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San Francisco: Building Community Broadband to Protect Net Neutrality and Online Privacy
Like many cities around the country, San Francisco is considering an investment in community broadband infrastructure: high-speed fiber that would make Internet access cheaper and better for city residents. Community broadband can help alleviate a number of issues with Internet access that we see all over America today. Many Americans have no choice of provider for high-speed Internet, Congress eliminated user privacy protections in 2017, and the FCC decided to roll back net neutrality protections in December.
This week, San Francisco published the recommendations of a group of experts, including EFF's Kit Walsh, regarding how to protect the privacy and speech of those using community broadband.
This week, the Blue Ribbon Panel on Municipal Fiber released its third report, which tackles competition, security, privacy, net neutrality, and more. It recommends San Francisco's community broadband require net neutrality and privacy protections. Any ISP looking to use the city's infrastructure would have to adhere to certain standards. The model of community broadband that EFF favors is sometimes called "dark fiber" or "open access." In this model, the government invests in fiber infrastructure, then opens it up for private companies to compete as your ISP. This means the big incumbent ISPs can no longer block new competitors from offering you Internet service. San Francisco is pursuing the "open access" option, and is quite far along in its process.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Sunday February 25 2018, @12:21AM
Besides that, nobody has a good solution for load balancing what few gateways exist from the mesh to the Internet, so some poor sod ends up with a saturated link while others go unused. More gateways make it harder to manage, and few gateways make it easier for ISPs to detect AUP violations. If it were easy, whores would do it.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.