Town Rejects Comcast and Chooses to Build Its Own Broadband Network

I get 100 down / 10 up, /w taxes i pay $66 no Data cap's, I first moved to little town in SC, worked with Corp office and local office and local Manager, When i first got it, Drops out and all that, Took year get everything where it needs be, now stable works no lag, no throttling speeds. I'm Happy.
 
The point, you missed it. I'll give you a chance to click the link, read it, and come back and try again.
I think you missed it.

My municipality sells water. Pepsi and other business sell water. My municipality does a better job and cheaper.

Same with roads, etc. Everything listed on that site you linked to that has a corporation also participating in the same sector, the corporation costs more and delivers less service.
 
I think you missed it.

My municipality sells water. Pepsi and other business sell water. My municipality does a better job and cheaper.

Same with roads, etc. Everything listed on that site you linked to that has a corporation also participating in the same sector, the corporation costs more and delivers less service.

No you missed it. We can't afford our current public infrastructure maintenances let alone upgrades or new public infrastructure. It was really obvious.
 
No you missed it. We can't afford our current public infrastructure maintenances let alone upgrades or new public infrastructure. It was really obvious.
We can afford it just fine. We just choose to spend 850 billion on the military a year instead. We have X amount of resources a year, allocation in general is the provlem but that's a whole other conversion and probably a soap box item so I won't say anything more.
 
We can afford it just fine. We just choose to spend 850 billion on the military a year instead. We have X amount of resources a year, allocation in general is the provlem but that's a whole other conversion and probably a soap box item so I won't say anything more.

You still didn't read the link. Shocking.
 
Can we fix the infrastructure we have already built but not "maintain(ed) and upgrade(ed) it when technology is mature enough" first?

If we stop giving millionaires, billionaires, and trillion dollar corporations unneeded tax breaks that they only use on themselves while firing thousands of the workers that produced their wealth, sure! We could bring America back into its golden age and fund everything others have had, if we'd just raise taxes for once. Would be nice to go back to the FDR/Eisenhower tax rates of 94% on income over $350,000, but that's unlikely anytime soon. Today, raising the tax bracket by 4% to 37% has certain people flip out as if investing in ourselves and having more freedom over our lives (and higher quality of life) without corporate meddling was a bad thing.
 
Works fine here in Longmont Colorado for electricity, water and fiber.
Electricity is 4 cents cheaper than national average (8 cents vs 12 cents) and $50 a month for 1 gig up/down no caps fiber internet

Government is awesome if allowed to be

As someone that lives next to longmont CO, I am very enthusiastic over the recent muni broadband bill introduced and passed for our town (erie Co) Hopefully this will occur soon...either way I have a positive outlook for future broadband in this area.

Edit: Hell, I'll offer my services for free to help speed up the rollout.
 
Data caps? Yeah. If only the unused amount would roll over to the next month, that'd be a small improvement. I wonder why I cannot use my 12 TB yearly data allowance, instead of a monthly 1TB?
Towns should own the bandwidth infrastructure, but ISP should able to provide services to the population, and I mean different ISPs. Not just one company.
 
I still think its a good idea for taxpayers to foot the bill for the backbone infrastructure. Lease it to ISP's to cover maintenance. ISP's pay for and get to keep last mile infrastructure. Set rules on the number of ISP's per square mileage or some type of ISP Zoning, because monopolies. ISP's can negotiate customer services and packages from content providers, states/cities can add on their taxes to help cover costs. Pity politicians aren't on our side though. Which brings up the real problem. Companies buying them off to get whatever laws they want passed which at one time was illegal.
 
If we stop giving millionaires, billionaires, and trillion dollar corporations unneeded tax breaks that they only use on themselves while firing thousands of the workers that produced their wealth, sure! We could bring America back into its golden age and fund everything others have had, if we'd just raise taxes for once. Would be nice to go back to the FDR/Eisenhower tax rates of 94% on income over $350,000, but that's unlikely anytime soon. Today, raising the tax bracket by 4% to 37% has certain people flip out as if investing in ourselves and having more freedom over our lives (and higher quality of life) without corporate meddling was a bad thing.

You think that 250,000 to 400,000 people are going to be able to fund that? Ok.
 
Good for the town and its people.

Comcast is digging their own grave in this space. So is Cox and others with their data caps. They predicted streaming a long time ago and made a preemptive strike. Time for consumers to strike back by going to the dark side and turning internet service over to the government. Granted, large cities with some competition don't need to go down this path but others definitely will benefit. Most households would be ok with 100Mbs speeds and unlimited data, for now. Triple that for 8k Netflix in 2030.And when it sucks it'll suck the same for everyone.
 
