Chattanooga offers residents lightning-quick connections, to telecoms' dismay

http://www.salon.com/2014/07/18/comcasts_worst_nightmare_how_tennessee_could_save_americas_internet_partner/

by jseliger • 12 years ago

344 175 12 years ago

jawns• 12 years ago

One way to address the private utility companies' argument -- that a publicly owned utility has a natural advantage over for-profit companies -- is to change the corporate structure of the utility so that it's no longer publicly owned.

For instance, it might be converted into a for-profit company, with the city retaining a portion of the shares, or into a cooperative (as many utilities, particularly those in rural communities, are incorporated). In fact, it could even sell off its shares in times of need to finance other municipal needs.

If it's converted into a cooperative, it would become 100% member-owned, and any profits would not go to outside shareholders, as with a publicly traded company, but would instead go back to its member-owners in the form of lower costs.

The more I think about it, the more I think this is the way to go for other cities of a similar size. Clearly, Comcast/Verizon weren't very interested in laying down their own fiber there if the city beat them to it. And once a utility company (in this case, publicly owned) has an effective monopoly in a certain area, it's going to be hard for others to introduce competing infrastructure. BUT, I would think that the ability to then sell the publicly owned utility would have significant value to the municipalities.

toomuchtodo14• 12 years ago

Thanks for touching on the coop model. I think that's a phenomenal way of addressing the muni broadband situation.

http://stopthecap.com/2012/01/03/want-rural-21st-century-bro...

Lagged2Death2• 12 years ago

One way to address the private utility companies' argument...

The private ISP's argument is a perfect flip-flop and doesn't really deserve addressing.

rrradical• 12 years ago

Genuinely curious-- what would stop Comcast from then buying it and then raising the rates to match the rest of their prices?

mseebach9• 12 years ago

A couple of reasons:

1: A coop generally can't have outside ownership.

2: Before Comcast can buy them, someone would need to sell it. It's not clear why they'd want to sell to Comcast.

3: If they did sell, they then (by definition) have the value of a community-wide network in their pockets. They could use that to build another community-wide network to compete with Comcast (then Comcast could buy that, but...)

But more fundamentally, if Comcast had a lot of money lying around for stuff like this, they could just invest it in becoming a properly good ISP that people would actually want to be customers of.

mseebach9• 12 years ago

The problem isn't the ownership model after the fact, it's who underwrites the risk of the initial investment. Most of the time, when public organizations make bold investments, they're mis-pricing the risk (which is easy to do when you have someone else around to pick up the tab if things goes wrong). In Denmark, the utilities did a fiber-laying frenzy around a decade ago and the business case did not follow through and the consequence was enormous cost to electricity consumers who never had a say in the matter (OK, technically they did through politically appointed oversight at the utilities).

I think the coop model for getting fiber to the home is awesome. Nobody benefits more from laying last-mile fiber than the homeowner. But forcing neighbors to invest in the project if they're happy with the state of the art isn't really fair IMO.

I've actually been thinking quite a bit of how a provisioning and operations consultancy that would help eg. home owners associations and the like build and run a fiber network and essentially be their own local ISP. Does such a thing exist?

streptomycin• 12 years ago

I've seen some apartment buildings that buy a T1 line (or whatever) so they can give their tenants "free" Internet included with their rent. That's basically the same thing.

pfitzsimmons• 12 years ago

I would love for someone to start a company that could bring fiber to cities via the kickstarter model. Getting the money upfront from customers could go a long way toward mitigating the risk. Ideally the company would be structured as a hybrid for-profit/customer co-operative (so maybe 20% of the shares would be 10X preferred stock owned by the for-profit arm, and the other 80% of shares would be owned by the customers).

martinald• 12 years ago

I think you raise a good point. In the UK local governments in South Yorkshire to run fibre (well, fibre to the cabinet) to ~98% of the properties in the area, costing £100m+ of taxpayer money.

It never got more than a couple of thousand subscribers out of the 1.3million people that it passed. It turned out that the large national ISPs would rather use their own infrastructure or wait for BT (the national telecom) to roll out their wholesale solution than have to have a special case for support, installs etc for such a small proportion of their userbase.

It got shut down and is now pretty much rotting in the ground.

ilkan• 12 years ago

That example doesn't apply here. The utility covered the cost by selling bonds. Municipalities use bonds to fund the building of toll roads and other long term projects without tax dollars.

