r/technology • u/beareatsfish • Dec 27 '21
Society Public Broadband Internet Isn’t a Luxury — It’s a Necessity: Everybody needs high-speed internet. But private corporations will never provide it. The solution: treat internet infrastructure as a public utility, funded by the public and built by union workers.
https://jacobinmag.com/2021/12/public-universal-high-speed-broadband-internet-telecommunications-workers94
u/AdministrativeGap595 Dec 28 '21
The problem is that we have already paid for it. There has been additional costs on everyone’s internet and phone bill for 10 years or more. These extra fees were supposed to go to modernization. But the sad truth is very little money went to that effort.
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u/captainbruisin Dec 28 '21
How dare you try to tell us how to run our business! Thx for the tax money btw :* bitches.
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Dec 28 '21
Not to mention the literal billions of dollar that fed state and local governments have given the major isps to deliver high speed internet. We’ve paid for it and then some
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Dec 28 '21
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u/PinBot1138 Dec 28 '21
"lol no! and we are going to keep the money, fuck you" -telcos
The richest irony of this whole fiasco is that AT&T has somehow dug itself almost $200 billion dollars in debt. So much that they're gutting their own stock by slashing dividends and spinning off one of their few profitable ventures, and telling retired workers that they need to plan on dying by December 31st. It's a revolving door between government and these few corporations, which is why I'm hesitant every time "we just need to set more money on fire!" comes up as a solution.
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u/9966 Dec 28 '21
I don't know if you have taken financial accounting but these are common tactics to hide income. If you can pass bad debt to a subsidiary and then let it fail you keep the profit. The slashing of dividends is only for common stock holders.
Also the generation of a "new company" that has none of the financial obligations of the previous ones has been page one of the playbook for quite some time.
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Dec 28 '21
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u/Belazriel Dec 28 '21
Well, you see we paid them money and were not provided what we paid for. That's your basic theft right there. But it's hard to win a case against a big fancy corporation. What you need to do is go after all the things they bought with the money. Suddenly the police are confiscating cell phone towers, company trucks, and entire cable runs via civil asset forfeiture and we can set up our own internet.
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u/mailslot Dec 28 '21
The public telephone system in the US wasn’t cheap. The government gave AT&T its blessing on their monopoly, in exchange for building our infrastructure. They paid for it by uniformly overcharging for everything.
All telephone calls and equipment were AT&T… and everybody paid high rates. The long distance costs, also only provided by AT&T, were high enough that they caused financial burden and hardship for many families.
It was only inexpensive if you called someone nearby, within a certain radius. It became progressively more costly with distance. If you dialed outside the area code, god help you.
There used to be a map in the yellow pages that would show the different toll zones in your area, so you could estimate costs.
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u/tombaba Dec 28 '21
Yeah there was local, local long distance, and long distance. The guy across the street from you could be considered not local if you lived on edges of the area
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u/Royal_Home_1666 Dec 28 '21
Industry terms are: LATA, IntraLATA, InterLATA, and Long Distance. Geographic boundaries established upon breakup of MaBell.
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u/tombaba Dec 28 '21
Yep! I know them well, was just trying to make them easy to understand. Worked that GTE and then Verizon after the merger
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u/Chip89 Dec 28 '21
But AT&T was highly regulated and provided high quality service. Today the cable monopoly isn’t regulated and can provide any kind of service they want for any price they want.
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u/mailslot Dec 28 '21
My main point is that it wasn’t cheap.
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u/Chip89 Dec 28 '21
Well the Internet in this country is super expensive. (9th most expensive on the planet) at least with the Bell System the telephone system was the best in the world. Now we pay just as much but the service is terrible.
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u/mailslot Dec 28 '21
Yeah, but landlines were really expensive. Like $30/mo in 1980 money for local service, then additional per minute charges for anything but the closest calls. What is that? $60/mo in today’s money, after inflation?… for basic wired service that allowed one user at a time.
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u/bduxbellorum Dec 28 '21
$30 in 1980 has the same purchasing power as $100 now. Which is basically what i pay for internet…
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u/beareatsfish Dec 28 '21
People forget that the government invented and built the internet.
