So, before everyone goes off on how it's only big business that's preventing great, high-speed internet, there are municipalities in this country that do run their own cable company.
That's a perfect example. Town owned and operated and it offers service up to 10Mbps for $50. More expensive and slower than the internet offered in many surrounding places. Oh, and they have a monthly data transfer cap that makes Comcast look good. At $40, you only get 75GB of transfer.
I think it's wonderful if municipalities want to try and roll their own competitors to commercial cable/phone/internet companies. However, it isn't all roses. It's expensive to build and operate and you need to get enough capacity to the internet to serve everyone's speeds.
The threat might have been better than actually building it.
The bandwidth cap sucks, but compared to DSL, that's a great deal for 10MBps. In Cambridge, MA we were paying Speakeasy more than that for 1.5MBps.
<rant topic="speakeasy">
It turned out to be terrible, but our contract locked us in for a year... and we moved to a new town in 10 months.
Free markets are great, contracts are fine, but in our situation, we simply didn't have any competitive options to choose from. Also, the assumption of "perfect knowledge of the marketplace" was violated because we didn't know how severely non-premium the service would be.
Speakeasy happens to be the worst ISP I have dealt with -- ever. Their support were competent, but customer service was terrible. They had a system-wide outage during the US Inauguration ceremony. Their prices, as I already mentioned, were very high, but we agreed to the contract under the assumption that we were paying for premium service.
In contrast, I can't say enough good about sonic.net, which is a California Bay Area ISP. I'm currently very satisfied with Teksavvy, who are an Ontario ISP.
Speakeasy, though... Avoid them. It's the free market in action. If you're in MA, and specifically in the Boston area, be aware...
I think that's a good argument for why municipalities ought to, at the very most, maintain the bottom-layer infrastructure itself and not try to actually operate services over it.
Somebody in Shrewsbury probably thinks the services and price structure they're offering is reasonable, but that "somebody" probably doesn't have the knowledge of the market or interest in making the ISP a success that an entrepreneur would.
As I said in another comment, there are good arguments in favor of publicly-maintained roads, as an alternative to having multiple parallel toll roads, all poorly maintained; but there are also good arguments why the government doesn't own all the vehicles or operate all the services that run on top of those roads. A government-run trucking company would likely be rather unpleasant to do business with.
http://www.shrewsbury-ma.gov/egov/docs/1231423976788.htm
That's a perfect example. Town owned and operated and it offers service up to 10Mbps for $50. More expensive and slower than the internet offered in many surrounding places. Oh, and they have a monthly data transfer cap that makes Comcast look good. At $40, you only get 75GB of transfer.
I think it's wonderful if municipalities want to try and roll their own competitors to commercial cable/phone/internet companies. However, it isn't all roses. It's expensive to build and operate and you need to get enough capacity to the internet to serve everyone's speeds.
The threat might have been better than actually building it.