One of the key differences between community owned networks and those driven by profit is customer service. Community-driven providers spend more and create more jobs in the community to ensure subscribers' needs are met. The massive private companies instead choose to outsource the jobs to call centers (sometimes in the U.S., sometimes outside) in order to cut costs (and jobs - see the report from the Media and Democracy Coalition).
We've seen a few examples of the big carrier approach in this arena - as when Cablevision billed apartment residents $500 after a fire for the DVR that was consumed in the blaze... stay classy, Cablevision.
Another difference between community networks and the big carriers is that big carriers see little reason to upgrade their anemic networks to ensure communities remain competitive in the digital age. As Free Press has long documented [pdf] big companies like AT&T have been investing less in recent years as the U.S. has continued falling in international broadband rankings.
Up here in Minnesota, Qwest has invested in FTTN - what they call fiber-to-the-node. We call it Fiber-to-the-Nowhere. For those who happen to live very close to the node, they get slightly faster DSL speeds that are still vastly asymmetrical. Meanwhile, Qwest has branded this modest improvement for some as "fiber-optic fast" and "heavy duty (HD)" Internet, misleading customers into thinking they are actually going to get faster speeds than Comcast's DOCSIS 3.
Much as I hate to praise the middling DOCSIS 3 upgrade, it certainly offers a better experience than any real results we have seen with Qwest. But as we carefully documented in this report, community networks offer more for less.
Two friends recently moved to Qwest. One, J, was convinced by a Qwest salesperson that Qwest would be much faster so he signed up for a 20Mbps down package. Fortunately, he didn't cancel the cable immediately because he was back on it quickly - he says Qwest dropped out 4 times in the day he had it (before cancelling it). He never saw downstream speeds faster than 6-8 Mbps and the upstream never even hit 1Mbps.
Another, E, signed up for Qwest's 40 Mbps upstream / 5 Mbps downstream service. Being a rather technical guy, he tried a variety of speedtests as well as FTP transfers from non-rate limited servers. Never saw 40/5 but did see a best of 37/4.5 (not the same iteration) at one point. Most of the results where around 50-60% percent of the promised speeds, with some extremely slow results mixed in.
Bear in mind that cable compares favorably right now, but with household traffic increasing some 30% every year, sharing that cable connection with hundreds of neighbors starts to look like gridlock in the near future.
This is what one can expect from a provider that puts profits and shareholders before the needs of the community -- including an honest representation of what people are buying.
At a recent Martinsville City Council meeting, the council offered unanimous support for a phased expansion of the city’s Municipal Internet Network (MiNet). What exactly the expansion will look like, and how it will be funded, very much remain a work in progress. Despite having been first constructed in the 1990s, Martinsville’s MiNet only has about 376 customers in a city of nearly 14,000 residents. There’s roughly 20 users currently on a multi-month waiting list, eager to get access to affordable fiber at speeds up to a gigabit per second (Gbps).
Golden, Colorado has struck a new right-of-way agreement with Google Fiber that should expedite the competitive delivery of affordable fiber to the city of 20,000. The deal gives Google Fiber non-exclusive access to public right-of-way to build a commercial broadband network, though it delivers no guarantee of uniform access across the entire city.
Los Angeles becomes first city in the nation to define digital discrimination at the local level in the wake of the new rules issued by the Federal Communications Commission to prevent digital discrimination. Other cities from Oakland to Cleveland are also leveraging the new FCC rules for local action.
Waterloo, Iowa’s municipal broadband project has taken a major step forward after nearly two decades of planning. Waterloo Fiber officials just launched their first limited fiber trial, will connect their first commercial customers in February, and are on target to deploy affordable fiber at speeds up to 10 gigabit per second (Gbps) to every last city resident by 2026. Construction of the network began last summer at a groundbreaking ceremony hosted by Waterloo Mayor Quentin Hart. Last month the city connected the first of four participants in a limited pilot project.
A looming new bill by Republican Kentucky State Senator Gex Williams could undermine decades of broadband progress made in the state’s capital city by a popular locally-owned utility, Frankfort Plant Board (FPB). Home to 28,000 Kentuckians, locals and utility officials are incensed at the bill, which they believe will unnecessarily result in higher rates, fewer jobs, and less broadband competition overall. Williams is circulating a bill in the Kentucky state legislature that, if passed, would force FPB to sell its broadband division to a private-sector company and subject it to more stringent oversight requirements.
The Idaho Broadband Advisory Board (BAB) has greenlit $120 million in broadband grants from the Idaho Capital Projects Fund (CPF) to fund 18 different broadband projects across Idaho, delivering affordable fiber access to 30,000 homes and businesses, many for the first time.