I just moved back to Cleveland, and I signed up for Cleveland Broadband (clevelandbroadband.com), which is incredible! I pay $50/mo for 1 Gb/s download and upload speeds with no contract or temporary introductory pricing. The best part is the customer service, which I've only had to use twice while initially setting it up, but it's a direct line to a person who physically came to my place within an hour and was super knowledgeable! We had a lengthy discussion about Ubiquiti networking gear.
I previously had Comcast/Xfinity, which was reliable, but felt absolutely scammy due to constantly changing pricing with multi-year contracts. Talking to a human for basic tasks like upgrading or canceling service was nearly impossible. Apparently their chatbot is capable of these tasks, but I could never get it to work.
I had municipal broadband in a town I lived in and it was the same experience: you get the feeling that everyone involved really cared about it because it's our town, not just an account number somewhere.
For what it's worth, I have Frontier in Los Angeles County and I have the same positive experience, other than that my gigabit connection is $70/month (it's possible that's reasonable given overall cost of living differences).
Is Cleveland an outlier of sorts? I expected broadband to be much cheaper in the US. Here in South America, I pay $30 USD/month for 1Gbps up/down. Considering all the equipment is imported, that seems way cheaper.
I wish ARSTechnica would pick up this story and do a deep dive. They have done an amazing job keeping up with all of the shenanigans that incumbent telcos pulled in the case of the town/city of Wilson in North Carolina back in the day rolling out their Greenlight fiber muni broadband network:
Would it make sense for the municipality to own the pipes that run in the city ? Like some cities own the sewer pipes.
Could it be an infrastructure that the city builds, owns, maintains and rents to ISP ?
The city would have a full control on how many houses are connected.
That is the type of investments that a city is suited for (i.e. large upfront cost financed by bonds).
AT&T, Charter, Comcast, they have no incentive to invest a lot upfront.
And they might duplicate the infrastructure.
At the end the customer pays for the piecemeal fiber deployment, and redundancy.
In my part of the globe the city is in the process of finishing installing fiber ducts to all addresses in the city (currently around 3.5M people) and ISPs run microfiber to any residential area, event apartment buildings. The effect is that you can get service from whatever provider you want without the hassle of "we don't have the infrastructure to do it". ISPs rent the fibers on a per distance price, but it is pretty much negligible.
When I say installing fiber ducts, I mean trenches with ducts that have exits on every address. And the microfibers are blown through those and you have a fiber optic cable to your door.
That's what they do here in Utah: UTOPIA (the municipality) runs its own fiber lines, and leases its network to private ISPs. That way, there is a single physical network with competitive pricing.
Of course, that doesn't stop Comcast, Centurylink, Google Fiber, etc. from running their own networks, and UTOPIA's coverage generally doesn't overlap where these other ISPs already have infrastructure.
Ideally the municipality should provide a "dumb pipe" to a point of presence, where the customer chooses an ISP. That way the municipality doesn't have to deal with IPv4/IPv6 addressing, or DMCA notices.
Cleveland Public Power is the City of Cleveland's municipally-owned electric company and is a Division of the Department of Public Utilities. The Department provides water, sewer, and electricity to the residents and businesses in the City of Cleveland.
Being NAASCO certified and having seen a lot of sewer pipe that's owned by a city, that's probably a terrible idea. Cities are also partially responsible for the bribing scheme required to open a Telco in a town.
There are already backbone providers, having communities band together as last mile providers would likely be far more optimal. It may seem like a minor distinction, but to me theres a big gap between "co-op" and "city owned".
As a general rule of thumb utilities is a mode of market failure for capitalism. No one's going to run multiple power/water/communication/sewer lines to your house and compete. At the very least they'll want to share poles/pipes.
Anyway the solution is easy and exactly as you suggested. No idea why people find this hard to comprehend.
Part of me likes this approach, but another part of me is hesitant putting the local government in control of all of the network infrastructure. It could conceivably allow local officials to turn it all off during a protest or something; similar to what we saw during the Arab Spring events.
It'll be interesting to see if they can do this better than previous attempts. I remember in 2009 when OneCommunity tried[1], 2014 when OneCommunity launched everstream, their for-profit arm (and didn't change much)[2], or the 2018 Old Brooklyn/Ward 13 project[3].