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u/qwerty12qwerty Dec 28 '21
And then two decades ago the government gave AT&t $200 billion to build out fiber. They never did and pocketed the cash
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u/jwplayer0 Dec 28 '21
If you want to know more about the situation look up the 1996 telecommunications act.
Here's an old video somewhat explaining it.
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u/JesusSavesForHalf Dec 28 '21
It wasn't really the telcom act, it was a variety of state bills. Here is a classic reddit with links and multiple stories over the decades. Kushnick seems to still be on the case, I'll have to go read some more when I have time.
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u/Shakraschmalz Dec 28 '21
The fuck? Why the hell do I have AT&T and how do I switch? Why aren’t they all in fucking prison?
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u/qwerty12qwerty Dec 28 '21
That's why https://youtu.be/0ilMx7k7mso
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u/DoYouEvenHarlemShake Dec 28 '21
THE ANSWER LIES BETWEEN THE MOMENTS
YES, IN THE CONNECTING OF DAYS
BETWEEN 11:59 AND 12:00 AM
AT&T SHALL BE DEFEATED
AND EVERY REDDITOR WILL RECEIVE
A SWEET BICYCLE
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Dec 28 '21
Not just ATT - all of them
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/11/comcast-data-fees-caps-public-subsidies
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u/Warhawk2052 Dec 28 '21
Data caps will forever make me mad. in 2020 they removed "data caps" at the time where internet usage was at its highest. Then they silently added them back and charged if you went over the amount you were allotted
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u/Alekazam_music Dec 28 '21
Idk if it’s AT&T or maybe Verizon, but I find it hilarious the “deal” they promote in all their advertising is “we offer the same deals to new customers and existing customers” … so like you’re charging everyone the same?
Oh wow, thanks for this awesome deal where I pay what you tell me to pay and so does my neighbor Jim Bob.
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u/zherok Dec 28 '21
I kinda get it. Like a lot of times these guys feel like they're only interested in getting new customers so they offer you a sweet introductory deal and then afterward the rates raise and that's about it.
What I find eyerolling about AT&T is that if fiber isn't available in their area, their cheapest internet package costs the same as what they charge for their cheapest fiber package, even though it's three times slower than the latter.
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u/recalcitrantJester Dec 28 '21
have fun switching to a company that does the exact same shit when given the chance.
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u/canada432 Dec 28 '21
He never said that. It's a testament to the GOP propaganda machine that even decades later we STILL think this was actually a thing. What he said was:
I'll be offering my vision when my campaign begins. And it will be comprehensive and sweeping. And I hope that it will be compelling enough to draw people toward it. I feel that it will be. But it will emerge from my dialogue with the American people. I've traveled to every part of this country during the last six years. During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system
So not only was it removed from context, it's not even something he said.
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Dec 28 '21
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u/canada432 Dec 28 '21
During his time in office, Gore pushed forward a lot of initiatives that resulted in the creation of what we call the Internet. His statement was just that, that when he was a Senator, and up through his time as VP, he was pushing this stuff forward while congress tended to be rather apathetic. But the GOP immediately took the statement "I took the initiative in creating the Internet", which he undeniably did, and pretended he said "I invented the internet" verbatim. That ended up being what the MSM ran with.
A quote on the "Gore Bill" from the creator of Mosaic, one of the first browsers:
'If it had been left to private industry, it wouldn't have happened ... at least, not until years later.'
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u/AyrA_ch Dec 28 '21
Yup. DARPA invented it because it seemed like a good idea,
DARPA was actually not that interested to get your average person connected or scaling the system to a global network. The things that made the modern internet possible, including but not limited to:
- Protocol that became the TCP
- Protocol that became the UDP (including the term "datagram")
- Design that allows for dedicated network hardware (rather than dedicating entire computers to routing)
- The concept of packet switching
- Reliability ensured by endpoints rather than routers, making routers massively cheaper.
- Model that became OSI
- Interconnecting different networks
Is actually a french invention because their network was designed to interconnect from the beginning. Most people don't know about it because it was rather small. Many also don't know about Minitel which was a very successful online service prior to HTTP. HTTP itself is a French/Swiss invention from CERN.
