North Carolina House Passes Anti-Community Fiber Bill → Re: rly?

With your reasoning, ANY RURAL AREA WHERE IT IS NOT ECONOMICALLY FEASIBLE FOR A PRIVATE COMPANY TO RUN AN ESSENTIAL SERVICE, THE POPULATION CAN JUST GET BENT.....Man I will be so glad when you and your kind are relegated to the scrap heap of history...

The town fiber projects end at the city limits in most cases which means someone on the other side of the line will not get service until they are taken in to the city. This means the farther out you are the less likely you will get Fiber.
The reason the Phone and Power worked is the government required you to serve everybody in return for a monopoly. When that was removed from the phone system service got worse because other companies came in and took the best business customers and communities and left the low return areas to the old phone company. Just look at New England when Verizon dumped them the new company went down the tubes. Verizon's service may not have been great service but but when you remove the big cities where they make a bundle it pays for the areas like the states they dropped.
I give you two cases. My family lived in a town that was served by an independent telco own 4 party line cost more then a Southern Bell single party line one mile away. The service was awful.
Case 2 after the monopoly was dropped another phone company next to the same BellSouth city started paying developers to allow them to provide service to the new sub development. The residents that bought the homes were not happy campers when they found out they could not get a BellSouth account. Anybody they called outside those serviced by the other company was long distance.
The reason the old Bell System was so good was Long Distance paid a lot of bills. When they lost LD with the breakup a lot of the advances stopped and they have just treaded water. Just like today Wireless pays a lot of the bills for the landlines that many customers are dropping but they are still required to support that one last customer.

If a city sets up the Fiber network like it was a private business with no favoritism on building sharing and the network had to pay the same taxes. The Wilson Network uses government office space, and the city power company service trucks plus no taxes. If you tried to build a private network you would not get that kind of help.

Better for some, worse for others. It's like the argument to deregulate first-class mail. If a private company doesn't have to provide service to a small rural community (or high-risk urban ghetto), that's a savings they can pass on to the cherry-picked service areas.

That's why treating this topic like it's a "free-market" is absurd. There are many things that we do which impact some negatively for the good of all. Healthcare is a good example. We criminalize lessor healthcare solutions, impacting lower-income people (even endangering their lives) for the sake of uniformity and more predictability. Seriously, how would a doctor with only 7 years and 8 months of education endanger someone compared to that person going without treatment because they can't afford it?

Consider zoning laws. Your neighbor can't enjoy her own private property any way she wishes because the mere *possibility* that she might convert her home into a late-night biker bar would require you to purchase enough property to provide for your own enjoyment of your own property without limiting your neighbor's enjoyment of hers.

We're not just individuals. We're a group with shared interests. The internet has reached a level of ubiquity that creates shared interests. It's so ubiquitous that, to save money, "we" stopped mailing IRS forms to everyone. "We" require people to file unemployment online. "We" require people to apply for jobs online.

We've reached the point that you can't function without the internet unless you're willing to spend time traveling to the library, waiting in line, and perhaps subjecting your confidential information to a keyboard logger.

If it were 10 years ago, I could understand concerns with cities owning internet infrastructure. I believe in another 10 years it's going to look retarded that they don't.