Debunking Municipal Broadband Myths - Episode 596 of the Community Broadband Bits Podcast

Christopher Mitchell (00:07):
Welcome to another episode of the Community Broadband Bits podcast. I'm Christopher Mitchell at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance in Minnesota, and I'm here with Sean Gonsalves, our Associate Director for Communications. Welcome back, Sean.

Sean Gonsalves (00:26):
Alright, glad to be back.

Christopher Mitchell (00:28):
Sorry that we missed last week [00:00:30] for anyone who was actually looking for a show. I think we missed it. I was on vacation. I did not miss it. Going to get some more in the can though, so we don't run into that problem again. We did, however, launch the Building for Digital Equity podcast. Again, that is back up, so we'll encourage people to check that out and be a good place to pick up some digital equity related content over every other week or so, I think is the schedule.

Sean Gonsalves (00:57):
Yes, yes.

Christopher Mitchell (00:59):
Awesome. [00:01:00] Sean, today we are going to talk about some of the arguments we've been hearing against municipal broadband with what's going on in New York and California and a few other places.

Sean Gonsalves (01:10):
That's

Christopher Mitchell (01:10):
Right. It seems like some of these people are getting paychecks again from the telephone and cable companies and they're starting to make some claims, so we wanted to address them.

Sean Gonsalves (01:21):
Right. I guess would you say that these were called before Crazy Talk? This is another addition. I mean, it seems like maybe like every six months to a year now we might have to do these [00:01:30] like they keep, I

Christopher Mitchell (01:31):
Think it might be a little more frequent than that. Yeah. So what are we going to address first? What do you want to do?

Sean Gonsalves (01:36):
I think a good way to start is just by reminding our vast audience of listeners about something that is underway in the state of New York. So the state of New York had established a municipal infrastructure program, which is designed to provide grant dollars for municipalities to build broadband networks. There were four pilots that worked very well and they [00:02:00] just launched it for the rest of the state. Shoot, I wish I had the exact amount somewhere on the order of couple hundred million dollars being made available. I forget the exact amount. And

Christopher Mitchell (02:10):
When they stop messing around with the policy, when it settles down a little bit, we're going to do a show about it. But it's been changing around a little bit. So that's why we haven't gone in depth on it.

Sean Gonsalves (02:19):
But the point is, is that the state assembly and the state Senate, they're in New York and the governor, they're all doing, they're in the midst of budget season. April 1st [00:02:30] was sort of the official deadline, although they haven't met that, and it is reconciling the different budget proposals from the state Senate, the Assembly and the Governor, and buried in the language of the state assembly budget. Proposal is a stipulation that limits that how those funds can be spent, namely, that they can only be used to serve or to build connections to unserved and underserved locations that creates all kinds of financial viability problems. They knew exactly what they were doing. Our [00:03:00] sources within the State House say this is Charter all over it, their lobbyists who've been pushing this hard and it just so happens that at the same time, boom, we see this gentleman who is clearly a scholar since he's associated with the New York Law School. No,

Christopher Mitchell (03:16):
No, no, no, no, no. Aha. See, here's the thing. He is with the New York School of Law, which is a, I don't know if I'll get in trouble for calling it a pretend university, and I don't have the kind of expertise [00:03:30] to call it a pretend university, but there are law schools out there that exist mostly to fool people into thinking they're going to get a degree that is going to be useful in the world and then find out that they have paid too much for too little knowledge. And some of those schools have departments that get money, as best I can tell, I'm guessing from the big cable and telephone companies because they just happen to have a department that exists to say things that are not true, [00:04:00] that happen to further the agenda of companies like Charter Spectrum. So this is not NYU, this is not a prestigious university that is actually out there that has a long history of educating people and them going on to do great things. This is the New York School of Law, which if you look it up, does not get the best ratings.

Sean Gonsalves (04:25):
Okay. So this guy isn't exactly quite as esteemed [00:04:30] as, what was it about a decade ago that Christopher U tried to attempt to do? A serious

Christopher Mitchell (04:37):
Christopher U is held in higher esteem than these jokers at NYSL. I believe it is how it is abbreviated, but none of these people are taken seriously. The people that actually care about knowledge in these places, which sometimes are few and far between, they laugh at these people. They wish they could get rid of 'em. I think these are not scholars. These are people who are getting a paycheck and a pretty nice one, I'm guessing. [00:05:00] Well,

Sean Gonsalves (05:01):
Who did take them or him seriously?

Christopher Mitchell (05:04):
Who?

