Last night, Wilson’s City Council voted to halt Greenlight Internet service to the community of Pinetops, North Carolina. City leaders, faced with the unfortunate reversal of the FCC’s preemption of harmful state anti-muni laws, felt the move was necessary to protect the utility. Service will stop at the end of October.

No Other Solution

Before the vote City Manager Grant Goings told the Wilson Times:

“Unfortunately, there is a very real possibility that we will have to disconnect any customer outside our county. That is the cold, hard truth,” Goings said. “Without getting into the legal options that our city attorney will discuss with the council, I’ll summarize it like this: we have not identified a solution where Greenlight can serve customers outside of our county.

“While we are very passionate about reaching underserved areas and we think the laws are atrocious to prevent people from having service, we’re not going to jeopardize our ability to serve Wilson residents.”

When H129 passed in 2011, it provided an exemption for Wilson, which allows Greenlight to serve Wilson County. The bill also states that if they go beyond their borders, they lose the exemption. North Carolina’s priorities are clearly not with the rural communities, but with the big corporate providers that pushed to pass the bill.

After Wilson leaders took the vote, Christopher commented on the fact that they have been put in such a difficult position:

"It is a travesty that North Carolina is prioritizing the profits of the big cable and telephone companies above the well-being of local businesses and residents. The state legislature needs to focus on what is good for North Carolina businesses and residents, not only what these powerful lobbyists want."

Economic Progress Grinds To A Halt

Chesterton, Indiana, plans to deploy a dark fiber network to serve municipal facilities, anchor institutions, and local businesses. Like their neighbor to the south, Valparaiso, they hope to boost economic development, improve local services, and help the community compete in the race to draw in new industries. “We learned if we didn’t have that in the ground ready to go, we couldn’t compete,” said Town Manager Bernie Doyle.

Taking It One Step At A Time

The Chesterton Redevelopment Commission released a Request for Proposals (RFP) in late July as part of Phase II of the project christened the Chesterton Fiber Optic Network (CFON). The community is looking for an entity to operate and maintain, provide last mile connectivity, and perform other services typical of an Operator. Late last year, the community released the Phase I Request for Information (RFI), for a firm to design the fiber backbone of approximately 15 miles. They chose a company in March. The final phase will seek out a firm to construct the network.

Chesterton wants Gigabit connectivity for municipal, public safety, education, and other public buildings. The network must also provide similar services to community anchor institutions and local businesses; the community wants to attract high-tech, bio-medical, and financial firms to diversify its local economy.

The community's priorities include retaining ownership, increasing economic development, and deploying an expandable network. Chesterton wants to have the entire project lit and offering services by June 1, 2017.

Future Funds, Present Projects

Like Valparaiso, Chesterton is banking on tomorrow's dollars to finance today’s investment. The city will use Tax Increment Financing (TIF) to fund the project. TIF will permit the city to finance the network with future gains in property or sales tax expected to from the geographic area that will obtain the redevelopment or infrastructure project. They will be able to borrow the funds, build the network, then use the funds generated from the network to pay off the debt.

Culver City officially broke ground on its new municipal fiber-optic network in August and expects to finish the project within one year. The beginning of construction marked the realization of a process that started some time ago in “The Heart of Screenland.”

Enter Culver Connect

Culver Connect will integrate existing publicly owned fiber to improve connectivity for municipal facilities, the Culver City Unified School District, and local businesses. The design for Culver Connect includes three rings and will add 21 miles to ensure redundancy and expand the footprint of the existing network.

The open access network will connect with carrier hotel One Wilshire and a hub in El Segundo. In addition to improving capacity and spurring economic development, Culver City community leaders want to encourage competition by lowering the cost of entry for Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

In 2013, the city hired a firm to draft a fiber network design and business plan framework. Soon after, members of the business community and leaders in education spoke out in the media, encouraging elected officials to take steps to improve Culver City’s connectivity. In November 2015 the City Council established a Municipal Fiber Network Enterprise Fund to be used for construction costs.

Staff estimated that the capital costs of the network backbone would be approximately $4.9 million and initial lateral builds would be another $2 million. Staff determined operating and maintenance costs would be $150,000 per month and projected revenues from leases after three to four years of operations at around $7.1 million in total. They also estimated that revenues will cover the cost of operation and equipment depreciation once the network is fully operational. The city hopes to lease to ISPs to offer choice to local businesses.

Vallejo’s Fiber Optic Advisory Group (FOAG) and the city manager are in the middle of developing the details of a citywide fiber-optic network master plan. As part of the process, the city recently released a Request for Proposals (RFP) for a dark fiber connection to an Internet Point of Presence (POP). The RFP also includes calls for wholesale Internet services. Responses to the RFP are due on October 7.

