US mayors urge Congress to ditch red-tape-slaying broadband expansion bill It's been slow going expanding America's high-speed internet coverage – and city-level opposition to one proposed national law to streamline broadband roll-outs may stall things further. The US Conference of Mayors, which speaks for the administrations of more than 1,400 cities with a population of at least 30,000 people, …
“ giving broadband providers millions in exchange for better internet”
Yes you did and required it to be used from city to city. Most of the time, over building existing fiber. Did not help a single person that did not live in the city.
Read what the definition of rural is.
Most don’t know that smaller cities receive “considerations” from a single carrier if it stays as a single carrier town.
Some time back I met with a lady with the commerce department. She was in charge distributing the new fed infrastructure money for our state. She was all about the last mile and no funds would be provided to a co unless it connected the home.
Have not heard from her. I think they gave her the window, carpet treatment. Broke the first rule of government, never solve a problem before it can be milked for all it is worth.
From the outside, the telecoms market in the US is an oligopol, or actually a carefully curated set of monopols, with very low competition between providers. They have carved up the attractive bits, and that's where money can be made with low investments.
In infrastructure-weak regions, there's just no incentive to invest money. Speeding up the process (by essentially forbidding cities to check if any of this is in their interest instead of the big companies) helps sweet Fanny Adams. Those are not the places where you earn massive amounts of money, and there's not even a guarantee to get your investment back in the next two years[x]. Same with public transport or anything, really (shops, GPs, anything), too high investments, too few people, too low expected revenue.
[x] which is the time frame they think in, as those companies are owned by the shareholders, and law more or less prohibits them to do stuff that hurts the "shareholder value" - $DEITY how I hate that term - so short term stock price increase over sensible development
As I understand these US proposals, they're conceptually not disimilar to the UK's "permitted development" regime that exempts telecoms (and some other infrastructure) from needing planning approval by local authorities, or reduces the scope for planning processes to object.
In a way they're good, but I'm also mindful that there's not too much evidence of whether this has actually resulted in wider broadband roll out than would otherwise be the case. Where it has been used to put up new telegraph poles there's often been a lot of (or at least very vocal) local resistance.
As always, the problem of planning is usually subsidiary to the basic economics of building out infrastructure, and the commonest issue is (for wires and pipes) the average length per property served. With essentially fixed income per connection, there's a point at which it is more costly to build than will ever be viable for a commercial outfit. That means it doesn't happen unless somebody other than the company puts their hand in their pocket, whether that's extra customer contributions from the beneficiaries, some level of mandated cross subsidy from other customers, or taxpayer handouts. It would be pretty unusual for permitted development rights to make much of aa difference to the economics of schemes.
In a way they're good, but I'm also mindful that there's not too much evidence of whether this has actually resulted in wider broadband roll out than would otherwise be the case. Where it has been used to put up new telegraph poles there's often been a lot of (or at least very vocal) local resistance.
Telecoms have been looking for ways to streamline permitting processes at local governments for years. I can sympathize with them that every city has a different process, and updating existing towers require permits. So every tower that had to be touched to roll out LTE and 5G required a permit. I can see a permit for trenching in new backhaul, but replacing an existing radio and antennas? But as carriers densify their networks to add more towers in areas already covered so they can support higher frequencies and handle more data traffic, they are lobbying to steamroll local authorities to get quick, guaranteed approvals. Some cities don't want visible cell towers everywhere. That is their citizens right. Imagine if Verizon submitted a permit to put an antenna on the top of the Washington Memorial, and the controlling government had to provide a reason for denial beyond it being a historical monument/building.
With a law saying permits must be approved or denied in 60 days, along with a justification for denial, it will encourage telcos to dump a lot of permit requests all at once hoping to overwhelm local approval agencies. A better solution would be any permit request that couldn't be reviewed in 60 days would be automatically denied. That would encourage telcos to work with local authorities to improve processes.
