community broadband networks

Bartow, Florida, located in Polk County near the center of the state, is considering a FTTH network for the community's 17,000 residents. At a recent City Commission meeting, members decided to put city administrators on task and develop a plan to eventually offer triple play services to residents.

Suzie Schottelkotte reported on the initiative for The Ledger.com, quoting Mayor Leo Longworth, who commented, "I think the residents are ready for it and it's something that's needed."

The City has an existing 100 mile fiber network and offers connections to some local businesses. Government and schools also use the network. At the meeting, city commissioners heard from a fiber optic consulting firm that estimated an expansion to households at $3.3 million for capital costs and $2.5 million to run the network during the startup years until the network breaks even. 

Comcast now serves the community through its cable television franchise agreement and is a source of constituent discontent:

"Without discrediting anybody, we just don't have the quality," [Mayor Longworth] said.

The Polk County Democrat also covered the discussion. Steve Steiner referred to the Mayor's comments about the private sector:

[Mayor] Long reminded commissioners that they as well as city staffers and the general public present, are familiar with the problems experienced with the current broadband provider. Long also expressed the doubt another provider would be willing to come to Bartow to install and upgrade the current system in place. The number of businesses and the size of the population does not provide any true incentive.

The Florida Cable Telecommunications Association (lobbyists for the cable industry) responded to the initiative in a predictable fashion. From the Ledger article:

"Before the city fathers take the taxpayers' money and move in this direction, they had better understand what they're getting into," he said. "It's going to be a long time before they're making money. How long do they want to lose money? — that's the real question."

The network generated about $155,000 in revenue for the city in 2012 and both stories indicate the desire to generate revenue as the main impetus. Currently, net income from the city electric department account for about half of Bartow's general fund. Community leaders hope entering the telecommunications industry will diversify the revenue source.

While potential revenue can be a factor, communities tend to primarily focus on expanding connectivity for quality of life, affordability, educational, and economic development. 

Bartow has an advantage because it already possesses an existing network that contributes to local economic development. Students are already connected with city resources, and local government is taking advantage of the network. The leaders and staff at Bartow have a higher level of expertise than communities who start from scratch.

While the commission seemed positive about the plan, both reporters describe a healthy dose of caution when moving forward. From the Ledger article:

"This can be done," [City Manager George Long] told commissioners during Wednesday's workshop. "There are very few negatives here. We can do it, but it has to be done properly."

Glasgow was a true pioneer in community owned broadband networks, starting with its own cable plant in the 1980s. Billy Ray, CEO of Glasgow Electric Plant Board, has been an inspiration for municipal broadband networks -- one can't dig into the early history of LUS Fiber in Louisiana without running into something from Billy Ray, for instance. Glasgow's network has been a tremendous success, resulting in tens of millions of dollars of benefits to the community.

In our interview, we discuss the bitter legal fights of the early years as Glasgow built its own cable network and eventually began offering Internet access. Additionally, we discuss the important role of these information networks in creating more efficient (and less costly) electrical systems -- an incredibly important implication that does not get enough coverage.

Given the extraordinary history of Billy Ray and Glasgow EPB, we hope this will be the first of several conversations exploring that community. You can read more from Billy Ray on his blog.

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This post comes to us from Patrick Lucey of the Open Technology Institute at the New America Foundation. The post was originally published there, but we are excited to feature it here as well.

Last month my colleagues and I at the the Open Technology Institute released a paper titled “Capping the Nation’s Broadband Future?” The paper examines data caps, an increasingly common practice where internet service providers charge individuals a fee if they exceed a monthly threshold on the data they use. The paper discusses how data caps are not a solution to network congestion concerns, nor a reflection of increased costs due to more people being online. A review of public financial documents for Comcast shows their broadband network operating are decreasing. Other costs, like bandwidth transit, are decreasing as well. Instead, data caps are a reflection of a lack of competition in both the home and wireless broadband market. 

As if to hammer home the larger point about a lack of competition, a few days after releasing the paper I received the following flyer in my mailbox. It is a promo piece from a joint marketing agreement between Comcast and Verizon Wireless where they promote each others’ services. Signing up for Verizon Wireless service will give me a discount on my home Comcast subscription. 

Although this agreement was approved by the FCC and Department of Justice, this kind of chummy behavior between supposedly rival companies is hardly a sign of aggressive competition. Verizon FiOS is often cited as the main competitor to incumbent cable companies, even though Verizon officials have stated the company is not expanding FiOS to new markets.  

At a recent public event, Vint Cerf, recognized as one of the creators of the internet, stated that since the days of dial-up service competition among broadband providers has “evaporated.”  Perhaps most telling for the American broadband market are recent developments in China, where new buildings are required to be wired with fiber optics if there is a larger fiber network in the area. The article touts how individuals will have their choice of internet providers. By adopting open access policies such as these on a large scale, customers in China -- a country that has embraced capitalism but is still nominally communist -- could end up enjoying greater free market competition than customers in the U.S. 

The lack of broadband competition in the U.S. has led more and more telecom policy leaders to worry that instead of competing and building state-of-the-art networks, internet service providers are increasingly focused on “harvesting” higher revenues from their customer base. Indeed, recent trends seem to confirm these fears, as providers have begun implementing data cap overage charges, introducing new modem rental fees, and entering into joint marketing agreements. 

It is important to have a discussion around data caps and what they mean for online innovation, commerce and consumer behavior. However, data caps are merely the manifestation of a larger problem: the lack of robust competition among U.S. internet providers. New entrants like Google Fiber in Kansas City or municipally-owned networks in other cities are offering faster broadband speeds and typically without data caps. Policymakers in Washington must focus on ways to encourage these local examples of innovation on a larger national basis in the broadband market.