Sean Gonsalves (05:04):
Forbes Magazine.

Christopher Mitchell (05:06):
Okay. Also Forbes Magazine, not what it used to be. You're in the publishing world. My friend Forbes magazine, a number of years ago, I remember this because when I was asked to be a columnist occasionally at Forbes, it was right after they had gotten rid of all of their standards.

(05:22):
I'm sure I published something there once or twice, but it was long after they relax their standards. At this point, I'm [00:05:30] just going to say, Sean, we could make it a game of, we could write something terribly and see how bad it was that we could still get something published in Forbes. So sometimes the stuff I agree with and sometimes the stuff I disagree with, and there is good stuff that is published by Forbes, but the fact that it is in Forbes is no longer an indication that it is worth reading in the way that in the days of your with functioning magazines and business models that worked it's whole new Forbes.

Sean Gonsalves (05:58):
Although, although [00:06:00] I would imagine that the general reading public is not exactly privy to that. And plenty of eyeballs saw what I call a hit piece that this guy Michael Santorelli, I believe I'm pronouncing his last name correctly. I hope so because Michael Santorelli wrote a piece that was published in Forbes and he's been trying to really give Senator Rachel May state Senator New York some flack for her support of municipal broadband. And so the piece in Forbes Magazine [00:06:30] reads pretty much like you think it would. But in this discussion, we kind of want to get into some of the warmed over half-baked misleading claims and framing that this legal scholar has put together about municipal broadband.

Christopher Mitchell (06:46):
So we're going to talk about that for the next 20 minutes. And I also wanted to note the program in New York is well-designed in the sense that it is not one of these programs that pretends that we have data that we don't have. We talked about this before, where the [00:07:00] unserved is the underserved, the municipal networks that have been built in New York and that will be built in New York will benefit both those who have no service available today as well as those who have a substandard service that's available today as well as those who cannot afford the service that might be available today. And so one of the claims that is often made more recently is that municipal networks are building in areas where people already have some kind of access. And I'll just say, yes, that [00:07:30] is true. Charter spectrum among other companies does claim to serve a number of these areas.

(07:36):
In some of these areas. That's true. In other areas, they're wrong. I'm not actually serving the home or the service is crummy or it's way too expensive or any number of other things. And we don't have good data on that because companies like Charter Spectrum make sure the FCC won't collect it also, that the state won't collect it. So it is true that some of the municipal networks are what they call overbuilding, which [00:08:00] is to say they're building a very high quality network in an area where there is a claim that something already exists and who knows if it's true or not.

Sean Gonsalves (08:08):
Exactly. And I'll just add that my favorite in air quotes, actually my least favorite term in all of broadband is this term overbuilding, which normal people call competition. As you point out, as you say, it's true obviously, that there are municipal networks building in cities and towns where there is some existing coverage by one of the incumbents. But you know what? [00:08:30] There's about two dozen cities and towns in Massachusetts that all have Comcast and guess what? And they're all covered by Comcast and every one of them can't stand it. Constituents all over the place are saying, we want want options. We want a choice. And therefore we are super interested in municipal broadband or at least trying to seed the ground with ways in which competition can be brought into the market.

Christopher Mitchell (08:56):
Right now, let's talk about that. We are talking about competition, and I don't want to spend a long time [00:09:00] on this, but one of the things that we've seen is this argument that electric service is a natural monopoly service, whereas broadband is a competitive service. And I remember this, and I remember thinking about this when I was straight out of grad school. I'd taken a few microeconomics courses and stuff like that, and I was trying to figure out is this a natural and monopoly? And I don't want to bore people with all that, but I want to be clear about something here. Electric service is a monopoly service because [00:09:30] states and the federal government have decided that it should be regulated as a natural monopoly service. Broadband is a competitive service because the federal government has decided we should regulate it as though it was a competitive service.

(09:43):
There's nothing that's significantly different about these things that makes one obviously not competitive and Monopoly and the other one very competitive. Now, if you wanted to make a case, I do think that in a future, [00:10:00] particularly one where we regulate spectrum more efficiently in a way that is not designed just to reward the Department of Defense at and t, Verizon and T-Mobile, I could see wireless changing that game. But to get high quality, affordable Internet service out to everyone that is reliable, we need to get a wire to everyone's home. And that looks a lot like electricity. That's what electricity is, right? At least that's the non-competitive part of electricity, getting a wire to people's homes, making sure it works. [00:10:30] And so this whole idea that like, oh, electricity is totally different. Crap, that's crap. Electricity's harder to build, it's more expensive to build. People die when you get it wrong in ways that usually doesn't happen with Internet service. They're both innovating in a lot of different ways. You could argue against me, I'm not going to say this isn't something you could argue about, but they're not worlds apart at the least.

