The US loves throwing poorly determined amounts of money at projects. For example:
PG&E gets to effectively tax Californians an amount of money determined, roughly, as whatever they can spend times 1.1. Guess who massively overpays and who ends up kicking an enormous amount of money toward PG&E for essentially no value.
The US allows medical providers to collect money on a basis that has essentially nothing to do with value delivered. Services end up very very expensive.
The US kicks approximately fixed amounts of money toward broadband providers. Guess who has no incentive whatsoever to maximize the value delivered for that price?
(Comcast recently quoted me approximately $27/foot to extend aerial fiber along an existing Comcast attachment, on a route with no complications whatsoever, so they can provide me (expensive) improved service. If they’re charging rates like this, then it doesn’t matter where the Federal assistance comes from: one way or another, everyone is massively overpaying.)
If the FCC wants to improve broadband cost-effectively, they should either attach conditions forcing their money to be well-spent or rework their process to enforce the existence of a genuinely competitive market. Then fiber could be installed at something approximating reasonable prices, and service could be delivered over that fiber at reasonable rates.)
I long ago came to the conclusion that utilities shouldn't be run by for-profit companies. Companies exist to maximize shareholder profit, everything else is consequential. Essential utilities (which arguably includes internet connectivity) run by companies typically lead to worse service and higher prices for customers. Even worse that most utilities are absolute or de facto monopolies, giving consumers no real choice to even pretend there's a market. This is especially bad when countries are pressured by institutions like the IMF to privatize their utilities as conditions for receiving international loans. Our current model of capitalism is failing in so many ways and the answer is not more capitalism and more ownership by companies.
Utilities are weird anyway. A private company provides the service, but pretty much every aspect of the service is heavily regulated by the government. Isn't that basically a government-controlled company in that case? Why not just have the government handle it?
For telco at least, some countries have exactly that and unfortunately it does not run more efficiently and centralizes potential content control. Innovation comes from competition, and privatization keeps content more freely flowing. If we can solve those two while centralizing that would be amazing but maybe unrealistic with current policy.
Internet is different to most utilities because there are so many competing delivery methods: Cellular (several networks competing here alone), wired (competition between DSL, FTTP, Cable), and the emerging satellite internet market (currently led by Starlink but plenty of room for competition as it's a global market).
This compares to the power grid or water supply in a given city, which are more of a natural monopoly. (Or indeed the railway lines)
And yet the actual best way to deliver data (and TV, etc) services has been unchanged for quite some time: single-mode fiber. PON is a sort-of monopoly-requiring technology, but boring active fiber is not. Someone, e.g. the city or a nonprofit or even the homeowners, could own the fiber, and the other end goes to an exchange point, and service providers can compete to provide service at the other end.
If all the ridiculous permitting and attachment rights get sorted out, single-mode fiber is cheap and straightforward to install.
Take a look at any of the rural nonprofit fiber services. They’re not particularly expensive to build or operate.
You're conflating capitalism with privately-held public utilities, which are very different things.
I'm strongly in favor of capitalism, but deeply oppose the concept of privately-held utilities with local monopolies. No company should be able to "own the telephone poles" and have the last word on how they are used and by who. The poles, water pipes, gas pipes, sewer lines, etc, should all be owned by the municipality or county and vendors should have to compete to service and maintain them. There would be a lot of red tape, and plenty of room for corruption, but at least we wouldn't be starting from the position of, "oh, we can't have municipal broadband because that company a few states over owns all of our infrastructure."
The thing is, what is a luxury to some is an “essential utility” to others. How many people really need gigabit internet? Is that “essential”? 20 years ago you might have been arguing that cable television was essential.
I mean, contractors rely on distributors like Home Depot for their income, that doesn't mean they have a right to Home Depot's in the middle of nowhere just because they want to work there.
> PG&E gets to effectively tax Californians an amount of money determined, roughly, as whatever the can spend times 1.1. Guess who massively overpays and who ends up kicking an enormous amount of money toward PG&E for essentially no value.
I mean that's strictly not true. PG&E's spend has to be approved by a regulator who in the past has not approved capital expenses.
> When PG&E suggested inspecting 300,000 poles a year to ensure safety in 2012, CPUC cut the total to 235,000.¹¹ In 2011 and 2012, when PG&E spent almost $100 million more on replacing poles than allowed by CPUC, the regulator took that as a reason to deny future claims for pole replacement spending. It said “PG&E demonstrated the capacity and willingness to spend more than previously authorized…to meet service obligations,” thus they would not include extra required pole replacements in the “rate base.” These sorts of decisions created exactly the wrong incentives, penalizing PG&E for doing more than was required.¹²
Sure, the CPUC pushes back a bit. But not nearly enough.