Intelligent Integration

As we reported in 2015, the community already has a significant amount of publicly owned fiber in place controlling the city’s Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). Vallejo also owns a considerable amount of conduit that can be integrated into any fiber network. As part of the master plan the city adopted in February, they intend to build off that infrastructure and offer better connectivity to businesses, community anchor institutions, and municipal facilities. Vallejo is considering a municipal utility, operating as an Internet Service Provider (ISP), or engaging in some form of public private partnership. They are still considering which route is best for the community.

More specifically, this RFP asks for proposals for either leased fiber or those installed and to be owned by the city. The connection will link City Hall with a carrier hotel or a POP managed by a third party so Vallejo can obtain wholesale bandwidth and Internet services. For questions, contact Will Morat in the Office of the City Manager: will.morat(at)cityofvallejo.net.

Fort Collins has the numbers, now it must weigh its options as it steps forward. This month the City Council received the results of a feasibility study it commissioned late in 2015 to help fill in its Broadband Strategic Plan. The results, along with city staff analysis, are now available for review (item no. 3 from the Aug. 23rd meeting).

A Growing Interest

Last fall, voters chose to reclaim local authority by opting out of Colorado’s SB 152, which in 2005 took away local telecommunications infrastructure decisions from municipalities. A resounding 83 percent of voters voiced their desire to have the option to develop a municipal utility. Local media and businesses had expressed their support for better connectivity through public ownership. Residents wrote to local papers describing how Fort Collins needed better Internet access to spur economic development. Clearly, the momentum was running strong.

Examining Several Options

The study examined several possible models, including retail, wholesale, and public private partnership models. The staff summary of the report suggests that staff consider a retail model, while more expensive to deploy, the least risky of those examined. From the staff summary:

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals issued their order on August 10th supporting the states of Tennessee and North Carolina in their challenge from an FCC decision from February 2015. Both states objected to the FCC’s decision to preempt state laws preventing municipalities from providing fast, affordable, reliable connectivity via municipal Internet networks. The Appellate Court Judges reviewed the legal arguments, the precedent, and the interplay between federal authority and state sovereignty. 

The impact of their ruling will affect more than a few pages in a law school text book. Access to high-quality Internet access positively impacts real people and businesses and, as Cecila Kang captures in her recent article in the New York Times, the people who depend on it fear the outcome if their state legislators take it away.

Family Farm Fear

Kang profiles Vick Family Farms, a family potato farm in Wilson, North Carolina.  The Vick family chose to invest in a processing plant when they learned that Wilson’s Greenlight would provide the necessary connectivity. Greenlight allowed them to increase sales overseas. Now, they may lose that connection:

“We’re very worried because there is no way we could run this equipment on the internet service we used to have, and we can’t imagine the loss we’ll have to the business,” said Charlotte Vick, head of sales for the farm.

As Kang notes in her article, the FCC has no plans to appeal the decision, so battles will resume at the state level. Advocates will need to be twice as vigilant because incumbents - the only ones that come out ahead from this decision - may try to push state legislators for even tougher anti-competitive state barriers.

Pinetops: Poster Child For Good Connectivity

Located on the southern end of British Columbia’s Vancouver Island sits the coastal city of Campbell River. The community recently received a $50,000 grant from the Island Coastal Economic Trust (ICET) to pursue better connectivity through a municipal open access network initiative.

Retain and Attract

The “Salmon Capital of the World” is also home to other industries that increasingly need access to fast, affordable, reliable connectivity. Approximately 31,000 people live in Campbell River. The island’s forestry and mining companies need to have the ability to transfer large data files, such as 3D renderings, detailed maps, and similar geographic files, to business associates. In addition to making the current situation better for existing industries, community leaders want to attract new industries. From a July Campbell River Mirror article:

“We need to retain our existing businesses and enable them to grow in place,” [Economic Development Officer Rose] Klukas said in a release. “We are also looking to attract and support technology and creative sector entrepreneurs – designers, programmers, software engineers, and more – and competitively priced, high-speed broadband is a must-have.”

The ICET grant will fund the completion of a fiber-optic ring that's owned by the city and currently used only for municipal operations. The city will expand the ring and allow Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to offer services to local businesses via the fiber-optic infrastructure.

The First Of Its Kind

This project will be the first open access municipal network on Vancouver Island. In addition to the more immediate need of better connectivity for Campbell River, ICET hopes to determine if this same model can be duplicated elsewhere on the island.