Sean Gonsalves (10:50):
I agree. I don't know all of the fine distinctions that I think economists may try to split hairs over in terms of what's a natural monopoly, et cetera. [00:11:00] But I feel like the one difference, at least sort of on sort of a gut level between electricity and Internet services that we're all used to having electricity and people are actually sort of embarrassed if there are pockets of America that don't have electricity,

Christopher Mitchell (11:18):
Right? Yeah. No, exactly. Yeah. If Internet service had been invented before electricity, which that would be, that's interesting. I would like to read that novel proposing how exactly that would happen. I don't know. [00:11:30] But people would be like, man, it's so weird. Electricity came about after Reagan, and so we decided it should be competitive. These things are not obvious, massive differences. This is a choice of regulatory. It's a regulatory decision that's been made by Congress and it's not an unreasonable choice, but it's just that electricity and broadband are simply not that different in the way that some of these folks want to talk about it. Okay. What's one of the comments he's been making [00:12:00] that you wanted to address,

Sean Gonsalves (12:02):
At least in the Forbes piece, and he's been verbose in other forums that we've come across, but in his Forbes piece, he once again trots out some of the usual suspects as examples of failures. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,

Christopher Mitchell (12:19):
Which was Wi-Fi. I'm going to give you 15 seconds on each as you go through Philadelphia Wi-Fi network, not even owned by the city, decided that privatized [00:12:30] a private company building out in Philadelphia 20 years ago in some neighborhoods, not even comparable to municipal broadband networks, just not irrelevant,

Sean Gonsalves (12:44):
But except that Philadelphia gets to take credit for that, for this private company's failure,

Christopher Mitchell (12:49):
Right?

Sean Gonsalves (12:50):
Yeah. Not exactly municipal broadly, it'd be like

Christopher Mitchell (12:52):
Blaming the state of California for Enron, although possibly if you dig into that, possibly the lax oversight, but that's outside [00:13:00] the realm of our discussion here. Yes,

Sean Gonsalves (13:02):
Provo, Utah is another failure. Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (13:05):
I mean, Provo, Utah, indeed. I mean, Provo, Utah is a classic example of the failure of state policy, which was designed to punish a city that wanted to have broadband competition. Provo and the cities that are part of Utopia wanted to build a network. Provo wanted to have a municipally owned system. They have a municipal electric there, just like Spanish Fork did. And the legislature said, Nope, we're going to [00:13:30] make it really hard and make your business model risky. And you know what? They succeeded. The state made sure Provo would not succeed. Provo ended up selling the network to Google, which meant that they got Google fiber at a time when a lot of other folks were desperate for it. And there's a lot of different numbers that have been bandied about as to how much Provo lost over the years. I don't want to dig into that.

(13:50):
But those numbers are usually based on the amount of money they borrowed and ignores the revenue. They generated the revenue that they offset by serving their municipal services and things [00:14:00] like that by delivering Internet access to city departments at no cost and that sort of stuff. I mean, given the prices that Comcast and US West were charging significant savings, were there no doubt. So I'll just say I, Provo I think you would say is a failure. It was a failure that the state that insured, if you look at Spanish Fork, there's no reason that I Provo, if it did not get targeted by the state, I Provo probably would've been much more like Spanish Fork, which is one of the more amazing success stories we have. [00:14:30] I mean, Spanish Fork is up there with Chattanooga if you actually dig into it. Just really wild success.

Sean Gonsalves (14:35):
And then of course there is the tried and true Burlington, Vermont example once again.

Christopher Mitchell (14:40):
Yeah, so Burlington, I mean, I'll stand up, say Burlington is a failure. It has nothing to do with broadband. You had a mayor and a chief administrative officer that screwed up and then they hid their problems, they refused. The city council did not do proper oversight until it was too late. And you have a city that dug itself into a big hole. It happened to be [00:15:00] around a broadband service. It could have been on any other service. That's bad governance. Every local government needs to have citizens and a city council that's on the lookout for that sort of thing. So yes, you could blame that. Now they have a high quality fiber optic network. People there love having the choice not being stuck with Comcast. So I think if you ask people like, is that the way you would do it? If you could go back and do it again, they would say no. And they would prefer that it was still publicly owned. It was privatized. This city took some kind of a loss. Again, [00:15:30] we don't know how much because no one really dug into the books. There was a lot of deception as best we could tell from that administration of that mayor. And so we don't know how much was lost, but I'll say it was not good. And that's the sort of thing that cities should be trying to avoid, however, not the kind of failure we would expect to see in many places.