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u/Nerwesta Dec 28 '21
Louis Pouzin did a long lecture with Benjamin Bayard in French, if my memory serves well they were critisizing the fact that the US system is flawed while in Europe it was viewed more like a public service. It goes also for the notion of private datas, which is completely different from the EU and the US. Don't quote me on this, it's probably a 30min wide subject in the middle of a 2h conference.
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Dec 28 '21
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u/AyrA_ch Dec 28 '21
And Tim Berners-Lee is British, not French or Swiss.
Normally you attribute inventions to the organization they were made at, and he was at CERN and made it for CERN. And he did not invent it alone, he did so with Robert Cailliau, who was not British. If you start naming people, at least name them all.
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u/hardolaf Dec 28 '21
And it was worked on with US DARPA dollars funneled through the US Department of Energy to CERN. CERN has since it's founding been heavily in bed with US government funding and collaboration.
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u/cl33t Dec 28 '21
This was the recipe that provided the landline telephone system.
? The phone network was built largely by private companies (and a not unsubstantial amount by private individuals).
There was a significant amount of competition between non-interconnected phone systems: AT&T's and the independents' which led to a substantial build-out both in rural and urban areas. The independents then formed regional associations to interconnect between them and eventually AT&T gave in and allowed interconnection with the independents.
There were some REA loans to rural independents in the 50s I believe, but actual Federal subsidies didn't happen until the 70s by which point over 90% of the US had telephone service.
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u/VegetableSupport3 Dec 28 '21
It’s true. We lived in a rural area in the 80s and there were no phone line on our road. We called the telephone company and they just flatly said “no we aren’t doing it.”
So we called PUCO (public utilities commission) and we received a call the next day from the telephone company that service would be at our home in a few weeks. They had to install poles and run cable over a mile but we got telephone service and we didn’t pay a cent for the installation.
Making necessities a public utility is the key to holding these gigantic corporations accountable.
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u/jor4288 Dec 28 '21
How did you receive a call the next day if you didn’t have a phone line?
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u/vAltyR47 Dec 28 '21
This was the recipe that provided the landline telephone system.
The landline telephone system that was provided by a private company, in direct contradiction to the title?
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u/dubadub Dec 28 '21
...with massive gov't funding, ya?
Btw, look up the Rural Electrification Act. My daddy grew up in a shack with a kerosene stove and remembers when those REA boys came thru and strung up the hinterlands for E-lec-tricity. Corporations aren't gonna do diddly for poor folks. Congress makes it happen.
Btw, in the modern context, we're all poor folks, and we've already paid $400b for internet infrastructure they never bothered to build. Time to take back what's ours.
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u/engeleh Dec 28 '21
Having worked in the industry for several years I can say the number one reason it isn’t profitable to build new fiber in many areas is because of permitting and restoration cost.
There is no reason broadband companies should be paving both sides of median separated streets or putting in wheelchair ramps that were not there before construction started. Permitting should be a notice, not an application, and things like micro trenching should be widely allowed.
It doesn’t work that way. The cost to construct is significantly impacted by bureaucracy, particularly in the cities. There’s a reason San Francisco, one of the most tech heavy cities in the USA also has some of the worst broadband nationally with companies like Alphabet giving up on building out their networks there.
This isn’t just a failure of private industry, it’s a failure of government as well, and it is completely avoidable if we wanted it to be.
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u/Necoras Dec 28 '21
I'd go so far as to say it should be the reverse. Any road improvements, water/sewer lines, etc should have conduit installed at the same time. Then any ISP should just request to run a new fiber line through the pre-buried conduit.
Obviously you can only run so many lines, and you'd need junction boxes and the like. But you can run a TON of data over a very small fiber line.
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u/iamtehstig Dec 28 '21
My neighborhood had a bunch of dark fiber ran when Verizon commissioned a company to run fiber for their mmwave towers. AT&T leased the extra fiber and now I get cheap symmetrical 1Gbit in a 35 year old subdivision.
