We live Chelsea, which is a mostly residential neighborhood in Manhattan and theoretically one of the world’s leading cities. Yet I have a choice of exactly one true broadband provider: Time Warner Cable. Verizon at my address offers DSL only, not FIOS. My Time Warner speeds are download at about 20 Mbps and upload at a paltry 1 Mbsp. For this and a phone number I pay a relatively absurd amount of money by any international comparison.

Why is that? Because we don’t have any last mile competition. The access market in the US has consolidated into just a couple of players both on the wired and the wireless side (with Verizon having both). There is simply no competition. This is a market in which government badly needs to intervene to fix this structural problem. My preferred solution would be for cities to run fiber everywhere themselves or to franchise a single fiber provider in an open utility model. The latter would mean that the provider like an electric utility these days would have to let competitive access providers run on its infrastructure.

I think at this point the case for Internet access being a utility on par with water, gas, electricity and sewage should be pretty self evident. Yet we are somehow still treating it as if it were some appendage to watching television.

We live Chelsea, which is a mostly residential neighborhood in Manhattan and theoretically one of the world’s leading cities. Yet I have a choice of exactly one true broadband provider: Time Warner Cable. Verizon at my address offers DSL only, not FIOS. My Time Warner speeds are download at about 20 Mbps and upload at a paltry 1 Mbsp. For this and a phone number I pay a relatively absurd amount of money by any international comparison.

Why is that? Because we don’t have any last mile competition. The access market in the US has consolidated into just a couple of players both on the wired and the wireless side (with Verizon having both). There is simply no competition. This is a market in which government badly needs to intervene to fix this structural problem. My preferred solution would be for cities to run fiber everywhere themselves or to franchise a single fiber provider in an open utility model. The latter would mean that the provider like an electric utility these days would have to let competitive access providers run on its infrastructure.

I think at this point the case for Internet access being a utility on par with water, gas, electricity and sewage should be pretty self evident. Yet we are somehow still treating it as if it were some appendage to watching television.