Zigurd• 12 years ago

Why are investor owned enterprises owed any explanation at all?

nzealand• 12 years ago

Or define any internet utility as a common carrier to open up competition.

lutorm• 12 years ago

The argument that a publicly owned utility shouldn't be allowed to do it because it has a natural advantage is ridiculous -- that's precisely the point!

Corporations exist to provide a good to society, and if a public utility would do that job better, then we should obviously be free to choose that model. It's not my job as a citizen to subsidize for-profit enterprise for the sole reason that they are for-profit enterprise!

abraxasz• 12 years ago

That was exactly my thought when I read the comment. I would be very curious to know if I'm missing something here, but it seems obvious to me that if a publicly owned company can do something better and cheaper (cheaper not only just for these people but also for the taxpayer, I don't know if that's the case here) then how is that a bad thing?

tiatia• 12 years ago

"It's not my job as a citizen to subsidize for-profit enterprise for the sole reason that they are for-profit enterprise!" Unfortunately, it is.

The numbers are so tremendously bend in favor of "socialized medicine" but it is basically communism and hence, the private model is better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...

SideburnsOfDoom• 12 years ago

a publicly owned utility has a natural advantage over for-profit companies

So what if it does? I do not think that this should be of overriding concern to us. The for-profit companies are not the only stakeholders here.

bencollier492• 12 years ago

Interesting, this. I suspect that under the currently-being-dbated TTIP, this would count as State Aid, and foreign shareholders in Comcast could sue the local government for lost profits.

davidw• 12 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Water_%26_Electric_Board has worked pretty well to provide water and electricity in the town I grew up in.

coldtea• 12 years ago

One way to address the private utility companies' argument -- that a publicly owned utility has a natural advantage over for-profit companies

And why shouldn't it have "a natural advantage over for-profit companies"?

Were "for-profit companies" granted a guarantee to have advantage over everything else somewhere?

bencollier492• 12 years ago

I wonder if the legal issues could be sidestepped by the local utility subletting the data usage of their cabling to, say, Google?

andrewguenther• 12 years ago

Just to confirm, the article doesn't really make it clear (or I'm just dense), but are they carrying broadband through power lines?

theandrewbailey• 12 years ago

No. EPB is fiber.

http://chattanoogagig.com/

wmf• 12 years ago

No, I think the electric company built a fiber network to manage their electric grid and then they decided to extend it to homes and businesses.

btrautsc3• 12 years ago

This is correct.

pyre3• 12 years ago

I guess the real question is then: Does allowing home/business users onto the same network that manages the electrical grid a good idea (from an OpSec point of view)? Does this make it easier to hack the electric grid? What happens to the electric grid when the network becomes congested?

mschuster91• 12 years ago

Without actually knowing, either this (PowerLine), or they use the existing resources (cable pipes, wiring posts, ...) to run fiber or other wires to their customers without having to invest in digging or putting up poles.

This saves not only the construction costs, but also allow speedy installation as the time needed to get digging/building permits falls away. It's dead fast to wire an entire city area with FTTH if you already have a network of pipes for electrical wiring.

davidandgoliath5• 12 years ago

& the best part: It's to every home by default, regardless of locale. You can be in the woods in a trailer and have gigabit :)

tim3332• 12 years ago

No - the data goes through fiber optic cables.

https://www.epb.net/power/home/products/smart-grid/

nickreese3• 12 years ago

Broadband over Powerline only exists in Ohio and Illinois due to the interference it creates on different radio frequencies.

http://broadbandnow.com/powerline

na852• 12 years ago

Typical response from entrenched American monopolies: Use the courts to prop up your outdated business model so that you aren't required to innovate.

e402• 12 years ago

It's not just lack of innovation. Sometimes there is innovation. It's the protection of monopolies. Comcast has been delivering me good speeds, but they're the only choice I have. That's what they want, it's the opposite of what I want.

na852• 12 years ago

In what way does that example illustrate that Comcast sometimes innovates?

rayiner8• 12 years ago

I really don't understand how everyone gets so excited over publicly owned internet infrastructure. Here in Wilmington, they can't get the buses to run within 30 minutes of scheduled time. I don't even want to imagine what the municipal internet would be like. Over in Atlanta, not too far from Chattanooga, the public sewer system has major sections dating back to the reconstruction after the civil war, and dumps untreated sewage into the Chattahoochee after a big rain overflows the system. Municipal infrastructure historically is under-maintained (hard to get people to long up tax dollars for something that already kinda works). It'll be curious to see how Chattanooga keeps up with the upgrade cycle over the next decades.

