Holy shit I love my internet service provider said no one ever!<\/p>\n
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:<\/p>\n
https:\/\/communitynets.org\/content\/community-network-map<\/a><\/p>\n Many of these are in blood-red states, the kind of places where it\u2019s 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\u2019s more, there\u2019d 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:<\/p>\n https:\/\/actions.eko.org\/a\/att-alec-lobby-community-owned-internet-networks<\/a><\/p>\n One of the great predictors of whether your town will get fast, affordable, future-proof fiber is its history. Many of today\u2019s municipal broadband co-ops are descended from rural telephone co-ops, and those telephone co-ops were birthed by the New Deal\u2019s rural electrification co-ops. This is the incredibly long shadow that good public spending casts \u2014 a century of successful provision of amenities that substantially improve the quality of life of whole regions.<\/p>\n Take Jackson and Owlsley Counties, rural Kentucky counties in Appalachia, some of America\u2019s 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 \u201cOle Bub.\u201d 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:<\/p>\n 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<\/a><\/p>\n The Peoples Rural Telephone Cooperative was founded in 1953, as an extension of the town\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n You don\u2019t need to live in rural Appalachia to reap the benefit of publicly backed broadband co-ops. In Minnesota\u2019s 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\u2019s just table-stakes: Paul Bunyan doesn\u2019t just offer reasonably priced, reliable, screamingly fast broadband \u2014 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:<\/p>\n https:\/\/ilsr.org\/article\/community-broadband-networks\/minnesotas-paul-bunyan-communications-shares-3-6-million-windfall-with-members\/<\/a><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s leading ISP, had unbelievably badly maintained infrastructure. We\u2019re talking about high-capacity long-haul wires draped over shrubs and tree-branches:<\/p>\n https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/tech-policy\/2019\/01\/frontier-letting-its-phone-network-fall-apart-state-investigation-finds\/<\/a><\/p>\n Minnesotans on Fiber\u2019s \u201cfree market\u201d 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\u2019s. Unlike Paul Bunyan\u2019s cheerful, local customer service, Frontier\u2019s service numbers went to \u201ccost-efficient\u201d (busied-out, distant) call centers where you could wait for hours to speak to someone who would either \u201caccidentally\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Frontier \u201cstrongly disagreed\u201d 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:<\/p>\n https:\/\/www.eff.org\/deeplinks\/2020\/04\/frontiers-bankruptcy-reveals-cynical-choice-deny-profitable-fiber-millions<\/a><\/p>\n By Frontier\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u2014 technology that dated back to Samuel Morse and the telegraph.<\/p>\n Frontier was especially interested in customers who had no alternatives \u2014 no cable or fixed wireless companies that could offer competition for Frontier\u2019s own terrible service. These customers were booked as an \u201casset\u201d and their connections were earmarked for substandard maintenance and slow upgrades. The old Lily Tomlin gag goes, \u201cWe don\u2019t care, we don\u2019t have to, we\u2019re the phone company.\u201d But Frontier really cared about the customers who had no alternative \u2014 they cared about royally fucking those customers.<\/p>\n Ladies and gentlemen, behold the marvel that is the efficient free market!<\/p>\n Municipal fiber is a godsend. It\u2019s fast, cheap and reliable, and it is an engine for economic development. Of course, the Trump administration is running away from municipal fiber \u2014 indeed, from all fiber \u2014 as fast as it can, because every fiber installation competes with Elon Musk\u2019s satellite based internet service, Skylink:<\/p>\n https:\/\/pluralistic.net\/2025\/07\/24\/geometry-hates-cars\/#dogshit-unit-economics<\/a><\/p>\n The thing is, satellite internet makes sense in a few places \u2014 temporary encampments, ships at sea \u2014 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 \u2014 no matter how many satellites there are over your head, they\u2019re 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\u2019 worth of electromagnetic spectra that are each isolated from one another.<\/p>\n Smart politicians aren\u2019t being sucked in by Musk\u2019s claim that he can billionaire his way out of the intractable laws of physics. They\u2019re 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:<\/p>\n https:\/\/pluralistic.net\/2024\/05\/16\/symmetrical-10gb-for-119\/#utopia<\/a><\/p>\n Moreover, these are symmetrical connections, meaning that they are as fast for sending data as they are for receiving it:<\/p>\n