#broadband

[destielmemenews]

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[mostlysignssomeportents]

When your ISP pays you

I'm on a tour with my new book Enshittification: catch me next in Cambridge, MA; Washington, DC and Brooklyn! Full schedule here.

Holy shit I love my internet service provider said no one ever!

Except, some people do love their ISPs. Across American more than 400 community-owned fiber networks, serving more than 700 communities, bring joy and satisfaction to their customers:

https://communitynets.org/content/community-network-map

Many of these are in blood-red states, the kind of places where it's impossible to find a readable copy of Atlas Shrugged because every page of every copy is stuck together. Nevertheless, these publicly owned networks are wildly popular with their subscribers. What's more, there'd be a ton more of them but for the brutal ministration of ALEC, the far-right, dark money policy shop that convinced multiple state governments to ban community broadband, even in places where there was no commercial broadband service:

https://actions.eko.org/a/att-alec-lobby-community-owned-internet-networks

One of the great predictors of whether your town will get fast, affordable, future-proof fiber is its history. Many of today's municipal broadband co-ops are descended from rural telephone co-ops, and those telephone co-ops were birthed by the New Deal's rural electrification co-ops. This is the incredibly long shadow that good public spending casts – a century of successful provision of amenities that substantially improve the quality of life of whole regions.

Take Jackson and Owlsley Counties, rural Kentucky counties in Appalachia, some of America's poorest places. Starting in 2009, the local telephone company, the Peoples Rural Telephone Cooperative, started pulling fiber to every home in both counties. To get that fiber over rugged mountain passes, they pulled it on the back of a mule named "Ole Bub." Soon, every subscriber had access to symmetrical fiber broadband at speeds of up to 10gb/s, and the region found itself at the center of an economic revival:

https://web.archive.org/web/20191210051442/https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-one-traffic-light-town-with-some-of-the-fastest-internet-in-the-us

The Peoples Rural Telephone Cooperative was founded in 1953, as an extension of the town's electrification co-op, itself founded in the 1930s after the passage of the Rural Electrification Act of 1936 (the REA was amended in 1949, allowing electrification co-ops to secure low-cost loans for telephone rollouts).

You don't need to live in rural Appalachia to reap the benefit of publicly backed broadband co-ops. In Minnesota's Beltrami County (pop 46,288; density 18.6 people/square mile, median income $33,392/household), the local co-op Paul Bunyan Communications offers symmetrical fiber at speeds up to 10gb/s. But that's just table-stakes: Paul Bunyan doesn't just offer reasonably priced, reliable, screamingly fast broadband – it also pays its members whenever too much cash builds up in its bank account. Paul Bunyan just paid out $3.6 million in refunds to its subscribers:

https://ilsr.org/article/community-broadband-networks/minnesotas-paul-bunyan-communications-shares-3-6-million-windfall-with-members/

The payouts are pro-rated based on how much you spend on broadband. Customers who were due $150 or less got a credit on their next bill, while customers owed more than $150 got a check in the mail.

Nice, huh? It gets nicer: in 2018, Paul Bunyan paid back its subscribers $2.2 million; in 2022, they paid back $6.3 million, and last year they paid back $3 million. Paul Bunyan employes 160 people in the county, at fair wages, with good benefits. Every dollar Paul Bunyan makes literally stays in the community.

99% of the county has access to fiber from the co-op. Local business growth has outperformed statewide performance. A local aerospace company owner said that the co-op fiber made the difference between running a business with $300,000 in annual revenue and a business making $3,000,000 per year.

