[HN Gopher] Washington state removes all barriers to municipal b...
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Washington state removes all barriers to municipal broadband
Author : joeyespo
Score : 276 points
Date : 2021-05-16 16:32 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ilsr.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (ilsr.org)
| dang wrote:
| Recent related thread. Others?
|
| _The Washington state legislature has voted to end limits on
| municipal broadband_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26803426 - April 2021 (112
| comments)
|
| There have been tons of threads about municipal broadband of
| course, but a lot of them are in the key of repetitive/indignant.
| But this one is also recent and also pretty good:
|
| _The number of cities with municipal broadband has jumped over
| 4x in two years_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26970493
| - April 2021 (324 comments)
| bilater wrote:
| As someone who is not well versed in this debate - can someone
| explain to me why it is a...debate? As in what is a (valid)
| argument against giving municipals the right to provide an
| internet service? Obviously big companies don't want the
| competition but how can they legally make an argument against it?
| salawat wrote:
| The normal logic is that private industry can't get a foothold
| against something subsidized by tax revenue, therefore the
| municipal option amounts to unfair competition.
|
| I've never really bought into that line of reasoning though,
| especially when upkeep can be bid out to these ISP's.
| splithalf wrote:
| Will be great for Bitcoin values.
| redisman wrote:
| Why? Is BTC somehow bandwidth bound?
| inson wrote:
| What does that mean for regular customers like myself?
| ptmcc wrote:
| As of yet, nothing.
|
| But this is still a good and necessary first step at removing
| an asinine prohibition.
|
| There is still no plan or funding for building out municipal
| broadband services, but it opens the door to having that
| discussion that was previously off-limits.
|
| Alternatively, it puts pressure on private ISPs to improve
| service or else potentially face competition from future
| municipal broadband.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Either a locally run ISP offering gigabit speeds at good prices
| or it'll scare in incumbent ISPs into doing upgrades to lesser
| but improved levels for higher prices. That's just going off
| the pattern I've seen in a lot of places when cities start
| looking into making their own ISP; local government starts
| looking into running fiber and suddenly the incumbent ISP comes
| and runs their own fiber.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| Given how remarkably one-sided the Washington legislature and
| Governor and AG have been, I am wary of municipal broadband in
| Washington. This is a one party state where leftists are
| embedding their ideology into virtually every public institution.
| For example public schools now push flawed gender ideology,
| critical race theory, and "civics" that are really progressive
| activism. Anyone speaking up against this injection of politics
| into our public agencies is in danger of losing their job, so
| there is nothing to balance out this bias.
|
| Given all this, I am worried that government controlled Internet
| services may come with censorship, controls, and surveillance
| aligned with their political views. If it displaces private
| providers that could be a huge threat to free speech and societal
| discourse. What I want is more competition and choice, not less,
| and I'm not convinced municipal broadband is the solution since
| it may end up removing choice and leave us with only a single
| public provider.
| dang wrote:
| " _Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic
| tangents._ "
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| throwawaysea wrote:
| Respectfully, I feel this isn't unrelated or generic. I live
| in WA and the situation here politically IS really that
| skewed. If I feel there is a threat to my ability to use the
| Internet freely and exercise free speech emerging from the
| state's political powers, who may soon be entrusted with
| operating this service, how else can I broach the topic? It
| is something that has to be discussed and planned for in my
| opinion.
| dang wrote:
| Any comment that goes "municipal broadband" -> "gender
| ideology, critical race theory" -> "progressive activism"
| has almost by definition gone on a generic ideological
| tangent. That's exactly what we ask people to avoid here.
| It leads to generic ideological flamewar, which is the sort
| of thing that will kill this place.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&so
| r...
|
| Your account seems to be using HN primarily for ideological
| battle. Would you please not do that? We've had to ask you
| about this multiple times before. Regardless of what you're
| battling for or against, it's repetitive and inflammatory
| and destructive of the curiosity HN is supposed to exist
| for.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comm
| e...
| throwawaysea wrote:
| (I understand if you don't have time to engage on this,
| but if you have time for one more response I would
| appreciate understanding this better)
|
| Why is that chain a generic ideological tangent? My
| argument is that one sided political ideology has come
| into every level of WA state's government, and it will
| therefore find its way to whichever government groups
| implement municipal broadband. The same political side
| has shown itself to be intolerant of free
| speech/differences of opinions on certain matters. So for
| those who stand on the other side of controversial and
| current topics like those I listed, they may need to be
| wary of this development and how it might be used against
| them, since the Internet is so fundamental to exercising
| our right to speech today.
