Cedar Fallsian here - our broadband service is amazing and unfaltering. The alternative cable company that serves our area on the other hand has weekly and monthly outages, and I regret to say, that's not even purely a residential deployment issue.

In Waterloo, IA, our neighboring town, the city council initially approved then backed out of working with Cedar Falls to participate in a greater municipal fiber deployment. Following a storm in 2009 that damaged utility lines on poles, I believe Cedar Falls moved forward with their plans to deploy fiber and deployed service to almost all homes over the course of a year and a half. The transition was seamless, and since then bandwidth has more than quintupled for the regular tier. I get 50/25 and it's rock solid. The best internet service I've ever had.

On the other hand, as an IT consultant I have businesses I work with in Waterloo. Some of them would like to switch to technologies like VOIP to reduce costs, but their Mediacom cable goes down on a weekly basis. I have one client for whom I have never seen a whole month of uptime, and they have had multiple business days without service in the past year. The only alternative for most of my clients is CenturyLink DSL, which hardly qualifies as broadband with most of the DSLAMs too widely distributed and over-subscribed for reliable throughput.

Mediacom is the same company that signed a letter to congress decrying municipal investment, and published a press release today[1] about how insulting it was that the President chose to support a municipal utility instead of their investment in Iowa.

If companies like Mediacom and Century Link really cared about providing a service, they would support Title II and competition. But they don't. The high barrier to entry suits them just fine, and as a result, internet options are terrible in Waterloo, and technology businesses have fled to Cedar Falls. We've even apparently been named the "Digital Capital" by Google (but I have no idea what that means, I personally think Des Moines has the best access to the backbone with Microsoft and Facebook both opening up datacenters there).

Sure, our gigabit fiber isn't $70 here, like Google offered, but it's there. And my internet service has never been more reliable. I know people who have Mediacom and Centurylink, and they hate it. And unlike their press release speaks about, the fiber deployment wasn't financially unsustainable or a waste of taxpayer dollars. As Mediacom says, "there is no reason to invest even more government dollars in municipally-owned broadband ventures, many of which wind up in financial difficulty."

Well, I'm curious if Mr. Commisso of Mediacom did any fact checking. CFU is self-funded. Even better, CFU actually contributes back to the city's general fund its excess revenue. It's not so much "spending taxpayer money" as it is saving, at least now that it's up and running.

Edited in addendum: Oh yeah, and for something the network engineers here might approve of: even when torrenting at 50mbps, my latency to Google and Microsoft is unchanged (10-13ms) and there appears to be little or no bufferbloat causing congestion. I've been able to play competitive real-time games and Skype while streaming, downloading, etc.

[1] http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20150114006231/en/Medi...