The most expensive part is the "last mile" or hooking individual buildings up to the grid. What I propose is that the Federal government build fiber to each and every public school and university.
From there, leave it up to the individual state, county, and city governments to see if they want to front the real cost, which is the last mile.
You could even make it like the New Deal and only hire chronic unemployed workers (unemployed >6 months) and train them to lay the fiber. These newly trained workers can then be hired by the local governments who choose to complete the last mile from the national backbone.
It would at least give the unemployed work, the schools access to information, and let the rest of us to decide whether or not to pay the real cost.
Anecdotally that is why my small town of <10,000 has two small businesses that offer 100mbps fiber in town and wireless (at ~DSL speeds) out of town.
In the '90s, Iowa put down* fiber that runs right through our town, and these companies were able to tap in and offer it, first to businesses and in a central area, and then later to any homeowner that wants it, thanks to a grant to offset the cost of installation (but only if they offered service to the entire town, probably less than 20 square miles). I pay $70/mo including a local phone number and the money stays local.
This. Please repeat your story - from the media it would sound like Verizon FiOS and Google Fiber are the only players - when obviously there are lots of companies making fiber plays right now.
Then fewer people would believe these articles about "why you will never get fiber" - arguably that's false, since it is only necessary to move to a city that has it.
If the '49ers moved to California for gold, it's not so far-fetched to have a mass migration away from these backwards, oppressive places that still only have high prices for slow speeds.
Nearly 100 years ago the citizens of my rural locality built a co-operative telephone company. The organization still remains owned by the customers and, as such, have to act to the interests of those customers.
The result is that the entire service area – which consists of mostly farms, and some small town areas – have had DSL connections for more than a decade and they have been working to roll out fibre to those locations for the past few years.
If the citizens are going to pool their money to build infrastructure anyway, what advantage does the government model bring over the co-operative model?
In a rural area with a strong sense of community, a non-governmental cooperative can work pretty easily. In an area with more fighting and less community, you need government power of eminent domain to acquire the rights to intrude on people's land for infrastructural purposes.
Given the battles that are heating up over wind turbines, I'm not sure rural areas have any more sense of community than anywhere else. Though perhaps things were different a century ago.
The main problem seems to be the lack of competition due to restricted infrastructure. In a lot of areas in the US, you only have one company that provides service to the area you live in. In a situation like that, the provider has little motivation to improve the service. This needs to be recognized as monopolistic and the infrastructure needs to be opened up so that it can be used by other providers.
Luckily, there is some decent competition in the wireless internet space. As technology continues to improve there, more people will have access to decent internet speeds wirelessly and the wired infrastructure will feel pressure to catch up. Hopefully more options for unlimited data plans will also become available in the near future.
As far as the absurd amount TV providers are charging for HD TV, DVR services and the like. Technologies like Netflix, Hulu, Apple and others are providing more internet-based services that provide this type of On-demand service at a much more reasonable price. I hope more content will become available on these types of services as more people realize how much better of a user experience it is over watching normal network TV (even with DVR).
Yeah, I think more and better competition is the answer but I'm not sure what the best way is to get there. More regulation? Less? We do, for the most part, have pretty good baseline infrastructure in the US. The infrastructure part of the problem is the 'last mile' piece, but in my mind this is something that can be easily accomplished by new, locally based entities. I think that municipally owned broadband is a really interesting option - GreenLight in Wilson, NC has had some good success: http://www.wilsonnc.org/living/fiberopticnetwork/greenlighth... - but they have had to fight off lobbying efforts by TimeWarner Cable and others to make such municipally owned efforts illegal, and the legality of such services is still on a State by State basis.
So - I guess another question might be, how do we make Community owned broadband an attractive option across the country?
I sadly feel the only way it can be fixed is via government solution. But it has be done on the federal level because a great deal of the issues we have with the current system is due to government on the local level. The system as it is in place right now is highly favorable to the providers which was rubber stamped by local governments in many places.
The US is a big country but it's not the problem of sprawl/distance/density or any of that stuff. The problem is that the US is essentially made up of fifty states that each have their own laws and regulations. Even then these states are broken up into counties (or equivalents) that may also have their own laws and regulations. Now toss in there the different deals and contracts that the different companies have with each of these entities. There's a reason why one neighborhood only has provider A while the next neighborhood down only has provider B.
Granted, there are things like this on the federal level too.
At some point it'll probably take an act of Congress to get the courage to say that the current system is not acceptable and detrimental to the country's future. What will probably have to be done is some kind of mass movement to convert the system to some form of municipal-based service similar to electricity and water in most areas. But even that system doesn't work out well for everybody.
I am sorry but the sole problem here is that the US administration has bought the cable and phone companies line that mergers are necessary and that they need to increase the bills to lay more fiber. In the same time in Europe we had massive government mandated unbundling of the last mile so all the companies actually layed fiber because service quality was the main differentiator. I mean who wants to compete on price in a competitive market.
I'm not saying that I think the government should step in, it's just that it feels that's likely outcome at this point. What you say would be the more agreeable solution to me. It's just that I don't see it happening unless there's a major change in how the government behaves in terms of big business in the US.
Sadly, I don't think "how do we fix it?" ever gets the responses it deserves at HN. I imagine it's because anyone with solutions is applying to YC with them. Still, I (and many others who have written blogs along the lines) would love to see HN comments sections filled with more solutions and constructive criticisms and less put downs or complaints for the sake of complaining. Now the question is, how do we fix that?
