Recently on Gigabit Nation, host Craig Settles visited with Mayor Max Beverly from Thomasville, Georgia. As our readers know, the Georgia General Assembly is again considering a bill to limit municipal efforts to bring connectivity to local residents and businesses. That bill is currently scheduled to be heard on Tuesday afternoon, 2/26, but many people have already expressed their anger at it in Facebook comments on the bill page.

HB 282 sets a very low bar for what is considered "served" - 1.5 Mbps - and prohibits municipal networks from serving those areas while also imposing a new heavy cost on investing in unserved areas. 

Mayor Beverly discusses how he and other Georgia community leaders are fighting HB 282 through education. Speaking from first-hand experience, he finds that elected officials often turn from support to opposition when they hear about the incredible success of Thomasville. 

Mayor Beverly finds himself sharing the story of Thomasville's victories that are all tied with the network, created in 1999. In Thomasville:

We recently came across a news report from Knoxville's WBIR.

The video touches on how the city has gone from a town that used to rely on the choo-choo to a metropolitan wonder that flies over fiber optic cables. Walter Cronkite called Chattanooga the "dirtiest city in America" but the network is transforming it into a technology capitol. Reporter Eleanor Beck focuses on the network's many customers and how they use their connections. Among those customers are an increasing number of businesses who seek the 1 gig service.

Beck spoke with Jack Studer, one of the founders of Lamp Post Group, a downtown incubator. Studer raved about the 1 gig network as a selling point to new businesses. Chattanooga's investment continues to fuel economic development and bring fresh entrepreneurs to town.

The story is a little under four minutes.

In Cuyahoga County, OneCommunity is leading the effort of upgrade the County's networking ability. With a special focus on improving pubic safety, the project is estimated to save the county $10 million over the next 5 years. From the OneCommunity blog:

The project provides high-bandwidth connectivity and secure video conferencing to more than 60 county offices and public safety locations; will provide wireless high speed Internet to the Justice Center, Courthouse, and Administration Building; and will equip County employees with mobile wireless access.

In addition, the Cuyahoga Regional Information Services (CRIS) emergency system is now available in public safety vehicles, enabling law enforcement officers to pull up criminal records while out in the community.  Cuyahoga Community College benefits from this public safety broadband connection as emergency personnel can use CRIS to help coordinate response efforts.

In Mayfield Village, a new network is being installed by OneCommunity in a city-owned office and industrial area. Mayfield Village anticipates this new resource and its high capacity will bring new businesses to its facility on Beta Drive.

Mayfield Village Planning Development describes the service:

The Mayfield Village fiber optic network is a new facet of our Beta Drive commercial district. The network is intended by the Village to save our businesses substantial amounts of money on their internet and other IT costs. Mayfield Village not only partnered with regional dark fiber organization OneCommunity to install the fiber, but the Village and OneCommunity have teamed up to offer very competitive internet service prices to companies wishing to connect to the network.

In 2011, MSNBC reported on Thomasville, Georgia. The small community beat the odds to nourish a vibrant downtown. At the time, local independent businesses in the U.S. disappeared as quaint main streets lost mom and pop ventures to the economy.

Such was not the case with Thomasville. MSNBC's report, a little over 2 minutes and embedded below, looked at how Thomasville had managed to created a thriving downtown economy filled with independent businesses. Thomasville leaders partnered with the private sector, concentrated on preserving its historic identity, and built a next generation fiber optic network. Thomasville's ability to merge yesterday and today worked.

Thomasville began construction of its own fiber optic network in 1995 to serve schools, libraries, businesses, and hospitals. At the time, the private sector was not interested in serving the area. Several other communities in the region began similar projects and, in 1997, those communities joined together to form the South Georgia Governmental Services Authority (SGGSA). In 1998, Cairo, Camilla, Moultrie and Thomasville created Community Network Services (CNS) through the Authority in order to offer services to residents. Since then, the collaboration has expanded from telecommunications services only to also providing high-speed Internet and television.

As Georgia mulls over HB282, this video shows how a next generation network is vital in similar communities. The legislation will strip local authorities of the ability to build their own next-generation networks as long as the private sector is providing some below-basic level of service. If the bill passes, many Georgia communities that need the benefits of a local network will never get the opportunity. From the CNS website:

The best part about CNS is that it is funded locally, by the cities which it serves. This means if you are a CNS customer, you are investing in your own communities, not a corporation headquartered across the country.

Susan Crawford sat down with Bill Moyers to talk about Internet access in America. The two touch on net neutrality, the digital divide, and how access is now a critical component to our economic development.

