Ask HN: Advice on bringing community broadband to Los Alamos?
As a complete outsider, I would think of this as follows.  The current status quo is a Comcast&#x2F;CenturyLink duopoly.  Let&#x27;s imagine I wanted to start a local ISP.  What would kill my company the fastest?<p>The thing that would pop up as #1 for me is access to poles to run fiber.  If this killed Google Fiber it can definitely kill a smaller upstart.<p>There are gatekeepers who limit this access and they work for the county, in the permit office.  The incumbents have a relationship with these people, and if they don&#x27;t you better believe that their folks will start building one as soon as your project is announced.  All your local contractors currently supporting Comcast are also not on your side.<p>It is in these people&#x27;s best interest to see your project die.  To make things worse, they don&#x27;t have to work very hard to make it happen.  All they have to do is sit on a permit application long enough to cast doubt on the project.  Whereas the broadband manager has a huge hill to climb in comparison: they would have to build a relationship with all the people blocking their progress or figure out how to sidestep them.<p>So the person you are looking for should have high-caliber government sales skills.  Good luck finding someone like that who also has a masters degree in CS and will work for 140k.  This person can make millions in commissions in enterprise IT sales and they know it.