If you want 100Mbps symmetrical broadband—which offers the same upload and download speeds—and you live in the state of North Carolina, you have only one choice: a city-owned broadband provider. The city of Wilson's "Greenlight" ISP recently bragged about signing up "North Carolina's first homeowners" with the service, which costs $150 a month if packaged with other services.

Such publicly owned networks can offer services that incumbents don't, such as the 1Gbps fiber network in Chattanooga, Tennessee, run by the government-owned electric power board. And they sometimes have more incentive to reach every resident, even in surrounding rural areas, in ways that might not make sense for a profit-focused company.

More than 130 US cities now operate such publicly owned broadband networks, according a comprehensive new map developed by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR). The group compiled what it calls the first-ever such list of 54 city-wide fiber networks and 79 city-wide cable networks "whose objective is to maximize value to the community in which they are located rather than to distant stockholders and corporate executives."

ILSR, as its name suggests, believes that local communities must be able to build the networks so important to their own futures, rather than leave something as vital as Internet connectivity to huge corporations, often based far away.

This is especially important now that "the Federal Communications Commission has all but abdicated its role in protecting open and competitive access to the Internet."

The map shows that most community-owned networks exist in the eastern half of the US—and this isn't just because of population density. The northwest quadrant of Iowa, for instance, has eight such networks, most in small communities. California has only a few in the entire state.

Some of the distribution may be the result of state restrictions on community-owned networks. As ILSR's Chris Mitchell noted last year here at Ars, many states have legal barriers in place to such networks. Nebraska, for instance, has an "outright ban" on the practice, while Iowa has no barriers—and Iowa has many community networks while Nebraska has none. (Still, this doesn't explain, say, Kansas, which has no barriers and no community networks.)

Private companies have long objected that government-owned networks represent unfair competition.