Fred Wilson on A Model For A Competitive Broadband Market:
I believe the telecommunications market needs to move away from vertical integration where one provider builds, manages, and delivers the entire telecommunications stack to the market.
In theory I like the idea of having municipalities “owning” the underlying infrastructure, then allowing others to provide services on top of that. In practical terms that broadly mean a two level stack: fiber in the ground and Internet services.
This appeals to the “Internet as infrastructure” view point. Internet service at home is no longer a nice to I have, I view it in the same category as other critical services like water and electricity.
Competition is good for many things, and hard for some things. When it comes to broadband, I really don’t want a different company each month ripping up the road to run fiber to a house. Instead it makes more sense to allow central control of the fiber running to a home, then allow competition to provide services over that fiber.
Unfortunately there are no fiber connections to my house, and I’m not aware of any plans to change that.