|
| From my observation censorship, tracking, surveillance,
| government control, and so on are regular topics in HN.
| For example there have been recent articles on FLoC, Tor,
| privacy issues with WhatsApp, cryptocurrency, and various
| decentralized services. To me it seems that these topics
| involve politics and ideology, which are almost
| inseparable from the existence of a technology like the
| Internet. This is why to me my comment feels directly
| related rather than a derailing tangent. Do you see it
| differently, and if so what's the nuance I'm not seeing?
|
| > We've had to ask you about this multiple times before.
|
| I acknowledge you've mentioned this to me a couple times
| before. I thought I had adjusted, and have tried to
| engage on a number of different topics here. I'm just not
| sure what I'm supposed to do at this point to not be
| characterized in this way. It feels like I am being asked
| to not participate or to artificial skew my participation
| a certain way (avoid certain topics or not introduce
| certain opinions). I saw from your search link you
| previously mentioned a burden of the minority view, and
| the need for patience. So is this something that I could
| discuss if the tone were different or if I explained my
| train of thought in a lengthier, more thoughtful comment?
| dang wrote:
| The problem is that (a) you hit a bunch of hot buttons in
| a generic ideological theme. I mean what does municipal
| broadband have to do with critical race theory? That's
| practically the definition of a generic tangent;
|
| (b) your comment was completely speculative - what
| specific reason is there to believe that use of municipal
| broadband might be restricted ideologically? or that
| alternate ISPs would cease to exist? I don't see any
| substance here.
|
| Not to mention (c) flamebait like "one-party state",
| which is language that has specific historical meaning
| and is highly inflammatory when adapted to other
| contexts.
|
| Widening the topic to something vastly broader and
| divisive, not adding any specific information, plus
| carelessly tossing in flamebait, makes it a generic
| ideological flamewar comment. It's not going to lead
| anywhere good, and by the 'expected value of subthread'
| test, that makes it a bad HN comment.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&
| sor...
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Municipal broadband cam be organised as a charity. If 'private'
| get outcompeted by a charity, they deserve to die
| longhairedhippy wrote:
| I live in Washington state and already under a single
| provider, Comcast, and it sucks, I pay $120 a month for
| unlimited gigabit which tops out at 400Mpbs if I'm lucky, and
| often cannot support a zoom call with video. I, for one, am
| thrilled this law passed. Anything that can force a broken
| monopoly to be more competitive is a win in my book.
| bombcar wrote:
| I pay a similar amount for 1/20th of your advertised speed
| and get roughly the same of your actual, and consider it
| decent.
|
| I do have a fiber line through my yard and someday will
| bother getting hooked up to it.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| A Zoom video call can be supported on less than 10 Mbps, so
| it's hard for me to accept this claim that your gigabit
| service can't support a Zoom call. I have Comcast (at a
| much lower tier) and have never had issues with steaming
| from multiple devices while video conferencing as well. If
| you have CenturyLink as an option for gigabit (available in
| several WA cities), they provide symmetric gigabit service
| for $70. In many parts of Seattle both providers are an
| option.
|
| In terms of affordability, I find the current providers to
| be VERY affordable. Comcast provides 25 Mbps service for
| $20 a month - more than enough for typical use. CenturyLink
| has cheaper tiers available as well, depending on location.
|
| As for choice - I would support laws that require sharing
| of last mile cabling and things like that. But if a public
| provider has unlimited funds and can run at a loss, that's
| going to cause private providers to exit or stop investing
| at least, leading us back to square one - a single
| provider, except now it's a slow bureaucratic government
| service.
| ttul wrote:
| I was involved in a local government committee to investigate
| local broadband for my town. The incumbents were understandably
| lazy at improving service quality, so we struck out on our own to
| look at alternatives, including a municipally run service or
| wholesale backbone.
|
| What actually happened is someone in government called up a
| friend at a municipal fiber specialist company, who agreed to
| start making rumblings that they were going to pull fiber to our
| town.
|
| Within two weeks, one of the large incumbents announced their own
| project for a $6M upgrade, which involved running submarine
| cables and totally rewiring the town's network to enable gigabit
| service.
|
| I'm saddened that the town never got a chance to build and own
| its own infrastructure, which would have been so much better,
| because it would have put locals in charge of this essential
| infrastructure - much as they already control water, roads, and
| sewage.
|
| But, ultimately, I now have gigabit service at a reasonably
| competitive price, in a small town that arguably never "deserved"
| it.
