If you don't mind the -20F cold in Winter, move to Bemidji, MN. I have family near Blackduck, MN and all the farms are wired with fiber by the telephone co-op ( http://www.paulbunyan.net/ ). They offer a 1Gb/s (up/down) tier.

Exactly. I don't understand why people can't see the difference. The reason we have such little competition at the local level is *because* local government limited it. There might be good reasons for it, but local government need to make it easier for companies to run wire. Look at the Google Fiber example, such bureaucracy with local government, and they gave up.

The other big difference is with a co-ops, people actually have work together on the project. Government? "Just give it to me!"

At the same time Irma was happening, the Earth was getting hit by a solar flare. It was the "perfect storm" in that we were experiencing a terrestrial storm and a solar flare at the same time. The solar flare impacts HF radio ( 30Mhz), GPS accuracy and satellite phones. VHF can still be useful, but long distance HF skip is iffy. Hams have some nice digital modes that can burst data. I would still rather have access to ham radios in a situation like that over sat phones. Search TamithaSkov on youtube for space weather reports and how the sun impacts radio.

That is extreme. Wasn't Bell Systems nationalized for a short time in US history?

Consider an alternate idea. At the local-level (cities), grant infrastructure-only licenses. Cities already regulate right of ways and pole access. Traditionally cities would grant long term franchises to cable companies in exchange for them building out cable. Continues with that, but any new agreements require that the cable company cannot offer video (no money in that anyway) and Internet. This would be closer to how it was during the dialup and DSL days.

Gold star for the city to get more than one company to do this.

And who made that happen? LOCAL CITIES. Their regulation allowed a single company to come into the city and have exclusive access for years. It worked in so far as that cities have infrastructure, but backfired because cable companies' coax turned out to be the best option for high speed connectivity. Copper pairs didn't cut it. Verizon tried to do fiber, but get too much on making money on video around the time that video is getting squeezed (cord cutters drive up content prices while demand continues to drop). There is no money in video.

The only option I can think of is if cities granted infrastructure-only licenses and locked them in for some number of years (e.g. 10).

Exactly! Why don't people understand this? Of course the cable/telco's had grounds to complain about this.

I don't think a solution requires that cities build and own the fiber. City owned is what the telco/cable co's are complaining about. The companies are competing against government which isn't fair. If the city makes it easy for another company to come in and compete with the other companies, then I don't see how they would have a legal argument against it. The exception to that is if the local cable company has an exclusive franchise agreement with the city and the city is trying to violate that contract. A lot of infrastructure was built because the city offered no-compete to the cable company so they would drop a lot of money to build out the system.

The other issue is access to poles. Some states have passed rules that allow new companies to touch or move cables that are not theirs while pulling their own new cable. This streamlines things by reducing paperwork to coordinate and get permission to touch each pole with the other companies..

It seems to me that cities should start issuing infrastructure-only franchise agreements. It be great for at least two or more per city. The idea is that the infrastructure only company builds out the cables and terminates to a meetme building. ISP can come in and sell Internet to anyone on the cable. The ISP's pay the infrastructure-only company for maintenance and service of the cable. This would be much closer to the old dialup and early DSL days

The FCC involvement is an "easy fix" (e.g. NN), but better management at the local level would be huge.

A distributed locally managed/scoped system is better for this. This was THE way things were done in the US. Churches, ethnic groups, and groups like the Shriners help pay people's medical bills. True charity. The government has slowly stepped all over this. What ever happened to separation of church and state? People only think it goes one way (no religion in government), but what about the other direction?

Maybe Netflix is just simply trying to save on transit costs. If it is an unknown ASN that could mean the traffic would traverse their costly transit link. Ya can't blame a company trying to save a buck, right?

You're wrong because the issues that Netflix had didn't have anything to do with Net Neutrality. It was in issue with letting a third party handle their peering. That third party (Cogent) prides itself in settlement-free peering agreements. When Cogent took on Netflix as a customer, they started sending way more data from their network then they were consuming and therefore went outside of the settlement-free part of their agreements. Cogent doesn't like to pay for peering and decided to drag their feet upgrading the ports. Netflix was much better off when they negotiated the peering agreements themselves, outside of any settlement-free parameters.

Stop using Netflix as an example of a violation of NN. Can we talk about real violations of Net Neutrality? Do you have an example outside of Netflix?

... and most people are wrong. People thought that ISP's were shaping Netflix traffic. ISP's were NOT shaping Netflix traffic. It was a peering problem where one party didn't want to upgrade the peering links. Most people assume the culprit must be the evil ISP, but that wasn't true. Cogent didn't want to upgrade the links because they like their settlement-free peering links. When they took on Netflix as a customer, those numbers changed and they didn't want to pay for it. The best solution was for Netflix to make their own peering agreements outside of Cogent. Problem solved.

In an interview Pai said that went to figure out way to increase competition everywhere. This building issue is just one aspect of what he wants to take on. He also noted that the FCC can only do so much at the municipal level.

THIS!

The FCC can only do so much. It seems to me if we want to make Net Neutrality a non-issue, we need to get cracking at the local level.

Yes, exactly. But the point still stands that there are choices. For example you can use cable company fiber to pull into a large building and just buy Ethernet service from them. That way you can choose your transit and bypass the possibility of Net Neutrality issues. You can also re-sell the bandwidth to others in the building so the cost can be shared. It works! It took months (only!?) to get all the permitting and agreements done to pull the fiber into the high-rise building.

You have exactly one choice that you're willing to pay for. I'm sure there are more options, but they could be a lot more money. In order of cost you probably have, dialup, cable/DOCSIS, DSL, WISP, satellite, cellular LTE, 2Base-TL (a cheaper form of metro Ethernet via copper pairs), T1/T3, metro Ethernet (via the cable company, but you can choose your transit. Also, construction cost).

If there is no WISP, why not build one?