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/CenturyLink duopoly.  Let'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'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's best interest to see your project die.  To make things worse, they don'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.