Sean Gonsalves (15:49):
So I don't know if you want to hit on the other two, but the point that I was trying to get at, he mentions Bristol, Virginia and Opelika, Alabama.

Christopher Mitchell (15:57):
Opa like Alabama privatized because the state would [00:16:00] not allow them to expand. They wanted the benefits of this network to go more, be spent more widely. Also, the network was, I think, barely breaking even in that case. What you always want to do is you want to get more customers to be generating revenue against a fixed cost of a lot of the network assets that were built, and the state would not allow them to expand. They privatized it. The company that bought it has been expanding. It seems like it's doing well. [00:16:30] So if Opelika have been able to expand, I think they'd be doing even better. Bristol, Virginia, that's another case of unfortunately, corruption. We have not seen as much corruption in the municipal space as we did in the federal space. However, it is true that when you have these enterprises that are generating cashflow and stuff like that, you can have people that decide to try to get some of their own.

(16:54):
They try to get some edge on it, and they can be misgoverned. Now, we [00:17:00] of course, see that in the private sector too, in the public sector. We actually find out about it more often because usually it will come to light eventually. Whereas in the private sector, if it does, something does happen, they can often keep it secret B, what I would say at and t does in terms of paying its executives in the shareholders and whatnot, is a form of extraction and theft. That is probably a much bigger problem for communities than even if they had a local ownership with someone trying to pull a little bit extra out of it. So [00:17:30] there is no scenario here. If there was a scenario in which I could tell you, Sean, if a city would just do a this and this, A, B, and C here, it would've nothing to worry about. That's not true. It is a complicated world. There's a lot of people out there trying to figure out how to get something that they probably don't deserve, and it happens in the private sector, happens in the public sector. So I mean, I don't find these five examples, which are five that come up over and over again. They're not representative.

Sean Gonsalves (17:58):
Well, and to that [00:18:00] point, and this is what these things always miss, is the larger context, which is all these scholars pick out the same handful. So really out of these five, there's like one and a half that you might be able to label as a failure in terms of a municipal broadband system out of 450 or so municipal broadband networks in the country. You think that's a little bit of context that might be important. I mean, you've got hundreds of these networks in operation, and yet it's the same [00:18:30] 3, 4, 5 that they trot out over and over and over again. So that's one of the more glaring things. But you had some things that you wanted to talk about. Yeah,

Christopher Mitchell (18:40):
One of those is related to this, which is a claim that like, oh, there's so many of these networks and when things go wrong, they have to sell 'em at a steep discount or they have to find some way of propping them up. It has happened. I could tell you Ashland, Oregon, they had to create a new tax [00:19:00] effectively to help pay for some of the cost overruns that they saw because of the way the planning was done. Now, after a few years of that, it might've been as many as five or 10. You and I were just recently revisiting Ashland last year, and there was no sign that there was a problem anymore. They corrected it, right? Utopia, same thing. Have big problems. They made some major mistakes, and now it is a remarkable success story. We often talk about Clarksville, Tennessee, where they built this network, they had some real problems for the first five years, [00:19:30] they've overcome them, and now they've saved tens of millions of dollars from the electric rates.

(19:34):
I mean, their electric rates are much lower than they would be otherwise. And they're building all kinds of new electric infrastructure that is paid for with profits from the telecom system, from the broadband system that is making sure the people who are paying their electricity bills don't have to pay a lot more for the benefits they're getting. And so the first thing I would note is that these systems do have problems. Every telecom system has an issue. I've talked to folks [00:20:00] from the smallest ISPs, and I've talked with a few of the folks who want to chat with us from the bigger ISPs. Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone makes catastrophic mistakes, and then you try to recover from them. And that's what happens. There are a few cases where they don't do it fast enough, and then there's a real problem. And so there's one Groton in Connecticut, it was sold at a big loss from what I can tell. There's a few like that, but the vast majority of them are networks that where they've been claimed to be a failure. And it actually turns out they've been a huge success [00:20:30] story.

