<story><title>Cleveland launches plan to provide cheap broadband</title><url>https://www.techdirt.com/2023/10/23/tired-of-being-ripped-off-by-monopolies-cleveland-launches-ambitious-plan-to-provide-citywide-dirt-cheap-broadband/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>llsf</author><text>Would it make sense for the municipality to own the pipes that run in the city ?  Like some cities own the sewer pipes.
Could it be an infrastructure that the city builds, owns, maintains and rents to ISP ?
The city would have a full control on how many houses are connected.
That is the type of investments that a city is suited for (i.e. large upfront cost financed by bonds).
AT&amp;amp;T, Charter, Comcast, they have no incentive to invest a lot upfront. 
And they might duplicate the infrastructure.
At the end the customer pays for the piecemeal fiber deployment, and redundancy.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ExoticPearTree</author><text>In my part of the globe the city is in the process of finishing installing fiber ducts to all addresses in the city (currently around 3.5M people) and ISPs run microfiber to any residential area, event apartment buildings. The effect is that you can get service from whatever provider you want without the hassle of &amp;quot;we don&amp;#x27;t have the infrastructure to do it&amp;quot;. ISPs rent the fibers on a per distance price, but it is pretty much negligible.&lt;p&gt;When I say installing fiber ducts, I mean trenches with ducts that have exits on every address. And the microfibers are blown through those and you have a fiber optic cable to your door.</text></comment>
<story><title>Cleveland launches plan to provide cheap broadband</title><url>https://www.techdirt.com/2023/10/23/tired-of-being-ripped-off-by-monopolies-cleveland-launches-ambitious-plan-to-provide-citywide-dirt-cheap-broadband/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>llsf</author><text>Would it make sense for the municipality to own the pipes that run in the city ?  Like some cities own the sewer pipes.
Could it be an infrastructure that the city builds, owns, maintains and rents to ISP ?
The city would have a full control on how many houses are connected.
That is the type of investments that a city is suited for (i.e. large upfront cost financed by bonds).
AT&amp;amp;T, Charter, Comcast, they have no incentive to invest a lot upfront. 
And they might duplicate the infrastructure.
At the end the customer pays for the piecemeal fiber deployment, and redundancy.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thomastjeffery</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s what they do here in Utah: UTOPIA (the municipality) runs its own fiber lines, and leases its network to private ISPs. That way, there is a single physical network with competitive pricing.&lt;p&gt;Of course, that doesn&amp;#x27;t stop Comcast, Centurylink, Google Fiber, etc. from running their own networks, and UTOPIA&amp;#x27;s coverage generally doesn&amp;#x27;t overlap where these other ISPs already have infrastructure.</text></comment>