The number of cities with municipal broadband has jumped over 4x in two years

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/02/gop-plan-for-bro...

Remember that Republicans tried to ban municipal broadband federally only two months ago! Just an absurdly, transparently corrupt move.

If you are a software engineer, working on municipal broadband or starting a local ISP is a really intense way to expand your skills.

For the past year, I've been volunteering at NYC Mesh (nycmesh.net), which is a non-profit that provides fixed wireless broadband in New York. I thought I knew a thing or two about networking — hell, I've even given a talk in the network track at LinuxCon in the past — but working on NYC Mesh really showed me the limits of that knowledge and has helped me learn a ton more.

I wish my city offered it. I just signed up with Frontier's fiber which like yay for that (though it was a process to get them to realize they have a connection on my street as their internal map was apparently out of date). But...

1. I wanted to use my own router instead of theirs. Turns out they send DHCP responses with VLAN 0 ethernet tags (which I guess is for 802.1p) which apparently a lot of DHCP clients don't understand at all. I tried OPNSense and Mikrotik ones and ended up having to apply a patch manually to dhclient that comes with OPNSense and recompiling it just to get an IPv4 address (https://github.com/opnsense/src/issues/114).

2. They don't provide native IPv6, they don't plan to provide native IPv6, they have a 6rd setup that is inaccessible by new customers, and to top it all off, from what I can tell they actively block 6in4/protocol 41 so I can't even use a third party tunnel.

3. Their tier 1 tech support at least knows what IPv6 is (the thing they tell people they don't support; they don't understand it beyond that). Their tier 2 support guy called me once but he clearly was simply relaying messages from an actual network engineer he was getting via text chat, so I got nowhere. Their tier 3 is their network engineers who have no time to talk to people like me since I never got a call I was promised from them and have no way to follow up except starting with the 800 number again (a literal multi-day process).

At least with city broadband I know exactly who works on the project and can go talk to the network engineer who can unblock protocol 41/unfuck the DHCPv4. /rant

The city I live in voted for municipal broadband in 2017. Our local private internet provider Comcast fought it at every turn, Comcast spent millions fighting municipal broadband in a city with about 150,000 residents. We started rolling out our own broadband to residents in 2020. It took a couple of years for the city to hire and build up a department and lay the infrastructure to support it city wide and I finally got the service at the beginning of this year, and it has been awesome. We have gigabit internet up AND DOWN for $59.95/month. What really burns me is the private providers we have, Comcast and CenturyLink, have been here for decades and could have done exactly what our city has done: run fiber to every neighborhood and house. It would have been cheaper for them too, they already had the infrastructure in place. They chose not to make the investment and instead spent millions trying to prevent us from providing better service for ourselves. I hope everyone has the chance to get better/cheaper internet service for themselves and their community, so far it has worked out great for us.

After reading many comments, I wonder why more people aren't looking into Space X's Starlink. Broadband speeds, no wired infrastructure, portable, no caps and $100/mo. It seems to be about $30 more/mo than most here are paying, but their broadband is tied to a physical location and not easily movable. Soon it will be mobile, as in dish corrects itself in realtime while driving a motorhome [1], etc. You can take them out in the middle of nowhere, as long as you don't leave your region, like I did 2 weeks ago as a test in the Willamette National Forest in Oregon, 20 miles out on a logging road. Didn't even get 1 bar of cell service, but was watching movies on Netflix in 4k and even played a bit of COD. You can change your region with Starlink, but it takes a day or two as you have to call and tell them the "new address." It's all manual. They are working on a way to automate those requests via the web so they take minutes to change instead of hours or days, and when mobile comes out you probably won't need to do that either.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/04/dishy...

Laying fiber is expensive, and the more rural you go the more expensive it gets.

I moved to Tennessee recently, and we have municipal broadband from EPB. On the one hand, it's offered at a fair price ($68/month for a symmetric gigabit connection). On the other hand, they have been promising IPv6 support for years but have completely failed to deliver. Unfortunately the sales people are every bit as non-technical at EPB as they are anywhere else, and they don't seem to understand the issue at all.

Does anyone else have the same experience, or is just EPB in particular that's bad on offering IPv6?

Obviously, I still prefer EPB's service over that of Comcast, AT&T or Cox. I'm not complaining about municipal broadband in general. (I would like to see a NAT-free internet in my lifetime, that's all.)

A little anecdote about municipal broadband in Sweden. Normally it's great and I love it. The ones I've seen have been run by the municipal real estate owner. They're the ones who build apartment buildings in a certain municipality but they're sometimes half privately owned.

In my current hometown they branched off a separate private company to manage the broadband.

Anyways, in a little town where I lived, a street of about 6-7 apartment buildings banded together and contacted Telia first about digging fiber to their buildings.

Telia gave them a disgusting deal which would have restricted all the tenants to the Telia ISP. They've done this before even in bigger cities where they sign a deal with one real estate company so all their buildings only have Telia.

My SO at the time actually worked for Telia but she was a clever girl because she realized you could go directly to the municipal broadband and have them dig the fiber. That way all the tenants could choose from any ISP in the country and not be restricted to just Telia.

This even raises the desirability of the building for young people who favour Bahnhof as ISP for example.

In Germany, there is a clear pattern:

- a community (often, but not always, rural) pleads one of our big ISPs (almost always deutsche Telekom, since we gifted our tax-funded telephone network to them) to provide better service (or service at all)

- dt. Telekom laughs in their faces and tells them to screw off

- the community gets together and finances building a network of their own, sometimes even involving locals to dig the trenches for the fibers. They calculate with a sharp pencil and need customers to break even.

- dt. Telekom notices this and quickly deploys their own network, steamrolling the new local ISP with their big marketing budget and brand name

- the small local ISP goes bankrupt, city initiatives stop etc.

And to add insult to injury, dt. Telekom then uses it's customers as leverage to bully content providers into crappy peering deals. They're also guzzling tax money by the millions in public-private partnerships all while screwing the public over.