I live in a town that got municipal broadband at the turn of the millennia. Since about 1999 they have offered 10/2 up to 10/10 speeds for $25-$50 a month over coax.
Except... that is all they have. All they have ever had. And as the population has risen, they have no budget to deploy more servers to meet demand, so every night the speeds crash and you have intermittent outages. Especially on weekends. They are running 20 year old switches that have to handle Netflix loads on a nightly basis.
So you go to town council meetings to find out whats up and it turns out that over 15 years later they still owe some ~3 million on the original bill of 22 million, and the whole town is 10 million in the red (with a population of 3 thousand) so it cannot spend money on practically anything.
So main street is like driving on a cobble trail with potholes that go unfilled for years, and school taxes are the highest in five surrounding boroughs and its still not enough for them.
Sure, you can be certain they got ripped off with whomever they bought the original deployment from back then, given its just coax and not even fiber, and the municipal ISP is only a small piece of general budget mismanagement, but it is a reflection on how bad in general politicians are at budgeting, and nobody should ever be surprised when someone cannot make a reasonable budget when they are doing it with other peoples money and they have no consequences to themselves besides possible reelection issues.
IMO, it is just a more fundamental reflection that politics and political office as it is arranged in the states is both systemically intentional and attracts people who are not technical, not actuarial, and often lawyers and other "people" persons who can talk big to get elected and then go into an echo-chamber of self-reinforcing superiority with all the other elected officials such that they never attract the kind of critical thinking or knowledge to approach anything close to municipal... anything, really, with any degree of competence. They just defer to their friends friend at a teleco wiring company or a water treatment operator or a civil engineering corps and get turned into a money faucet for terrible results. I'm not saying every government has to behave that way, but at least from my observations all the ones I have been under have, at best, been incompetent, and have often been of malicious intent towards its own citizens at their expense for corporate donors and insiders to their social circle. But it is certainly systemically intentional.
The water actually has a lead warning in east PA, and we do have near weekly evening power outages. But the septic is county based and the electric is at the state level, and in PA you can buy from any electric provider in the state and the lines are maintained near us by Harrisburg.
So it sounds like your area fails in the infrastructure department pretty fundamentally. There are many other cities where it never blacks out, the water and sanitation has been great for decades and the roads are maintained. Those places would do municipal internet better too.
Except... that is all they have. All they have ever had. And as the population has risen, they have no budget to deploy more servers to meet demand, so every night the speeds crash and you have intermittent outages. Especially on weekends. They are running 20 year old switches that have to handle Netflix loads on a nightly basis.
So you go to town council meetings to find out whats up and it turns out that over 15 years later they still owe some ~3 million on the original bill of 22 million, and the whole town is 10 million in the red (with a population of 3 thousand) so it cannot spend money on practically anything.
So main street is like driving on a cobble trail with potholes that go unfilled for years, and school taxes are the highest in five surrounding boroughs and its still not enough for them.
Sure, you can be certain they got ripped off with whomever they bought the original deployment from back then, given its just coax and not even fiber, and the municipal ISP is only a small piece of general budget mismanagement, but it is a reflection on how bad in general politicians are at budgeting, and nobody should ever be surprised when someone cannot make a reasonable budget when they are doing it with other peoples money and they have no consequences to themselves besides possible reelection issues.
IMO, it is just a more fundamental reflection that politics and political office as it is arranged in the states is both systemically intentional and attracts people who are not technical, not actuarial, and often lawyers and other "people" persons who can talk big to get elected and then go into an echo-chamber of self-reinforcing superiority with all the other elected officials such that they never attract the kind of critical thinking or knowledge to approach anything close to municipal... anything, really, with any degree of competence. They just defer to their friends friend at a teleco wiring company or a water treatment operator or a civil engineering corps and get turned into a money faucet for terrible results. I'm not saying every government has to behave that way, but at least from my observations all the ones I have been under have, at best, been incompetent, and have often been of malicious intent towards its own citizens at their expense for corporate donors and insiders to their social circle. But it is certainly systemically intentional.