Good luck convincing the taxpayers of that fact. It should be regulated and made available as such, but made to run for free by government agencies…I think that will piss absolutely everybody off for a number of reasons.
Pretty well every case I’ve read of municipal owned fiber nets has been a grand success, barring interference by the local carriers. Let the city own the infra and the carriers compete for access. Of course you get the whinging about ‘muh free market/choice’ but that’s the case for any public works really.
Not contracted monopolies or direct city run, but like ‘IAAS’ seems to work. Much like how you see some small cell companies providing unique offers riding on one of the big carriers networks. Often those small carriers provide better deals, particularly when the carriers they ride on are forced to sell wholesale access at reasonable rates.
The city selling wholesale access funds the infrastructure maintenance and the carriers are better able to compete with each other since all they really have to do is set up a router and pay the city’s access rate fees.
Not so far off, providing infrastructure locally then leaves a lot of the major transit to backbone carriers to make the interconnects. Those providers are largely transparent to the end users. Now nationalizing carriers like that would be a hefty lift, but if we can take the local service out of the ISPs hands it would let the municipal hosts negotiate those peering arrangements in bulk. How many towns are well equipped to handle that might be another matter though.
The free market cannot solve this because of the requirements for infrastructure both with up front costs and in needing to have easement access on very specific stretches of land. It completely breaks the assumptions economists make to be able to imagine the free market works.
Good luck convincing the taxpayers of that fact. It should be regulated and made available as such, but made to run for free by government agencies…I think that will piss absolutely everybody off for a number of reasons.
Pretty well every case I’ve read of municipal owned fiber nets has been a grand success, barring interference by the local carriers. Let the city own the infra and the carriers compete for access. Of course you get the whinging about ‘muh free market/choice’ but that’s the case for any public works really.
No. Just have the city run it. Contracted monopolies are still toxic.
Not contracted monopolies or direct city run, but like ‘IAAS’ seems to work. Much like how you see some small cell companies providing unique offers riding on one of the big carriers networks. Often those small carriers provide better deals, particularly when the carriers they ride on are forced to sell wholesale access at reasonable rates.
The city selling wholesale access funds the infrastructure maintenance and the carriers are better able to compete with each other since all they really have to do is set up a router and pay the city’s access rate fees.
Way different than a federally funded ISP. Note the comment OP is making.
Not so far off, providing infrastructure locally then leaves a lot of the major transit to backbone carriers to make the interconnects. Those providers are largely transparent to the end users. Now nationalizing carriers like that would be a hefty lift, but if we can take the local service out of the ISPs hands it would let the municipal hosts negotiate those peering arrangements in bulk. How many towns are well equipped to handle that might be another matter though.
The free market cannot solve this because of the requirements for infrastructure both with up front costs and in needing to have easement access on very specific stretches of land. It completely breaks the assumptions economists make to be able to imagine the free market works.