Sean Gonsalves (20:31):
Right? And I know this isn't a perfect analogy, but I think about it sometimes as a way to point to sort of the ridiculous of these, well check out these handful of failures. Therefore, municipal broadband is a bad model. It's inherently wrong and unstable, not viable. The analogy between restaurants and ISPs is not one-to-one by any stretch, but restaurants or businesses fail all the time, but no one ever makes the case that because a particular operation or [00:21:00] business failed, that means the entire idea is bad. Oh, look, Denny's went out of business or whoever. I mean, maybe they didn't. And therefore all breakfast restaurants are bad ideas. It's just ridiculous. And so there's that aspect. And then I also think about, and this is something that we've talked about before, is to the extent that you've got fairly recent municipal broadband networks that are edging up to breaking even or breaking even, or maybe have to subsidize a portion of [00:21:30] it in the upcoming years or two, why shouldn't communities be able to make that choice? If that's something that, if they feel like that infrastructure is important enough for reasons that you don't see on the balance sheet, why shouldn't communities be able to, I mean, you talk about that was it that trucking company in Minnesota,

Christopher Mitchell (21:48):
Fortune Trucking.

Sean Gonsalves (21:50):
And so I just think that this whole debate tends to obscure and tries to remove that option of community saying, you know what? We don't [00:22:00] care that this isn't some big cash cow that's making money hand over fingers. We're happy with universal coverage, and if it means that we're putting in a few thousand dollars a year, but it also means that we're retaining businesses or attracting new ones because we have this network, then it's worth it to us.

Christopher Mitchell (22:17):
And that brings up a key question that I think people should always ask. Who decides? A lot of times we get focused on what should they decide? Oh, I'm from a blue state. I don't like the way those red states are doing things. I [00:22:30] think communities shouldn't be able to ban plastic bags or something like that. And it's like, you know what? The question is, who should decide? And if a city wants to decide to ban plastic bags, alright, I might agree, I might disagree, and we can argue about that, but the city should be making that choice when it comes to this infrastructure. The city's got to be able to choose. The state doesn't know what's going on. I can tell you Michael doesn't know what's going on. He doesn't know what's going on in the cities that he feels confident talking about. And so [00:23:00] the idea that he's going to make rules or propose rules that will impact all these other places that he doesn't know what he's talking about and how that will impact them, it's ridiculous.

(23:09):
And that's the part that gets me is that there is no point at which a person right now sitting in a state capitol or in Washington DC knows enough about the local situation to be able to tell the community, oh, the obvious solution is for you to just try to get Comcast to do better or for you to build a municipal broadband network. Obviously, [00:23:30] we don't think the federal government should require this of local governments to try to resolve the massive market problems we have. This is something where local folks need to come together. So here's what happens, right? It's not the ideal of there's a town of 15,000 people and 5,000 people show up for a town meeting and they somehow do it, right? No. What happens is some group of people does their homework and proposes it. People start evaluating the plan. It goes to city council.

(23:56):
People that care can talk about it. They'll make up their mind. You [00:24:00] and I have studied a lot of places where they have said, you know what? We looked at it. We're not confident enough of doing it. It's fine. Their choice, a lot of them in two or three years are going to come back and they're going to look at it again. And some of them are going to say, no, we still don't like it. It's still too risky. Others are going to say, you know what? Now we think that it's worth doing. That's the way this system should work. And the thing that kills me is people like Michael Santorelli are out there trying to use this half-assed research to convince people to take that choice away. So they don't even [00:24:30] have that option because he's saying, whatever you got there in West Plains, Missouri, that's good enough for you. He wouldn't want to live there and deal with that service, but it's good enough for them.

Sean Gonsalves (24:43):
What's that network? Shucks, the community in, I think it's Frankfurt in Kentucky, that there's the senate proposal from a guy that doesn't even live in the district trying to force the city to sell their wildly popular and successful municipal broadband network. [00:25:00] And I'm not saying that this will happen, and I think, I don't know how likely that is to pass, but let's just say it does in a bad scenario, and they're forced to sell that network. That network will end up being on one of these failure lists down the road and totally leave out the part that they were forced to sell their network.

