Mayor Gary Fuller won’t tolerate lies about his city. In a recent Opelika City News release titled, Setting the Record Straight - Response to Yellowhammer article, Mayor Fuller corrected the numerous misleading errors in a piece written by Jordan LaPorta. The Yellowhammer article covered a Taxpayer's Protection Alliance Foundation (TPA) report, filled with errors and misrepresentation about municipal Internet networks. TPA is one of the many front groups that describe themselves as "nonpartisan think tanks" but are actually funded by industry leaders with an agenda to advance policies that limit competition.

Mayor Fuller has seen untruths written about Opelika before, but this time he felt it was time to fight the flying monkeys.

Get Your Facts Right

Mayor Fuller corrected a number of brazen untruths LaPorta tossed out in his article, including:

• OPS ONE is not taxpayer-funded - No, LaPorta, there are no tax subsidies. Additionally, there have not been any federal or state grants used for the network.
• Expenditures grossly overstated - LaPorta incorrectly attributes the cost of an electric grid modernization ($20 million) to the cost of the FTTH network ($23 million). The two are not one and the same. Do your homework.
• Number of Gig subscribers - LaPorta reports that OPS has one Gigabit subscriber, but they actually have five residential customers who take the service. The city council has recently reduced the price to $94.99 for Gigabit service in some bundles.

This Is Why Opelika Is A Success

OPS ONE is generating annual gross revenues of around $5.5M after three years serving the community. There are more than 3,200 subscribers and testimonials of customers who appreciate obtaining service from a hometown Internet access provider. Even though OPS ONE is still young, states Mayor Fuller, it’s on track:

Mr. LaPorta does correctly quote me as stating Opelika’s network “has not...

Earlier this legislative session, we followed legislation in Virginia, which would have negatively impacted municipalities’ ability to use their publicly owned infrastructure to improve connectivity. We’re now watching a bill in Missouri that’s been resurrected from legislation that died last year. Another state bill just appeared on our radar in Georgia that interferes with local community authority by prescribing stringent rules on permitting and applications.

The Wrong Direction

When our Christopher saw it, he said: 

This is based on the false notion that cities are the barrier to better networks rather than recognizing the power of pole owners and existing attachers as a far more significant barrier.

The bill, HB 336 or the Broadband Strategy for All of Georgia Act, allows communities to be certified as “broadband ready,” which may allow providers that serve those communities eligible for state tax incentives. In order for a community to be certified as a “broadband ready community,” it must comply with a specific model ordinance, created by the state that dictates the process for reviewing applications for broadband projects.

The bill starts out all wrong, by defining broadband as 10 Megabits per second (Mbps) download by 1 Mbps upload. Clearly that indicates that its point of origin is the incumbent telephone companies who want to make it easier to provide their slow DSL, rather than encourage upgrades to the FCC definition of “broadband.” As a reminder, the federal government considers broadband to be 25 Mbps / 3 Mbps.

The process proposed in HB 336 assumes that local communities that are trying to protect their public spaces are the bad guys and any DSL or cable company who wants to insert their lines or equipment in public space is but a poor victim. The bill applies to any “public rights of way, infrastructure and poles, river and bridge crossings, or any other physical assets owned or controlled by the political subdivision.”

The Heavy Hand Of The State

HB 336 caps application...

While people in rural Washington State continue to limp long on DSL, satellite, and even dial-up, two bills in the state legislature that would have allowed public utility districts (PUDs) to offer retail services stalled in committee. 

Rural Areas Need Retail Service From The PUDs

State law requires PUDs to adhere to the wholesale-only model so rural residents and businesses can't obtain the connectivity they need because national providers don't offer high-quality Internet access in those regions. If no providers are interested in working with the PUDs to lease fiber infrastructure to serve rural areas, potential subscribers in the hardest to reach areas are just out of luck. These two bills would have filled the gaps by allowing PUDs to directly serve customers.

One Step Forward

HB 1938 was reviewed and there was some testimony in the House Technology & Economic Development Committee, but no vote. The Senate companion, SB 5139, was never picked up in the Senate Energy, Environment & Telecommunications Committee. In order for the bills to advance, they needed to pass out of their referred committees by February 17th.

Even though these bills failed to move forward, the fact that they were introduced and one obtained attention from committee members is encouraging. If you live in rural Washington, you understand how difficult it is to obtain fast, affordable, reliable connectivity. You don’t need to wait until a bill has been introduced to contact your elected officials to let them know you support state policies like HB 1938 and SB 5139; they want to hear from you all year.

In January, Governor Bill Haslam announced that he and Senator Mark Norris would introduce legislation to provide grant funding and tax credits to private companies in order to expand rural connectivity in Tennessee. In a recent Knoxville News Sentinel, Christopher took another look at more subsidies to large private providers and how that strategy has worked out so far.

We've reprinted the op-ed here:

Christopher Mitchell: State needs better broadband, not subsidies

If you were tasked with improving the internet access across Tennessee, a good first start would be to examine what is working and what’s not. But when the General Assembly debates broadband, it frequently focuses on what AT&T and Comcast want rather than what is working.

Broadband expansion has turned into a perennial fight between Tennessee’s municipal broadband networks and advocates of better connectivity on one side and AT&T and Comcast on the other. On one side is a taxpayer-subsidized model, while the other depends solely on the revenues of those who choose to subscribe. But which is which?

AT&T has received billions of taxpayer dollars to build its networks, whereas Chattanooga, Tullahoma and Morristown, for example, financed their fiber-optic networks by selling revenue bonds to private investors and repaying them with revenues from their services. The big telephone companies are massively subsidized, whereas municipal networks have generally not used taxpayer dollars.

It is true that after it began building, Chattanooga received a Department of Energy one-time stimulus grant for $111 million, but that was actually less than AT&T is getting from just one federal program in Tennessee alone – over $125 million from the Connect America Fund. And most of the money to Chattanooga went into devices for its smart grid that have since led to massive job gains.

These community networks offer modern connectivity. Chattanooga offers 10,000 Mbps to anyone in its territory. AT&T is getting enormous checks from Uncle Sam to deliver 10 Mbps. Comcast will soon offer 1,000 Mbps, but only for downloads. If you are a small business trying to upload lots of data, Comcast won’t get you there.

According to a 2016 Consumer Reports study, Comcast and AT&T were among the most hated companies across the board. Chattanooga’s Electric...