A better solution would be any permit request that couldn't be reviewed in 60 days would be automatically denied. That would encourage telcos to work with local authorities to improve processes.
But then you have the problem that effectively all a local authority has to do is ignore the requests it doesn't like - no need for any justification. If you enshrine that in law, you effectively block much development.
Automatic permission or automatic refusal - both are wrong in some way or another.
Yes. They do. And they mostly focus on short term gain. And there's the problem. This was exactly my point.
One could even say that privatisation of public infrastructure is the main problem. Is a big state-owned behemoth any better? Depends how it is run, and what your goal is. Do you want to provide everybody with clean water, electricity, internet, public transport and is the result a net gain for the country, one that is worth the investments needed? Can such a big company be run efficiently? What does efficiently even mean in this context? When does searching for an inexpensive solution turn cutting corners?
I do not pretend that I know the answer to this, but looking at what happens when we privatise e.g. the railway I have the feeling that this is not a great solution...
Closest thing we have to a government railway in the US is Amtrak--which has, for generations, been a byword for inefficiency against multiple metrics.
Of course, government money for the railways was quite loose historically--and it came with pretty much every sort of corruption available.
And those rural hicks won't see broadband any time soon! And when it finally arrives if you think it is going to be cheap, you would be wrong!
For a 10th of the money being spend here they could buy a StarLink station for every person in these rural areas.
This is typical government, spend billions of dollars and last centuries technology. It analogous to the Generals always fighting the "last war"!
Here at Mountain Fastness 2.0, we have fiber to the home1 but speedtest.net shows about 20 Mb/s down at the moment. That's provided by the local electric co-op's ISP branch, and it's rate-limited by our plan; I could get more bandwidth if I wanted to pay for it.
Thing is, I don't need it. My wife and I both work from home, and frequently I'm working on a remote system while she's streaming television or something, and it's Just Not A Problem. Our mobile-phone service is also over a picocell using our Internet connection for backhaul, and again no discernible issues.
I'm sure some people have a legitimate need for more bandwidth, but we don't.
1Available in most of this quite rural county, because it was run by the power co-op using their existing infrastructure (utility poles and access).
I live in a tiny town in the middle of frickin' nowhere. A few years back the (small) ISP laid fiber everywhere, and I now have pretty reliable gigabit internet (measures >900 consistently both ways on speedtest.net).
So IMO there's no change to the current process needed. ISPs are just unhappy with the fact they need to get projects approved.
IIRC a law was passed (locally somewhere in the US?) to prevent local community run cooperatives from installing their own internet infrastructure or getting government funding to do so. Those damn socialist commy bastards.
While nowhere near free, installing fibre is not crazy expensive once you have the initial investment (fuser, micro trencher etc) - which is small once divided by 100+ homes. Multi cable single mode can be laid for approx $1k per km. The problem is bureaucracy, port barrels, and getting people like bridge companies, telegraph pole owners, not to take the piss when charging 'rental'. Ask me how I know.
Like most problems us riff raff have to put up with (e.g. expensive houses) the first step is to just stop those with the power from deliberately make things worse - the whole 'if only we could fix this' narrative is total BS.
As I see it, the core issue is the sweetheart deals that the cable companies cut with the municipalities in the 80s. That gave us local monopolies poised to drive local ISPs out the minute that cable could be hooked up to home computers. It also meant that the cc's now held the whip when negotiating with content providers. NN started out in an attempt to loosen the whip hand, but within two years, it was clear that big content would be the primary beneficiaries. The reality is that with NN, BC wins against the ISPs, which are in fact the CCs.
What does that have to do with this issue? It's that the local politicians really like the money they can get from the CCs, and the best way to manage that is by delaying (or not) projects.
Funny thing, though, our constitution (dead letter that it is) explicitly grants congress the right to regulate interstate commerce. While local governments can & must be able to tend generally to livability, they don't get to play robber barons, either.
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