Also, no company wants taxpayer-funded alternatives to their product. Its impossible to effectively compete with a public entity that can tap tax revenue. That angle doesn't really add anything to the article.

toomuchtodo14• 12 years ago

And yet, my roads, police and fire services, and municipal maintenance services work very well.

Just as with the private sector, you'll be able to find public initiatives that aren't reaching their goals, or are outright failures. Should they not be permitted to compete against the private sector when the private sector chooses not to serve a certain unprofitable market segment? If you're that good at providing services, why as a private business are you worried about competing with an "incompetent" (as you may argue) public sector initiative?

Full Disclosure: I fully support municipal broadband, and want a stake driven through Comcast's heart.

anigbrowl2• 12 years ago

There's no inherent problem with publicly funded services, but they're only as good as the public body that runs them. If you're in a well-run city/county that's great, if you're in a dysfunctional one then not so much.

I wouldn't have much confidence if my place of residence (Oakland CA) set up muni broadband, for example, although I'd like to be proved wrong. Large parts of the city government are painfully inefficient.

baddox6• 12 years ago

And yet, my roads, police and fire services, and municipal maintenance services work very well.

Do they really though? Road infrastructure (especially bridges) is widely recognized to be really bad in the USA. It's hard to say how well police work without comparing it to something else, but just based on the US prison population I would say that police don't work well. Fire and maintenance services might work reasonably well, but I bet both are shockingly expensive.

rayiner8• 12 years ago

And yet, my roads, police and fire services, and municipal maintenance services work very well.

For varying definitions of 'very well.' Public services are good at delivering a minimum level of service to everyone. Everyone will get water and sewer service. That water might not be particularly clean, and the sewers might dump untreated sewage into the environment, but everyone will get it. The problem for you in this narrative is that you're the yuppie who would be happy to have a higher water bill in order to have cleaner rivers: you're not going to get your way.

Chattanooga was able to piggy-back this on the fiber network put in place for smart grid. What happens in 10 years when that network becomes obsolete? Your neighbors will have to vote to fund upgrades. Will they do that? 60% of people who have access to FiOS do not subscribe. When those same people vote on whether to raise their utility bill to fund upgrades, do you think you'll be happy with the result?

You sound unhappy with Comcast, but the fact is that they pump enormous amounts of capital into their network, while municipalities are famous for letting their infrastructure rot.[1]

I'm not opposed to public services. The question is: will municipal internet be more like NYC's transit system, or more like the ones everywhere else?

[1] The U.S. Society for Civil Engineers estimates we're $3.6 trillion behind on infrastructure maintenance. http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org

bicx3• 12 years ago

I'm in Chattanooga and I love it. Their customer service is great and they've upgraded me from 50mbps to 100mbps, then again from 100mbps to 1000mbps for the same monthly price. I just get emails that say "We've upgraded your internet speed!" I like a free market too, but it's too late to keep the government out of the competition. They ended that game when they allowed providers to lay claim to large areas free of direct competition.

btrautsc3• 12 years ago

I'm here too; EPB is amazing. I cut cable about 6 months ago (kept 100mbps), yet they were still awesome from a customer service perspective.

There is a lot of talk in the thread about public vs private - regardless of ideology - EPB is an incredibly run public utility (as least as a customer)

sujal• 12 years ago

I think someone hits on this in a different thread, but there are forms of incorporating these sorts of utilities that avoid most of the difficulty of maintenance, etc. For example, in the recent multi-week power outage a few years ago here in CT, the best response came from the municipally owned power company serving the Norwich area [1]. It's not impossible to do this.

Also, there are better ways to look at how to fund these. For example, having municipalities own the wiring only, and let ISPs pay to have access to the homes (similar to how telecom or power systems work now, e.g. different charge for distribution). I would love more choices of providers, honestly, and with fiber, there are better options for managing traffic at the neighborhood and local level.

