20 years ago, Spokane Washington had to redo its streets, so they laid fiber downtown before repaving. This allowed ISP's and telecoms to plug in and run very cheap ISP's and hosting services. Downtown telecom/isp exploded with connectivity.
We found an older building had highspeed access due to fiber. We rented a small office, (closet really), and paid for 100meg connection to an ISP on a lower floor. Ran an entire ISP with dialup/dsl and hosting that was cheap, and even offered credit card processing. Years before comcast or large telecom offered DSL.
Ive seen over the years, Spokane have large backup hub for PNW banks and other large bandwidth hungry companies move in. Hands on hosting services, Internet turn key web hosting, etc. All in a midwest type town due to the availability.
Even across the border in Idaho, some smaller towns that now have fiber have startups popping up due to cheap land, cheap bandwidth, and low cost of living. I'm always seeing startups hiring big data dbas, network engineers and programmers.
I just wish they would expand further into the very small rural towns. Wifi at my folks small town community center is packed with people due to dialup being the only thing available to the community. Either drive into Spokane, hope you have Verizon LTE coverage, or pay for limitted usage sat.
With a large contingent of the population believing that government is the problem rather than the solution, infrastructure investment by the government becomes a very contentious proposition even if it makes financial sense.
So you think government infallible? I guess you look at Comcast and go "what a bunch of assholes" am I right? The problem is that the same people who work at Comcast also work in government. There's a really good reason why Americans are fed up with government, and it's not because of talk radio--it's because incompetence is very well identified at all levels.
Yeah, I hate Comcast. Maybe enough to give municipal a go. But I doubt very much that in the long run municipal Internet will end up anything but a cluster from top to bottom.
Infrastructure is simply hard--it has to pretty much be a monopoly with all the problems that monopolies create. It won't matter if it is a government monopoly or a private one at that point. At least with Comcast I can tell them to screw off and buy shitty DSL (true story, I did!). With government my only choice is to move.
By the way, all the cities around mine have muni liquor stores. Only my city has privately run stores. The privately runs stores are way better. My city is also the only one that has private trash collection. The prices aren't a hair's difference, though. It doesn't matter except that if I don't want my trash picked up I am free to take it to the dump myself and pay to drop it off there instead. It would save maybe $10 a month, e.g. not worth it.
In the end, I just want ethical companies selling me fast broadband. I don't really trust our city or county to do Internet when they screw up so many simpler things all the time. They have enough to do and enough people on the payroll.
The US will have to raise taxes dramatically at all levels, to do everything that people want it to do (or figure out how to grow the economy far faster). 40-50 years ago, entitlements for example were a small cost for states and the Federal Govt (a huge slush fund for the Federal Govt in fact, they wasted trillions of dollars in entitlement money they were supposed to save). Costs have climbed a lot in all regards, while revenue as a share of GDP has largely not gone up with it.
If the US had fiscally responsible politicians, it would have a modest public debt, and trillions of dollars in a sovereign wealth fund derived from decades of surplus revenue for eg Social Security. Infrastructure would be a non-issue.
Simply put, priorities. You can do this (spending up), but you have to do that (taxes up); or you can choose not to have that (spending down), and so you can do this (taxes down).
Taxes are going up a lot either way, given the massive explosion in entitlement costs inbound, or QE is going to handle it with inflation. The US will hit a trillion per year in deficits in a few years, primarily due to entitlement costs, and partially due to excesss military spending.
This is all accurate, with the caveat that we could still have univeral broadband and other first world services provided to all if we cut back on unnecessary military spending (a conversation for another thread!).
Quite a bit of the problem isn’t spending per se, but waste, inefficiencies, and corruption (not to mention us dragging forward GDP, impoverishing the future).
> with the caveat that we could still have univeral broadband and other first world services provided to all if we cut back on unnecessary military spending
Without question. The US could shave $200+ billion off of military spending fairly easily, with no increased threat to its well-being.
However the US has superior broadband to Europe already. I don't see how the US is failing at delivering first world service in that regard. It's expensive, too expensive perhaps. If you adjust for wages, it's still too expensive but not nearly so (the median EU wages are far below the US median for example).
Japan is generally renowned for having very first rate infrastructure. They've spent incredible sums of money in relation to their GDP on that over the last ~30 years. The US has nearly caught up to Japan on average broadband speeds and distribution. That's a fact that seems to shock people when they hear it, because for so many years the US broadband situation was ugly by comparison.
My personal opinion about this is that privatization replaced investment in infrastructure. When the companies and congresscritters realized they had all this post-New Deal infrastructure being owned run and operated by the government, they started doing their normal shadyness and tossing kickbacks to their good ol boys, and voila, horribly crippled infrastructure because some rich people wanted even more money.
Of course the excuse is always some variation of "government can't run anything right", "this service costs too much to operate", and "if we sell these assets thats revenue for us!", while ignoring all the nuance and interdependency that factors into infrastructure.
The end result for citizens is lesser quality service at a higher price, almost every time.
This is where corruption leads. Both parties are owned by K-street.
There are a few other places in WA with fiber, too -- looks like Chelan County is one. They also have super-cheap electricity and are somewhat lower crime than Spokane, from what I can tell (which is the main drawback of Spokane; it's pretty nice in a lot of other ways.)
We found an older building had highspeed access due to fiber. We rented a small office, (closet really), and paid for 100meg connection to an ISP on a lower floor. Ran an entire ISP with dialup/dsl and hosting that was cheap, and even offered credit card processing. Years before comcast or large telecom offered DSL.
Ive seen over the years, Spokane have large backup hub for PNW banks and other large bandwidth hungry companies move in. Hands on hosting services, Internet turn key web hosting, etc. All in a midwest type town due to the availability.
Even across the border in Idaho, some smaller towns that now have fiber have startups popping up due to cheap land, cheap bandwidth, and low cost of living. I'm always seeing startups hiring big data dbas, network engineers and programmers.
I just wish they would expand further into the very small rural towns. Wifi at my folks small town community center is packed with people due to dialup being the only thing available to the community. Either drive into Spokane, hope you have Verizon LTE coverage, or pay for limitted usage sat.