Tired Of Being Ripped Off By Monopolies, Cleveland Launches Ambitious Plan To Provide Citywide Dirt Cheap Broadband

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Tired Of Being Ripped Off By Monopolies, Cleveland Launches Ambitious Plan To Provide Citywide Dirt Cheap Broadband::Cleveland has spent years being dubbed the "worst connected city in the U.S." thanks to expensive, patchy, and slow broadband. Why Cleveland broadband sucks so badly isn't really a mystery: consolidated monopoly/duopoly power has resulted in a broken market where local giants like AT&T and Charter don't have to compete on price, speeds, availability, customer…

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Since it appears there's precedent for this falling apart, hopefully Cleveland's government will have done their research and be prepared, albeit I'm not necessarily optimistic either.

It's not a precedent, it's a playbook and telecos have been following it for decades. If you have one of the big telecoms in your city, they will sue to block municipal broadband. These suits win more often than not and even when they lose the rollout is usually delayed long enough as a result that they break even on legal fees.

This is actually Cleveland's second attempt to expand municipal broadband after their prior effort in 2021 was thwarted when the Ohio state government banned Cleveland and other cities from offering a public option -- obviously at the behest of lobbying from ISP special interests. Correction: the broadband provision was struck from the budget bill before it was signed by the governor. It appears that the 2021 effort to build out municipal fiber failed for other unrelated reasons.

This new initiative is actually a bundle of public-private partnerships as opposed to true state-owned infrastructure:

SiFi and CircleC, not the city, will own the finished networks. With little to no taxpayer money being spent, it’s a tradeoff city leaders say they felt made sense.

“They already have a right to use our right of way—we’re not providing any special access to it, the agreement is just us all getting organized for how permitting for such a large scale project will go,” Davis said of the SiFi partnership. “Since the city’s [not] paying for it or putting anything in, it’s not getting an equity stake.”

Similarly, Davis noted that DigitalC will also maintain ownership of their finished wireless network.

“We at the City are not contracting for infrastructure,” Davis noted. “We’re contracting for DigitalC to take 23,500 households–about 50,000 residents–that don’t subscribe to at-home broadband today and get them to become at-home internet subscribers, and provide digital adoption services and training to 50,000 residents. Basically, we’re paying to halve our present unconnected rate of 32 percent.”

NOTE: The original article has a typo where they misquote Davis as saying “Since the city’s paying for it or putting anything in, it’s not getting an equity stake.” This has been corrected in my quoting of the article

The metro area where I live had to do this public-private partnership for the same reason. They proposed public fiber years ago and Mediacom sued and blocked it. This was how our metro area (a collection of roughly 6 cities) got around that bullshit lawsuit. As a result, we now have 1Gb symmetrical fiber for $60/mo (Mediacom charged $120+/mo for 1Gb and maaaaybe 10Mb up on good days, oh and constantly had outages).

Fuck Mediacom and their ilk.

Fuck the courts that enable them instead of shutting these monopolies down.

Just because the city's not "putting anything in" doesn't mean they aren't contributing or absorbing costs.

The city should have a stake in it, since it's on city property, and the city maintains the local infrastructure (poles, right-of-ways, etc) that these companies need to install anything. Otherwise it's just another (local) monopoly.

Wow, I missed that they banned it in Ohio. It must only apply to new systems as I'm fairly sure Fairlawn is still operating municipal fiber.

That's really irritating though, of course they snuck it into a budget bill.

Whoops! I went back to double-check after seeing what you said and found that the provision was actually dropped from the bill in the time between when it was passed by the Senate and signed by the governor.

The way it got quietly dropped like that kept it from being well publicized, but the long and short of it is that I misremembered and then failed to spot this detail while fact-checking myself. I'm sorry for spreading misinformation -- I've updated the original post

I grew up in Cleveland. Family still lives in the area. I am not expecting anything good to actually happen

The Browns are more likely to win the Super Bowl than this happening.

We doing okay this year, despite our best efforts to fail

We doing okay this year

First time? I've been a Browns fan since '88 - I know how this is going to end.

This thread aged perfectly for Cleveland 🙃

Ha ha it sure did. "I told you so" is the only thing I'll always have going for me as a Browns fan.

It's always something, isn't it? If we have a good defense, no offense. Good quarterback? No offensive line. 7-3 record? Injury time!

Haha hardly. I grew up in Cleveland. I fully expect us to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory every week, every year

The Browns tried like hell to lose the last two games but the officials just wouldn't let them.