[1] http://www.norwichpublicutilities.com and http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/04/business/the-troubling-con... (the section re: Norwich is about halfway down)

tssva• 12 years ago

It's not really mentioned in this article but EPB owns the fiber and EPB Fiber Optics which delivers the broadband service pays a fee to them to use the infrastructure. What would be interesting is if EPB opened the infrastructure up for other providers to use and compete for customers.

dasil003• 12 years ago

It's really just a testament to how terrible the private ISPs are. At least with public internet there is a theoretical way to set certain standard, whereas with the ISPs' de-facto monopolies and huge capex barrier to entry we know they have zero incentive to ever improve service.

maineldc• 12 years ago

Water, electricity and sewer are stellar examples of things that fade into the background and are often run by highly regulated public entities. I would love for my internet to be as reliable as my power.

garrettgrimsley• 12 years ago

In Wilmington, which the parent comment mentioned, the power is run by Duke Energy. The water & sewer is public, and is subject to frequent breaks and spillages as a result of how outdated the infrastructure is.

mullingitover• 12 years ago

Well, given that it's a natural monopoly, the private sector probably isn't going to do much better with it. The natural inclination will be for a private business to demand ever-increasing rents to feed their shareholders' desire for profits and growth. Public investment can make longer-term investments that retail investors don't have the stomach for, and it's not like the private sector is utterly incapable of waste and mismanagement.

Someone1234• 12 years ago

You make two arguments and they contradict one another:

1. That public internet would suck because all public projects suck (and cite examples). 2. That private companies wouldn't be able to compete with public ones.

They cannot both be true. If the public offering was as bad as you claim, private companies could compete (e.g. on quality).

So which is it? Either public companies suck and therefore private companies would be able to compete (by virtue of them sucking less presumably) OR public companies don't suck and the private companies wouldn't be able to compete.

Your whole post reads like one of those propaganda pieces put out by the far right, interest groups, or think tanks. Just generic "all public services are terrible" then switch it up into "it is unfair that companies have to compete with taxes!"

One could take the logic in your post and use it to literally argue that all public entities ever should be closed and privatised. Even things like cops, fire services, and so on could be hit by that logic. There's no limits.

baddox6• 12 years ago

They cannot both be true. If the public offering was as bad as you claim, private companies could compete (e.g. on quality).

Unless those private companies are legally prohibited from competing, or are prohibited from practically competing by things like red tape or fees for constructing infrastructure.

mynewwork• 12 years ago

It absolutely can be both. The government-run solution could be poorly managed, unreliable and overly expensive while still scaring away the massive investment needed for someone else to compete. A private for-profit business could be completely undercut by the government service which can be incredibly unprofitable but continue to operate using tax dollars.

The current telecom oligopoly is bad, but a government-run monopoly is the one thing that could be worse. Now, public money going to build last-mile fiber which is then leased to competing ISPs to create a functioning marketplace (neither corporate oligopoly nor government monopoly, but a true economics-textbook 'free market') sounds like something that could be a good use of public money & power.

tstrimple• 12 years ago

One reason I'm excited about it is because it introduces some form of competition in a market that currently doesn't have any. As long as municipal broadband isn't the only option, they will have to provide better service than the existing companies in order to attract and keep business.

Also, the existing infrastructure was built with tax money and heavy tax breaks as well. Local governments won't really be at an advantage for having those levers to pull.

ceejayoz• 12 years ago

The US is in the peculiar situation where a large portion of the population has been convinced that government cannot be competent and thus shouldn't be expected to be.

Meanwhile, in much of the developed world, people are shocked when a train is a minute late.

wutbrodo• 12 years ago

Exactly, and for some reason people who make these sort of claims are unable to comprehend the fact that there may be a connection between believing/acting/voting as if government doesn't work and then having underfunded government projects fail hard.

opendais• 12 years ago

I'd call it the depressing situation, personally. I wish I could carve out a small corner of the US sometimes where people don't actively sabotage the ability of government to function effectively.

mindslight• 12 years ago

Well then, let's answer that question in a few decades. Nothing is keeping private companies from building out infrastructure and competing, either now or in the future when the municipalities become sluggish without recourse.

