I may be missing something but is the suggestion that local municipalities dig their last mile and run their own fiber?
That's ... Not likely to succeed surely? I assume the actual dig out is a specialised job, with no private hire market, the back haul ... To where and to whom? Do most towns know where their nearest telehouse/interconnect is? The support tasks are difficult - and scale pretty well, but not if you have no scale.
Ultimately this sounds like "hey let's build a public ally owned nationwide fiber network!" Why not start at that point?
A common approach is to incorporate a municipally owned subsidiary that hires the appropriate expertise. That's how the electric and plumbing networks were built in many towns, for example. A number have since been sold off (turned into privatized utility companies), but some are still city-owned. Other cities have gone for a pooled model, where the each city owns their utilities, but rather than administer them directly, pays into a nonprofit organization that provides the service/maintenance, thereby gaining some economy of scale (e.g. http://www.ncpublicpower.com).
That's what some of us in Seattle are pressuring the city to do. Seattle City Light is a power company owned by the city and is already doing extensive work for the smart meter rehab. The idea is, while SCL is out digging around, lay last mile fiber.
There's a big ol thread [0] on this in NANOG with lots of juicy implementation details. I'd hesitate to use the word 'consensus' in relation to a mailing list in any way but my take home is that if the municipality sticks to providing L1 (i.e. a physical fiber as opposed to an 'internet connection') it requires a manageable level of expertise and still vastly lowers the cost of entry for ISPs to provide the rest of the stack.
That's ... Not likely to succeed surely? I assume the actual dig out is a specialised job, with no private hire market, the back haul ... To where and to whom? Do most towns know where their nearest telehouse/interconnect is? The support tasks are difficult - and scale pretty well, but not if you have no scale.
Ultimately this sounds like "hey let's build a public ally owned nationwide fiber network!" Why not start at that point?