> Here in DC, lines have been shut down for weeks at a time due to deferred maintenance. Several lines are completely unable to keep their scheduled time.

DC is uniquely screwed because the city is under the jurisdiction of the federal Congress, so you have the problem of representatives elected by far away constituents not caring even when the subway has high usage.

> If you were proposing to have the Barcelona government run my internet here in DC, I’d say have at it. But I don’t live in Barcelona. I live in America, where our local governments re uniquely incompetent and wasteful compared to those in other developed nations.

That's fair. And installing municipal fiber in DC probably is a bad idea. But that doesn't mean it's a bad idea in every US city or anywhere the local government is better managed.

> The price discrimination point actually cuts against municipal broadband. When the city runs things, prices become a social justice issue, which forces prices too low.

This is only true where it's true. For example, any town without a huge income disparity wouldn't have this problem, or anywhere that redistributive policies aren't locally popular. And where redistribution is popular enough to control local policy, it can be satisfied in the same way it is for food or housing -- taxpayer subsidies to low income people. Or, ideally, a UBI; but that's harder at the local level (where you can't control local immigration), and taxpayer subsidies are obviously still preferable to underfunding infrastructure. Then if the taxpayers later choose to spend less money, they can reduce the subsidies without underfunding the network.

It's not as if price discrimination is actually desirable. The profit-maximizing pricing for a food cartel is charging twenty odd times as much for normal food and then capturing the low end of the market by offering a miserable gruel for 90% of the previous average price, which is intentionally so bad it will ward off anyone who can afford to pay more. The takeaway from that can be that a food monopolist would allow the poor to lower their food bills by 10%, but only if you count solely dollars and not value for money. And that's assuming the gruel would be 10% less than now rather than 10% more -- anyone with enough market power to price discriminate tends to also have enough market power to capture more of the surplus from everybody.

> I don't know what private ISPs are like outside the D.C. area. I can push 700/700 on my FiOS regardless of time of day (and I suspect my limiting factor is the fact that my only wired machine is an Atom mini-pc with realtek nic).

90+% of the country doesn't have that. In many places you can get 50Mbps/20Mbps from Comcast, but plenty of unfortunate souls are stuck with Frontier as the only provider.

And even if you're "lucky" enough to have Comcast, their reliability is terrible. They've having an outage right now.

> I find it totally not believable that DC/NYC/Phila/Baltimore (to name the last several places I've lived) could give me a similar level of service.

These are not instances of well-managed cities. NYC is probably the least worst, but even that's more because of high density and wealthy people making up for government waste.

The ideal place for municipal fiber isn't huge high density cities that already have FiOS and two other providers, it's cities with population ~200K with enough density to be worth the candle but not so much that multiple incumbents are already providing symmetric gigabit for affordable prices.

> I think it'd be more about oversubscribing OLTs until speeds during prime time dropped to just above what's necessary for Netflix. Because that's what all our other public services are like in these cities.

The difference is the proportion of the total cost needed to add capacity. To add a subway line you have to spend a billion dollars digging tunnels, buy more subway cars and then pay to operate them indefinitely. To make the internet faster, you have a one-time cost to upgrade the terminating equipment but can reuse everything already in the ground and thereafter your operating costs are the same as before, if not lower when newer equipment is more efficient.

It's less expensive to the point that not doing it is typically either incompetence or for strategic reasons, e.g. for price discrimination or because purposely not upgrading transit links hampers video competitors and forces Netflix to pay for peering.