My suggestion would be to just wait it out. Let them build it and lose money. Eventually they will realize that they have no idea how to be an ISP, the customers will not deal with slow government response times to complaints, and the government will hate dealing with title II issues and open internet regulations. They will throw their hands up and offer it via bid or something else to a private company to manage/own/run. You might be able to pick it up for far less than it would have cost you to build. I certainly would not try to overbuild them before they get going. The average consumer has already heard about their promised prices, you will be fighting that even though they have not even started building yet.
Do a search for the UC2B project in Illinois, it was a municipal/university system built with stimulus funds. They did what they needed to meet grant obligations, then they all argued among the partners about who and how they would run things and failed at that. They finally let a private company take over and expand the system. Thank You, Brian Webster www.wirelessmapping.com www.Broadband-Mapping.com From: Af [mailto:af-boun...@afmug.com] On Behalf Of Carl Peterson Sent: Monday, July 06, 2015 8:45 PM To: af@afmug.com Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Plan to Compete with Municipal Fiber? Assuming you didn't have to recoup build costs, I don't see how it would be hard to run the network at $50 per sub. Bandwidth is dirt cheep at scale and there isn't much to go wrong with a fiber plant. On Jul 6, 2015, at 3:10 PM, Christopher Gray <cg...@graytechsoftware.com> wrote: About $40M is grant funding from the state for "last mile" services that is only available to municipalities. The balance of the funding is coming from town borrowing. My town will receive about $1.2M from the grant and will vote in September whether to authorize $2.3M of borrowing that would be paid with property tax. I'm 95% sure this will go through, and the network would be lit in about 3 years, but I can't get their numbers to work out. I cannot see how they can actually provide service and maintain their network and offer a base service of only $50 / month. If that jumps to $100, I could see remaining competitive, though. On Mon, Jul 6, 2015 at 1:58 PM, Chuck McCown <ch...@wbmfg.com> wrote: Where is the funding coming from? I would not be comfortable building in an area where I am sure to get over built. From: Christopher Gray <mailto:cg...@graytechsoftware.com> Sent: Monday, July 06, 2015 11:56 AM To: af@afmug.com Subject: [AFMUG] Plan to Compete with Municipal Fiber? Several of the rural towns in my planned coverage area are looking into municipal fiber (average density about 10 premises per fiber mile, all above ground). They're claiming $50 for 25 Mbps service, $79 for 100 Mbps, and $109 for 1 Gbps. They already have funding authorized in about half of the towns they are targeting... but they'd be about 3 years from providing any service. Is it reasonable or possible to compete with such a thing? Should I ignore any area that plans to fund this, or might it be worth getting a foothold before their system is lit? Thanks - Chris