PG&E is currently charging 4-7x the national average rate, with CPUC approval. [0] And, even if reimbursement for long-overdue safety improvement is a reasonable idea, the way they’re approaching it is absurd.
As an example, there’s a technology called, variously, “rapid earth fault clearance” or a “ground fault neutralizer”. It’s a device at a station that massively reduces the amount of energy delivered into a downstream ground fault (e.g. downed power line hitting dry vegetation). California is uniquely suited to deployment of these devices because CA is the only state that bans the practice of using a neutral conductor that’s grounded along the utility poles (and thus produces a residual current even without a fault if the loads are unbalanced between the phases).
The recent PG&E “rate case” in which PG&E got permission to yet again raise rates despite already being hilariously expensive gas PG&E spending ludicrous amounts of money on poles and vegetation management and installing a whopping two REFCL devices per year.
For context, a fire-prone region of Australia tested these devices a few years ago by intentionally dropping a protected, energized conductor into a box of dry plants, and they didn’t catch fire. The protection worked.
[0] In the state that created Tesla, it’s not actually especially economical to drive one if you live in PG&E territory. This is pathetic.
I do. Work in a non-profit ISP in a large US city. We witnessed extreme abuse of the system from the big players. Even chatted with the FCC and whitehouse office about it. We were told to just abuse it ourselves because there was no political capital to actually fix it.
My organization is fighting for funding to continue it because despite the abuse, it is very much helping folks. I personally hope it dies though. This is how we get entrenched broken systems. We need to be fighting for a real solution (Municipal ISPs) instead.
> The US loves throwing poorly determined amounts of money at projects.
The use of Throwing here seems to focus ire on the existence of funding. Poorly Determined then amplifies the effect. Together, they would invite a conclusion that funding shouldn't be.
The remainder hints that may not have been your intent, tho.
> (Comcast recently quoted me approximately $27/foot to extend aerial fiber along an existing Comcast attachment, on a route with no complications whatsoever, so they can provide me (expensive) improved service. If they’re charging rates like this, then it doesn’t matter where the Federal assistance comes from: one way or another, everyone is massively overpaying.)
I rarely pull up my Xfinity account but I did the other day when I moved and was shocked at how bad the experience was. I counted that it took ~3 minutes of loading + redirects to get me from the login screen to my account screen, and that's on a gigabit internet connection from Xfinity!
I was pissed but then I relized, they have a virtual monopoly in my region and besides paying for Starlink, there are no other options. These guys have zero incentive to make thier website better, because what are you going to do?
I think people also need to accept that you can’t ignore basic economics. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to run fiber a hundred miles to the middle of nowhere because there’s one small town there.
To me, it’s a bit like saying every town needs a Starbucks, and a Home Depot, and a target. And if the town can’t sustain the economics of those businesses, everyone else needs to pay higher prices to subsidize them, because... reasons.
Those reasons that we sometimes should do things that don't make economic sense are called "the public good". We don't need government and regulations to do things that are aligned with economic incentives--those things do themselves in a reasonably free market. We need government for those things that don't make economic sense, but that we should do anyway because it is better for everyone.
Unfortunately, the way the US and state governments tend to do these uneconomical "public good" things is: "Throw money at already-large corporations, who pocket the money and don't do the thing anyway, because there were no strings attached."
I don't think you can really argue that there is "public good" in building essential infrastructure wastefully and inefficiently. Ghosts towns and abandoned towns have always been a thing, since the dawn of civilization. They're abandoned usually precisely because it doesn't make sense to invest in infrastructure there - a railroad, a post office, a port, an electric plant. This isn't new. It's okay if cities die. The people that lived there aren't dying too. They're moving elsewhere, where they have better access to infrastructure and services. There's nothing wrong with that. And we shouldn't be wasting money to prevent it.
We’re not talking about economically inefficient ghost towns. We’re talking about large telco not being interested in building out fiber because the _profit_ wouldn’t make a blip on their spreadsheets and thus wouldn't drive the type of growth their shareholders are looking to see reflected in their company OKRs or whatever.
The deal with these protected monopolies, when the public grants them, is that the receiver is required to build out infrastructure to serve all the citizens who granted them the privilege of planting poles or digging trenches all over their public property (for comfy profit) in the first place. However those incentives are at conflict with a for profit charter as you understand.
We’ve done a woefully terrible job holding these companies accountable for building and investing in infrastructure even when it wouldn’t be convenient, which has been demonstrated time and again as people are raising in this thread. These telcos literally take billions in gov’t grants and sit on them saying “we tried it was too expensive, moar $$ plz”, which is complete and utter BS.
If we didn't have these arrangements then sure, let a for profit company do as it pleases. Let it negotiate the land rights with individual citizens. Let it raise the initial capital privately to fund buildouts. Etc. That’s just not how we handle common good utilities.
