What the US desperately needs is competition - two many cities and states are still stuck with telco/cable monopolies where informal agreements mean one of the options is either stupidly expensive, slow/costly to install or only offers the bare minimum speed so you are left with one provider.
I kind of disagree. The US is where it is partly as a result of the breakup of Ma Bell that created regional operators and monopolies. Then competition created mutiple operators fighting over the most lucrative areas. Or sometimes service provision being blocked by regulation, a bit like in the UK where Hull kind of exists in it's own mini-muni-monopoly. Or the UK's cable TV industry, where licences were awarded by region, then were promptly assimiliated into Virgin.
But this has lead to situations where there's pretty much a de-facto monopoly in services due to an incumbent being there first, or massive overbuild where multiple operators chase the same customers. Which then leads to fun given telco services being newest, so given the shallowest burial layer, which means roads covered in a layer of ducts, making servicing gas/water/electricity layers more fun. So more backhoe-fade.
Or just large amounts of money being wasted through overbuild. Or because of constant roadworks leading to disruption, 'stops' put on roads so they can't be dug up for X years for new provisions.
And then there's fun around USO (Universal Service Obligations), which are a tax/fee levied on connnections that's intended to support/subsidise rural provision, but often doesn't. Or can mean small rural/muni operators that create their own local monopolies and consumers might still not get a great service.
But such is politics. Personally, I've long been a believer that broadband infrastructure is/should be a natural monopoly. Which is kind of like Openreach. They lay the fibre, then wholesale it to providers who run services over the top. Then it's one butt to kick & regulate, and/or award USO money to to do the rural provision. Which isn't always perfect, eg we ended up with the BBC holding a large purse due to DSO costs being lower than predicted.
So personally, I really like muni-networks. Going through the planning & civils stuff to provision a customer a 1Gbps IP-ish service is expensive, time consuming and a general ball-ache. But it's allowed me to create traffic jams. Munis have responsibility for stuff like roads, bridges and other public utilities, so why should broadband be any different? It would be cheaper & less disruptive to add ducts as roads are resurfaced or improved, and if that means I could order a 1Gbps Ethernet-ish, I could provision customer services across it faster than if I had to lay my own fibre.
Regulation would be relatively simple, ie mandate G.984 compliance, competition at the services layer, and cost+ or LRIC pricing. Ok, not entirely perfect given some aspects of G.984 being a bit vague, but technically, that doesn't matter too much if the line interface is Ethernet and the services are via a router. Some years back I looked at doing this on Martha's Vineyard, which was doing some major road resurfacing & improvements. Muni broadband made sense given it's an island.
But basically it seems a more sensible and capital-efficient way of solving broadband provisioning challenges like the high costs involved in rural provision. And if munis can do it for water & drainage provision, why not bit-pipes as well?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