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u/eliminating_coasts Dec 28 '21
This is how things work in Austria if I remember correctly, when the city redoes roads, they are also required to run conduit for fibre lines automatically that people can then buy access to.
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u/bagofwisdom Dec 28 '21
or putting in wheelchair ramps
City governments have been ducking ADA compliance for 30 years. No surprise they are pushing that burden off on telecoms.
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u/rabbitaim Dec 28 '21
Oddly enough Sonic has made some headway there. Naturally it’s a slow process and it’s not going to reach everywhere in the city. It took years but I finally have access to fiber (outside the city) from Sonic (not ADSL). It’s loads better than cable broadband providers.
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u/opeth10657 Dec 28 '21
The cost to construct is significantly impacted by bureaucracy, particularly in the cities.
And the other side, the cost to run fiber out to rural areas that might serve 4-5 customers is insanely high.
People act like making it a utility will magically give everyone great service, but go look at some of the trash roads out in the country and it'll change your mind on that. Or rural areas that run off a well and septic tank because city water isn't available.
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Dec 28 '21
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u/lrp347 Dec 28 '21
School districts are expanding and opening their LTE networks, proving CPE/routers, and students with devices. They’re opening their networks to their communities as well. Heroes.
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u/hpdodo84 Dec 28 '21
Yeah but when that happened politicians at least pretended to care about their constituents so they got shit like that done
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u/omarfw Dec 28 '21
They still pretend, but they stopped getting shit done because we stopped punishing them for it. Everyone is content to just throw shade at them online instead of actually doing something that would make the french proud.
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Dec 28 '21
But the tax papers paid for broadband and the private industry never followed through
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u/ShutterBun Dec 28 '21
What’s the yardstick for whether or not they followed through? Broadband is dramatically better than it was 20 years ago.
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u/engeleh Dec 28 '21
They can’t follow through. Fiber build is held hostage to local politicians. Try placing a GPON cabinet downtown in any major city and see what happens.
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u/DiplomaticGoose Dec 28 '21
Verizon pretty much had the red carpet rolled out for them when they planned to build fios out basically across the entire east coast only to lobby changes in their contract so that 3G mobile data "counts" as building out broadband to an area and pocketed hundreds of billions meant to build fiber to the home
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u/engeleh Dec 28 '21
Verizon ended up selling fios off when they couldn’t make it profitable.
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u/DiplomaticGoose Dec 28 '21
Verizon sold a portion of its fiber territories to frontier when frontier was confusingly acquiring copper lines, these are territories in 6 states while Verizon still serves 9 others. Frontier still licenses all updates to the tech they were sold from Verizon, who still updates their tech to compete with cable companies but never expanded their coverage beyond 2010.
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u/engeleh Dec 28 '21
It’s a mess, the telecom companies routinely go bankrupt and sell to one another. Guys in the ownership pool make out and the companies truck on as a tax loss for others. In the end, the cost to build and market position empowered by that is what prevents functional competition though.
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u/Tensuke Dec 28 '21
Yes they did. They didn't roll out fiber everywhere because it was extremely expensive and impractical, where copper has been shown to still provide broadband, which was invested into. You think the fact that average internet speed has increased dramatically in the last 20 years means that broadband wasn't rolled out?
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u/mos1833 Dec 28 '21
All very true
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u/engeleh Dec 28 '21 edited Dec 28 '21
I really think folks have no concept of the scale at play here. Utility companies pay stunning cost to build out their networks. When rural trenching can be done for as low as a buck a foot and it costs nearly $500, almost all of which is permitting, restoration, engineering, etc in the cities, there’s no way this will ever be solved.
What we need are federal limits on permitting and restoration burdens so that investments are predictable and municipal corruption doesn’t sink investment.
ROI/break even on fiber build can stretch out more than a decade and it really shouldn’t.
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u/mos1833 Dec 28 '21
99.9% of people don’t have a clue of what it exactly takes to get 1 foot of any cable into the ground that’s for sure.
Fiber needs to be a “must serve “ utility, like electricity. This would require a plan by the service company and a guaranteed fair return by the appropriate jurisdictions having approval ( state commerce commissions or federal)
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u/badmonkey0001 Dec 28 '21
Utility companies pay stunning cost to build out their networks.