A lot of the problems seems to be that Internet service doesn't need to be a full monopoly. Separate the organization that tears up the ground and from the one that provides data service.
BT (British telecom) tried that, first they split the network infrastructure biz into openreach, then they opened up the work for more contractors winning bids.
All the same "profit" arguments you're making against Telco's hold equally well against Starbucks or Home Depot or anyone else for that matter. Bad, risky investments are bad and risky no matter how much you try to subsidize them.
I agree that throwing tax money at corporations without clear deliverables is bad policy. It's also bad policy to waste taxpayer dollars building bridges to nowhere, which is precisely what broadband access in the middle of nowhere is.
Access to infrastructure makes places more desirable to live. It increases property values, which in turn encourage more development. I get it. I understand why local governments throw incentives to telcos to artificially make their cities more attractive and lucrative for business. It's not just telcos. We do it for sports stadiums, factories, movie productions. By and large, these policies end up being wealth transfers from the poor and middle class to wealthy people.
I get what you’re saying. I think you’re over simplifying. Building a bridge to a town of 10,000 is hardly nowhere. What you’re saying sounds like we should all just live in cheap concrete studio apartment complexes in one big city where we can hyper optimize human existence and squeeze maximal profit out of society… A bridge to a town of 10k can be quite profitable. Maybe not as much as a bridge to a town of 10 million, but my point is that because these companies are so big they shy away from projects with smaller rewards. Small locally owned mom and pop ISP would step in and fill the gap, but big telco has the monopoly on infra and won’t do the build out. Nobody is running negative and the line still doesn’t get deployed.
I think people should choose to risk and invest money and projects as they see fit. There are plenty of smaller and less densely populated towns with fiber broadband.
> A bridge to a town of 10k can be quite profitable
If it was, someone would do it. That's the beautiful thing about capitalism.
You're right, but that's why the Rural Electrification Act has been used for almost 90 years to provide electrical and communication services to communities where it's uneconomical without federal loans.
Same can go for electricity, water (if there is no local enough source of good water), as well as transportation infrastructure, mobile network coverage, and access to goods. I guess the main question is, does it make sense for a lot of such places to be abandoned, just because they will never be able to compete with cities in terms of cost due to distance and being smaller markets?
It does make sense to run fiber, even to places like that.
Aerial fiber cable costs ~ $8 per foot. Those towns already have electricity, so they have telephone polls. 100 miles * 5280 * 16 (doubling the material cost to account for termination, connectors, etc), is $8.5M. Assuming the fiber lasts 30 years, that’s $281K per year. Small towns in the US have 2500-4999 people. At the minimum size to qualify as a town, that’s $112 per person per year, or under $10/month for the trunk line. At $100/month per house that should be profitable.
Also, the trunk will serve people outside of town.
The ACP money should be used to fund build-outs like this and dictate that the resulting lines have common carrier status (any ISP can rent bandwidth on them at the same price and priority).
I'm going to go out on a limb and assume you've massively underestimated the true cost of installing fiber (you include no labor, or maintenance, or any equipment costs besides just the fiber for the trunk line (last mile installation is often much more expensive)), and massively overestimated the amount people in small towns are willing to pay for internet. Factor in that construction and installation in remote areas can be significantly more expensive, and the high risk that small, remote towns are likely to disappear and die over the course of 30 years, and there aren't many reasons to invest in expensive long-term infrastructure there.
> The US loves throwing poorly determined amounts of money at projects.
I'd actually broaden that to say that we love to throw poorly determined sums of money at idealized end-goals.
Well-defined projects, with clear strategic approaches and benchmarks of success, are often missing from the equation, and money is regularly spent on activities that are purely performative, or even counter-productive.
Perhaps greater funding for libraries to have the fastest internet in an area, and to provide greater resources such as computers, and education for how to use them.
Folks aren't going to make the trek to a library every time they want to watch a video or take an online course. Or imagine they have children that they'd have to supervise/provide care for while doing whatever necessitated the trip.
I'm not denying the side effects of libraries being a beacon - that much is true.
But this program was designed to ensure folks had reliable fast internet at home.
How? Those of us that still remember the days of monopoly telephone, it was glorious. High uptime targets, excellent quality of service, and low cost for new installation because it was the monopolist. Nowadays, try getting Comcast 100 meters outside city limits.
Yes, you are likely reading that right. A standard installation charge for most broadband providers when you start service is somewhere between $100 and $250. That's when you already have everything in place and they just need to provide a modem and activate it at the head-end.
For situations where they need to run an entrance line, especially for fiber-optic entrances, the prices can truly be absurd. I previously was charged $12/foot for coax entry for a cable connection at a house that didn't previously have cable service, and they made no efforts to optimize for length, fiber is usually $25/foot or more. This is on top of an "service initiation fee", which was $500 for gigabit over coax, and would have been $2500 for gigabit over fiber. All told it was nearly $3k to get gigabit coax as new service at my prior house, and fiber would have cost me more than $15k, despite it all being microtrenched in an existing easement where the provider had right of way, no street crossings, and covered in part by state and federal subsidies on the back-end.
