Comment by fiftyfifty

The city I live in voted for municipal broadband in 2017. Our local private internet provider Comcast fought it at every turn, Comcast spent millions fighting municipal broadband in a city with about 150,000 residents. We started rolling out our own broadband to residents in 2020. It took a couple of years for the city to hire and build up a department and lay the infrastructure to support it city wide and I finally got the service at the beginning of this year, and it has been awesome. We have gigabit internet up AND DOWN for $59.95/month. What really burns me is the private providers we have, Comcast and CenturyLink, have been here for decades and could have done exactly what our city has done: run fiber to every neighborhood and house. It would have been cheaper for them too, they already had the infrastructure in place. They chose not to make the investment and instead spent millions trying to prevent us from providing better service for ourselves. I hope everyone has the chance to get better/cheaper internet service for themselves and their community, so far it has worked out great for us.