In my small island community, I participated in a municipal committee whose mandate was to bring proper broadband to the island. Although two telecom duopolies already served the community, one of them had undersea fiber but zero fiber to the home (DSL remains the only option), whereas the other used a 670 Mbps wireless microwave link for backhaul and delivery via coaxial cable. And pricing? Insanely expensive for either terrible option.

Our little committee investigated all manner of options, including bringing municipal fiber across alongside a new undersea electricity cable that the power company was installing anyway. I spoke to the manager of that project and he said there was no real barrier to adding a few strands of fiber, since the undersea high voltage line already had space for it (for the power company’s own signaling).

Sadly, the municipality didn’t have any capital to invest a penny into that fiber, so one day, one of the municipal counselors just called up a friend who worked for a fiber laying company and asked them for a favor: put out a press release saying that they were “investigating” laying an undersea fiber to power a municipal fiber network on the little island.

A few weeks later, the cable monopoly engaged a cable ship and began laying their own fiber. Competition works, folks. Even if you have to fake it.

I wish this kind of perspective (international comparison) could be applied to several areas of the USA economy: tax compliance, campaign finance, and banking regulation. Good work, OP.

In Charlotte NC, I have 3 choices of internet providers, two of them fiber.

As you are doing with this post, "broaden the base." The vast majority of voters do not understand the issues here. That is your biggest obstacle.

My POV would call this regulatory failure vs free market lie. That way, the enemy is a smaller target.

Path to progress is to get a friendly state (WY, RI, TX) to pass the legislation. Then shop that around among activists in other states.

If people knew they were only getting 1/25 of a shared product, that would get political hackles up.

Thanks for taking the time to think this through and make your argument.

Init7 has on its blog another amazing write up https://blog.init7.net/en/die-glasfaserstreit-geschichte/

Municipal and co-op broadband in the US needs subsidies, loans, replication, and expansion. Where I live has a farmer co-op for electricity and internet in a mostly sparse, rural area with various residential housing developments scattered around. What was GFiber in the regionally-nearby metropolitan area had beta 20 Gbps internet for $250 USD/mo. 1 Gbps symmetric fiber co-op is $100 USD/mo. Prices are high compared to Europe. Possibly not high prices compared to Australia.

Australia and the UK both have a similar business environment to the Swiss model (but without the superior bandwidth) due to the way that their government-owned telephone monopolies were privatised: Telecom Australia (now called Telstra) and British Telecom (now called BT) were required to allow their newly-formed competitors to sell services over their networks (for appropriate maintenance fees, of course).

The US and German models are consequences of just yelling 'Free market!' without stopping to think about what's actually being sold in that market, and how to encourage genuine competition.

Looks like a good article explaining some key concepts like natural monopoly.

And yeah, the US model is to tout free enterprise to the skies but then have the state give control of a given market to a single or a couple of monopolists.

The problem is the US has created a constituency of state-dependent small and large business people whose livelihood depends this contradictory free-enterprise ideology.

Why isn’t france your European example? Its larger and better served than switzerland

This article would be so much better without the generic AI-generated images everywhere.

if the internet cabal in the US was actually a free market, you’d be right!

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