What these broadband regional monopolies do is basically double-charge for the same work. The state and feds pay them to do it, then they also charge the customer to do it, and they take no efforts to minimize any of the costs because there is no incentive to do so. The prices they charge are also outrageously higher than the actual cost of delivering the service. I was once a BICSI certified fiber optic installer. I happen to know exceptionally well exactly what the costs are for running that service. For what they wanted to charge me $7000 for, I could have done the work myself (including my former labor rates) for a mere $1600, which includes a healthy margin. That's also based on fiber prices from ~20 years ago, and things are much cheaper now from a materials perspective. There's really no excuse.
$3k-15k sounds like a realistic estimate (no judgment on whether it really should cost that much), but what GP said is three orders of magnitude higher.
True, but the moment you have a street crossing (which requires municipal permitting and traffic management) the cost skyrockets unless there's existing conduit under the street. Since that wasn't my situation I don't have exact numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised to know it would be $20k-$30k for each street crossing. If the GP of my original comment was in such a situation, it could easily exceed $100k for a fiber run.
Yes, you read correctly. They refused to provide service at the nearest corner of the property (where it would be a short drop from a pole) and insisted that it be at the primary dwelling. That was going to be more than some maximum distance for new aerial service imposed by the municipality, so would have to be underground. Comcast refused to let me hire my own contractor to install a conduit, and instead wanted $300 per foot and a needlessly circuitous path. That's where $210k came from. Their original bid at $1M didn't have any details on cost breakdown.
I used to live in a town where Comcast had a government enforced monopoly. Outages were regular, service was garbage, wait times for new installs were a month or more, and speeds were 20mbps. The town literally next door had great service, rare outages, little waiting, and gigabit speeds. Comcast didn't have a monopoly there.
Then you don't remember those days at all, because there were plenty of areas the monopoly refused to serve where residents had to cobble together their own service and fight to be connected.
This always makes me nervous - it's not a huge jump from "the government provides the service" to "the government decides what you can and can't say on the service". They regulated TV because the "airwaves" were public, and they didn't even provide those, they just licensed them.
Whenever there's a question if the US government should provide a benefit to its population there's always someone coming up with a variation of the slippery slope fallacy trying to defend against it. The paranoia against the government the US has seems to bring more downsides than upsides, you pay for all the costs associated with that but no protection for when a tyrant governs your country (which seems to be approaching fast given the current political scenario).
The government has the monopoly of violence, if the government decides you can't say something on some media it won't be the fact of having it privatised that will stop them, it's as simple as that.
Your interstate highway system wasn't funded by private companies, a nationwide fiber optic infrastructure won't be either. Let the government invest in the wellbeing of its citizens, let them create a massive open fiber network (like what Sweden has done) to enable broadband for as many as possible, it's the centralisation of coordination that gives a government a lot of leverage to create benefits to its population, while you keep fighting ghosts the US will keep being a country for business first, citizens secondly.
I don’t know, that alone seems like a good enough reason to stop giving them control over things to me. I don’t want the entity providing my information also having legal authority to murder me.
Like if I can buy something from from an entity with the authority to kill me or an entity without for a little bit more, I'll pay the extra.
Companies can focus on providing service to their paying customers and (for the most part) ignore everyone else. Governments, on the other hand, have to govern over everyone.
As a society (through our group decision-making process, politics), we decided everyone should have access to education, as it's massively beneficial to have an educated workforce and the unlocked positive-sum economic opportunities significantly reduce the number of people who elect (or are stuck with) zero-sum criminal opportunities (and these people are very expensive to have to manage).
We could leave a lot of the country without usable access to the internet, but from the start we decided it's better that everyone be connected (our Constitution explicitly authorizes Congress to establish post offices and post roads). And thanks to our political system and relatively high degree of openness, we have been able to discover and patch a lot of the abuses of the system that motivate you to prefer private options.
The point is that it already has control over you, willingly or not you are part of the social contract. Society organised itself with governments to achieve things that private profit-driven motive can't, you wouldn't have roads connecting low density or low income places if they had to be paid for, the postal service wouldn't deliver to unprofitable areas, schools wouldn't exist or would be extremely bad in low income or low density areas.
Communication is necessary, a government providing (or enabling) infrastructure that can reduce costs to all is a net gain for society. Your paranoia only bring higher costs to everyone, increases the gap between the haves and have-nots since poor people cannot afford a higher price for services when society is unwilling to provide a baseline for them.
Are you against public schools? A government can decide to completely indoctrinate students as they wish, even with that risk I believe most people would say that it's worth it for the government provides education for kids.