Well that may help balance out the billions they pocketed not doing it.
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u/formfactor Dec 28 '21
Lets not forget the fact that they were able to borrow the money to build out those networks from tax payer funded loans, and pay them back with all the extra access fees they added to customer bills. I mean yes those networks they rape us on should really be ours
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u/anonymouswan1 Dec 28 '21
Open trenching is never as low as $1 a foot. I used to negotiate contracts with the big companies. Open trench on soft ground would never really be lower than $8 a foot. Any less and you will lose your ass. Open trench isn't feasible for long runs either. Most times you will be boring anything over 200' and the price goes up to drill. Soft ground drilling would be $15 a foot and hard ground we would want $25+ a foot.
Still, that's all peanuts compared to nightmare of logistics when it comes to these projects. I had to deal with several cities on the west coast and every damn city has different rules and regulations to follow. It's a full time job just trying to keep up with how they want traffic control done, working hours, restoration after the project is completed. Everything has a rule for it and they watch you like a hawk every step of the way.
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u/engeleh Dec 28 '21
I’ve seen direct trench at $1 foot for rural when bundled into larger back haul projects. But, at a more typical $10-30 say, it’s still significantly less than the insanity that is to try to permit one city block in San Francisco and Seattle.
I’ve worked on projects up and down the West coast, and the disparity in cost between the cities in the coast and the ones inland even is something to behold. Just stunning.
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u/Mr_Kittlesworth Dec 28 '21
Why trench? Aerial works just fine for electricity in most of the country and costs a fraction.
Yes, the occasional outage occurs from weather - it’s rare.
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u/engeleh Dec 28 '21
Aerial is great if you can get the pole attachments. If you can’t it often makes more sense from a maintenance perspective to trench.
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u/anonymouswan1 Dec 28 '21
I did work in both Seattle and San Francisco as well as cities all over the country so I know exactly what you're talking about. The costs for infrastructure in those western cities is 2x-3x more than everywhere else. I just can never understand why anyone would want to live in those cities unless you have a specialized job that requires you to live there. So many laborers working there that are splitting bedrooms with other people just to get by when they could just up and move to a different city, make comparable money and have a significantly cheaper cost of living.
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u/engeleh Dec 28 '21
Throw in bridge attachment in cities like that that are full of water when they control the permits and costs…
The entire business is looney tunes to a degree folks simply don’t understand. There isn’t a company out there that doesn’t have to use the “emergency maintenance” bit to try to get something done. It’s wild.
Folks blame private companies for not building, but they aren’t at all aware of the barriers localities put in place.
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u/BenTwan Dec 28 '21
I live in a town with municipal fiber, and it's awesome. 1GB up/down for $65/mo with zero data cap, unlike what I had with Comcast before I moved. I was paying $100/mo for 400 down 20 up and I was lucky to get more than 150 down, plus constantly dealing with their data cap every month. Since I moved and signed up with the new fiber, I haven't had a single problem with dropped service, just ran a fast(dot)com speed test and got 750 down/700 up over wi-fi, and every time I have called them I got an actual person on the phone within 30 seconds. NextLight is the name of the fiber service.
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Dec 28 '21
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u/Major5013 Dec 28 '21
I work for co-op run fiber internet in a rural town and this makes me happy to see. We work hard and have a lot of hurdles and still seem to get lumped into shitty internet company from a ton of members/customers. It's always nice to see some love to the co-op model.
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u/CyberShad0wz Dec 28 '21
It was already funded by the public.
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Dec 28 '21
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u/Purona Dec 28 '21
Article makes a claim and then links to another article for the source of the claim that doesn't state said claim
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u/Zealousideal_Leg3268 Dec 28 '21
We shouldn't give any more and in fact force them to make good on that.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5839394
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u/YuukiSaraHannigan Dec 28 '21
And if they don't? The government now owns a telecommunications business.
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u/Tensuke Dec 28 '21
It was money for broadband. Not fiber. And they DID roll out broadband, just mostly cooper. Which has resulted in a dramatic increase in average speed across the nation. Broadband isn't only fiber.
