> Reforms to the Pole Attachment Act have made this shit is easy now. Easy, but not cheap.
AFAICT, the pole attachment regulation changes only happened in mid-January 2024. They're probably good changes, but
1) They happened just yesterday, speaking in "policy time".
2) If you don't think an absolute assload of time and money can be wasted with doomed-to-fail appeals and spurious orders for documentation and impact analysis and the like, you've spent all your life in a shockingly well-run city (or maybe a place with next-to-no municipal services and associated power grabs).
> It doesn’t matter in which cardinal direction you travel for 20 minutes...
Well, it does, actually. See below for commentary on your particular selection of SJ as your exemplar city.
> ...regulatory capture ain’t stopping anyone from starting their own ISP.
And yet for some weird reason, there are precious few non-telco/cableco ISPs in places like San Francisco that are doing something other than reselling rotting DSL, or running small microwave dishes on rooftops (that is, being a WISP).
San Jose may be remarkably well-managed (though, I expect WISPs make up the lion's share of your 20 ISP figure (and they're playing on easy mode in regards to permission-seeking)), but other places in the Bay Area are definitely not.
I've been living in SF for more than a decade, and I've watched Monkeybrains notice that building a city-wide fiber network was completely impractical and resorted to being a WISP. I've also watched Sonic's fiber installation program in the city stall for roughly a decade. While I'm glad that starting in mid 2019 [0] they've been able to string and light up fiber to not just small sections of the most western portions of the city but a significant fraction of the city, much of Sebastapol got lit up quite a while back. You'd expect a big city with a high density of customers would get lit up before a fairly small, sparse town if it was just a cost/benefit analysis doing the location selection.
Whatever you want to call it, the political and regulatory situation on the ground is obviously getting in the way of folks providing civilized-speed data transit services to potential customers in many major cities. You don't want to call it "regulatory capture"? Okay, sure. The on-the-ground political resistance and obstructionism is still rooted in the same sort of backroom dealing and under-the-table kickbacks, so you're just using a different phrase for the same behavior.
[0] Notice that this substantially predates the pole attachment rule changes that you've brought up.
>You'd expect a big city with a high density of customers would get lit up before a fairly small, sparse town if it was just a cost/benefit analysis doing the location selection.
The costs are so high that a reasonable person would never expect that, not without government subsidies. Like what's happening in the small towns.
Nothing is stopping you from starting an ISP-- except the fact that you'll go broke because most people are happy with Comcast. Sorry if I didn't make that assertion clear enough in my original comment.
That's why Google Fiber pitted cities against each other in mortal combat to see who could get the most people to sign loyalty pledges promising to subscribe and they turned on the electrified subsidy extraction machine to "high" before making a deployment decision.
> The on-the-ground political resistance and obstructionism is still rooted in the same sort of backroom dealing and under-the-table kickbacks
This is not true. Literally and actually you can start an ISP and run 100-gig fiber to every single block in San Francisco and no government or cabal in a smoke-filled room can stop you. Only your creditors can.
> That's why Google Fiber ... turned on the electrified subsidy extraction machine to "high" before making a deployment decision.
If by "subsidy extraction" you mean "Required that the only objection incumbents could make to GF's pole attachments were objections rooted in real safety issues, that all objections must be resolved rapidly, and that incumbents could not charge GF outsized pole attachment fees (IIRC, often defined as 'not more than the incumbent had been historically charging themselves').", then, yeah, I agree they did demand a level playing field free from unreasonable interference from incumbent operators.
> That's why Google Fiber pitted cities against each other ... to see who could get the most people to [promise] to subscribe...
Yeah, that's part of any big, expensive rollout. You don't do it unless you have enough people who commit to use the service for a period of time to make it worth doing the rollout.
> ...most people are happy with Comcast.
The difference between the rates and restrictions imposed by the incumbent ISPs in areas where there is healthy ISP competition and areas where there is not suggest otherwise. Even credible rumors that an independent ISP might serve a significant portion of an area with a mon- or duopoly cause the incumbents to scramble to offer freebies, rate reductions, and gratis data transfer cap and speed increases.
Given the all of the previous, and that the FCC continues to update their pole attachment regs to add more avenues for appeal and impose more and more "playing field leveling" rules, I suspect you know less about this topic that you claim to.
It's also Burlingame, San Mateo, Fremont, Union City...
Or, if the traffic is bad, it's Redwood City, Menlo Park, Stanford, Cupertino...
Or, if you're taking public transit (or walking), it's pretty much just Mountain View.