All of this is even cooler when you learn about the kind of internet service the rest of Minnesota has had to cope with. A 2019 Minnesota Commerce Department investigation found that Frontier, the state's leading ISP, had unbelievably badly maintained infrastructure. We're talking about high-capacity long-haul wires draped over shrubs and tree-branches:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/01/frontier-letting-its-phone-network-fall-apart-state-investigation-finds/

Minnesotans on Fiber's "free market" service suffered from frequent outages. They paid higher costs for their unreliable, slow DSL lines than Paul Bunyan customers in Beltrami County paid for fiber that was literally thousands of times faster than Frontier's. Unlike Paul Bunyan's cheerful, local customer service, Frontier's service numbers went to "cost-efficient" (busied-out, distant) call centers where you could wait for hours to speak to someone who would either "accidentally" drop your call or simply refuse to help you. Customers frequently lost access to 911 service, and often saw spurious, sky-high charges on their bills that no one would explain or erase.

Frontier "strongly disagreed" with the report. But when Frontier went bankrupt (a year later!), we got a look at its internal operations and discovered just how much contempt the company had for its customers:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/04/frontiers-bankruptcy-reveals-cynical-choice-deny-profitable-fiber-millions

By Frontier's own calculations, it could have made an extra $10 billion by investing in fiber rollouts, but it chose not to make that money, because the stock analysts at institutional investment funds would punish any telco that committed to capital expenditures with long-term payouts. Since Frontier's execs were mostly paid in stock, they decided not to risk a drop in their personal net worth, and so they left ten billion on the table and millions of customers stuck on 19th century copper-line infrastructure – technology that dated back to Samuel Morse and the telegraph.

Frontier was especially interested in customers who had no alternatives – no cable or fixed wireless companies that could offer competition for Frontier's own terrible service. These customers were booked as an "asset" and their connections were earmarked for substandard maintenance and slow upgrades. The old Lily Tomlin gag goes, "We don't care, we don't have to, we're the phone company." But Frontier really cared about the customers who had no alternative – they cared about royally fucking those customers.

Ladies and gentlemen, behold the marvel that is the efficient free market!

Municipal fiber is a godsend. It's fast, cheap and reliable, and it is an engine for economic development. Of course, the Trump administration is running away from municipal fiber – indeed, from all fiber – as fast as it can, because every fiber installation competes with Elon Musk's satellite based internet service, Skylink:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/24/geometry-hates-cars/#dogshit-unit-economics

The thing is, satellite internet makes sense in a few places – temporary encampments, ships at sea – but it is vastly more expensive than fiber to install and maintain, and it is millions of times slower than fiber. Nor is this something you can fix by filling the sky with more collision-prone, astronomer-demoralizing minisats – no matter how many satellites there are over your head, they're all in the same universe and have to share its single, fixed electromagnetic spectrum. Meanwhile, if you want more broadband in your fiber network, you just pull another bundle of fiber (principle ingredient: sand) through your conduit and you add dozens of new universes' worth of electromagnetic spectra that are each isolated from one another.

Smart politicians aren't being sucked in by Musk's claim that he can billionaire his way out of the intractable laws of physics. They're pulling fiber, and lots of it. In Utah, the aptly named UTOPIA network is serving publicly owned fiber to 21 cities, and private businesses can offer service over that public system, which means that Utahans have their choice of 18 carries:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/16/symmetrical-10gb-for-119/#utopia

Moreover, these are symmetrical connections, meaning that they are as fast for sending data as they are for receiving it:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/03/beautiful-symmetry/#fibrous-growth

To put this in Information Superhighway terms from the 1990s, a symmetrical broadband connection is necessary for you to be a "netizen," while an asymmetrical connection that beams lots of data to you but isn't capable of letting you talk back is what makes you a "mouse potato."

