After 16 years of living in my city, they will finally have city-wide fiber internet. I’m pretty stoked because the fastest internet I could possibly have is a WISP at 50gbps down and 10gbps up. Now I will finally have gigabit but it’s through the city, and I’m wondering if they will be more strict on illegal content...
While I understand the sentiment, I kind of disagree with this. Cities implement fiber in different ways. Not all of them focus or care about residential service. In my city, they essentially set themselves up as a backhaul carrier. So when ISPs move into town rather than building out large infrastructure they connect into the city’s and pay the city for interconnect. That money then goes to city services which is why we have so many parks and different programs.
Usually resellers are allowed to use it. It might be prohibitively expensive for them, but there is availability. Again that depends on how the city has it set up, but typically you as a citizen are getting a return on that investment either way.
I spent many years working building and maintaining fiber networks, and I can unequivocally tell you that the answer to this is maybe. Normally you can treat city fiber just as any other ISP. A lot of them have different rules and different thresholds on what they allow and what they do not allow. Fiber networks are extremely expensive to build. So while you definitely need to protect the multi-million dollar investment you’ve made, depending on how you’ve built it it can be a little tricky to police what everyone is doing.
What’s interesting is just because you are not receiving notice of a DMCA infraction, that does not mean that your ISP has not received a notice. There is this idea that if you are not set up for it it is difficult to track out what account held what IP 30 days prior or 60 days prior. That is kind of a BS excuse, but I have been at companies that did not have logging because they did not want to have logging.
We did collect email notices and pass them around though weekly to see who could find the most absurd DMCA takedown. So I will say, if you were pirating some weird ass mommy fetish furry porn everyone in that call center knows it and is laughing about it.
I think the issue with what you’re saying here is that you’re assuming an ISP is going to pay the same amount that residential customers pay. They will ultimately pay several times more than what would the same amount of residential customers of your own pay. There is a general rule that you do not build fiber where fiber already exists. It is just that expensive. So if a city’s fiber network is laid down first, ISPs typically will not cross those boundaries. They would rather pay for hand off as that is actually cheaper than building and maintaining the infrastructure.
One of the big differences between backhaul carriers and ISPs is the amount of actual personnel required as well. Backall carriers don’t need giant call centers filled with customer service reps and residential techs. They don’t need an army of field services to go out and install local services for residents.
Final point I can make to that is that regardless if it’s an ISP or it’s a city-based service, nobody builds fiber networks with residential in mind. When you build a fiber network you build it to businesses because the same service that you could sell to a residential customer you could sell to a business customer with a 10x multiplier on it. After you establish business services, you backfill residential. I worked accounts where one business client equaled 10,000 residential.
In the end, cities that establish themselves as backhaul carriers make more money for the city because they will cost less to build, less to maintain, and have the advantage of business billing.
What are your thoughts on fiber through the city?
After 16 years of living in my city, they will finally have city-wide fiber internet. I’m pretty stoked because the fastest internet I could possibly have is a WISP at 50gbps down and 10gbps up. Now I will finally have gigabit but it’s through the city, and I’m wondering if they will be more strict on illegal content...