Christopher Mitchell (25:21):
Yeah. Yep. No, exactly. A lot of the networks that have failed are in places that actually have more regulations and make it more difficult to do business. You would think that [00:25:30] we would have more of our failures in the states that have not regulated, right? Because supposedly these laws are about protecting the taxpayers. That's what they all say. And yet, I'd be curious if we actually looked at the number of networks that are claimed to be failures that we would agree are failures. I think we would find that most of them are in states as I'm just thinking about this right now. Most of them are in states where there is some kind of restriction that has made their business model more difficult. So there's no reason to think that we would see [00:26:00] a benefit by any kind of policy change that would make it harder to do this. Now, one of the things that as we close, I do think is an argument that I've seen from different quarters, which is that some cities use a demand driven model, and so they don't do universal service

Sean Gonsalves (26:17):
Like fiberhoods. In other words,

Christopher Mitchell (26:18):
They use fiberhoods. Now, first of all, most folks don't use fiberhoods. So this is a pretty small minority of folks that do because, and I'm always curious about if you're building a fiber hood, it means that you're going to build one neighborhood first, [00:26:30] and then you might be building another neighborhood halfway across town. That's no way to build a network. If you're building out, you want to build in an area, you want to keep your costs down by building in adjacent areas and driving up in those areas most likely. So that fiber hood model is not very common. True.

Sean Gonsalves (26:47):
Also, and also in fairness to those who are using the fiber hood approach, the logic is that we don't want to spend a lot of upfront capital and we're going to use the revenues from [00:27:00] the network from our subscribers to continue to expand. So it's not like it's a ridiculous model. And something, it kind of reminds me of another model, which is I feel like private ISPs often do, which is build to the areas where there's the most interest.

Christopher Mitchell (27:14):
But what happens then that's where it changes. So if you're living in an area and you're maybe a lower density or higher cost, the private companies, you're out of luck. You can't force them to build. Whereas you get your neighborhoods neighbors together [00:27:30] and you're talking about this is a city enterprise. I pay tax dollars. Why am I not getting served by the city enterprise? You can go out and change city policy. What we see in the Fiberhoods is often that's how they get started, but often they end up covering everyone. So this is just, I feel like it's nonsense because cities are typically more responsive and are more likely to be available throughout the entire city than private companies because their jobs depend on [00:28:00] keeping those people happy. So I think that's where we're going to have to leave it. Any last words?

Sean Gonsalves (28:04):
No. Like I say, I think we just have to get used to doing this whack-a-mole thing, because these things do not go away. But I do think though it is ultimately a sign that they're actually losing the propaganda war in that regard or the battle for hearts and minds. Now, they have lobbying power and they certainly can bend the ears of lawmakers, but from the general public standpoint of view, [00:28:30] the arguments that you hear against municipal broadband just run counter to people's guts on the street in terms of they want choice, they want competition, they want these kind of things. And when you're resorting to making an argument, trying to convince people that choice is a bad thing, and just let the status quo, which is how we're here in the first place, just continue. You're on the losing end of an argument.

Christopher Mitchell (28:53):
I'll go further than that. If that's the kind of thing that you're going to spend your time doing, you might end up at some washed up second [00:29:00] rate, third rate, academic institution, academic wannabe institution, just pedaling this stuff hoping that some big monopoly is going to keep writing you checks to me. I don't know. For some folks, they're like, man, this is great. I don't have to work that hard. I don't have to demonstrate I'm doing anything. I'm going to get this check. I'm going to be like, keep living the life I want to like doing serious work. You like doing serious work. To me, that sounds like a horror show, but for some folks, that's a pretty good life, I guess. So it's a big country [00:29:30] got thrown at 330 million people. There's all we got all kinds of places. Then it's

Sean Gonsalves (29:33):
A good life. Especially if you have yourself personal access to high-speed Internet and you don't have any problem paying for it, then who cares if there's millions of other people who are not in your shoes?

Christopher Mitchell (29:44):
Right? Yeah. Well, I hope everyone enjoyed having a week off last week. Got to catch up. We're going to try and keep 'em rolling from here out. We'll see how well we do. But don't forget to tune into the building for Digital Equity feed, and if you listen for another minute, you'll hear about all the other [00:30:00] ILSR podcasts and stuff like that. So thanks for your time today.

Ry Marcattilio (30:03):
We have transcripts for this and other podcasts available at communitynets.org/broadbandbits. Email us@podcastmuninetworks.org with your ideas for the show. Follow Chris on Twitter. His handle is at communitynets. Follow communitynets.org Stories on Twitter that handles at muni networks. Subscribe to this and other podcasts from ILSR, including Building Local Power, local energy rules, [00:30:30] and the Composting for Community Podcast. You can access them anywhere you get your podcasts. You can catch the latest important research from all of our initiatives if you subscribe to our monthly newsletter@ilsr.org. While you're there, please take a moment to donate your support in any amount. Keeps us going. Thank you to Arnie Sby for the song Warm Duck Shuffle, licensed through Creative Commons.