| rz2k wrote:
| The incumbent ISP would have eventually had to upgrade to
| gigabit anyway. Maybe they were waiting until the same upgrade
| would cost $2M instead of $6M.
|
| Clearly, they revised their schedule because decades of revenue
| streams, even from a small town, can be worth more than the
| relative expense of upgrading now rather than later.
|
| Did the rates increase for customers who chose the new gigabit
| service? Often the new service offering doesn't make sense to a
| monopoly provider in terms of revenue increases in the short
| term, so competition or threat of public options are an
| important tool that can work even better than public utility
| boards.
|
| Finally, it's worth noting that with changing political
| climates priorities changes, especially when it comes to
| infrastructure. The Flint water system was publicly managed,
| and it isn't even the worst one in the country. Thousands of
| publicly managed bridges are at risk of collapse due to
| underfunded maintenance.
|
| Cold War fears about existential threats motivated great
| federal projects that focused on resiliency and creating the
| foundations for productivity. Without those same threats,
| legislation mandates intentional vulnerabilities like
| backdoors, fails to fund national standards that could limit
| cyber-extortion, and new internet-related initiatives are
| regularly more intent on erecting barriers to entry and toll
| booths than they are on nurturing any new or disruptive
| industries.
| doikor wrote:
| > Maybe they were waiting until the same upgrade would cost
| $2M instead of $6M.
|
| Most of the cost is the actual digging/laying new fiber. The
| price of that does not really go down over time (instead the
| cost of labor goes up over time usually). The actual fiber
| and equipment is a very small part of the cost.
|
| This happened at my parents town. They were looking at
| setting up their own municipal ISP and after some
| research/quotes it ended up costing X which was too much.
| They tried again a decade later and the cost for roughly the
| same system was 1.5X so even more out of their budget.
|
| The other case is the fiber already existing and the ISP
| refuses to upgrade to enable higher speeds then that is just
| pure greed.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| The trick is to seize on when existing infra projects are
| being done (major roadwork or perhaps replacing water,
| sewer, or buried power) and throw the conduit and fiber
| down at the same time, as the incremental cost is trivial.
| This is referred to as Dig Once policy.
|
| Fiber is cheap. When you dig, install fiber!
|
| https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/otps/policy_brief_dig_once.
| p...
| m463 wrote:
| It's also interesting that (well, like copper) fiber
| speeds have been upgraded again and again using different
| transcievers (the gbic thing)
| [deleted]
| darig wrote:
| I live in a small city, but it's the biggest one 100+ miles in
| any direction, so it shows on most maps. AT&T laid fiber
| everywhere, but just capped off all the endpoints. Now any plan
| to lay municipal fiber would probably interfere with AT&T's
| infrastructure, and AT&T could hold up the process. If anyone
| actually made anything that worked, AT&T could just finish the
| job (that they got grants to do that assumed they wouldn't just
| stop after the fiber was laid), and compete on price.
|
| Shady, shady business.
| m463 wrote:
| > reasonably competitive price
|
| I would suggest that this is a lower price, but not a price you
| would get with robust competition.
| xbar wrote:
| No doubt. But it's 2021 and rural communities are catching up
| to where urban centers were 10 years ago. Not perfect, but
| better.
| skybrian wrote:
| That's some good negotiating. It's probably for the best
| because the town doesn't have to take the financial risk? If
| something goes wrong you want there to be some shareholders to
| take the loss. (In return, they profit if nothing goes wrong.)
|
| A lot of towns have a huge bill coming up when they have to
| replace outdated sewer systems.
|
| > The EPA reckons water and sewer systems will need $743
| billion of upgrades through 2035
|
| https://www.marketwatch.com/story/climate-change-means-water...
| ttul wrote:
| As a consumer, I am not terribly displeased. Value-wise, I
| would have preferred that the municipality ended up owning
| the base fiber infrastructure and leasing it out to
| commercial operators. But that fantasy has passed.
| chmod775 wrote:
| > in a small town that arguably never "deserved" it.
|
| Apparently it was still profitable. Just less so than
| continuing to milk old infrastructure.
| smiley1437 wrote:
| I suspect the incumbents also want to minimize the number of
| precedent-setting municipalities that control their own
| broadband. Each one could potentially become a good example
| of the benefits of publicly owned infrastructure - and then
| inspire other cities to do the same.
| AS_of wrote:
| Great news, for them. For the rest of us,
|
| Are there any organizations we can support to help do this in
| more places?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://ilsr.org/
|
| https://ilsr.org/broadband-2/
|
| https://muninetworks.org/
| exabrial wrote:
| On the surface, this looks great. An independent municipal
| provider? Saweet!
