Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
I’ve written for years about how U.S. broadband is expansive, patchy, and slow thanks to mindless consolidation, regulatory capture, regional monopolization, and limited competition. That’s resulted in a growing number of pissed off towns, cities, cooperatives, and city-owned utilities building their own, locally-owned and operated broadband networks in a bid for better, cheaper, faster broadband.
Regional giants like Comcast, Charter, or AT&T could have responded to this organic trend by offering better, cheaper, faster service. But ultimately they found it far cheaper to undermine these efforts via regulatory capture, congressional lobbying, lawsuits, protectionist state laws, and misleading disinformation.
They’re big fans of creating fake consumer groups that then attack community broadband networks under the pretense of being “locally concerned citizens,” which you might recall is something Charter recently got busted for in Maine.
They also enjoy funding various “think tanks” who don’t “think” about policy issues, so much as they parrot false industry attacks. Usually under the pretense of being objective, concerned locals simply looking out for the public welfare.
Like in Idaho and Massachusetts, where telecom-financed groups like the Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA) and the Mountain States Policy Center have been peppering local news outlets with misleading local editorials that lie to locals, and portray community broadband as some sort of inherent government boondoggle. Like this editorial by the TPA in the Cape Cod area:
So there are countless different types of community broadband networks, including municipal networks, cooperatives, city-owned utilities, or even public-private partnerships. There’s also a broad variety of ways to fund them, many of which never touch a dime of taxpayer money. A lot of these networks have been helped greatly by the billions in subsidies included in 2021 COVID relief and infrastructure bills.
[...] Popular telecom and media reformer Gigi Sohn, who you might recall was booted from an FCC nomination after the telecom industry ran a successful smear campaign against her in the media, is now the Executive Director of an organization called the American Association For Public Broadband. Her org has been busy trying to counter the disinformation telecom-backed groups are pushing to the public.
Chief among them being that community broadband networks are inherent boondoggles (surely a surprise to hugely popular networks like Longmont Colorado’s Nextlight, Utah’s UTOPIA or Chattanooga’s EPB):
These community owned networks usually have broad, bipartisan support. And they routinely offer locals symmetrical gigabit fiber for as little as $70 a month, without usage caps, weird fees, long-term contracts, and other misleading crap. They tend to treat broadband as an essential utility and public good, with a priority on consumers. You can see why AT&T and Comcast wouldn’t like that.
[...] But it’s a pretty tired playbook at this point. Regional telecom giants dismantle all meaningful competition via regulatory capture, take billions in subsidies for networks they don’t consistently upgrade, raise prices endlessly, and then fund covert attacks on anybody that might dare do things differently, whether that’s reformers at key regulatory agencies, or locals trying to build their own reliable fiber network.
None of this is to say that community broadband networks are some kind of magic panacea. Like any business plan, they’re highly dependent on smart budgeting and savvy local leadership. But they’ve proven time and time again that not only are they a useful way to upgrade long-neglected communities, they’re a lovely motivator for entrenched regional monopolies that simply stopped trying years earlier.
(Score: 5, Touché) by NotSanguine on Friday November 08 2024, @05:04AM
Someone beat me to the above (different) techdirt piece on the same subject.
https://www.techdirt.com/2024/11/07/16-u-s-states-still-ban-community-owned-broadband-networks-because-att-and-comcast-told-them-to/ [techdirt.com]
16 U.S. States Still Ban Community-Owned Broadband Networks Because AT&T and Comcast Told Them To
More at the link above.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 5, Funny) by pTamok on Friday November 08 2024, @07:53AM (9 children)
Yes, but community broadband is socialism.
When characterised in this way, some people have a visceral negative response to the idea. Excessive-rent-extracting monopoly providers driven by a profit motive are preferable.
