In Japan it was competition that fixed this. The government did something (not sure what) but it was not "funding municipal broadband".
I'd say one thing to do is outlaw the contracts that let governments only approve a single provider.
It was Softbank that brought the competition. In 2001 they started offering 1meg connections for $20 a month. The competition cost 10x. Softbank had aggressive marketing too, putting up booths at neighborhood train stations where they could sign you up and hand you a device on your way home.
The competition lowered their prices to match within a couple of months. Softbank doubled the speed to 2meg, same price. The same pattern. The competition matched price within a few weeks. Softbank raised their speed to 8meg. repeat.
Hitting the most populous 10% of counties will get you a good way towards universal coverage (LA county alone as >9M people, which would rank #12 as a state population).
Competition is great except when it isn't. Rural customers get screwed because they're not worth the effort. You'll spend more money running fiber to them than you'll ever get back, and that's before you take competition into consideration.
Back when we had the AT&T monopoly the government forced them to serve rural customers. It was subsided by a small fee on every phone bill. That carried over to the baby Bells because they were local monopolies. The problem is, no one has land lines anymore and no companies are willing to take on the last mile problem without a hefty incentive. Being the broadband monopoly is part of that incentive.
I argued for years that the AT&T breakup was done in the stupidest way possible. Put the natural monopoly - the last mile - on its own and regulate the hell out of it like we did AT&T. Then allow competition to run the service on top of those connections. We started in that direction but lost our way somewhere.
Yea, the breakup of AT&T was stupid. Even worse, it just allowed all of the baby bells to be bought up one by one by a really badly run Canadian company. Now rather a lot of that money started leaving the country and being gobbled up in a foreign bankruptcy and pension scandal and stock market crash. Yay. (Ok, not all of that was entirely foreseeable.)
But to get back to the original topic, I was referring specifically to the local monopolies that so many cities have granted to cable companies which exclude not just other cable companies but certain types of internet services as well. I was specifically not talking about rural areas, where that’s not a problem. Not many cities out there in the countryside.
If you want to see fiber installed everywhere, make the FCC annul all of the local monopolies and speed up all of the local permitting processes. Just have the FCC rule that no local permitting process for installing internet service in existing conduits or on existing poles may take longer than a fixed period of time (I dunno, a month or two should suffice), otherwise the permits are automatically granted. If the permit applications don’t meet your local rules then you need to identify the problem and reject the application quickly, not drag things out for years. Something along those lines.
Subsidies to speed up rural deployment of real broadband are a separate topic.
It is not irrelevant, who is going to pay $30,000/mile to run fiber out to rural homes when the subscription fees for a lot of rural properties will never pay for the infrastructure? The US is massive and full of sparsely populated rural areas, all of which will ignored by capitalists. Starlink is then their only option.
I’m all for getting rid of local monopolies that aren’t municipally owned.
Again, this is irrelevant to the conversation we were having about price competition. Competition solves the problem of high prices automatically.
> The US is massive and full of sparsely populated rural areas, all of which will ignored by capitalists. Starlink is then their only option.
Ironically, Elon Musk is a capitalist who is making bank by serving the sparsely populated rural areas. He is certainly not ignoring them. You can get Starlink service in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and if there is any more sparsely populated place on Earth then I don’t know about it.
At least have a coherent argument before you complain that competition can’t solve a problem.
I'd say one thing to do is outlaw the contracts that let governments only approve a single provider.
It was Softbank that brought the competition. In 2001 they started offering 1meg connections for $20 a month. The competition cost 10x. Softbank had aggressive marketing too, putting up booths at neighborhood train stations where they could sign you up and hand you a device on your way home.
The competition lowered their prices to match within a couple of months. Softbank doubled the speed to 2meg, same price. The same pattern. The competition matched price within a few weeks. Softbank raised their speed to 8meg. repeat.
AFAICT it all finally settled (25 years later). Currently $40 for 1gig fiber or $60 for 10gig fiber or $50 for https://www.softbank.jp/internet/sbhikari/
And NTT is competitive https://flets.com/