Democracy, if you don't like it vote for people against it and if it wins still that's the breaks sometimes. Some things work better with collective action than private enterprise especially things that require large build outs of infrastructure that you don't want duplicated: eg roads, you're paying to maintain a lot of roads you never drive on because their existence benefits everyone.
In that sense, I would not be against a municipal government installing a system of conduits and/or dark fiber, and charging ISPs and other fiber users for it (provided they had some reasonable obligations to conduct the whole business transparently).
I think conduits and dark fiber are both more similar to roads (and utility poles and the structural cables between them) than actual internet service; and the nice thing is that new private entities, provided they are not preempted by rigid bylaws, are then enabled to seek out a better standard of service without duplicating the whole infrastructure.
The big question in the municipality as network layer only is how do companies actually compete?
They could offer certain services I guess like IPTV but then why are they an ISP/Cable service provider instead of just a streaming platform separate from being an ISP.
Could they do any better on speed by getting better interconnects to the wider internet or is that also part of the community infrastructure?
The options for differentiation seem rather slim so I'm wondering how much actual competition there would be in this model.
> The big question in the municipality as network layer only is how do companies actually compete?
This is why I am more interested in the dark fiber or conduit services. The major technical risk of municipal networks is that they will not keep up with new backhaul equipment innovations. Australia maintains a national "broadband" service which is haunted by stagnation, and while it is easy for people to say they simply didn't try hard enough, I think it's more likely that this risk is endemic to government-operated telecommunications infrastructure.
I would set the system up so that vendors can compete by installing better or more interesting routing infrastructure in the dark fiber network, or on their own fiber in rented conduit space. Possibly they could also offer edge computing, peering at substations, wireless services, private networks, and probably all sorts of things you or I have not thought of yet.
> Could they do any better on speed by getting better interconnects to the wider internet or is that also part of the community infrastructure?
They are empowered to do whatever makes sense, they could even do hard private networks if they wanted.
It seems to me the dark fiber approach will wind up just having one ISP for a given region of the network because to have multiple ISPs running along the same piece of fiber you need shared equipment at each end which is basically the "municipal network layer" model I described. How do you get regional competition with a dark fiber model?
Also I think the government upgrade issue so often boils down to just lacking the money to do it because defunding upgrade budgets is an easy target for budget games to make room for the latest tax give away or social program. Make it self funding and put protections against raiding it's budget into the charter.