However, let's ask that same question about "privately" owned Internet. To have an actual market, there must be more than a single provider. Which means the overwhelming majority of places have been stuck at DSL for over a decade!

guelo3• 12 years ago

One of the reasons that corporations are so firmly on the "cut-taxes" bandwagon is because it allows them to make your argument: that government-run projects are awful. Of course one of the reason some of them are awful is because they are underfunded, and because there are all these conservative politicians that don't want government projects to be successful so they make sure they're not.

sliverstorm• 12 years ago

Common carrier has worked out for other utilities in the past. Publicly owned infrastructure is the next step.

You can view it as simply as, developing a single distribution network and subscribing to Comcast/AT&T/etc at your discretion over that common distribution network saves everyone money, because the city has only one distribution network rather than several cable networks, DSL, satellite, etc. It additionally could encourage competition among service providers, as incumbents would not need to develop their own distribution network.

Lagged2Death2• 12 years ago

Here in Wilmington, they can't get the buses to run within 30 minutes of scheduled time. I don't even want to imagine what the municipal internet would be like.

Saw this elsewhere today. Speedtest result from Chattanooga:

http://www.speedtest.net/result/3637087466.png

Every private corporation that ever took a tax abatement, subsidy, or other government incentive is also "taxpayer funded."

waivej• 12 years ago

Wow! It's 25% more than I'm paying for Comcast and 26500% faster.

davidandgoliath5• 12 years ago

While this might be true of a lot of entities, it's worth noting that EPB has amazing customer service. I can't scream enough about how great they are.

That might not prove true for a lot of entities though, but EPB is great. They're likely one of the few well run power companies though, I've heard lots of horror stories elsewhere.

georgemcbay2• 12 years ago

Ultimately what it boils down to is that many people (including myself) want something other than the current status quo for internet service, which is a fucking travesty in most of the US in terms of price for (poor) service.

If the solution comes from the private sector, the public sector, or rainbow unicorn fairies is a secondary concern. But the current system is clearly not the answer, which is why I can't read about the home Internet options available to people in most of the world (with a few other exceptions like Canada and Australia) without nearly breaking down and crying.

asynchronous13• 12 years ago

Over in Atlanta, not too far from Chattanooga, the public sewer system has major sections dating back to the reconstruction after the civil war, and dumps untreated sewage into the Chattahoochee after a big rain overflows the system.

Wow. Just wow. You do know that Atlanta privatized its water, right? The private company, United Water, failed to deliver on it's contract. The city took over water duties again after finding fraudulent billing and lower water quality delivered by United Water. Since the city took over in 2004, they've reduced sewage overflows by 97-99%.

That's a really terrible example to use for your argument.

tim3332• 12 years ago

Go Chattanooga!

malchow• 12 years ago

Loosk like EPB, the electric utility co. in question here, is offering 1Gbps over fiber for $70/mo.

https://epbfi.com/enroll/packages/#/

hajile• 12 years ago

Also note that the connection is symmetrical at 1Gbs while most connections greatly favor download and punish upload

davidandgoliath5• 12 years ago

I moved to Chattanooga mostly because of EPB. It's worth noting I average about 900mbps up, and 900 down. During peak hours it's about 900/750, which I find impressive.

nickreese3• 12 years ago

The thing that is left out of the EPB conversation is the amount of federal funding they got. While it does make a good case study, what is impressive is the smaller cities that are beginning to roll it out even in states where laws ban/limit it.

Like Opelika Power in Alabama: http://www.opelikapower.com/.

For my startup broadbandnow.com we've been emailing every mayor in the US offering free statistics about coverage, fiber penetration, etc in their local area along with how they can bring faster speeds to their area.

So far the campaign is going well, we've emailed almost 300 mayors, but after countless phone calls and email changes with city officials, the disheartening reality is that most cities have 2 options to bring faster interent to their area.

1 - Install their own network 2 - Beg incumbent providers to increase their speed / coverage.

I think it's still a few years out, but I'm forecasting a huge slew of crowd funded or community backed providers entering the market to fill the gaps in coverage. (Our goal is to be a part of that movement)

nickreese3• 12 years ago

Update: Here is a relevant post outlining the 19 states with laws limiting municipal broadband.

http://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadblock...

sehugg• 12 years ago

Also the funding they got ($111.5 million) was from the DOE under the auspices of building out a "Smart Grid" [1]. Doubtful that a full fiber connection to the home is required for these applications.