Somewhere in there, there was an initiative (probably 2009 or so?) that included public wifi in Cleveland Heights along much of Cedar Road, where One Community had a wifi SSID "OneCommunityPublic" (or something similar). That got shut down quickly.
My buddy was at Case Western back in 2007/8ish and worked on that One Community project. He called it 'porn for the poor'.
There were all these utopian ideas getting floated about how revolutionary the idea was and that basically lack of high speed internet access was the only thing keeping all these people in poverty.
If we just gave the poor fast internet access as a public service then they would all learn to code, get remote jobs, and raise themselves out of poverty.
Months into the experiment they discovered that no one used the free job training features that came with the internet access and instead they were just using it for porn and piracy.
I remember that and did contact Everstream for internet service. It was 1000/1000, but they wanted $500 for running the lines from across the street and then $500 per month after that. Insane.
There's actually an existing initiative that provides cheap wireless across parts of lower income areas run by PCs for people and pretty large nonprofit. So there's definitely hope with expansion from wireless to fiber I think.
Really frustrating that this article focuses so much on the partisan attacks in the back half.
When I lead the (successful) effort to build a city wide FTTH network in Quincy, IL, our most fervent supporters were all Republicans. We got far more support from the IL GOP than the IL Democratic Party. (The former helped us, at the federal level, secure additional funding for the local telco coop that runs Adams County’s fiber lines.) Despite this, I wouldn’t promote our success as the story of one party beating another and it really diminishes the hard work of people from both sides of the political divide.
> despite billions in tax breaks, regulatory favors, and subsidies, companies like AT&T have long refused to upgrade low-income and minority Cleveland neighborhoods to fiber.
There is a very easy solution to this. Electric utilities should be required to lay fiber along with electric. They can choose to offer internet (better) or offer fiber with a choice of carriers.
EPB in Chattanooga has been providing fiber to homes for decades.
Imagine that: company gets free money from the government to do such-and-such thing but isn't strictly required to do it, then they take the free money and don't do the thing. It's almost like corporations are self-interested and un-altruistic.
It's the obvious solution, so of course it won't be done.
I now have four separate companies' fiber running through my property, of which I am connected to only one, but I could switch to two others anytime I wanted to, and then they'd run the "last connection" to my house. It's kinda silly.
(The fourth is a business line, which I could connect to but that involves more work as it is older.)
If the municipality owns the poles and the power company this is comparatively easier. In places that own both, like Traverse City in Michigan, Chattanooga TN, or Longmont CO, this model can be incredibly effective. The problem, at least in my part of the world (Michigan) is that most municipalities do not own the poles or the power company. The power company is instead a large publicly traded corporation, albeit with strong regulation.
Adding regulation to force power companies to run dark fiber on new runs only addresses part of the problem. You still have to deal with the millions of miles/kms of installed grid that sees proactive maintenance _maybe_ once a decade.
Not to mention the state laws in dozens of states that place onerous rules on municipalities installing their own broadband service, or even outright forbid the practice entirely. These laws are often the result of ILECs lobbying state governments or using their lobbying groups to directly write "model legislation" that state governments subsequently adopt.
Too little too late. Comcast is running ads trying to scare people into not dropping their home internet service. That’s a pretty clear sign that a lot of people are doing just that and relying solely on mobile.
I'd love it if Baltimore City could get it together. 90% of Baltimore has only one wired broadband provider, Cocmast -- who charges like 50% more for the same service than in markets with competition.
(Some tiny portion of Baltimore has verizon fiber available. Some growing portion has the new T-mobile 5G wireless home internet; apparently not enough to get Comcast to reduce prices to what they charge in markets with competition)
[+] [-] sxg|2 years ago|reply
I previously had Comcast/Xfinity, which was reliable, but felt absolutely scammy due to constantly changing pricing with multi-year contracts. Talking to a human for basic tasks like upgrading or canceling service was nearly impossible. Apparently their chatbot is capable of these tasks, but I could never get it to work.
[+] [-] 1-more|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sarchertech|2 years ago|reply
Customer service and speed hasn’t declined and prices haven’t gone up (they haven’t even kept pace with inflation) like the naysayers predicted.
[+] [-] tshaddox|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] p1mrx|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] beeburrt|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tight-ship|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] waldothedog|2 years ago|reply
Enjoy your gig, I’ll be here waiting for spectrum to arbitrarily raise my rates again
Welcome back btw!
[+] [-] OnACoffeeBreak|2 years ago|reply
- https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/11/the-price-of-mun...
