time customers, in order to rent seek and rig prices as customers stay.

Voters overwhelmingly back community broadband in Chicago and Denver

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