How do Municipal and City Broadbands Work?

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Just saw the Patriot Act Episode last night and did not understand how a city can setup its own broadband bypassing ISPs?

In: Technology

2 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Obviously, you can’t bypass *all the ISPs* – you’re still going to need to peer with some sort of backbone provider. Other than that, however, there’s no reason that the city can’t be the one that builds & runs the “last mile” connections that physically connect to homes and buildings. All the technology is fairly well understood & standardized.

Anonymous 0 Comments

In plain terms, the city becomes an ISP serving residential customers in its area.

Many cities operate utilities — water, natural gas, and/or electric power — and have facilities — rights of way, pipes, conduits, poles, trucks, and sometimes existing communications lines — already in place. This makes it *relatively* easy for them to add Internet connectivity by just running lines alongside their existing plant.

I say relatively because it still requires a lot of investment to make the leap from, say, distributing electricity to providing Internet service. They have to hire engineers and technicians to plan, build, and maintain their new network, which is no small undertaking. The cities that have done it successfully are medium-sized cities with enough resources to take on the challenge, but whose infrastructure is still small and simple enough to be manageable.