If we stop giving millionaires, billionaires, and trillion dollar corporations unneeded tax breaks that they only use on themselves while firing thousands of the workers that produced their wealth, sure! We could bring America back into its golden age and fund everything others have had, if we'd just raise taxes for once. Would be nice to go back to the FDR/Eisenhower tax rates of 94% on income over $350,000, but that's unlikely anytime soon. Today, raising the tax bracket by 4% to 37% has certain people flip out as if investing in ourselves and having more freedom over our lives (and higher quality of life) without corporate meddling was a bad thing.


Lol. Wtf.
 
If we stop giving millionaires, billionaires, and trillion dollar corporations unneeded tax breaks that they only use on themselves while firing thousands of the workers that produced their wealth, sure! We could bring America back into its golden age and fund everything others have had, if we'd just raise taxes for once. Would be nice to go back to the FDR/Eisenhower tax rates of 94% on income over $350,000, but that's unlikely anytime soon. Today, raising the tax bracket by 4% to 37% has certain people flip out as if investing in ourselves and having more freedom over our lives (and higher quality of life) without corporate meddling was a bad thing.

Da fuk? Are you drunk? If not, you should be.... :confused:
 
Comcast will lobby the state, state will pass a preemptive law barring any city from running their own network.

Maybe in a state with a shitty corporatist GOP government but that wouldn’t fly here in Mass. Not a chance.
 
Comcast will lobby the state, state will pass a preemptive law barring any city from running their own network.

In many states they have done this.

This is Massachusetts though. I doubt that would happen here.
 
Good for them. I hope it works out. I also hope that neither their council nor whoever ends up doing the actual project credibly delivers on the promise and doesn't just pocket the money.
 
I don't know, it seems to work with water.

Unless you are in California.

20 years ago when I bought my home, the water bill was around $35 per month
Now, my water bill runs $85-$90 per month, even though I use less water.
 
Unless you are in California.

20 years ago when I bought my home, the water bill was around $35 per month
Now, my water bill runs $85-$90 per month, even though I use less water.
Well maybe if you socal people would slow your population growth you wouldnt need to steal water from the other half of the state. :D :D :D

For us here it is combine water and sewage and my bill runs.maybe 60-80 a month, but the water portion is rather cheap. 1 unit of water is like 7 bucks and a unit is 746 gallons, so do the math... it is still cheap. Now processing outward is what kills the bill, I want to say sewage almost triples the bill
 
There's an old saying: The only thing worse than a government monopoly is a private monopoly. The only reason people are happy about choosing the former is because the alternative is even worse. But as every government service - it starts with a great promise, then gradually the quality deteriorates and either the price rises or it gets heavily subsidised.
 
I have the best of all worlds here in Kennesaw GA. $30.00 a month for public water and $70.00 a month for ATT Gigabit internet with no cap. Electricity is cheap as well. Thanks for reminding how great living in the south is.
 
Good on them!

Competition is key. I have no idea how the mega-carriers have ended up with monopolies wherever they sign up...but I suspect a bit of money and weak-willed (or greedy) politicians.
While this actually is competition, some might see it as socialism. Smart move for the town for sure, the ISPs in the US are highway robbers to put it mildly. We get unilmited LTE no caps at a fraction of the price.
 
We're getting to the point again where I must wonder if our capitalism is suffering under the power (greed) of monopolies, oligopolies, and otherwise behemoth corporations.

Perhaps it's time for the next Teddy Roosevelt to come along...
 
I wish this would happen in more states and cities, but sadly, Comcast has agreements that "prohibit local governments from becoming internet service providers and prohibit municipalities from selling or leasing their fiber to local startups who would compete with these huge corporations." We need this to become popular and for more cities/towns to reject these ridiculous agreements when they finally expire.

Source
 
Comcast was in the right place at the right time. I think most Comcast areas started out as local cable tv companies. They laid coax for tv cable service but lucky them it can carry data signals too! Compared to FIOS or other companies that had to lay their own fiber or DSL companies who relied on copper which is not competitive speed wise anyway.

Not sure what happened, but it seemed like alot of them consolidated and the next thing you know it turned into NBC/XFinity corporation. I think in many areas they were the only high speed ISP available and competing only against DSL (this was years before FIOS/fiber became a thing for residential use).

I know I stuck with them for ages (who the hell wants DSL? Yuck!) until I moved into an area that had ISP competition. In my case another cable company (RCN). Up until that point Comcast was the one and only available and basically jacked your rate up every year or two or ... whenever they wanted. I told my coworker I paid $50 for 155mb and he just about flipped out.
 