It's grimly hilarious that the right has done so much damage to public fiber rollouts, given their oft-repeated grievances about being "shadowbanned" by dominant services. With symmetrical fiber, every crank could run their own server – a 4chan in every garage. And if that fiber is provided by the government, then your ISP will be bound by the First Amendment, and legally prohibited from discriminating against customers based on their political speech (something that commercial providers can do to their heart's content):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/17/turner-diaries-fanfic/#1a-fiber

The New Deal was a mere blip in the American project, but a century later, America's poorest, worst-served people are still reaping its benefits, with far faster, cheaper connections than you can get from the big telcos that have sewn up New York City and Los Angeles. And in some of those places, the public ISP doesn't just shower their subscribers with fast data – they shower them with millions of dollars.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/03/we-dont-care-we-dont-have-to/#were-the-phone-company

[jangillman]

[saywhat-politics]

Trump Threatens To Withold Billions From States That Try To Make Broadband Affordable To Poor People

Earlier this month we noted how California was attempting to pass a new law ensuring that broadband would be affordable to poor people. The

Trump Threatens To Withold Billions From States That Try To Make Broadband Affordable To Poor People

Earlier this month we noted how California was attempting to pass a new law ensuring that broadband would be affordable to poor people. The original law proposed that the biggest ISPs would need to make sure they offered speeds of at least 100 Mbps down, 20 Mbps up for $15 a month to California residents who qualify for existing low-income assistance programs. It mirrored a similar law in NY State.

Offering 100/20 Mbps service for $15 a month would only cost the state’s four largest ISPs less than 1 cent on the dollar in revenue, while providing nearly $100 million per year in savings to low-income state residents.

But the proposed law (California Affordable Home Internet Act (AB 353)) was already poised for destruction after the bill’s sponsor, Democratic California Assemblymember Tasha Boerner, introduced a whole bunch of amendments behind closed door at the behest of telecom lobbyists.

[mitchipedia]

Trump Threatens To Withold Billions From States That Try To Make Broadband Affordable To Poor People

Earlier this month we noted how California was attempting to pass a new law ensuring that broadband would be affordable to poor people. The

[awwfulsounds]

Motorola Broadband Communications Sector planning calendar cover art 2000 (x)

[tomorrowusa]

FCC to eliminate gigabit speed goal and scrap analysis of broadband prices

Analysis of broadband affordability deemed “extraneous” by FCC chair.

The MAGA FCC wants to screw consumers to help bigtime telecommunications companies which make big contributions to Republicans.

The Federal Communications Commission is ditching Biden-era standards for measuring progress toward the goal of universal broadband deployment. The changes will make it easier for the FCC to give the broadband industry a passing grade in an annual progress report. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr's proposal would give the industry a thumbs-up even if it falls short of 100 percent deployment, eliminate a long-term goal of gigabit broadband speeds, and abandon a new effort to track the affordability of broadband. Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act requires the FCC to determine whether broadband is being deployed "on a reasonable and timely basis" to all Americans. If the answer is no, the US law says the FCC must "take immediate action to accelerate deployment of such capability by removing barriers to infrastructure investment and by promoting competition in the telecommunications market." Generally, Democratic-led commissions have found that the industry isn't doing enough to make broadband universally available, while Republican-led commissions have found the opposite. Democratic-led commissions have also periodically increased the speeds used to determine whether advanced telecommunications capabilities are widely available, while Republican-led commissioners have kept the speed standards the same.

The cynical idiots who ignorantly claim that there is no difference between the major parties will probably be among the first to complain when their speeds go sluggish and their bills rise.

Fiber networks can already meet a 1,000/500Mbps standard, and the Biden administration generally prioritized fiber when it came to distributing grants to Internet providers. The Trump administration changed grant-giving procedures to distribute more funds to non-fiber providers such as Elon Musk's Starlink satellite network. Carr's proposal alleged that the 1,000/500Mbps long-term goal would "appear to violate our obligation to conduct our analysis in a technologically neutral manner," as it "may be unreasonably prejudicial to technologies such as satellite and fixed wireless that presently do not support such speeds."

Even though Elon Musk and Donald Trump may be having a lovers' quarrel, they are still benefiting financially from their relationship.

[azspot]

Trump admin warns states: Don’t try to lower broadband prices

ISPs getting grants must offer “low-cost” plan, but they get to pick the price.