William Herrin wrote:
On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 10:20 AM, Jay Ashworth <j...@baylink.com> wrote:
Over the last decade, 19 states have made it illegal for municipalities
to own fiber networks
Hi Jay,
Everything government does, it does badly. Without exception. There
are many things government does better than any private organization
is likely to sustain, but even those things it does slowly and at an
exorbitant price.
Muni fiber is a competition killer. You can't beat city hall; once
built it's not practical to compete, even with better service, so
residents are stuck with only the overpriced (either directly or via
taxes), usually underpowered and always one-size-fits-all network
access which results. As an ISP I watched something similar happen in
Altoona PA a decade and a half ago. It was a travesty.
The only exception I see to this would be if localities were
constrained to providing point to point and point to multipoint
communications infrastructure within the locality on a reasonable and
non-discriminatory basis. The competition that would foster on the
services side might outweigh the damage on the infrastructure side.
Like public roads facilitate efficient transportation and freight
despite the cost and potholes, though that's an imperfect simile.
Let's see:
- municipal water supplies work just fine
- about 20% of US power is supplied by municipally owned electric
utilities, for about 18% less cost (statistics might be a little stale,
I haven't checked recently)
- about the only gigabit FTTH in the country comes from muni networks
- the anti-muni laws hurt small localities the most, where none of the
big players have any intent of deploying anything
Miles Fidelman
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