However, I will say that small (community) operations have a disadvantage: sometimes they cannot economically justify employing the necessary expertise to run an operation properly. This means they need to purchase the expertise, sometimes irregularly, which ends up being quite expensive. It doesn't have to be only broadband: any community operated service has the same problem - as does any small company. You can get the benefits of scale by buying service from larger expert, whereupon it becomes obvious that letting the larger operator run things directly could be cheaper in the long run - so long as the contract is properly managed. If things are outsourced, the necessary expertise within the small operator to regulate, control, and manage the contract often disappears, leaving the large-scale operator in control.
Things that are simple enough to manage locally, and which do not get great advantage from scale are good candidates for community provision. Unfortunately that is not always the case. I have personal experience of working in a volunteer organisation that, as part of its role, is required to manage some commercial rental contracts, both as lessor and lessee. It does not have the scale or expertise to do it properly, and does not have the funding to get the necessary professional advice. As you can imagine, problems follow. Community managed projects can run into the same sand-trap.
While I object (perhaps viscerally) to large providers getting excess profits from poor services delivered captive markets, where local markets are small it is very difficult to see where things can be improved without significant strong, impartial expert-driven regulation. Regulatory capture then becomes a problem.
Some communities will be large enough to run community broadband sustainably. The low end might be lower that I think. I would say that a call for community-run broadband is a symptom of a lack of effective regulation.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 08 2024, @08:59AM (4 children)
You seem unfamiliar with the ways that municipal broadband is and can be implemented. Here's some info for you. You're welcome.
https://www.newamerica.org/oti/reports/community-broadband/the-success-of-community-and-tribal-networks-case-studies-of-fairlawngig-nextlight-and-yurokconnect [newamerica.org]
https://www.nlc.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Community-Broadband-Brief-2.pdf [nlc.org]
And there's lots, lots more. In fact, there are more than 900 municipal networks [communitynets.org] already operating in the US.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by pTamok on Friday November 08 2024, @09:51AM (2 children)
Perhaps you didn't read to the end of my posting
You give some excellent examples.
Small municipalities need to look carefully at how sustainable community broadband is. I'd love for the answer to be 'everyone can do it'. The unfortunate fact is that everybody cannot, for the reasons I outlined. Volunteer groups are often angry because they could do a better job than the current incumbent, whoever it might be: the trouble is, what happens when group members lose interest, or move away, or get sick, or die. The current (volunteer) group might well be able to do a better job, but working in a commercial environment has a whole set of extra challenges that can make things difficult. The financial regulations and requirements alone for small organisations are a significant burden. There's a lot of regulations that don't apply if the organisation is non-profit, or small enough, but there is still a lot of obligatory stuff that has to be done.
I think community broadband is a great idea. I just don't think it will work everywhere, and we need to think about solutions for places where it doesn't work.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 08 2024, @10:42AM (1 child)
You make a bunch of good points.
And yes, smaller communities have additional hurdles to overcome, although (IIUC) some have handled such issues by banding together into regional networks. Utah Broadband [utahbroadband.com] comes to mind.
But yes, strong planning and ensuring economic viability is critical for such projects. I just wish elected state officials would stop implementing bans and restrictions (often wholly written by the big telecoms' lapdog, ALEC [wikipedia.org]) on muni broadband, especially in areas which are poorly and/or under-served by the big ISPs.
I'd expect that many more places could reasonably implement municipal broadband (usually, the most economically viable way is to lay cable (FTTP/FTTH) and then sell access to that last mile to multiple ISPs who can compete on price, service and other features. Creating a competitive marketplace that can pay for maintenance and upgrades to the infrastructure.
As to who might manage such infrastructure, I'd also expect that private contractors and/or local utilities can pick that up without breaking the bank.
But again, as you mentioned, viability will depend on the scale and scope of implementation, management and maintenance.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by pTamok on Friday November 08 2024, @02:34PM
I am wholly in agreement with you. I am tired of living in apartment blocks that have a local monopoly, so I can use only the ISP chosen by the block management. I am happy for the block management to administer the physical infrastructure, but I wish I had a choice of ISP that use the infrastructure to deliver service. It's basically defining VLANs, and there are a lot of Operations and Maintenance Standards defined for multi-provider networks: EXFO White paper 038: Understanding Ethernet OAM (PDF) [exfo.com] Your ISP should not be determined by who owns the cable that passes your door/goes into your dwelling.