Isn't it better if everyone shares the burden through taxes for road construction enabling transportation rather than a network of private roads, each owned by a different entity that you are required to pay for access?
Having the choice to pay for a private entity to provide you services is reasonable, completely shutting off the government from providing the basics of expensive infrastructure that will pay off in a span of 15-50 years which private entities can build services on top is mind-boggling dumb for your personal and a society's finance (case in point, healthcare in the USA). Worse, without giving you any bigger freedom since an evil government won't care if it's public or private, and on top of it I'd say much the opposite since you are then beholden to private entities that you have absolutely no democratic power to go against.
> I'll pay the extra.
It's not only you paying the extra, it's every single individual in your society, cumulatively that's a bad decision since the money could be spent more efficiently elsewhere.
Right now, what a lot of people so rural they don't get broadband have is the newspaper, AM radio, the local network news, the national network news, and/or the cable news. Four of those five have seen major providers controlled by large-scale ideological campaigns to one degree or other.
I'm not saying it's a slam dunk or anything, but access does at least permit another shot at viewing the world through a lens other than the movement conservative one.
If there is going to be public investment it should result in municipalities owning the last mile. Maybe the only thing that governments have done better than the private sector (other than use of violence) are roads, plumbing and electric. Broadband seems similar enough to those that it would also be a good fit.
There is still a place for companies to build the internet backbone and maintain the big pipes connecting cities.
I tend towards being more Libertarian, but the one place that I think governments should be involved in is infrastructure - the stuff where competition would be wasteful (who wants a bunch of competing private roads?).
I think it makes sense for governments to provide "roads, wires, and pipes" and then let the private companies decide what goes over the roads, wires, and pipes.
My municipality can maintain my wires but I can choose my ISP. Just like they maintain the roads, but private companies use them.
It can work out in practice, but such things always have weird incentives lurking around the corner. Starlink has no particular reason to improve services in corner cases where there is no competition. It's probably better to have the gubmint buy the services in bulk, so they have better leverage in the future to switch.
The American model is to eschew socialism with the public/private duality that brings the worst of both worlds - high prices, zero accountability, and double the bureaucracy.
The need for competition is real, and in many instances regulations are written by the regulated, but we need to find a way to solve our fake "ha ha it's not real socialism" model in a way that fits our American society.
Universal broadband access is a governmental program supported by Democrats to give Internet access to Republicans. Hard-nosed politics would suggest the program should not have a bright future. States can deal with this problem, or not, as they choose.
it's always been weird to me how badly elected democrats want to help republicans out in the in boondocks like I know those people show up at the state legislatiures but they're rigidly inflexible, ideologically committed and will never vote blue no matter what the democrats do for them, I want to shake my parties leaders sometimes like they will never love you, stop it.
> Universal broadband access is a governmental program supported by Democrats to give Internet access to Republicans.
This isn't a bad observation.
To speak plainly here: It taps at the notion that poor rural Rs ought to realize that the national R party likes them poor and angry. It's not untrue but it's totally tone deaf to the reality that the national D party hasn't given a meaningful crap about rural poverty in my lifetime. (source:recovering conservative)
> Hard-nosed politics would suggest the program should not have a bright future.
Our bazillionth lesson that hard nosed politics benefit a small group at the expense of most everyone else. Much work+money goes into making sure the lesson isn't learned.
> States can deal with this problem, or not, as they choose.
This runs up against a bright line. It runs between states that are openly, gleefully hostile toward helping vulnerable people - and the states that sometimes help when they aren't busy being inept/apathetic/confused/corrupt.
Alternative take: Universal broadband is a governmental program supported by Democrats to give Internet access to human people, some of which identity as Republicans, with the goal of improving things for all if us.
Jesus fuck, why does it always have to be us vs. them?
Practical quantum computing is going to be available in 3-5 years, and whatever "permanent" solution we establish today is going to have to be revisited as we use new protocols, etc in ways that we may not yet be able to imagine
(I know I'll be downvoted for this because there are some with no vision, or they'll say "it's just bandwidth what does protocol have to do with")
On 1998, the US started giving hundreds of billions of dollars to the telecoms to roll out fiber natinwide.
This incredible event led to the US becoming the first country to have fiber deployed nationwide.
Wait, I'm misremembering that slightly... Oh yes, I remember now: The telecoms pocketed the money instead of delivering the promised infrastructure, and now the US lags much of the world on Internet connectivity.
AT&T took that money and laid a whole lot of fiber in my rural area and never lit it up. A few years ago my power coop rolled out fiber to everyone in the area and it's great.
When Xfiniti was the only broadband option in my neighborhood, I was paying a lot for crappy service. Then AT&T decided to compete with them, ran fiber to my house for no charge, and now I have a symmetric gigabit for less money.