- https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/03/cable-backed-ant...
- https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/02/fcc-o...
- https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/09/muni-...
- https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/10/city-...
[+] [-] llsf|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ExoticPearTree|2 years ago|reply
When I say installing fiber ducts, I mean trenches with ducts that have exits on every address. And the microfibers are blown through those and you have a fiber optic cable to your door.
[+] [-] thomastjeffery|2 years ago|reply
Of course, that doesn't stop Comcast, Centurylink, Google Fiber, etc. from running their own networks, and UTOPIA's coverage generally doesn't overlap where these other ISPs already have infrastructure.
[+] [-] p1mrx|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gooseyman|2 years ago|reply
Cleveland Public Power is the City of Cleveland's municipally-owned electric company and is a Division of the Department of Public Utilities. The Department provides water, sewer, and electricity to the residents and businesses in the City of Cleveland.
Edit - link https://www.cpp.org/index.php/About
[+] [-] oooyay|2 years ago|reply
There are already backbone providers, having communities band together as last mile providers would likely be far more optimal. It may seem like a minor distinction, but to me theres a big gap between "co-op" and "city owned".
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pottertheotter|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AnotherGoodName|2 years ago|reply
Anyway the solution is easy and exactly as you suggested. No idea why people find this hard to comprehend.
[+] [-] jpk|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrgifford|2 years ago|reply
Somewhere in there, there was an initiative (probably 2009 or so?) that included public wifi in Cleveland Heights along much of Cedar Road, where One Community had a wifi SSID "OneCommunityPublic" (or something similar). That got shut down quickly.
[1] https://www.cleveland.com/business/2009/07/onecommunity_seek...
[2] https://everstream.net/press-releases/onecommunity-launches-...
[3] https://connectyourcommunity.org/cdjc-program-four-points/fr...
[+] [-] CSMastermind|2 years ago|reply
There were all these utopian ideas getting floated about how revolutionary the idea was and that basically lack of high speed internet access was the only thing keeping all these people in poverty.
If we just gave the poor fast internet access as a public service then they would all learn to code, get remote jobs, and raise themselves out of poverty.
Months into the experiment they discovered that no one used the free job training features that came with the internet access and instead they were just using it for porn and piracy.
[+] [-] BreadPants|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] markofzen|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atdrummond|2 years ago|reply
When I lead the (successful) effort to build a city wide FTTH network in Quincy, IL, our most fervent supporters were all Republicans. We got far more support from the IL GOP than the IL Democratic Party. (The former helped us, at the federal level, secure additional funding for the local telco coop that runs Adams County’s fiber lines.) Despite this, I wouldn’t promote our success as the story of one party beating another and it really diminishes the hard work of people from both sides of the political divide.
[+] [-] thelastgallon|2 years ago|reply
There is a very easy solution to this. Electric utilities should be required to lay fiber along with electric. They can choose to offer internet (better) or offer fiber with a choice of carriers.
EPB in Chattanooga has been providing fiber to homes for decades.
[+] [-] nerdponx|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bombcar|2 years ago|reply
I now have four separate companies' fiber running through my property, of which I am connected to only one, but I could switch to two others anytime I wanted to, and then they'd run the "last connection" to my house. It's kinda silly.
(The fourth is a business line, which I could connect to but that involves more work as it is older.)
[+] [-] zrail|2 years ago|reply
Adding regulation to force power companies to run dark fiber on new runs only addresses part of the problem. You still have to deal with the millions of miles/kms of installed grid that sees proactive maintenance _maybe_ once a decade.
Not to mention the state laws in dozens of states that place onerous rules on municipalities installing their own broadband service, or even outright forbid the practice entirely. These laws are often the result of ILECs lobbying state governments or using their lobbying groups to directly write "model legislation" that state governments subsequently adopt.
[+] [-] ourmandave|2 years ago|reply
Connection to AT&T backbone surcharge..............................$39.99
[+] [-] selimthegrim|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ralph84|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gs17|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] jrochkind1|2 years ago|reply
(Some tiny portion of Baltimore has verizon fiber available. Some growing portion has the new T-mobile 5G wireless home internet; apparently not enough to get Comcast to reduce prices to what they charge in markets with competition)
[+] [-] taylorbuley|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amiga386|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spandextwins|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qup|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] doublerabbit|2 years ago|reply