Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
The Institute For Local Self Reliance (disclosure: I have done writing and research for them) has released an updated interactive map of every community-owned and operated broadband network in the U.S.
All told, there’s now 400 community-owned broadband networks serving more than 700 U.S. towns and cities nationwide, and the pace of growth shows no sign of slowing down.
Some of these networks are directly owned by a municipality. Some are freshly-built cooperatives. Some are extensions of the existing city-owned electrical utility. All of them are an organic, popular, grass-roots community-driven reaction to telecom market failure and expensive, patchy access.
[...] Data routinely notes that community-owned broadband networks provide faster, cheaper, better service than their larger private-sector counterparts. Staffed by locals, they’re also more directly accountable and responsive to the needs of locals. They’re also just hugely popular across the partisan spectrum; routinely winning awards for service.
[...] That’s not to suggest community-owned broadband networks are some mystical panacea; they require smart leadership, strategic planning, and intelligent financing. But if done well, they not only drive significant fiber improvements directly to local markets, they incentivize lumbering regional private sector monopolies — long pampered by federal government corruption and muted competition — to actually try.
Widespread frustration with substandard U.S. broadband drove a big boost in such networks during COVID lockdowns. Since January 1, 2021, more than 47 new networks have come online, with dozens in the planning or pre-construction phases. Many are seeing a big financial boost thanks to 2021 COVID relief (ARPA) and infrastructure bill (IIJA) legislation funding (the latter of which hasn’t even arrived yet).
In response to this popular grass roots movement, giant ISPs have worked tirelessly to outlaw such efforts, regardless of voter intent. 16 states still have protectionist state laws, usually ghost written by giant telecom monopolies, prohibiting the construction or expansion of community broadband. House Republicans went so far as to try and ban all community broadband during a pandemic.
Lumbering regional monopolies like Comcast, AT&T, and Charter could have responded to this movement by lowering prices and improving service. Instead in many cases they found it cheaper to lobby politicians, sue fledgling networks, or create fake “consumer groups” tasked with spreading lies about the perils of community-owned broadband networks among local communities.
But based on the growth rate of such networks, these efforts have backfired, and locally-owned and operated broadband networks appear to be more popular than ever.
(Score: 5, Informative) by EEMac on Monday October 07, @09:16PM (1 child)
In theory, I agree with you.
In practice, with commercial companies:
* Customer service is not *always* bad, but it's often bad
* The government already spies on our connections [wikipedia.org]
* Commercial companies have inserted ads and tracking into web pages [duckduckgo.com]
* My internet jumped in price from $60/month to $150/month just because they could
* I get completely different speeds depending on whether I let the commercial internet company spy on my FTP transfers, or I use secure FTP
* Torrent and file downloads were completely blocked if the company didn't like the name of the file I was downloading, although this *mostly* stopped happening a few years ago
In practice, community broadband users report:
* Low prices
* Stable speeds
* Reliable operation
* Good customer service
(Score: 3, Touché) by Ox0000 on Monday October 07, @10:09PM
It's almost as if having a service provided by a faceless vulture who only cares about picking every last piece of flesh off of the carcass of its victims and doesn't give a flying hoot about the wreckage it leaves behind is somehow of lesser quality than the service provided by something with a vested interest and ties to the area and residents it serves. Verily, I have no idea why this discrepancy would exist. This is truly stupefying, incomprehensible, unanticipated, unimaginable even.
Surely, your experience is merely anecdotal, an outlier, a freak coincidence!
Truly, I wonder if anyone has ever taken the time to do a thorough investigation of this type of discrepancy, because surely, it's a very complex situation that is super-hard to comprehend. I'm confident our current findings from are merely anecdotes, barely hunches or subjective feelings even, which can benefit from a more robust, deeper, longer investigation/study.
But I must be hallucinating...
</sarcasm>(*)
(*) The sarcasm is not aimed at the parent post (to be clear)