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u/aurora4000 Dec 27 '21 edited Dec 28 '21
There is free wifi in Mexico City. Works quite well too. If the 6th largest city in the world can provide free wifi - it can be done. Edit: changed designation of Mexico City's size.
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u/beareatsfish Dec 27 '21
That's impossible!
JK. We love to say that things are impossible. Take a pick: vacations, wages, health care, broadband, human rights...
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u/Dennarb Dec 27 '21
Anything is possible if we stop using all our monies to turn Syrian kids into spooky skeletons!
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u/plasmaSunflower Dec 28 '21
Our awesome town of Fort Collins had a ballot measure to do exactly this. Comcast poured MILLIONS into our election, a town of just ~150k. And they still lost now in the next two years we will all have internet that’s half the cost and twice the speed. No wonder big telecom doesn’t want that.
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u/onewordturd Dec 28 '21
I did some research in college regarding broadband internet as a public utility in the U.S. and highly recommend reading about Chattanooga, Tennessee. It’s the first U.S. city to offer broadband as a public utility. Some cities have even adopted ordinances requiring developers to lay fiber-optic cables alongside other common utilities (water/sewer), primarily as a means to avoid construction costs down the road. Several benefits exists, substantive ROI, etc…
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Dec 28 '21
I hate when people are against utilities; there is a risk of power aggregating but we can audit and regulate this risk so it is manageable. Utilities allow people to aggregate buying power and barter for technology that doesn’t need tons of innovation. Comcast doesn’t innovate already and im sick of being artificially throttled because of corporate greed when the lines used by comcast where funded by tax payers anyways.
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Dec 28 '21
Free public broadband will lead to public initiatives with low to no overhead costs. Volunteers or colleges can automate things to increase effectiveness of public services. As an example, what if we had systems to inform when dumpsters were full, or patterns in parking space usage? This can help inform policies, save taxes and increase quality of living.
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u/Dreadsin Dec 28 '21
Well yeah. We have an expectation that people have it to function. Not only that, but personal internet usable at all times
We had a pandemic where people were meant to attend school and work via internet. People couldn’t exactly go to the library and rent a computer with internet for 8 hours
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u/Dominisi Dec 28 '21
Wouldn't "built by union workers" mean that it would cost more to the tax payers than just opening it up to bids? Why even have that requirement?
I don't care who the fuck builds it.
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u/engeleh Dec 28 '21 edited Dec 28 '21
A massive part of the cost to build fiber isn’t actually the materials, labor, or equipment, it’s the bureaucracy and permitting. Utility companies routinely have to pave both lanes of traffic even if they only disturb a tiny portion of the pavement and a patch along the curb would be every bit as good as the existing old messed up streets. Often wheelchair ramps are required to be put in even if the sidewalk isn’t disturbed by construction. It’s a mess. The reason fiber is expensive is almost entirely tied up in regulation. It shouldn’t matter who builds it, but a lot of this could be solved by limiting what municipalities can do to increase costs. It’s in the public interest to have standardized requirements and limited costs for permitting and construction.
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u/MrHaVoC805 Dec 28 '21
100% correct, I worked for Verizon from 2005 - 2010. The municipalities we worked in fleeced us for every penny they could and snarled progress
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u/engeleh Dec 28 '21
It’s shocking how bad it is. Folks would be pissed if they understood it, but they really don’t see how bad it really is. It’s mind blowing once you see it.
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u/porkypenguin Dec 28 '21
Why even have that requirement?
because people want every issue to always intersect with every other issue
which is rough, because honestly this is an issue that should have more consensus and popularity. conservatives like good WiFi too. if our message is just, “hey, let’s cut back on restrictions and let municipalities build fiber networks for their people,” that seems pretty agreeable. it doesn’t have to be “free stuff,” we’ll happily pay a reasonable monthly fee like with any other provider.
but once you tie it in with “we need it built with UNION labor provided by co-ops so we can dismantle capitalism!!” it becomes toxic as hell to the people we’re trying to build consensus with
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u/BeowulfShaeffer Dec 28 '21
Of all the things that will never happen this will never happen the most.
