Tired Of Being Ripped Off By Monopolies, Cleveland Launches Ambitious Plan To Provide Citywide Dirt Cheap Broadband::Cleveland has spent years being dubbed the “worst connected city in the U.S.” thanks to expensive, patchy, and slow broadband. Why Cleveland broadband sucks so badly isn’t really a mystery: consolidated monopoly/duopoly power has resulted in a broken market where local giants like AT&T and Charter don’t have to compete on price, speeds, availability, customer…
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Countdown to the lawsuit by AT&T and Charter followed by Republicans trying to ban municipal broadband.
Seriously, something like that is going to happen. Tacoma, a city near Seattle, had their own broadband. The city broke all kinds of laws to give a contract to another provider so they don’t own the service anymore. Seattle was fighting for their own internet at the time and used Tacoma as an example. Guess what happened next.
Since it appears there’s precedent for this falling apart, hopefully Cleveland’s government will have done their research and be prepared, albeit I’m not necessarily optimistic either.
It’s not a precedent, it’s a playbook and telecos have been following it for decades. If you have one of the big telecoms in your city, they will sue to block municipal broadband. These suits win more often than not and even when they lose the rollout is usually delayed long enough as a result that they break even on legal fees.
This is actually Cleveland’s second attempt to expand municipal broadband
after their prior effort in 2021 was thwarted when the Ohio state government banned Cleveland and other cities from offering a public option – obviously at the behest of lobbying from ISP special interests.Correction: the broadband provision was struck from the budget bill before it was signed by the governor. It appears that the 2021 effort to build out municipal fiber failed for other unrelated reasons.This new initiative is actually a bundle of public-private partnerships as opposed to true state-owned infrastructure:
SiFi and CircleC, not the city, will own the finished networks. With little to no taxpayer money being spent, it’s a tradeoff city leaders say they felt made sense.
“They already have a right to use our right of way—we’re not providing any special access to it, the agreement is just us all getting organized for how permitting for such a large scale project will go,” Davis said of the SiFi partnership. “Since the city’s [not] paying for it or putting anything in, it’s not getting an equity stake.”
Similarly, Davis noted that DigitalC will also maintain ownership of their finished wireless network.
“We at the City are not contracting for infrastructure,” Davis noted. “We’re contracting for DigitalC to take 23,500 households–about 50,000 residents–that don’t subscribe to at-home broadband today and get them to become at-home internet subscribers, and provide digital adoption services and training to 50,000 residents. Basically, we’re paying to halve our present unconnected rate of 32 percent.”
NOTE: The original article has a typo where they misquote Davis as saying “Since the city’s paying for it or putting anything in, it’s not getting an equity stake.” This has been corrected in my quoting of the article
The metro area where I live had to do this public-private partnership for the same reason. They proposed public fiber years ago and Mediacom sued and blocked it. This was how our metro area (a collection of roughly 6 cities) got around that bullshit lawsuit. As a result, we now have 1Gb symmetrical fiber for $60/mo (Mediacom charged $120+/mo for 1Gb and maaaaybe 10Mb up on good days, oh and constantly had outages).
Fuck Mediacom and their ilk.
Fuck the courts that enable them instead of shutting these monopolies down.
Just because the city’s not “putting anything in” doesn’t mean they aren’t contributing or absorbing costs.
The city should have a stake in it, since it’s on city property, and the city maintains the local infrastructure (poles, right-of-ways, etc) that these companies need to install anything. Otherwise it’s just another (local) monopoly.
Wow, I missed that they banned it in Ohio. It must only apply to new systems as I’m fairly sure Fairlawn is still operating municipal fiber.
That’s really irritating though, of course they snuck it into a budget bill.
Whoops! I went back to double-check after seeing what you said and found that the provision was actually dropped from the bill in the time between when it was passed by the Senate and signed by the governor.