|
| What we've seen happen: network construction is contracted out to
| Comcast. They now have [yet another] local monopoly.
| scythe wrote:
| My city's government has a lot more leverage negotiating with
| Comcast than I do alone.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| I have few objections to Cox, Comcast, and so forth being
| reduced to a CLEC-alike for DOCSIS connections, especially if
| the municipalities sign contracts that require the CLEC-alike
| to spend x% of revenue paid them by the city on infrastructure
| buildout _first_ , performance upgrades _only if_ no unserved
| areas remain.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Mississippi did this in 2019, and used a portion of the first
| round of Coronavirus stimulus money to offer block grants to get
| the ball rolling, to great success.
|
| >They used a portion of the funds to supercharge the rollout of
| high-speed broadband to the most underserved areas of the state
| in an effort to close the digital divide.
|
| They went to rural electric co-ops -- private, independent
| electric utilities owned by the members they serve -- many of
| which were left gobsmacked by the offer, according to David
| O'Bryan, general manager of Delta Electric Power Association,
| which now serves Carroll and Grenada counties with broadband.
| Many of these co-ops had been preparing to deploy networks but
| lacked the cash to begin a major project, especially in the most
| remote and sparsely populated parts of their territories.
|
| The result has been an acceleration in broadband deployment that
| could make Mississippi one of the most connected states in the
| nation within the next five to six years. That's a huge leap for
| the state, which last year ranked 42 out of 50 in BroadbandNow's
| 2020 connectivity rankings.
|
| https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/how-coronavirus-stimulus-...
| twalla wrote:
| That's....uh... remarkably progressive for Mississippi - and
| the first bill (HB 366 from 2019) passed nearly unanimously [1]
| https://legiscan.com/MS/votes/HB366/2019
|
| Props to MS legislators for seeing the value in municipal
| broadband.
| ls-lah_33 wrote:
| Most electrical transmission is cooperatively owned in rural
| areas of the US.
|
| https://www.electric.coop/electric-cooperative-fact-sheet
| [deleted]
| nealabq wrote:
| https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc...
| (3 May 2021) outlines which states have broadband restrictions.
| Key quotes:
|
| _- 18 states have restrictive legislation in place that make
| establishing community broadband prohibitively difficult._
|
| _- Five additional states (Iowa, Arkansas, Colorado, Oregon, and
| Wyoming) have other types of roadblocks in place that make
| establishing networks more difficult than it needs to be._
|
| _- A further five states (Arkansas, Idaho, Tennessee,
| Washington, and Montana) have introduced bills to remove
| municipal broadband restrictions so far this year. Montana's bill
| has failed, while Arkansas' passed in February._
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| With regards to legislation repealing restrictions and enabling
| muni networks, it's like marijuana legalization. You keep
| throwing it on the ballot each election cycle until it sticks
| from cohort turnover. Some states turn over faster than others.
| [deleted]
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| Does 'prohibitively difficult' mean that towns aren't allowed
| to put in networks? or simply that it's hard to get funding
| from some higher level of government?
|
| It's hard to imagine some state law that prohibits a town (or
| neighborhood for that matter) from building out some kind of
| internet access.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >It's hard to imagine some state law that prohibits a town
| (or neighborhood for that matter) from building out some kind
| of internet access.
|
| That seems more like a failure of imagination, since ALEC[0]
| has been writing bills for state legislators to do just that
| for many years.
|
| cf. https://www.prwatch.org/news/2014/02/12385/how-alec-
| helps-bi...
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Legislative_Exchan
| ge_...
| smelendez wrote:
| Those laws absolutely exist. Usually passed by state
| legislatures who see it as government overreach, encouraged
| by the big ISPs.
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| Huh. That's ridiculous.
|
| If a city can force everyone to pitch in for a library (
| _cough_ homeless center), I 'd think that running some
| wires and hooking up some gear would be a no-brainer.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| Who created the barriers?
| _delirium wrote:
| In this case, also the Washington State Legislature.
|
| As I understand it, under WA law, public utility districts have
| a specific set of things they are authorized to do. Prior to
| 2000, this didn't include telecommunications at all. In 2000,
| the legislature passed a law [1] that authorized public utility
| districts to build/acquire/operate telecommunications networks,
| but only for: 1) internal use by the district or other public
| entities, or 2) to resell on wholesale terms to other
| providers. It specifically said "Nothing in this subsection
| shall be construed to authorize public utility districts to
| provide telecommunications services to end users". This new law
| amends the 2000 language to allow providing direct service to
| end users as well.
|
| [1]
| http://lawfilesext.leg.wa.gov/biennium/1999-00/Pdf/Bills/Ses...