Policies designed to encourage this kind of competition should be preferred to some sort of public utility. This can include municipally-owned fiber, with the bandwidth rented out to providers, it can include subsidizing rural broadband, and it can include requiring that providers who are a monopoly in a given area meet certain standards in terms of quality and price.
What I don't want is to backslide into a situation where I have only one option, and if it sucks, well then I'm welcome to not use the Internet. That option being publicly owned is at least as likely to make the result worse as it is better.
73 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 146 ms ] threadPG&E gets to effectively tax Californians an amount of money determined, roughly, as whatever they can spend times 1.1. Guess who massively overpays and who ends up kicking an enormous amount of money toward PG&E for essentially no value.
The US allows medical providers to collect money on a basis that has essentially nothing to do with value delivered. Services end up very very expensive.
The US kicks approximately fixed amounts of money toward broadband providers. Guess who has no incentive whatsoever to maximize the value delivered for that price?
(Comcast recently quoted me approximately $27/foot to extend aerial fiber along an existing Comcast attachment, on a route with no complications whatsoever, so they can provide me (expensive) improved service. If they’re charging rates like this, then it doesn’t matter where the Federal assistance comes from: one way or another, everyone is massively overpaying.)
If the FCC wants to improve broadband cost-effectively, they should either attach conditions forcing their money to be well-spent or rework their process to enforce the existence of a genuinely competitive market. Then fiber could be installed at something approximating reasonable prices, and service could be delivered over that fiber at reasonable rates.)
This compares to the power grid or water supply in a given city, which are more of a natural monopoly. (Or indeed the railway lines)
If all the ridiculous permitting and attachment rights get sorted out, single-mode fiber is cheap and straightforward to install.
Take a look at any of the rural nonprofit fiber services. They’re not particularly expensive to build or operate.
I'm strongly in favor of capitalism, but deeply oppose the concept of privately-held utilities with local monopolies. No company should be able to "own the telephone poles" and have the last word on how they are used and by who. The poles, water pipes, gas pipes, sewer lines, etc, should all be owned by the municipality or county and vendors should have to compete to service and maintain them. There would be a lot of red tape, and plenty of room for corruption, but at least we wouldn't be starting from the position of, "oh, we can't have municipal broadband because that company a few states over owns all of our infrastructure."
They don't need gigabit internet but for large numbers rural residents even normal 25Mbps broadband isn't available.
I mean that's strictly not true. PG&E's spend has to be approved by a regulator who in the past has not approved capital expenses.
> When PG&E suggested inspecting 300,000 poles a year to ensure safety in 2012, CPUC cut the total to 235,000.¹¹ In 2011 and 2012, when PG&E spent almost $100 million more on replacing poles than allowed by CPUC, the regulator took that as a reason to deny future claims for pole replacement spending. It said “PG&E demonstrated the capacity and willingness to spend more than previously authorized…to meet service obligations,” thus they would not include extra required pole replacements in the “rate base.” These sorts of decisions created exactly the wrong incentives, penalizing PG&E for doing more than was required.¹²
https://ciceroinstitute.org/pge-failing-california/
PG&E is currently charging 4-7x the national average rate, with CPUC approval. [0] And, even if reimbursement for long-overdue safety improvement is a reasonable idea, the way they’re approaching it is absurd.
As an example, there’s a technology called, variously, “rapid earth fault clearance” or a “ground fault neutralizer”. It’s a device at a station that massively reduces the amount of energy delivered into a downstream ground fault (e.g. downed power line hitting dry vegetation). California is uniquely suited to deployment of these devices because CA is the only state that bans the practice of using a neutral conductor that’s grounded along the utility poles (and thus produces a residual current even without a fault if the loads are unbalanced between the phases).
The recent PG&E “rate case” in which PG&E got permission to yet again raise rates despite already being hilariously expensive gas PG&E spending ludicrous amounts of money on poles and vegetation management and installing a whopping two REFCL devices per year.
For context, a fire-prone region of Australia tested these devices a few years ago by intentionally dropping a protected, energized conductor into a box of dry plants, and they didn’t catch fire. The protection worked.
[0] In the state that created Tesla, it’s not actually especially economical to drive one if you live in PG&E territory. This is pathetic.
My organization is fighting for funding to continue it because despite the abuse, it is very much helping folks. I personally hope it dies though. This is how we get entrenched broken systems. We need to be fighting for a real solution (Municipal ISPs) instead.
This is the crux of it - there is no reason we can't proposition something to replace it while continuing to move forward.
If you want muni ISP, it'll take a few years just to get the ducks in a row.
What's your take Google Fiber's foray into ISP territory and it's associated snail pace progress/surrender?
The use of Throwing here seems to focus ire on the existence of funding. Poorly Determined then amplifies the effect. Together, they would invite a conclusion that funding shouldn't be.
