Town Rejects Comcast and Chooses to Build Its Own Broadband Network

BlueFireIce said:
All of which is tax payer funded. Longmont is a very small city, and even still received over 20 million in DOLA grants for building out the network, along with many other subsidies. The debt they owe has not been paid back, even with most of the bill being footed by the tax payers, no one said they can't build a fiber network, what I said was building a network that doesn't bleed money that tax payers end up having to cover, as very few of these networks are solvent, the ones that are will still take hundreds of years to pay off the debt (meaning they really aren't), and doesn't take into account the grants that tax payers have to cover to build the network in the first place.
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Not sure where you got the DOLA information from. I know Longmont issued a $40 million bond in 2014 to build out NextLight and the bond would be payed back by nextlight customers, not taxpayers

You also clearly don't understand how debt on a government level works. I recommend you read Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty for a better understanding. Hint: You don't pay off bonds early especially with such low rates.

In either case, yes, the taxpayers willingly said, "Yes" to creating bonds to build the last mile of fiber to homes. The payoff? The city now has arguably the fastest internet in the United States with outstanding local service. Need to hold someone accountable? I can go to my city counsel that meets weekly and voice my concern. (I havent had to oc as the service is amazing!)

To pay for maintenance at the current $50 rate, adoption had to be around 25 or 30%. After 4 years (really 1.5 for the entire city as it was done in stages) the adoption rate's over 50%. The best part? Comcast is scrambling to stay relevant (250 mb w/ caps at $70 a month /yawn) and CenturyLink has all but given up (good riddance). So bond payments and service are all easily covered. Makes you realize how overpriced comcrap and all other telco monopolies are.

The best part? All the money stays in Longmont; not to some rich C-suite asshole or shareholder and many Colorado cities are planning to follow Longmont's lead.
 
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harbingerofdoom said:
the amount of just... crazy tinfoil hat wearing nonsense in this thread is entertaining.

hang on a minute guys, lemme get some popcon.
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I know. I basically read the comments here because this place is full of the trendy new school “conservatives” that think it’s worth taking it up the ass from corporate America as long as the “libtards” get pwned and can’t do anything via the government. That’s the devil’s path to socialism don’t you know? Better to let the almighty free market of two companies that have captured the relevant regulatory bodies take care of things.

Yeah we’re going to turn into Venezuela if we allow municipalities to deliver a service that is a utility now basically. Fucking morons need to turn off the Fox News.
 
chris7191 said:
I know. I basically read the comments here because this place is full of the trendy new school “conservatives” that think it’s worth taking it up the ass from corporate America as long as the “libtards” get pwned and can’t do anything via the government. That’s the devil’s path to socialism don’t you know? Better to let the almighty free market of two companies that have captured the relevant regulatory bodies take care of things.

Yeah we’re going to turn into Venezuela if we allow municipalities to deliver a service that is a utility now basically. Fucking morons need to turn off the Fox News.
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Hey man. If it's scary to your ideology and on tv you should endlessly defend it with the exact same commentary by your biased information sources. (/s if anyone missed it)
 
The Mad Atheist said:
Not really, local libraries have a habit of blocking some content.
Coarse, that's on free networks.
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Ffs really? It's to protect their internal network from idiots bringing in a payload that would cost the municipality a payload of money. How can you make that comparison? It's so flawed its laughable.
 
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