KEY STUDY FINDINGS • The full capital cost is estimated at ~$194 million, incorporating a 30% contingency and inflation over a 5-year construction period, assuming a 40% take-rate. • A City contribution of ~$150 million is required to establish a sustainable FTTP business from scratch, applying reasonable assumptions under a “base case”. This contribution is the investment the City would need to make for which there would likely be no return. The remaining capex can be supported from net revenues after operating costs. • Entering into a partnership with one or more entities to lease fiber and run the business would reduce the City’s risks and potentially reduce costs. A partner could potentially leverage existing operations and assets, achieving economies of scale. 2 FTTP in Cambridge will likely require a City contribution

-A full report prepared by city staff is due Tuesday, and more hearings are needed before a decision to proceed. That would launch 18 to 24 months of market research, selection of a business model and a partner, negotiations and bonding out the expenses before years of installation.

How many city committees have studied this over the years? Meanwhile Xfinity still enjoys a virtual monopoly in the city. It’s laughable for a city that houses institutions such as MIT and Google.

Why the hell doesn't the city just go to MIT+Harvard and say "make this happen"?

I love the picture from the article:

>A Comcast Xfinity truck gets a refinement at the Seattle Pride Parade 2017. (Photo: Comcast Washington State via Flickr)

Community broadband? Nah, but how about a van with a pride sticker? Or are you a nazi?

The difficulty is always the existing infrastructure, not technology. Neither university is good at working on utility poles or digging trenches.

I feel like public services do well when there is competition(USPS)—and not so well when there isn’t (MBTA), so perhaps this could work.

Oh no doubt. I was simply implying that they lay on the guilt for some cash. If there's 120 million of NRE - well, MIT and Harvard lose 60 million in the couches on an average weekend.

You think the MBTA doesn't have competition in the form of private cars, ride share, bikes, walking, etc? The difference between the postal service and public transit in the US is that one (mostly) hasn't been systematically sabotaged for decades.

None of those things are really competition in that they offer the same service (e.g., a very low percentage of the population that uses the MBTA would bike to work today, even if you paid them). USPS has direct competitors that offer basically the same set of services.

The service is getting people to their destination. If they stop taking the T and still need to get to work, they're going to use one of those other options. Probably driving.

The USPS doesn’t have as much competition as you think. Other shippers don’t really send letters, and some types of letters are legally required to go though the post

You’re not wrong, but that’s a broader definition of competition than what economists typically use. To offer up an absurd example to illustrate this point, suppose I prevent you from all other means besides hovercraft of commuting to work, then I suppose you would take a hovercraft to work (if you HAD to get work), and therefore conclude a hovercraft must be competition with the MBTA (generally). Thus, we must first consider the closeness/substitutability of alternatives before deeming them as sufficiently competitive to be considered proper competition.

In the end, I think we treat these agencies (public transit, mail, etc) too much like businesses and not like public services.

No one questions whether roads are making enough money because it's understood that they enable productivity in the areas they serve. Meanwhile we expect the T to pay for itself rather than act as a utility.

>o one questions whether roads are making enough money because it's understood that they enable productivity in the areas they serve. Meanwhile we expect the T to pay for itself rather than act as a utility

I'll get slammed for saying this, but a big part of the problem with a non-competitive public service like the MBTA is that, in the long run, the unions and the contractors will extract all of the benefits from the system until it's too expensive to maintain. Thus, it becomes a never ending money pit.

But then again I don't really have any good answers to solve it.

The USPS is required by the Constitution and avails itself from longstanding cultural understanding that the founding fathers thought it important and that a well run postal service is a matter of national pride.

Of late the libertarians in this country have decided even that shouldn't be, although the Constitution limits most acts of sabotage against it.

>Of late the libertarians in this country have decided even that shouldn't be, although the Constitution limits most acts of sabotage against it.

Yah, conservatives have done their best to try and destroy it for the past two decades, and thank god their options for interference are somewhat limited. In any event, when you cut through the bullshit, the USPS basically costs almost nothing (on a net operating basis), and still provides all the valuable services that the framers intended (and several more).