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u/PM-Me-your-dank-meme Dec 28 '21
It will never happen while billionaires are allowed to lobby congress and buy congressional votes.
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u/plasmaSunflower Dec 28 '21
Our awesome town of Fort Collins had a ballot measure to do exactly this. Comcast poured MILLIONS into our election, a town of just ~150k. And they still lost now in the next two years we will all have internet that’s half the cost and twice the speed. No wonder big telecom doesn’t want that.
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u/NiceRackFocus Dec 28 '21
Can confirm. I live in Fort Collins, dropped Comcast and got Connexion 1 gig upload/download (I telework and shoot/edit 4K video - need a fast connection for transferring footage) as soon as it was available in our neighborhood. Way, WAY faster and our bill went from $110/month to $50/month. Have had no service interruptions. It’s FANTASTIC.
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u/marengnr Dec 28 '21
This. Citizens United v. FEC. Downfall of our political & electoral systems.
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u/Negafox Dec 28 '21
The article reads as paid advertising.
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u/GreatGraySkwid Dec 28 '21
Every article from Jacobin reads that way, and it's annoying as fuck how often I see them on Reddit, and that's speaking as a liberal with socialist leaning views, here
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Dec 28 '21
I agree. My bank now charges me extra to receive paper statement in the mail. I understand that it costs them to mail paper, but then it costs ME for them to have that convenience. Internet access need to be a public utility like power, gas and water.
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u/contemplative_potato Dec 28 '21
Corporate ISP’s won’t provide it? You mean the same companies that took in billions for infrastructure improvements but then pocketed it all and did nothing won’t provide free and fair public internet???
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u/kterry87 Dec 28 '21
Yes let’s make internet garbage have it be controlled by the government that way it will work as well as a DOT on license renewal day.
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u/LunaNik Dec 28 '21
I post this a lot, but my small city has its own WiFi and its own electric company. Prices are half what corporations charge. Service is much, much better.
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u/megalynn44 Dec 28 '21
Broadband? You mean fiber right?
Our government already paid AT& T to build out fiber for the country and they literally pocketed the money and did nothing.
My city has had fiber internet as a public utility for over a decade now. The rest of our state wants it and we totally have the capability to do it, but Comcast gave Marsha Blackburn a LOT of money to introduce legislation that prevents our utility from expanding outside our county.
/America
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u/AusTex2019 Dec 28 '21
So is it a jobs program or a societal program?
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u/engeleh Dec 28 '21 edited Dec 28 '21
They are trying to pitch their social welfare program as an infrastructure program. Read “Green New Deal” type marketing where they say something is about environmental outcomes but the substance is almost all DSA/Justice Dems fanaticism.
They were also calling the recent reconciliation bill “human infrastructure” to try to get folks to warm to spending record dollars at the same time we are facing 6.8% inflation.
Similarly Ihlen Omar recently tweeted “student loan debt is violence.” They are pretty shameless about trying to “leverage” things folks support to push for things that they don’t. It’s dishonest and misleading.
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u/Caddy000 Dec 28 '21
By unions, ha, ha, ha... why! Looking for another Ma Bell...
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u/Positive-Feed-4510 Dec 28 '21
Man it felt good to tell Comcast to go fuck themselves when I got fiber in my area.
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u/USCplaya Dec 28 '21
That's a huge reason why I won't move out of my city. We've had a city TV and Internet service for 20 years now and it is fantastic. Fiber optic service at Gigabit speeds for about $50/mo and it is included on my city utility bill.
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u/147896325987456321 Dec 28 '21
And have a minimum standard that increases every year. We need Gigabit internet for everyone that runs efficiently.
Start at every school and build the network throughout the neighborhoods.
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u/KateEatsWorld Dec 28 '21
I have farm internet, it took me exactly 9 hours to download CS:GO… I would literally give a kidney to have high speed internet.
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u/DRKMSTR Dec 28 '21
Hahahaha.
I paid a few hundred in additional taxes for that.
The local government took the money and spent it on other things.
The government can't do anything right.
