Excerpt from the article by Jon Brookin, originally published at Wired on August 11, 2022
…Operating an ISP isn’t Mauch’s primary job, as he is still a network architect at Akamai. He started planning to build his own network about five years ago after being unable to get modern service from any of the major ISPs.
As we wrote last year, AT&T offers only DSL with download speeds up to 1.5 Mbps at his home. He said Comcast once told him it would charge $50,000 to extend its cable network to his house—and that he would have gone with Comcast if they wanted only $10,000. Comcast demands those up-front fees for line extensions when customers are outside its network area, even if the rest of the neighborhood already has Comcast service…
Under state law, “Municipalities in Michigan are not simply able to decide to build and operate their own networks, they must first issue an RFP for a private provider to come in and build,” the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s Community Broadband Networks Initiative wrote. “Only if the RFP receives less than three viable offers can a municipality move forward with building and owning the network. There are also additional requirements that municipalities have to follow, such as holding public forums and submitting cost-benefit analysis and feasibility studies.”…
The county’s RFP set 25-Mbps download and 3-Mbps upload speeds as the minimum acceptable tier, but stated a strong preference for ‘at least 100-Mbps download speeds, ideally with symmetrical upload speeds, from wireline technology to accommodate present and future bandwidth-hungry applications.”
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Read the full article here.
