In a sane country, the mere attempt at blocking the establishment of a competitor would have been grounds for a Ma Bell-style dissection of both companies.

My area is stuck with the illusion of choice between Comcast cable and AT&T DSL.

That’s wonderful news for Bountiful. Quite a $48m middle finger to these monopolies.

We taxpayers built a municipal fiber to house broadband in Longmont Colorado. Stable service, one of the fastest in the nation and inexpensive.

I love it when a telecom asks me to"upgrade" to their service. It messes up their script when I ask them if they can beat 1 gig up and down for $45.

This is the way competition should work. Some things private companies do better, other things the government can do better. Let them hash it out in the market without loading the dice.

My area got super lucky. The VAST majority of the metro area I’m in is dominated by one for profit electric co and 2 for profit “big name” ISPs that have barely implemented fiber. I was forced to use one of them and got 3Mbps Down and 1Mbps up advertised DSL. I was generally lucky to see half of that.

I live just outside the metro center in a more rural area. We have an electric coop that is extremely affordable. When the federal gov pushed out millions in broadband grants, the coop jumped on it. Built out a massive fiber core and buried all the fiber they could. What they couldn’t bury, they ran on their electric poles. Now have symmetric gigabit fiber to the home and incredible local support.

Fuck major ISPs and their bullshit. They tried to block our coop and got told to eat shit.

This is the way. I want all places and all businesses to have healthy competitors. Businesses should not be allowed to acquire other businesses unless they have been operating in losses for at least 5 years. That’s how all this monopolistic bullshit will stop.

Good! The only reason I am able to have affordable fast internet is due to having 3 real high speed options: google fiber(5gb max), att fiber(2gb max), and spectrum(1gb max). If only one of those existed at my location I would bet I would have worse service at a higher price.

Sorry telcos! You lose, and suck, in that order.

That's great news. I'm also glad to hear that Gigi Sohn has found her next project after being unfairly prevented from serving on the FCC.

They are very lucky to have this work out well for them. So many other communities are lucky to have broad support for infrastructure upgrades.

A fitting name for a beautiful outcome.

I wish them bountiful data transfers without Telco trashiness.

Good for them.

In México it's kind of weird. We certainly have competition, but there are major leaders like: Telmex, izzi, Megacable and Totalplay. They are mostly mediocre, but they'll try to outpace their competition every time they can. There are jobs just for advertisement where people move from sector to sector leaving pamphlets and trying to convince you to change your service. The problem is that they usually buy competitors to improve their infrastructure. For example, izzi bought part of Axtel, which to me was the best service provider in Nuevo León, so we moved to Totalplay the next month after the acquisition.

They always have offers and will offer you 'better' packages to convince you, sometimes matching the same price just so they gain a new customer (commissions are also an incentive for workers). Recently the government announced a new service provided by our federal energy commission (CFE) which aims to provide free internet in rural and public places and paid mobile data plans. More competition is always welcomed.

Gotta say that our Federal Telecommunications Office sometimes does its job and protects you against bad-faith movements like ISPs blocking you from moving and/or using other methods that are not approved, but no public services have a clean record. Still, at least here I'm seeing some progress.