In the words of Bill Moyers, "This is pretty strong stuff." Bill and Susan also talk about how we have come to this point through lack of competition advanced by telecommunications companies' lobbying and legislative ennui.

They spend some time looking at Lafayette, Louisiana, one of the cities that we covered in our 2012 case study, Broadband At the Speed of Light: How Three Communities Built Next-Generation Networks.  The two also dig into ways policy change can improve access and efforts we can all make to heighten awareness of the issue. This is a great discussion for any one, regardless of their place on the Internet access learning curve.

Franklin, Kentucky expects to see more positive economic growth when it launches its new fiber optic network. According to an article in the Bowling Green Daily News, the south central community is ready for the upgrade:

“We are super excited about it,” said James McCaslin, associate vice president of academic affairs and director of Franklin-Simpson Center. “It will be like going from 1970 to 2013 with the flip of a switch.”

We contacted Tammie Carey, Fiber Services Manager for Franklin Municipal FiberNET, and she was good enough to answer some questions. She told us that 32 miles of aerial fiber are strung in three loops around the city to ensure redundancy. She expects the network to launch near the end of January for local businesses, though the utility has already been serving one business as detailed below.

The decision was based solely on a desire to boost economic development, a sentiment echoed in the Daily News article:

It’s hard to recruit industry now if you don’t have (fiber optics),” said Dennis Griffin, industrial recruiter for Simpson County. “A lot of industries, particularly in this area, are satellite plants connected to their corporate offices, somewhere else in the United States. They all need to be connected by fiber.

“So if you don’t have that, it’s hard to compete with communities that do,” Griffin said. “Ten years ago, you could get by with T-1 lines – now most industries are just expecting that you have fiber."

Apparently, City officials contacted AT&T and Comcast several years ago and asked them to install fiber to the Franklin industrial parks. When they refused, City Leaders began pondering the possibility of a municipal fiber network. Tammie tells us about the decision in an email:

“The electric co-ops represent possibly the greatest potential for expansion of really good infrastructure in rural America,” [Todd] Pealock said, explaining how it’s a natural fit for co-ops to be infrastructure providers.

“It’s very synergistic for our linemen to hang cable, to lift the hardware up,” Pealock said. “The splicing is very natural for them.”

Todd Pealock is CEO of Habersham Electric Membership Corporation (EMC), and chairman of the board of North Georgia Network. In a recent article in the Electric Co-op Today news page, Pealock described how electric coops have a natural affinity for bringing broadband to rural America. We brought you a similar news story from Missouri earlier this year. Electric coops  are partnering with the public sector in a range of projects across the country.

The North Georgia Network project is funded primarily with a $42 million stimulus grant and state grants contributed to building the 260-mile backbone. Another 800 miles of middle and last mile installation was completed on November 30, 2012.

The project already connects schools, government, hospitals, higher ed, and other community anchor institutions across an eight county area. Over 2,000 homes are connected to the open access network. Businesses also trust their broadband needs to the network, intended to spur economic development in the region. In addition to Habersham EMC, Blue Ridge Mountain EMC is also a partner.

“It’s been a natural magnet of interest to the business community,” Pealock said. “I think they see this as tremendous infrastructure.”

Because they are cooperatives, owned by the customers, these organization are accountable to communities in ways that absentee-owned companies like Windstream, Frontier, and others are not.

“We want to grow our own new businesses in Indianola, and Simpson College is home to an entire group of potential entrepreneurs who we hope will find support for their efforts here and some day choose to locate their businesses here,” [Jerry Kelly, former Indianola mayor and executive director of the city's development association] said. ‘What we are doing is called ‘economic gardening.’ What grows here will stay here.”

Thanks to the Indianola Municipal Utilities (IMU) next-generation broadband network, the city and the college have fertile soil to nurture that garden. We previously wrote about this FTTH partnership here, explaining that the community owns the infrastructure and a local business provides services over the network.

The partnership between Simpson College, the Indianola Development Association, and IMU is called the Indianola + Simpson College Entrepeneurial Devopment Initiative. The student-business incubator will bring together students, mentors, and existing businesses with the hope that resulting entrepeneurships will sprout and grow in Indianola.

Through the partnership, the incubator will have access to IMU's server platforms, wholesale bandwidth, local marketing and outreach efforts, and customer service activities. 25 students will develop senior Capstone Projects through the initiative. College and city leaders anticipate that number will continue to grow.

The Simpson College News Center also writes that the project will be led by Chris Draper. Draper is associated with Des Moines' Startup City, a technology-based business incubator. Draper is CEO of the first graduate of Startup City, Meidh Tech, which offers property management technology solutions.