Oh and from what I understand, if you live in an HOA or Condo or Apartment building, Xfinity / Comcast is known to cut deals for exclusive access to your neighborhood / building - which means kickbacks to the owner / developer but shitty rates for you.
 
socialism

Whats wrong with socialism ? I mean we Danes are probably more socialist than any commie country of old you can think off ( that have failed by now ) and we are one of the best friends of the US.
You guys just have to say jump, and we say how high.

Okay we are a lot more too, we are democratic, and a god damn monarchy too.

And we have Fibers all over to a degree many places you cant put a shovel in the ground without hitting one,,,,,, as some idiot did on Black Friday.

Okay i have to admit often Denmark really piss off the Texan i have living inside me, and sure a lot of things would be better with a lot of needed changes here too.
Most of our fiber infrastructure are only there due to private or municipality owned power distributors getting a big ass break by government back in the 90ties, sure we still have the old national but now privatized telephone / internet giant looming over it all, and for sure it would be better if that just died as soon as possible, or at least was given the "standard oil" treatment.
 
Which always sounds great, just like every government project.

However history has shown with other municipal networks, it never cost what they city predicts, and upkeep on the network is far more than expected, most municipal networks operate at a loss, not including the initial debt to build the network. The few that are not negative cash flow would take 60 years to just break even on the debt, which is already outside of the typical network expected life span of 40 years. What this means is more tax money to subsidize other peoples internet access. As such, most municipal networks income and losses are not reported and bundled in with their electric power operations. Keeping in mind most of these networks are going to cost more as time goes on, as even when they are newer, they are bleeding cash from maintaining the network, and as networks age, that will go up. So rather than paying off the debt to build the network, they are padding on more to keep it going.

But like most cases when government tries to get into business, the idea of being financially solvent never really comes into the picture.


I call bull on this. I am not familiar with every municipal internet rollout, but every last one I have heard of provides better service than a private sector alternative at a much lower cost while staying cost neutral after the initial investment and rollout, with subscription fees paying for the cost of running the system. I can't remember hearing of anyone unhappy with these services.

Don't get me wrong. I generally believe a free competitive market would do a better job at driving improvement, but due to the large barriers to entry (regulatory, and cost) we don't have a free competitive market. We have small islands with psuedo-competition between two providers who aren't really competing well, and then large areas of local monopolies by one provider or another. Compared to this, a municipal system is much better.

I'd rather take an incompetent and underfunded local government working FOR me than a highly competent and shrewd corporate business interest working AGAINST me. Because that's what businesses do. The only thing that drives them to serving their customers is competition. Without the competition they just become leeches taking as much advantage of their customer base as they can.

I wouldnt pay that much for broadband and houseline together.
Nearer 2/3 maybe, for both.
They had better sell cheaper packages or it will be a bust. But then they need to put prices up.
I'm not so sure this is viable for them.

I pay ~$220 per month for internet and cable TV. I'd drop the TV, but then I lose my bundle discount, and my bill is almost as high.

Granted, I have Gigabit service, but still...

I'd LEAP at municipal internet if it were available.


That said, extremely tiny north eastern town? Yeah I fully expect less than 40% to sign up for internet.

Yeah, I've lived in Massachusetts for 20+ years, and I've never heard of Charlemont.

In Massachusetts, unless you are inside the rt 128 circle around Boston, you don't exist. Heck, I might even expand that to all of New England. Nothing of value (except for a few large state schools) exists outside of the rt 128 circle.

That said, why the assumption that people in small towns don't like Internet? This isn't 1993 anymore

No you missed it. We can't afford our current public infrastructure maintenances let alone upgrades or new public infrastructure. It was really obvious.

We can certainly afford current infrastructure. It's just that our priorities are all messed up so we haven't done the necessary maintenance. We are not a third world country. Instead we are wasting money stimulating an already overheated economy with unfunded tax cuts, and blowing trillions on maintaining a military and wars we don't need. It's all about priorities. We've had ours messed up ever since the end of WWII.

You still didn't read the link. Shocking.

I read your link. I have no idea what point you are trying to make. It is not obvious. Yes, our infrastructure is rated poorly. We all know that. This has nothing to do with our inability to afford it, and everything to do with our messed up priorities.
 
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You think that 250,000 to 400,000 people are going to be able to fund that? Ok.

Yes. Those few hundred thousand have more wealth than nearly all people combined.

Realize Jeff Bezos should be making 30 million dollars on interest from his investments alone every single day. While that is on the high end, the stark contrast from the top 0.1% and nearly everyone else is staggering.
 