Hudson is bringing better connectivity to local businesses with Velocity Broadband, its gigabit fiber network, and is now exploring the potential of Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) for the rest of the community. The city recently issued a Request for Proposals (RFP) for a feasibility study to review the possibilities for service to residents. Proposals are due August 26.

From the RFP Summary:

This project will result in the production of a Feasibility Study containing a residential needs assessment, deployment strategy options and construction cost estimates. The desired outcome of this planning effort is to provide a tool for the city to establish if Hudson residents want this service and determine a successful deployment strategy and the associated cost to implement fiber to the homes (FTTH) within the City of Hudson. 

The city wants the study completed by the end of 2016.

We’ve covered Hudson’s venture into accelerating connectivity for businesses since 2014. The community of 23,000 started by incrementally building out a fiber-optic institutional network (I-Net) over a period of about ten years, which it later expanded to offer gigabit service to businesses. Chris interviewed Hudson City Manager Jane Howington last December about the city’s Velocity service. Check out episode #181 of the Community Broadband Bits podcast for that conversation. Since the launch, local businesses have been excited to obtain fast, affordable, reliable connectivity.

The full RFP is available on the city's website.

Unless you live in a rural community, you probably assume becoming a Gigabit community is all about the miracles of speed. Speed is important, but so is Internet choice, reliable service, and respectful customer service. It’s also about being excited as you consider future economic opportunities for your rural town.

Businesses Struggling With Old Services

Before Greenlight began serving Pinetops, the best community members could get was sluggish Centurylink DSL. Suzanne Coker Craig, owner of CuriosiTees, described the situation for her business:

Suzanne used to be a subscriber to Centurylink DSL service at her Pinetops home, but years ago she just turned it off. “We weren’t using it because it used to take forever; it just wasn’t viable.” She now has Greenlight’s 40 Mbps upstream and downstream service. “It’s just so very fast,” she said.

Her business, a custom screen printing shop, uses an “on-time” inventory system, so speed and reliability is critical for last-minute or late orders:

“We work with a Charlotte company for our apparel. If we get our order in by 5 p.m. from here, the next day it will be delivered. That’s really important for business.” Before Greenlight, Suzanne described how “We had been sweating it out.”  Suzanne’s tee-shirt store only had access to 800 Kbps DSL upload speed. She would talk to the modem. “Please upload by 5 p.m. Please upload.” Now she can just go home and put her order in at the last minute. “We are comfortable it will upload immediately….It’s just so much faster. Super fast…Having Greenlight has just been very beneficial for our business.” 

She also subscribes to Greenlight from home and her fiber connection is able to manage data intense uploads required for sending artwork, sales reports, and other large document transfers. As a Town Commissioner, Suzanne sees Greenlight service in Pinetops as more than just a chance to stop "sweating it out."

“I just see a brighter future for our town now,” she reflected. “It’s a neat selling point. It’s difficult in small rural areas to get good technology-based companies. This now opens the door for us to recruit just those kinds of businesses…It’s hard to imagine a business that does not need Internet access.” 

Drawing inspiration from a previous project in the Research Triangle, communities around Asheville are joining forces. The goal is high-speed Internet access.

West - Next Generation Network (WestNGN) is a multi-government collaboration in the Asheville area to encourage investment in fiber-optic networks for Gigabit (1,000 Megabits) connectivity to the region.

An Established Model

The Research Triangle, the area around Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, started a new collaborative model to bring Gigabit connectivity to their communities. Six municipalities and four universities there established the North Carolina Next Generation Network (NCNGN). The project encourages private sector providers to develop ultra-fast networks.

The Land of Sky Regional Council is an Ashville-based multi-jurisdictional development organization that includes Asheville, Biltmore Forest, Fletcher, Hendersonville, Laurel Park, and Waynesville. 

A Wide Impact

The Land of Sky Regional Council will provide project management by setting up a steering committee, analyzing regional data, and drafting a Request for Proposals (RFP) for Gigabit service. The group hopes high-speed Internet service will boost economic development. 

They want to reach 125,000 customers south and west of Asheville. As Smoky Mountain News reported the project costs for the first year total $35,000. Each community will pay $4,000 and then contribute proportionally based on population. For instance, Asheville will pay $11,893, and Waynesville will pay $4,877. 

Waynesville is the seat of Haywood County, which is working to improve connectivity by developing a broadband master plan. While the Haywood County Economic Development Council’s planning focuses on opportunities for the county, Waynesville is collaborating with communities in nearby counties through the WestNGN project. 

"An Awesome Opportunity"