alt Hacker NewsMunicipalities don't know anything about the job and few have the resources and personnel to become sufficiently experienced. I know every other poster on HN has a story where they personally stepped in and saw their local government through the process for incredibly cheap, hey that's great, but how is some random municipality without an elder tech god living with them supposed to get "municipal" internet without contracting with an ISP who actually knows how to get that work done?
We're talking rural broadband. These municipality don't have great human capital for this kind of stuff. Hell, they struggle to just fill potholes.
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That is not how it works here. Municipality owned fiber is common here in Sweden (called stadsnät). Often several smaller municipalities join together and co-own the venture.
A common variation is that they just provide the physical infrastructure and you can then select which ISP to use on top of the fiber, from a list of about 15 or so usually. This seems to work fine in rural Sweden, so I don't see why it wouldn't work elsewhere.
As to potholes, that is not a big problem? It is usually a larger problem in the cities than out in the countryside.
I guess we have different versions of HN cause the one I read has headlines on the front page pretty regularly about people (collectives, not individuals) doing their own broadband successfully. There's a reason right-wingers and lobbyists are against this and try to pass laws preventing it. It's because it works and undermines their position as rent-seekers who don't invest in their infrastructure.
i was only using fiber as just one example. but in the case of fiber, there are plenty of non rural areas that still can’t get it and are stuck with terrible options.
even so, even in rural areas, nothing at all stops them from hiring people the same way they hire a weatherman or a police man or a fireman or a city accountant. there are educated intelligent people in rural areas…