[1] https://www.epb.net/news/news-archive/epb-chattanooga-awarde...

crymer11• 12 years ago

EPB does have a very nice "smart grid" that uses fiber optic lines to connect to stations positioned all over their network that monitor the condition of the connected grid and can rapidly shut off power to a very localized area. They realized that they still had quite a large bit of bandwidth remaining, and decided to start an ISP.[1]

1- This is all based on what I recall from conversations with EPB higher-ups when I spent a day chatting with them for a school event.

jdhendrickson• 12 years ago

Interesting name for your start up, any relationship to the company that used to be based in Irving Texas?

dang• 12 years ago

Article title changed to (compressed) subtitle to reduce baitiness.

polarix• 12 years ago

Thanks for leaving a comment here indicating the change. This should be standard behavior, if it's not already.

hyperliner• 12 years ago

When should the government enter a "private" market opportunity? I think the answer is "Only when necessary to advance the public good."

It seems people want to have one model or the other ALWAYS. But it is not that easy. We don't want firefighters being a private business because a house would burn before you can pay for the service. Or police: the service is typically needed where those with least ability to pay live.

However, it also does not follow that government should enter, say, into the haircut business or the fashion business. But the simple "threat" that it would be possible should send the message to private participants that service at reasonable cost is expected in some markets.

To the extent that access to information and communication is a necessary requirement in the Republic, then it seems to me that it is the government role to ensure this.

EDIT: I wonder at what level though. It seems that if the service is necessary, local initiatives have the least chance to be successful. Maybe this is one of those projects where states have a better chance.

eyeareque• 12 years ago

Innovate or litigate at its finest.

jrockway2• 12 years ago

"The result is a system that now provides the nation’s fastest broadband"

Well, tied for fastest. It only goes up to 1Gbps. Meanwhile, Japan has at least 2Gbps (and I think I saw 4Gbps somewhere, but don't have a source).

TheSisb2• 12 years ago

Keyword: Nation

montecarl• 12 years ago

How does one even make use of >1Gbps internet in a residential setting? Do they sell 10 GigE routers for consumers? Are there any desktops or laptop out there with 10 GigE? I think the answer is no.

The fact that you can get a 1 Gbps link to the internet is amazing. This is pretty much the fastest LAN connection you can get. The difference between LAN and WAN will be gone before too long (other than latency).

tacticus• 12 years ago

Do they sell 10 GigE routers for consumers?

Not yet. But the cost of 10Gbe is dropping quite rapidly.

jdong• 12 years ago

Except due to routing 2Gbps in Japan is way worse than 1Gbps in the US for most content.

krankin1• 12 years ago

I used to live in Chattanooga, EPB was wonderful. My favorite thing about the internet service, my bill was exactly the price advertised (like 59.99). No additional fees, no extra taxes, all of that rolled into the advertised price. It's a little thing, but helped to build trust. Oh, and the download speeds were always as advertised or better.

minimax3• 12 years ago

Like a publicly traded corporation, the utility issued bonds to raise resources to invest in the new broadband project. Similarly, just as many private corporations ended up receiving federal stimulus dollars, so did EPB, which put those monies into its new network.

This is kind of a bullshit comparison. The bonds they are talking about are bonds issued by the city of Chattanooga and backed by the revenue of the local electric utility. That isn't something a telco can do. And they are muni bonds so they receive favorable tax treatment (the interest payments on the bond are tax exempt at the federal and state level) which is reflected through lower interest rates (cheaper borrowing costs) for the issuer. So to say that, hey, the local electric utility did a thing that any old telco could do is not realistic. Also the part about receiving stimulus money is really contrived. The utility directly received DOE (Dept of Energy) moneys in a way that none of the big telcos did.

rosser6• 12 years ago

And municipally owned utilities can't lobby (read: buy) congresscritters like the telcos can. Life's just unfair to everyone, innit?

georgemcbay2• 12 years ago

Also, the (private "stay-out-of-our-business-unless-you-are-giving-us-corporate-welfare") telcos have and continue to receive billions of dollars worth of financial incentives in the form of subsidies, stimulus tax breaks, etc.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/11/big-isps-dwell-in...

mseebach9• 12 years ago

No, you don't generally don't need to invest a lot of resources to lobby yourself. (There are other politicians with power to do things than "congresscritters". In this case the relevant body would be ... the municipal owners.)

minimax3• 12 years ago

Do you understand the significance of being able to borrow against the revenue of the local electric utility? This is what that means: EPB goes to the market and says "hey guys, I need like $200M to make some internet and I can raise the electric rates of all the citizens of Chattanooga to whatever it takes in order to pay it back." There is almost no risk for the lender and if the project were to fail it would be $200M down the drain for the citizens of Chattanooga (at least all the ones that buy electricity, which is probably most of them). Why would you even need lobbyists at that point?