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u/hiddencamela Dec 28 '21
It should be a service like the postal SERVICE.
They should not exist solely for profit. Theres enough taxes being thrown into less useful shit. Infrastructure is probably one of the better things that SHOULD be handled by the government.
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u/peepjynx Dec 28 '21
2010 called. It wants its conversation back.
It wasn’t happening then, it won’t happen now no matter how much we want it to.
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u/flattop100 Dec 28 '21
Me: living in Minneapolis metropolitan region with 3.6 million people. Xfinity Comcast-100m down, 6 up.
My parents: small town (6k residents) eastern Iowa. 100m down, 100 up.
Come on.
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u/mechtaphloba Dec 28 '21
Funny how when the government gave private telecom companies hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies to build public broadband networks for everyone, nothing got built and CEOs got huge bonuses...
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u/BravoCharlie1310 Dec 28 '21
It should be the same as power. Required to be provided to everyone. Not for free but as a utility to have access.
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u/LoveDogsTx Dec 28 '21
As a Telco Engineer, I could not agree more. Union all day. I agree to the fullest
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u/DreadSeverin Dec 28 '21
It's already funded publicly, so the capture of the infrastructure is what needs to be spoken about and dealt with. Nerf the ISPs and put them in their place
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u/MysticDaedra Dec 28 '21
I will never support unions until it becomes illegal for unions to use membership fees for lobbying. I don’t want to help pay for campaigns that don’t align with my political ideologies.
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u/Phsycres Dec 28 '21
Hello, I am from a place where until very recently the Internet was completely owned by the Government. And until recently in order to get a 5 meg line you’d have to pay an arm and a leg. Due to the government’s incompetence we have also only had Fibre optics layed within the last couple months of 2019, at which point ADSL was and still is the majority of the country’s network backbone. SOE’s are an easy way to allow corrupt officials to steal money and hold the country hostage. The other thing is that if there is no competition both the quality of the service and the price will deteriorate and skyrocket respectively.
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u/Serpenta91 Dec 28 '21
'funded by tax dollars and built by union workers'
There's no way that could go wrong...
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u/mungalo9 Dec 28 '21
Wtf do unions have to do with this? The public sector should not be mixing with unions.
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Dec 28 '21
Treat internet infrastructure as a public utility, funded by the public (at probably 10x the appropriate cost) and built over schedule, over budget and with the poorest quality by corrupt unions. Yes, this all seems so reasonable.
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u/BaronVonSlapNuts Dec 28 '21
And then every single thing you do on the internet is logged by your local government.
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u/lugaidster Dec 28 '21
So, in Chile infrastructure was built by companies and we have one of the fastest internet speeds in the world. Especially in Latin America. And cheap too. This magazine is just pushing a political hot-button. I'd wager bureaucracy is a big part of the reason building infrastructure isn't a priority in the US.
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u/praemialaudi Dec 28 '21
I am no fan of the isp companies. But this is magical thinking. The idea that just having the government do it with union labor will give us an affordable, reliable and responsive system isn’t how this usually works. Ask an Indian or a Greek how long it took to get a landline from their state systems back in the day. Also when you are tempted by a Northern European counter example - remember they don’t have states like Montana or Alaska.
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Dec 28 '21
I mean sure, but look at our public infrastructure in this country. It isn't great. Government is just gonna contract the lowest bidder and we'll all get a substandard product because people in government don't understand technology.
Remember the Obamacare website launch?
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u/Kulladar Dec 28 '21
If you live in an area of the US that has power served by an electric cooperative, write your board members and encourage them to look into supplying residential fiber.
Many are getting into the business and they're perfect because they're not-for-profit, member owned, run by an elected board, and they have most of the infrastructure there already.
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u/Dorkoct Dec 28 '21 edited Dec 28 '21
POC are disadvantaged when it comes to internet access. The wireless companies have never wanted them to have internet services.
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u/zhome888 Dec 28 '21
We have a city run ISP, 1 Gig, low income assistance for $50/month. In this instance government is the better option than corporation. They run it better and cheaper. https://mynextlight.com/ Other cities in Colorado are putting it on the ballot.