The Briefing Room
General Category => Politics/Government => Topic started by: PeteS in CA on February 20, 2020, 09:12:49 pm
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https://pagetwo.completecolorado.com/2020/02/18/municipal-broadband-experiments-failing-nationwide/ (https://pagetwo.completecolorado.com/2020/02/18/municipal-broadband-experiments-failing-nationwide/)
DU Professor: Municipal Broadband experiments failing nationwide
University of Denver Professor of Finance, Ronald Rizzuto, has been a telecommunications consultant for more than three decades. He is considered an expert on municipal broadband. Rizzuto recently finished investigating dozens of cities and towns across the U.S. that entered the broadband market, in many cases, more than a decade ago.
In an interview with Complete Colorado, Rizzuto said what he found didn’t surprise him. Most of the communities have either sold their broadband enterprise or are failing and looking for a way out.
More than 200 communities nationwide currently offer municipal broadband, but only a small percentage of them have been successful, Rizzuto said, and in those instances, specific rare circumstances applied.
“Penetrations are usually in the 30-40 percent,†Rizzuto said. “Very seldom do you see something that has blown it out of the park. There are some that have been at it for 10 years and they are barely at 20 percent.â€
Businesses offer a better service-price than can bureaucrats? Who could have foreseen that? What disturbing, though, is the desire by so many city councils and mayors to attack businesses.
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https://pagetwo.completecolorado.com/2020/02/18/municipal-broadband-experiments-failing-nationwide/ (https://pagetwo.completecolorado.com/2020/02/18/municipal-broadband-experiments-failing-nationwide/)
DU Professor: Municipal Broadband experiments failing nationwide
Businesses offer a better service-price than can bureaucrats? Who could have foreseen that? What disturbing, though, is the desire by so many city councils and mayors to attack businesses.
Shocking. *****rollingeyes*****
Cities should only contemplate such things when the private company can be reasonably shown to be gouging the customers, and only as a last resort. My little city just did that with the water company: >100% rate increases in < 5 years.
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It is really too bad.
I will step away from all y'all for a minute and opine, as this is something a city or county could do rather well - Providing open space public wireless... Also providing for localized internet that would serve when otherwise wide-spread outage exists.
Perhaps it is more of a thing out here in the boonies, but we have been without internet for days on end because of a backbone router failure, and that more than once. Would that the internet were more distributed - that the 'Flathead county node' could operate on its own without the rest, providing local information services that are now all but lacking without the internet... local papers cannot be accessed, local radio and TV cannot be streamed, maps do not work, and etcetera. Heck, even the phones don't work, what with so many of them being VOIP anymore, and cellular networks being reliant upon that same backbone.
There may be radio and tv, but no one has an antenna to get at it... And as I found out recently myself, I only had ONE radio in the house, and the only reason I had that was because I use it in the shop.
Like with the reliance on trucked in food, when the networking goes down there is nothing. Not supporting local vegetable farming and local ranches and dairies will eventually be devastating in a catastrophe. It is in the same sense that I utter warning about information services.
And just like that trucked in food - The cost is not really the issue. The farms and ranches are already there - It is an organizational thing. A matter of governance. The sort of thing government is supposed to do.
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Good article Pete... thanks for posting.