One way Harvard/MIT/other-institutions-companies can actually help is guarantee a certain number of customers to the system. If they reimburse staff for home internet, make sure there are incentives to use municipal broadband. With guaranteed customers, the uncertainty around financial risk is minimized, making financing easier and deals with private partners less necessary.

That's a super idea! Heck, they could take 'payment in kind' for their initial investment.

BTW, loving that my initial post is being downvoted while the parent is being upvoted :-) I guess we found the Comcast fans!

One big thing I wish were addressed: what if my landlord isn't cooperative? Generally, fiber-to-the-home is done by putting an ONT/ONU (optical network terminal/unit that handles the fiber signal) in the basement and running ethernet into the unit. You can use MoCA (multimedia over coax) to get from the basement to the unit, but a lot of places just have the coax punch through the side of the building rather than coming up from the basement (I'm sure back in the 80s a lot of landlords didn't care about what was cheap property back then). Will Cambridge make an ordinance that landlords have to allow tenants to hook up municipal fiber? In a city where most people rent, this is a big concern. If Cambridge gets municipal fiber and I can't get it because my landlord isn't cooperative, that's a big problem - and will severely impact the take rate. This has stymied Verizon's Fios a lot in New York City. Verizon will have Fios available, but can't get it into your unit. Sometimes they're able to use coax wiring in the building already. Sometimes landlords just shut them out - and sometimes the cable company will pay the landlord for exclusivity (though I think the city is moving against that).

I guess I'm left wondering how the service will get from the street to my unit with a landlord that might not care. The presentation had so many tiny details on how they were getting it around the city and such, but didn't talk about getting it into the units. I know that some large buildings in Somerville are Comcast-only because of this (one of my friends hates it about his building). If my cable connection is just something that was drilled through the third-floor exterior wall back in the 80s, but now the landlord doesn't want new punctures in their property that's now worth millions, what will happen? Am I just out of luck? I'm sure many landlords will accommodate and might see it as a selling point to their property, but it seems like it could be a bit logistically difficult in many situations. A 30 unit building isn't going to want 30 punctures in their building. MoCA is an option, but then everyone is sharing a theoretical 2.5Gbps (depending on how good the wiring is) and not really getting the full fiber experience (and MoCA can bring some security concerns since most people don't enable encryption on it and additional latency). I'm guessing that most large buildings will end up being MoCA which isn't ideal and I'd have to assume that a lot of small buildings probably just have a bunch of exterior penetrations for coax rather than wiring down to the basement.

Does anyone have details on how renters will get service in different scenarios? Is this a solved problem that's so boring they didn't put it in the presentation? I guess it just feels like it's missing because they talk about all sorts of random details like the trenching, hubs, maps of the backbone, primary, and secondary distribution, taps, drop access handholds, and fiber distribution cabinets. Again, maybe this is something that is solved, but it doesn't seem to be given what people in other cities seem to complain about. Maybe this was already discussed in other documents?

Oh, there was a major sabotage attempt of USPS: https://ips-dc.org/how-congress-manufactured-a-postal-crisis-and-how-to-fix-it/

As noted by councillors during the city council meeting last night, this really is not a big price tag for something that presents so much benefit to the entire city

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Comcast cannot "undercut and win at any point", they still have to make a profit, which the city will not have to do. And the city would have a risk of what, not making a profit?

Greater speed, lower cost, net neutrality. Much of Cambridge can't get fiber, so people have to choose between cheap and slow or fast and expensive cable internet. And even when you choose the fast and expensive plan, the actual speeds never meet the advertised speeds. The city will also offer even lower prices for low-income residents, who don't even have the luxury of choice, they're just stuck with the cheapest option. And then there's net neutrality, a founding principle of the internet that is no longer legally guaranteed and unfortunately is left up to the ISPs to decide if they want to preserve it for their customers. The city would have a mandate to ensure net neutrality.

Here's some basic info about municipal broadband around the country: https://communitynets.org/content/successes-and-failures

They don’t have a monopoly. Mobile internet is an affordable option. Fios is an option in some locations.

There is no reason to downvote this comment. Mobile internet is very competitive price wise versus broadband. Comcast can bundle more services to make their product cheaper or more desirable than what municipal can provide. There is no way 50,000+ households care about net neutrality that much. Municipal broadband would be an enormous waste of money.