But are the odds in your favor? I live in the DC area. What are the odds that the public ISP is going to be run better than WMATA, where trains are catching fire on a regular basis? Or the roads, which are chock full of potholes. Or the water system, where the system is full of lead pipe? Or the sewer system that dumps untreated sewage into the local rivers after heavy rains?
The difficulty in an ISP is going to be about initial funding and being sued by regional monopolies. An ISP, specifically one that does not require additional hardware/software to organize and power tiered net neutrality violations logic, has orders of magnitudes less moving parts and disruptive needs for real estate/infrastructure. Maintainence labor could be simplified by training existing city electrical teams to work on both wire sets. We're talking about something with a lot less toes to step on. The failure scenarios for an ISP are so miniscule they make public transportation look like Chernobyl. Does a public ISP need to be ran better than those other things? There's just so much less to mess up and the consequences are just so much smaller and less permanent. Even if the mayor explicitly sells you out to the NSA or acquires someone's browsing history abusively or somehow the internet is out for a day, that's pretty much nothing compared to lead water, out of service rail line, environmental disaster, etc..