The remainder hints that may not have been your intent, tho.
I rarely pull up my Xfinity account but I did the other day when I moved and was shocked at how bad the experience was. I counted that it took ~3 minutes of loading + redirects to get me from the login screen to my account screen, and that's on a gigabit internet connection from Xfinity!
I was pissed but then I relized, they have a virtual monopoly in my region and besides paying for Starlink, there are no other options. These guys have zero incentive to make thier website better, because what are you going to do?
To me, it’s a bit like saying every town needs a Starbucks, and a Home Depot, and a target. And if the town can’t sustain the economics of those businesses, everyone else needs to pay higher prices to subsidize them, because... reasons.
Unfortunately, the way the US and state governments tend to do these uneconomical "public good" things is: "Throw money at already-large corporations, who pocket the money and don't do the thing anyway, because there were no strings attached."
The deal with these protected monopolies, when the public grants them, is that the receiver is required to build out infrastructure to serve all the citizens who granted them the privilege of planting poles or digging trenches all over their public property (for comfy profit) in the first place. However those incentives are at conflict with a for profit charter as you understand.
We’ve done a woefully terrible job holding these companies accountable for building and investing in infrastructure even when it wouldn’t be convenient, which has been demonstrated time and again as people are raising in this thread. These telcos literally take billions in gov’t grants and sit on them saying “we tried it was too expensive, moar $$ plz”, which is complete and utter BS.
If we didn't have these arrangements then sure, let a for profit company do as it pleases. Let it negotiate the land rights with individual citizens. Let it raise the initial capital privately to fund buildouts. Etc. That’s just not how we handle common good utilities.
A lot of the problems seems to be that Internet service doesn't need to be a full monopoly. Separate the organization that tears up the ground and from the one that provides data service.
I agree that throwing tax money at corporations without clear deliverables is bad policy. It's also bad policy to waste taxpayer dollars building bridges to nowhere, which is precisely what broadband access in the middle of nowhere is.
Access to infrastructure makes places more desirable to live. It increases property values, which in turn encourage more development. I get it. I understand why local governments throw incentives to telcos to artificially make their cities more attractive and lucrative for business. It's not just telcos. We do it for sports stadiums, factories, movie productions. By and large, these policies end up being wealth transfers from the poor and middle class to wealthy people.
> A bridge to a town of 10k can be quite profitable
If it was, someone would do it. That's the beautiful thing about capitalism.
We can opine about living in a libertarian paradise, but we don’t.
Aerial fiber cable costs ~ $8 per foot. Those towns already have electricity, so they have telephone polls. 100 miles * 5280 * 16 (doubling the material cost to account for termination, connectors, etc), is $8.5M. Assuming the fiber lasts 30 years, that’s $281K per year. Small towns in the US have 2500-4999 people. At the minimum size to qualify as a town, that’s $112 per person per year, or under $10/month for the trunk line. At $100/month per house that should be profitable.
Also, the trunk will serve people outside of town.
The ACP money should be used to fund build-outs like this and dictate that the resulting lines have common carrier status (any ISP can rent bandwidth on them at the same price and priority).
I'd actually broaden that to say that we love to throw poorly determined sums of money at idealized end-goals.
Well-defined projects, with clear strategic approaches and benchmarks of success, are often missing from the equation, and money is regularly spent on activities that are purely performative, or even counter-productive.
The FCC Is Taking Steps to Wind Down the Affordable Connectivity Program
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39152332
Republicans Kill Popular FCC Program That Made Broadband Affordable for the Poor
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39616347
I'm not denying the side effects of libraries being a beacon - that much is true.
But this program was designed to ensure folks had reliable fast internet at home.
For situations where they need to run an entrance line, especially for fiber-optic entrances, the prices can truly be absurd. I previously was charged $12/foot for coax entry for a cable connection at a house that didn't previously have cable service, and they made no efforts to optimize for length, fiber is usually $25/foot or more. This is on top of an "service initiation fee", which was $500 for gigabit over coax, and would have been $2500 for gigabit over fiber. All told it was nearly $3k to get gigabit coax as new service at my prior house, and fiber would have cost me more than $15k, despite it all being microtrenched in an existing easement where the provider had right of way, no street crossings, and covered in part by state and federal subsidies on the back-end.
What these broadband regional monopolies do is basically double-charge for the same work. The state and feds pay them to do it, then they also charge the customer to do it, and they take no efforts to minimize any of the costs because there is no incentive to do so. The prices they charge are also outrageously higher than the actual cost of delivering the service. I was once a BICSI certified fiber optic installer. I happen to know exceptionally well exactly what the costs are for running that service. For what they wanted to charge me $7000 for, I could have done the work myself (including my former labor rates) for a mere $1600, which includes a healthy margin. That's also based on fiber prices from ~20 years ago, and things are much cheaper now from a materials perspective. There's really no excuse.
