[opendtv] Re: After beating cable lobby, Colorado city moves ahead with muni broadband
- From: Craig Birkmaier <brewmastercraig@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 04 Jan 2018 06:43:30 -0500
Jon Brodkin is certainly prolific.
;-)
But he, and the City of Ft. Collins are in for a few surprises.
From the article:
"The network will deliver a 'net-neutral' competitive unfettered data
offering that does not impose caps or usage limits on one use of data over
another (i.e., does not limit streaming or charge rates based on type of
use)," a new planning document says. "All application providers (data, voice,
video, cloud services) are equally able to provide their services, and
consumers' access to advanced data opens up the marketplace."
So in other words, this network is NOT going to be neutral. If any service
provider attempts to work with the city to make their service work reliably -
i.e. by entering into network peering agreements or installing edge servers at
in the City facilities that service will violate the stated Net Neutrality
goals of the service.
And then there is the minor issue of what it will cost. The planning document
suggests the build out cost will be in excess of $100 million. The city is
giving the City owned electric utility $1.8 million to get started.
Just another example of a government entering into revenue generating
businesses that turn “profits” into tax revenues, to keep city taxes lower. As
is the case here in Gainesville, the “city” power and light service ALSO serves
unincorporated areas surrounding the city - thus these areas help keep taxes
for city residents lower.
In theory all of this is good. We have seen many successful municipal
deployments like in Chattanooga. And we have seen many failures - the planning
document provides some key guidelines:
In providing support for these continued talks, council identified specific
policy objectives (based on recommendations from the working group)
including: a ubiquitous buildout, competitive access to the network,
opportunities to provide high-speed access to those with limited financial
resources, and protections against the sale of the network to existing
incumbents.
It will be interesting to see what happens if the city is unable to fund the
entire project, or it fails. My guess is that they will do what our City owned
utility did here in Gainesville - go out an cherry pick the best broadband
customers first.
This correlates nicely with the article yesterday by Bob Frankston, promoting
AMBIENT CONNECTIVITY.
For a century we have lived with heavy taxation of utilities; apparently
government now needs the capture the profits of commercial utilities, as they
are facing strong resistance to raising taxes.
This would be a good bargain, IF we could depend on local politicians to
control spending and run these public utilities responsibly. Sadly that’s not
what happened here in Gainesville.
Highest utility rates in the state...
Regards
Craig
On Jan 3, 2018, at 11:21 PM, Monty Solomon <monty@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/01/colorado-city-to-build-fiber-broadband-network-with-net-neutrality/
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