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Darn those communist getting faster and way cheaper internet that the people exclusively control... When will the commies stop attacking corporations freedom to bend hard working citizens over and have their way with them with BS contracts that raise in price every few months?

In all seriousness though, I'd love for America to build a nationalized fiber optic network, and 5G network, where citizens pay at cost to build, maintain and upgrade it when technology is mature enough. Just like education and healthcare, there's no need to privatize these services.

The level of stupidity from you flat-earthers of politics. Comcast is voluntary you fool. Payments to government are not. So explain who exactly is doing the bending over?

Also those of you who only know about ISP's from the point of demarc have no clue what you are talking about. This is a total feel good story but light on actual real world business facts.

They mention poles so they are running aerial fiber. Should work great during the next nor'easter. So who is going to own the fleet of bucket trucks, maintenance, and staff to support the infrastructure. Is there a CO already built out? Who is going to develop and staff their NOC? Who is going to hire/staff/manage the layer2/layer3 engineers? Like most "government" projects the will brag on paper, implement and 10 times the cost, obfuscate actual results, then ultimately hire a private contractor at inflated bid to take over the mess.

This is not a pro Comcast post, but more of a show some f'n appreciation for ISP's post since most of the entitled posters on here think they simply "deserve" internet for waking up in the morning. You on the left are the biggest group of spoiled adult children on the planet.
 
I think you missed it.

My municipality sells water. Pepsi and other business sell water. My municipality does a better job and cheaper.

Same with roads, etc. Everything listed on that site you linked to that has a corporation also participating in the same sector, the corporation costs more and delivers less service.

For the love of god, the stupidity of this laughable analogy. Your municipality sells bottled water? Really? What spring do they use? Do they send coke to your tap? Ask the residents of Flint, Michigan where it was run by democrat government incompetents how their "free" water is. You have no clue what you are talking about, and simply trying to create adult sounding arguments for demanding others pay for your responsibilities.
 
For the love of god, the stupidity of this laughable analogy. Your municipality sells bottled water? Really? What spring do they use? Do they send coke to your tap? Ask the residents of Flint, Michigan where it was run by democrat government incompetents how their "free" water is. You have no clue what you are talking about, and simply trying to create adult sounding arguments for demanding others pay for your responsibilities.

Angry clown apparently thinks public water is a bad idea because of one incompetent municipality, ignoring the rest of the successful civilized world.
 
We can certainly afford current infrastructure. It's just that our priorities are all messed up so we haven't done the necessary maintenance. We are not a third world country. Instead we are wasting money stimulating an already overheated economy with unfunded tax cuts, and blowing trillions on maintaining a military and wars we don't need. It's all about priorities. We've had ours messed up ever since the end of WWII.

Another political fat earther

1. Your side is certainly trying to make America a third world country. Thanks to your policies we have cities where "citizens" are openly sh1tting on the side walks. Bravo...such "progress"
2. Unfunded tax cuts? You are one sorry individual to even say that. Do you actually believe all money comes from your mama gubment? Are you that poorly educated. No. Government only TAKES money from private citizens, it makes nothing. That is our money to begin with my little wannabe Stalin.
3. Funding the military is a requirement of the constitution. Funding all your insane leftist policies is not. Funny how you on the left always want someone else to pay for your adult responsibilities then try to morally justify your greed as if the taxpayer owes it to you.
 
I wouldnt pay that much for broadband and houseline together.
Nearer 2/3 maybe, for both.
They had better sell cheaper packages or it will be a bust. But then they need to put prices up.
I'm not so sure this is viable for them.

That price is cheaper than any package available in my area. I pay spectrum 79 for 250gb internet only.
 
Angry clown apparently thinks public water is a bad idea because of one incompetent municipality, ignoring the rest of the successful civilized world.

Not what I said, but like a good little progressive they have to misrepresent the conversation to attempt to score a point. You are one of the children attempting to correlate a municipality with a soda company which exposes the laughable knowledge you have on any of these subjects. Always enjoy hearing from the 1040EZ crowd what should happen with others tax money.
 
Not what I said, but like a good little progressive they have to misrepresent the conversation to attempt to score a point. You are one of the children attempting to correlate a municipality with a soda company which exposes the laughable knowledge you have on any of these subjects. Always enjoy hearing from the 1040EZ crowd what should happen with others tax money.

I did quite a bit better from the tax cuts than most of flyover country. After all, it's rich liberals in blue states generating most of the economic activity in this country. We subsidize red states so it is nice to have that cut back a bit.
 
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