I didn't get Comcast.
The government has the monopoly of violence, if the government decides you can't say something on some media it won't be the fact of having it privatised that will stop them, it's as simple as that.
Your interstate highway system wasn't funded by private companies, a nationwide fiber optic infrastructure won't be either. Let the government invest in the wellbeing of its citizens, let them create a massive open fiber network (like what Sweden has done) to enable broadband for as many as possible, it's the centralisation of coordination that gives a government a lot of leverage to create benefits to its population, while you keep fighting ghosts the US will keep being a country for business first, citizens secondly.
I don’t know, that alone seems like a good enough reason to stop giving them control over things to me. I don’t want the entity providing my information also having legal authority to murder me.
Like if I can buy something from from an entity with the authority to kill me or an entity without for a little bit more, I'll pay the extra.
As a society (through our group decision-making process, politics), we decided everyone should have access to education, as it's massively beneficial to have an educated workforce and the unlocked positive-sum economic opportunities significantly reduce the number of people who elect (or are stuck with) zero-sum criminal opportunities (and these people are very expensive to have to manage).
We could leave a lot of the country without usable access to the internet, but from the start we decided it's better that everyone be connected (our Constitution explicitly authorizes Congress to establish post offices and post roads). And thanks to our political system and relatively high degree of openness, we have been able to discover and patch a lot of the abuses of the system that motivate you to prefer private options.
Communication is necessary, a government providing (or enabling) infrastructure that can reduce costs to all is a net gain for society. Your paranoia only bring higher costs to everyone, increases the gap between the haves and have-nots since poor people cannot afford a higher price for services when society is unwilling to provide a baseline for them.
Are you against public schools? A government can decide to completely indoctrinate students as they wish, even with that risk I believe most people would say that it's worth it for the government provides education for kids.
Isn't it better if everyone shares the burden through taxes for road construction enabling transportation rather than a network of private roads, each owned by a different entity that you are required to pay for access?
Having the choice to pay for a private entity to provide you services is reasonable, completely shutting off the government from providing the basics of expensive infrastructure that will pay off in a span of 15-50 years which private entities can build services on top is mind-boggling dumb for your personal and a society's finance (case in point, healthcare in the USA). Worse, without giving you any bigger freedom since an evil government won't care if it's public or private, and on top of it I'd say much the opposite since you are then beholden to private entities that you have absolutely no democratic power to go against.
> I'll pay the extra.
It's not only you paying the extra, it's every single individual in your society, cumulatively that's a bad decision since the money could be spent more efficiently elsewhere.
I'm not saying it's a slam dunk or anything, but access does at least permit another shot at viewing the world through a lens other than the movement conservative one.
There is still a place for companies to build the internet backbone and maintain the big pipes connecting cities.
I think it makes sense for governments to provide "roads, wires, and pipes" and then let the private companies decide what goes over the roads, wires, and pipes.
My municipality can maintain my wires but I can choose my ISP. Just like they maintain the roads, but private companies use them.
The need for competition is real, and in many instances regulations are written by the regulated, but we need to find a way to solve our fake "ha ha it's not real socialism" model in a way that fits our American society.
This isn't a bad observation.
To speak plainly here: It taps at the notion that poor rural Rs ought to realize that the national R party likes them poor and angry. It's not untrue but it's totally tone deaf to the reality that the national D party hasn't given a meaningful crap about rural poverty in my lifetime. (source:recovering conservative)
> Hard-nosed politics would suggest the program should not have a bright future.
Our bazillionth lesson that hard nosed politics benefit a small group at the expense of most everyone else. Much work+money goes into making sure the lesson isn't learned.
> States can deal with this problem, or not, as they choose.
This runs up against a bright line. It runs between states that are openly, gleefully hostile toward helping vulnerable people - and the states that sometimes help when they aren't busy being inept/apathetic/confused/corrupt.
Jesus fuck, why does it always have to be us vs. them?
(I know I'll be downvoted for this because there are some with no vision, or they'll say "it's just bandwidth what does protocol have to do with")
This incredible event led to the US becoming the first country to have fiber deployed nationwide.
Wait, I'm misremembering that slightly... Oh yes, I remember now: The telecoms pocketed the money instead of delivering the promised infrastructure, and now the US lags much of the world on Internet connectivity.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5...
Policies designed to encourage this kind of competition should be preferred to some sort of public utility. This can include municipally-owned fiber, with the bandwidth rented out to providers, it can include subsidizing rural broadband, and it can include requiring that providers who are a monopoly in a given area meet certain standards in terms of quality and price.
What I don't want is to backslide into a situation where I have only one option, and if it sucks, well then I'm welcome to not use the Internet. That option being publicly owned is at least as likely to make the result worse as it is better.