(Score: 1, Troll) by VLM on Friday November 08 2024, @05:55PM
That stuff is interesting, but doesn't explain how its implemented.
My theory is "most of the time" when CBB is implemented, a competitor in the nation wide ogliopoly provides all the service to the "community broadband" as a beachhead to make advances against the legacy ogliopoly provider.
I live in a pretty big successful non-diverse city and we can barely collect leaves annually much less run an entire modern cable TV headend and plant. Just the studio for "public access TV" seems right about on the border of what public IT infra spending can support, everything else would be impossible.
I don't think boomers will give up ESPN on TV anytime soon. So if you boot Spectrum out of a muni to "run community broadband" the CBB provider is just going to sign a service contract with Comcast, as more or less a MSP, to run the same stuff over the same lines doing the same things. With the goal of "flipping" the neighboring munis in the future so they're not going to F over the CBB... not yet anyway, but it is inevitable long term.
I don't think what you're seeing is some kind of "socialism / communism of the means of production" what you're really seeing is something like a "trade union of TV watchers" banding together to demand a good deal in as a bargaining process. If your state govt neuters the muni utilities board, I guess you need something like this "trade union of TV watchers" to control an unregulated monopoly.
I'm talking about larger movements in general. I am sure there is precisely one farm community that kicked out cable and brought in a WISP or even made their own WISP or otherwise did something creative. But an individual anecdote gets in the way of discussing long scale trends, which seems to be turf gang wars between national ogliopoly providers. Everything else seems to be marketing hand waving and happy generalizations.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday November 08 2024, @02:28PM
Assuming community broadband is socialism. Then all co-ops, and perhaps all non-profit entities are also examples of socialism. I don't have anything particularly against socialism kinds of things. I just have a problem with pretty much every socialist republic that has ever existed. I'm also a pretty firm believer in the following statement: "democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 08 2024, @05:33PM (2 children)
Many small communities don't have their own police department, but they don't go without police protection, they have the county sheriff or state police. Muni broadband can be done the same way. Communications need to be financed like roads.
Also we really need to do away with the client/server setup and go with some kind of ad hoc networking in a real dumb pipe. Then the internet will be truly neutral
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday November 08 2024, @06:26PM (1 child)
You have to look at an org chart to figure out who's responsible for each stretch of road. Also there's strange operating agreements over the years where the city will take responsibility for snowplowing, perhaps, even if its not "their" road in a legal ownership sense.
Funding the "local cops" is weird because the county gathers and disburses prop tax where I live, and they keep proportionately more county funds to fund the sheriff if you get sheriff service instead of muni police service. Its cheaper to have city cops in my city than to pay the expensive sheriff so we have city cops. Out in farm land its cheaper to pay more to the sheriff than to run a very tiny police dept so they are willing to pay more. At some size its cheaper for a village to hire their own cops, so they do. I don't know if this was the funding model you were thinking of where the county will provide expensive slow WISP service to people who don't have fiber to the home in the city. It is complicated and all the complication and middlemanning has a price. For example we have a "luxury" bus system in my city that costs the city more per trip than the average taxi cost; our cost per rider is about $7/passenger and a competing neighboring-ish city that junked their busses and replaced with a city taxi service pays $6/passenger which is less than we pay for 40 passenger busses that are usually empty, so I think our buses days are numbered... Note that every time someone rides a bus in our city, the city is impoverished by roughly $3. My point being an overly complicated system can be unusable and extremely expensive to run, yet every little part of the overcomplicated system seems like "such a good idea".
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 08 2024, @07:56PM
Thing is, if they can have police and roads, they should be allowed to have their internet free of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman delusions