I'm not try to be a cheerleader for the big telcos, but I think there are valid financial reasons cities shouldn't fund these kinds of projects this way.

rayiner8• 12 years ago

Municipal workers' lobbies are some of the most powerful in the country.

NoPiece• 12 years ago

Laws may vary state to state, but in California, municipal utilities can and do lobby, and also have set up a statewide group to lobby on their behalf.

http://cmua.org/

Fully staffed, CMUA has an impressive roster of professionals: experienced lobbyists, regulatory and communications specialists, and legal professionals – all experts in their fields with extensive knowledge of every aspect of California energy and water policies.

MCRed• 12 years ago

I am hopeful that this will show people why municipalities granting monopolies to phone and cable companies is a bad idea.

I've argued this for years, and many of the people who are now pro-net neutrality, in years past would argue that there needed to be these monopolies, because otherwise the infrastructure wouldn't be built, or poor people wouldn't be able to afford it, etc.

In fact, EPB is probably a local monopoly- many power companies are, though that is less the case today than in decades past.

specto• 12 years ago

My sister has this and doesn't upgrade to the 1000 service because she doesn't need it, even though it's $12 more than 100. I'm sitting here lucky if I get 11 down .5 up

kqr2• 12 years ago

OT, but how is Chattanooga's startup scene doing? A little while ago, there was this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5166034

Also, http://noogastartups.com/

tjefferson2• 12 years ago

We posted at almost the exact same time. We're down here in an accelerator right now, and the quality of designers and engineers is incredible. The city is working pretty hard to put itself on the map as a place to start a company, especially on the hardware/additive manufacturing side of things.

And there's great beer everywhere, three climbing gyms walking distance from my desk, and dirt-cheap office space.

tjefferson2• 12 years ago

I'm really glad to see EPB getting some good press: they not only took a really innovative step forward with their physical infrastructure, but also partnered with a local accelerator program (http://www.thegigcity.com/gigtank/) to give startups access to their expertise and grid data to help new companies in the smart grid/smart home space. This was the first year they've done so, but I expect they'll continue.

Full disclosure: we're www.gridcure.com in the smart grid track of the most recent cohort of the program (Demo Day is on the 29th. Ahh!), and can't speak more highly of the startup community in Chattanooga and the quality of work that goes on here. EPB's been a terrific pilot partner for us.

discardorama• 12 years ago

One angle missing in this whole debate is privacy.

For example: the USPS, having started as a government agency, has the weight of the law behind it. No one can mess with your (physical) mail.

Similarly, I can imagine a scenario where traffic on a municipal-owned fiber network could enjoy some protections that a private operator won't.

As an example, ATT is more than happy to bend over and go above and beyond the law to help the feds, hoping for favors in return.

HistoryInAction• 12 years ago

Interestingly, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee) introduced an amendment that the House passed banning such local broadband efforts, which require explicit approval by the FCC: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/house-republicans-are-killi...

If startups had a Chamber of Commerce equivalent, as Chattanooga's Enoch Elwall has been proposing, our community could effectively push back in a unified political voice through a local organization.

ekianjo• 12 years ago

Yet, in an epic fight over telecommunications policy, the paradigm is now being flipped on its head, with corporate forces demanding the government squelch competition and halt the expansion of those high-quality services.

ISPs and Telecoms are amongst the industries that lobby governments the most - they are actively fighting against Free Market, so there's nothing about this which is "flipping this paradigm on its head".

jackvalentine• 12 years ago

The obvious answer to complaints is to open the network up for wholesale and force the utility company that built it to sell access to it's retail arm for at least the same price as it's charging others.

Chattanooga offers residents lightning-quick connections, to telecoms' dismay

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