This sketch of a sketch of an argument that you have laid out it a total non sequitur. It seems to me that you're pointing to the Flint water crisis as proof either that all municipal infrastructure efforts are disastrous, or that enough of them are that the public utility alternative is essentially dead. If that is the "argument," then the easiest way to defeat this is just to say, "Flint was news because it represented a rare and egregious failure."
That's it. That's all we need to say to rebut that in its entirety.
If we stop there, however, we miss the opportunity to point out the converse: It's not news when customers get gouged for sub-par service, because corrupt and monopolistic practices are rampant within capitalist institutions, especially around lock-in. Cable companies. Phone companies. Privatized utilities. Airlines after deregulation. Military suppliers. It's just not news.
We'd also miss the opportunity to point out that the tactic of pointing to one criminal failure of a civic organization as proof positive that private industry is universally better is a favorite tactic of a certain obnoxious kind of 20-something free-market fanboy set.
HN is better off when that set either stays home or ups its game.
Flint is an extreme example, but almost all municipal water systems are a disaster. In Atlanta, the sewer system dumps raw sewage in the Chattahoochee when it rains. In Chicago, old lead pipes are poisoning kids. It happens because rates are set by elected boards, not by markets, and because municipalities are not forced to bear the external costs of poor infrastructure.
U.S. broadband speed and cost lag other industrialized nations too. The only general lesson here is that the U.S. is big and infrastructure is expensive.
Your comment made me go look it up. Q1 2016 Akamai report ranks the U.S. 16th for average download speed. ZDnet currently ranks the U.S. 41st for average speed on their broadband speed test though. Both are obviously non-random samples, but Akamai probably has a less skewed distribution.
I thought it was interesting that for the % of homes with at least 4mbps service, Akamai ranked the U.S. 44th globally at 88%. That's another way to look at infrastructure: how many folks have broadband at all?
Whether these numbers count as "lagging" is in the eye of the beholder, obviously. We're not top ten in any category.
See my post to the other reply. We're ahead of Canada, Australia, and the other big, economically diverse European countries. I don't think that counts as lagging.
Doesn't it? I thought it's common knowledge the US has the worst Internet infrastructure out of all first world countries. The prices I see mentioned here for residential connections seem to confirm that. It also seems that download caps for residential connections are a thing there, which is a practice I personally consider barbaric.
Akamai's State of the Internet always shows average connection speeds in the US being faster than the UK, France, Spain, and Germany. The dense northeastern states are as fast as the Netherlands, Switzerland, etc. 5 US states have more than half of connections above 15 Mbps, while only one European country does ( Norway ). It is more expensive, though.
Flint is an extreme example, but underinvestment in infrastructure is not rare. It's endemic. Governments across the country are underinvesting in infrastructure at all levels. It's not just me who's saying this. It's been a major talking point of the democratic party for years.
And that's for infrastructure like roads and water delivery where technology is largely static. The problem would likely only be worse for more dynamic infrastructure like broadband.
In large part because the wealthy, and corporations, have entirely shirked their taxpaying obligations. That is: paying for the services which enabled them to become wealthy in the first place.
It is for now; come back in 10 years and lets see. Keeping fibre in the ground working in the face of storms, other people digging it up and tech churn (ok, what is after 10Gbe ? How are you going to run that round the mainstreet?) isn't rocket science, but it is a technical maintenance task and new build infrastructures have a great upfront advantage. For a while.
Buried fiber works just fine regardless of storms. Aerial fiber is a different matter. Patching up fiber cables after a cut is no big deal. Tech churn, i.e. what active equipment to use, is just run of the mill stuff. You can upgrade the optics to 100G if you need it, but if you don't nobody is forcing you to move past 10G.
I've built and ran fiber networks for over 10 years and operations and maintenance is no big issue.
Super interesting: what fault rate (per 1000 per week) do you see and what kind of geography are you in (urban?)
On the past 10Gbe point : contention is the killer, there is a rise of "super users" for example video editors shipping to and from the cloud, which drives the need for > backhaul - are you not seeing that?
Also on the bigger points; small providers have to peer, like everyone, but do they get good deals? How about prices on kit? Strategic deals with Huweii / Cisco are hard enough for tier one, do you not think that you'll get squeezed ?
Buried fiber doesn't really develop faults once it's put in the ground and doesn't really require any maintenance either.
The deeper you put it the safer it is and when we put in fiber we put it in deep. The rate faults that occur are fiber cuts and these fiber cuts are usually the result of some contractor not using call before you dig or being sloppy about it.
Bandwidth usage is always growing, but then again the cost of IP transit is constantly going down too. Heavy users aren't really an issue and end user 10G connections are rather rare. Those that really need dedicated 10G connections buy leased lines or wavelengths and pay accordingly. More bandwidth usage isn't a problem, it's a good thing that drives more business.
Peering is easy and cheap to small and large providers alike. Transit is also so cheap that it often is cheaper to buy more IP transit than to build out more peering capacity.
Access to networking hardware is not a problem and there are products for every need and price point. The largest issues are access to capital, barriers to entry and competition.
Because the incompetence of municipal governments (in most of the US) is in overbuilding infrastructure to serve unproductive areas so that maintenance obligations come to consume ever larger portions of the budget unless they can achieve the Ponzi scheme of paying for it with the taxes from new growth. That would be terrifying to compete with.