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| Typically Comcast/Charter by reaching up through the rectums of
| politicians and moving their mouths with their hands.
| exabrial wrote:
| In the USA, typically government agencies are prohibited from
| selling services that compete with private sector companies.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Buzzare. If they can compete without making a loss/tapping
| taxpayer money, then incumbents don't deserve to survive.
| exabrial wrote:
| That should be the way it works, but the [federal]
| government is allowed to incinerate a nearly infinite
| amount of cash. Some state governments are becoming that
| same way unfortunately. Municipalities don't really have
| this option, so it may not be as big of a deal.
|
| See my other comment about contractors though... what we
| saw in TN was Comcast "contracting" its services to "build
| a municipal network", but instead just built their own crap
| using taxpayer funding.
| rhino369 wrote:
| I would agree with the last sentence, but municipal
| projects rarely operate on a level playing field. At a
| minimum, they get access to tax-payer backed bonds to raise
| capital that private companies can't match.
|
| They also get to regulate their competition.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| The city can always regulate the competition out of
| existence, so they are predestined to win the competition.
|
| Which in turn means no one tries to compete, since it's
| pointless, and the city has a monopoly by default.
|
| Or at least that's how it usually plays out. Don't know if
| any jurisdictions have found a way to make this work well.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| It is never the case that they can compete without making a
| loss, as that would effectively make them a private
| company. The Post Office, for example, is supposed to have
| its own P&L, yet we keep giving them billions every time
| they run out of money. So you get the worst of all worlds,
| the lack of accountability of a private company but the
| taxpayers are on the hook.
|
| Almost all these pseudo-government projects are funded out
| of the general budget, and some are off-books but still
| off-balance sheet liabilities of the government. E.g. a
| port authority that floats its own bonds, but those bonds
| are guaranteed by the local government, so if the port
| authority becomes insolvent the government is on the hook.
| If you think entity X can make its own profit and loss,
| then ask yourself: who is on the hook when the bonds sold
| by X default? It is always going to be a taxpayer for a
| government project.
|
| A clean separation between things that are supposed to turn
| a profit and things that should be funded socially is a
| good separation, and trying to blur those lines is usually
| a bad idea, as you create these unaccountable subsidized
| bureaucracies that end up being poorly run sources of graft
| after a few generations.
|
| Now whether internet access itself should be subsidized or
| turn a profit is a different matter. It's critical
| infrastructure, like roads, so you can make a case for
| subsidies.
| salawat wrote:
| Post Office is a bad example as I understand it because
| from what I've heard it's being run by someone notorious
| for wanting it dead to clear the way for private sector
| competitors, and it is the single private organization in
| the United States required to pre-fund its pension fund.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > The Post Office, for example, is supposed to have its
| own P&L, yet we keep giving them billions every time they
| run out of money.
|
| And they run out of money because of pension benefit
| requirements and a lot of other politically mandated
| issues (see e.g.
| https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/apr/15/afl-
| cio/wi...).
|
| Not to mention the events of the 45th Presidency with
| tearing down sorting machines and other actions intended
| to impede by-mail voting...
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Source / citation?
| reilly3000 wrote:
| Props to Chelan County in WA for leading the charge on making
| this a viable model. The county P.U.D. owns and maintains the
| fiber infrastructure and sells it wholesale to ISPs. A friend of
| mine worked on that project and it has netted some concrete
| economic development wins. Wenatchee has been an ag center but is
| adding plenty of clean energy jobs and expanding into a Seattle
| alternative for tech (trying at least).
|
| https://www.chelanpud.org/my-pud-services/residential-servic...
| jorblumesea wrote:
| Realistically, municipal broadband doesn't make sense for every
| town or city. But what this should hopefully do is open up
| avenues to create competition for ISPs to create the services
| they promised, or upgrade existing services.
|
| I'm fairly convinced it's just greed and laziness. It's funny how
| back when Google fibre was rolling into town, suddenly
| centurylink upgraded its service...
| grahamburger wrote:
| I've been helping some cities recently to price out the cost of
| broadband projects. Cities often have some assets (property,
| access to fiber, sometimes access to wireless spectrum) that can
| make building a broadband network feasible. I'd love to chat with
| anyone interested in doing this in their city - email in my
| profile.
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