nonce413's comments

Yes, I do see a difference between apples and oranges - in areas with "vigorous competition", municipal fiber does not get support!

We're talking about areas where there has been no competition, and the incumbent has already succumbed to the same exact lethargic rent-seeking that people ascribe to municipal services.

Also it appears you seem to be thinking that "municipal fiber" means there are employees at City Hall with a blank check from the general fund. WG&E is a separate corporate body, overseen by the City of Westfield. I would guess they will be doing operations for Charlemont et al, but Charlemont will be free to choose a different operating contractor in the future.

So what we're really talking about is the ownership of the built-out infrastructure, which government has traditionally been paying for anyway - this story is about Charlemont not giving $500k to Comcast! The idea that the government should pay to build out infrastructure to be owned by a private company isn't the "free market" - it's textbook corruption!

For context - I am libertarian, and I recognize that there is no difference between government and a de facto monopoly that one is forced to patronize. In fact, the latter is a great way of describing the former. If you want to make a philosophical argument that government has no business subsidizing communications infrastructure at all, I won't argue. But that is generally not the point of contention around "municipal broadband".

I'm just drawing a distinction because there's this toxic political meme of labeling an area with no competition as "the free market", and smearing collective action attempting to serve themselves as "government meddling", when in reality the latter is just the market mechanism itself! Customer demand gets so pent up that they start demanding a new competitor, and seek investment from the main source available to them. The new municipal entity still has to compete in the market for customers, and so any complaint from the incumbent about the government pushing them out of business is horse shit.

Sorry about your Internet choices - I was speaking based on friends in Arlington and Newton. It sounds like the market has failed you too, and it was not correct to chalk it all up to population density. RCN's upload speed sucks compared to my fiber here, so maybe that's some consolation?

Have you investigated whether any CLECs offer better DSL connections over that Verizon (Nynex, really) copper? IIRC, if you go to Megapath's website and check their business options (which I think involves a follow up phone call), they will send you a spreadsheet of all services available at your premises, which can be informative.

5G is a red herring, as 4G would be sufficient. Before Westfield's fiber rollout, I drove around town mapping cell towers hoping to use LTE for home Internet. IMHO they're not really dense enough for such use, especially without directional antennas. Never mind the latency.

Also, Verizon is really the only provider that extends into the more rural areas listed, and I doubt they would want to cut into their mobile profits with the rates required to compete with wired access.

Marked based outcomes are efficient. 90 miles east of here, metro Boston generally has a choice between three modern providers - Comcast, RCN, and Verizon.

The western part of the state seemingly does not have the population density to attract this kind of investment. Comcast here is the monopoly provider of what we consider modern service, and AFAIK engages in their standard monopolistic playbook of throttling, caps, and continual billing shenanigans. Verizon is the ILEC, and could easily upgrade the DSL infrastructure for higher speeds and slowly build out fiber where it makes sense. But they don't because they see no profit in competing!

The worst part is that when Comcast steps up their game to compete with Whip City Fiber, Comcast will then spin those upgrades as an example of how municipal fiber was unnecessary. This has happened pretty much everywhere a city has gotten fed up with an incumbent monopoly and built out municipal infrastructure. And that is my main point - if one is a actual proponent of free markets, then one should support a second player entering the game and creating competition.

In this situation, the main thing municipalities are bringing to the table is the investment capital - investment which the quasi-governmental "private" telecommunications industry has refused to make themselves. Municipal services do not prevent private companies from entering the market - they merely preclude the private companies from receiving the juicy public subsidies that they've become accustomed to for building out their "private" infrastructure.

> the common folk in a town have to pay at least somewhat for the municipal broadband even if they do not use it; so it'd better be worth using.

Just anecdotally, there are Whip City Fiber signs up all over (you get a discount if you let them put one on your lawn with installation). We're long past the days where Internet access is desired by only a subset of the population. I think $70/mo is a little above what "everybody" wants to pay. I am hoping after the initial financials have settled, they will offer a lower tier.

> actively excluding competition (Comcast in this case, if the title is anything to go by)

If you read the article, what Charlemont rejected was the town paying Comcast for a build out. That's a significant point that's glossed over in most of these public vs private debates - with low population density, private communications companies do not nobly invest their own money, but get the government to pay for the infrastructure that they end up owning.

> I mean, just do a traceroute and see how many hops there are before you get to a peering node

Most carrier equipment operates below layer 3, and so is invisible to traceroute. But since you referenced it:

    traceroute to 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
     1  192.189.29.1 (192.189.29.1)  4.120 ms  4.267 ms  4.427 ms
     2  172.17.1.85 (172.17.1.85)  4.021 ms  4.077 ms  4.100 ms
     3  h252.63.131.40.static.ip.windstream.net (40.131.63.252)  10.661 ms  10.613 ms  10.600 ms

> That way we once again can have competition like during the time DSL was popular

DSL competition never happened in the area under question. Covad (a CLEC) deployed gear in Springfield, but Westfield (40k people) was only ever served by Verizon.

> Verizon has upgraded the FiOS network several times since 2005

The what network?

Your comment is reasonable in the abstract, but I'm sorry to say that in the specific context it's ridiculous. There is little functional difference between a municipal network that has trouble convincing residents to spring for an upgrade, and a company that will never see a profit in it.

Except that municipal network is currently offering 1Gb/1Gb with a possible future difficulty, while the Verizon network is offering 3Mb/384kb and hasn't been touched since it was deployed two decades ago.

Hey, local news on HN! I'm glad to see Whip City Fiber is spreading so far up north. They started in Westfield (40k people), and then moved to building out local towns that are basically similar kind of "hilltowns" places that have been neglected by Comcast et al for years.

Westfield Gas and Electric has been Westfield's municipal power company for as long as I can remember, and I've heard few complaints about their management. This is not their first time providing Internet service, as they used to run a dialup ISP back in the day.

The concern about future upgrades is kind of ridiculous in context - the Verizon infrastructure here is still at the bare minimum, with no hope of ever being upgraded. I have no doubt that when the gigabit infrastructure is finally looking outdated and slow, Verizon will be sitting there offering the same "high speed" 3Mbit. That is, if they haven't convinced the feds to allow them to sell the copper for scrap.

The service itself is a lone single mode fiber, with a GPON terminal. Installation planning was done by a WG&E employee who even showed up in a bucket truck. Installation was in two parts - one entire contractor to direct bury a flexible conduit with the length of fiber, and a second contractor to complete installation on both sides of the burial. My speed tests show basically full gigabit up/down.

(Also, comments by new accounts start off dead now?! I made a throwaway because I'd rather not state my explicit location as part of my main profile)