The way it got quietly dropped like that kept it from being well publicized, but the long and short of it is that I misremembered and then failed to spot this detail while fact-checking myself. I’m sorry for spreading misinformation – I’ve updated the original post
Ah good! That simplifies things for Cleveland then.
I grew up in Cleveland. Family still lives in the area. I am not expecting anything good to actually happen
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Nope. Republicans don’t like anything except “owning libs”.
They profess to, but if you look at their voting history and policy making, they really support corporations that spend lobbying money to enrich their campaign.
Pretty nearly every time.
No. They like corporations.
Oh no, they will lose out on all that efficiency from the free market
If only they had Comcast, they could experience the joy of 10G internets.
By 10G I assume you mean a monthly data cap of 10GB?
No it’s 10G, so much higher than 5G. The only thing better would be 11G.
For $4,000,000,014, I’ll make you one that goes to 12G.
There’s nothing free market about how cable companies operate.
Sure there is. They are natural monopolies that form in the free market. The free market isn’t a good thing. It’s what gives us things like child labor and corporate owned towns.
Lol, so all the regulation protecting them is “natural”?
No, those come after they gain a monopoly. Those regulations weren’t there when the “free market” turned them into a monopoly.
There are certain products and services that form a monopoly naturally when they operate in a free (or even relatively free) market. Those are referred to as natural monopolies, ISPs are among them.
This ia good, natural monopolies should be run by local goverments or the goverment.
Ohio state legislature will make this illegal, or at least place a specific regulatory burden to make it illegal in this one city e.g. No town or city with a population over [insert Cleveland population -5%] or No city or town bordering large bodies of water [Lake Erie]. I guarantee it.
The solution is simple: Secede from the state of Ohio, declare Cleveland an autonomous city-state, and befriend nuclear Gandhi so no one will dare contest you.
A small town near me (6,000 population) installed fiber optic around down and now it’s considered a public utility and low cost to boot.
Yea we are in the Chattanooga area and enjoy gigabit symmetrical fiber for $67/mo. No taxes or extra fees, just the 67. It’s a big part of why we chose to live here.
Howdy neighbor I’m in Tri-Cities. :)
Here gigabit would be around 8-16$/mo.
To be fair, $65/month for gigabit fiber is pretty standard.
It’s what we got here in Southern Illinois, although I don’t use it.
Lol I’m paying $100 a month for 500mbps asymmetrical and I know others have it worse too
I thought you might be referencing Olds, Alberta who also did this a decade ago
Great! Now do healthcare.
And housing.
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My electric coop installed fiber last year, up to gigabit with no limits and no throttling. They’re even cool with my rampant torrenting.
I’ve been saying for years that internet should be treated like a utility, and I was right.
Question: could not a private company mostly owned by the city do it? Normal for profit company providing alternatives? And do it block by block…
They could… but typically that required pulling tons of permits to do. Also means that they intend not to make a whole lot of money doing it since “cheap” is part of this. Companies are a bit allergic to doing a lot of work for cheap.
But to that point, I have enough density in my area that centurylink is installing fiber (finally…) and actually offering it at almost reasonable value. It makes monetary sense for them in this case. So they’re doing it.
CenturyLink from where I grew up (rural Wisconsin), still only offers DSL as the fastest option. I now live in rural South Vietnam, and I have a fiber drop into my bedroom. Ridiculous really.
I’m so curious, how did you end up moving from rural Wisconsin to rural vietnam
for the fiber
Actually, I just fell in love with it. Wonderful food, people are kind,
internet fast, no politics, fantastic coffee. I could go on for days.no politics
Be careful, you can end up in other place with fast and cheap(100Mbit/s for ~4-10$/mo) internet and without politics - Russia.
Where I lived before, the city had the municipal power company build the open-access fiber network. They already have all the right of way and lines right up to people’s houses so perfectly suited.
They already have all the right of way and lines right up to people’s houses so perfectly suited.
Right of way doesn’t mean they don’t still have to submit permits and such to the city/county.
Easements on your property for utilities are usually out of your hands as a homeowner anyway.
