I was involved in a local government committee to investigate local broadband for my town. The incumbents were understandably lazy at improving service quality, so we struck out on our own to look at alternatives, including a municipally run service or wholesale backbone.<p>What actually happened is someone in government called up a friend at a municipal fiber specialist company, who agreed to start making rumblings that they were going to pull fiber to our town.<p>Within two weeks, one of the large incumbents announced their own project for a $6M upgrade, which involved running submarine cables and totally rewiring the town’s network to enable gigabit service.<p>I’m saddened that the town never got a chance to build and own its own infrastructure, which would have been so much better, because it would have put locals in charge of this essential infrastructure - much as they already control water, roads, and sewage.<p>But, ultimately, I now have gigabit service at a reasonably competitive price, in a small town that arguably never “deserved” it.
Mississippi did this in 2019, and used a portion of the first round of Coronavirus stimulus money to offer block grants to get the ball rolling, to great success.<p>>They used a portion of the funds to supercharge the rollout of high-speed broadband to the most underserved areas of the state in an effort to close the digital divide.<p>They went to rural electric co-ops -- private, independent electric utilities owned by the members they serve -- many of which were left gobsmacked by the offer, according to David O'Bryan, general manager of Delta Electric Power Association, which now serves Carroll and Grenada counties with broadband. Many of these co-ops had been preparing to deploy networks but lacked the cash to begin a major project, especially in the most remote and sparsely populated parts of their territories.<p>The result has been an acceleration in broadband deployment that could make Mississippi one of the most connected states in the nation within the next five to six years. That's a huge leap for the state, which last year ranked 42 out of 50 in BroadbandNow's 2020 connectivity rankings.<p><a href="https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/how-coronavirus-stimulus-funds-helped-one-state-create-a-broadband-miracle/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/how-coronavirus-stimulus-...</a>
<a href="https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadblocks/" rel="nofollow">https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc...</a> (3 May 2021) outlines which states have broadband restrictions. Key quotes:<p><i>- 18 states have restrictive legislation in place that make establishing community broadband prohibitively difficult.</i><p><i>- Five additional states (Iowa, Arkansas, Colorado, Oregon, and Wyoming) have other types of roadblocks in place that make establishing networks more difficult than it needs to be.</i><p><i>- A further five states (Arkansas, Idaho, Tennessee, Washington, and Montana) have introduced bills to remove municipal broadband restrictions so far this year. Montana’s bill has failed, while Arkansas’ passed in February.</i>
On the surface, this looks great. An independent municipal provider? Saweet!<p>What we've seen happen: network construction is contracted out to Comcast. They now have [yet another] local monopoly.
Recent related thread. Others?<p><i>The Washington state legislature has voted to end limits on municipal broadband</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26803426" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26803426</a> - April 2021 (112 comments)<p>There have been tons of threads about municipal broadband of course, but a lot of them are in the key of repetitive/indignant. But this one is also recent and also pretty good:<p><i>The number of cities with municipal broadband has jumped over 4x in two years</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26970493" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26970493</a> - April 2021 (324 comments)
I've been helping some cities recently to price out the cost of broadband projects. Cities often have some assets (property, access to fiber, sometimes access to wireless spectrum) that can make building a broadband network feasible. I'd love to chat with anyone interested in doing this in their city - email in my profile.
Realistically, municipal broadband doesn't make sense for every town or city. But what this should hopefully do is open up avenues to create competition for ISPs to create the services they promised, or upgrade existing services.<p>I'm fairly convinced it's just greed and laziness. It's funny how back when Google fibre was rolling into town, suddenly centurylink upgraded its service...
Props to Chelan County in WA for leading the charge on making this a viable model. The county P.U.D. owns and maintains the fiber infrastructure and sells it wholesale to ISPs. A friend of mine worked on that project and it has netted some concrete economic development wins. Wenatchee has been an ag center but is adding plenty of clean energy jobs and expanding into a Seattle alternative for tech (trying at least).<p><a href="https://www.chelanpud.org/my-pud-services/residential-services/fiber-optics" rel="nofollow">https://www.chelanpud.org/my-pud-services/residential-servic...</a>
As someone who is not well versed in this debate - can someone explain to me why it is a...debate? As in what is a (valid) argument against giving municipals the right to provide an internet service? Obviously big companies don't want the competition but how can they legally make an argument against it?