By the time a local community is ready to light up their municipal fiber optic network, they’ve already invested several years' worth of debate, investigation, and energy. While deploying a network is certainly a complicated task, educating the community, growing support, and helping elected officials determine the best approach is equally difficult. What’s it like in the early stages for those visionaries who feel that their city or town needs a publicly owned option?

This week we find out from Chicopee’s Joel McAuliffe, Councilor for Ward 1. He’s been advocating for a municipal broadband network for several years and his message is growing. In addition to working to educate his fellow council members about the need for local high-speed Internet access, Joel has reached out to folks in the community. Last fall, he encouraged citizens to sign an online petition supporting the proposal and to contact their elected officials to urge them to move forward on the matter.

Joel describes how the city has certain advantages that he’d like to capitalize on for a citywide fiber network. He talks about local concerns that are driving the effort, such as high rates and poor services, and that with a municipal network to offer competition, he believes Chicopee can attract new business and new residents from the Boston area. Chris and Joel also discuss the challenges for a city council in making decisions based on technology when they are not well-versed in those technologies.

When Joel introduced his petition to the community, he also published...

While Christopher was in Ontario, California, at the 2018 Broadband Communities Economic Development Conference, he took advantage of the opportunity and recorded several discussions with experts to share with our Community Broadband Bits Podcast audience. This week, we’re presenting his conversation with Deb Socia, Executive Director of Next Century Cities, and Bob Knight, Executive Vice President and COO of Harrison Edwards. His Public Relations and Marketing Firm has some special insight into the broadband industry.

In their discussion, Deb, Bob, and Christopher get into the challenge that faces every community that searches for ways to improve local connectivity — political will.

We often report on communities that are considering some level of investment in publicly owned Internet network infrastructure. From convening committees to commissioning feasibility studies to entering into talks with potential partners there are many steps that a community may take that may lead to nowhere. The reality is that moving from consideration to implementation is a path filled with potential pitfalls, especially when elected officials face challenges from incumbents bent on maintaining their positioning in a community. It’s also a process to determine if a publicly owned network is right for a community; every place is different and each local government faces the process of discovering what’s best for them.

Bob and Deb have worked with many local officials and have seen firsthand the types of issues that can fracture political will toward a local broadband initiative. In this...

Whether you’re a local elected official, a business owner, or a grassroots advocate, you’ve learned that politics can make or break an initiative to invest in publicly owned Internet infrastructure. Improving local connectivity is only one of many initiatives that are influenced by partisanship. As we’ve seen in Washington, DC, hyper-partisanship leads to ineffective gridlock. Is there a way to move forward despite strong diametric positions?

In the most recent episode of ILSR’s Building Local Power podcast, "Breaking Through Partisanship: Left-Right-Local," our own Christopher Mitchell leads a conversation with John Farrell, Stacy Mitchell, and David Morris, directors of the ILSR Energy Democracy, Community-Scaled Economies, and Public Good initiatives, respectively.

The group discusses both broad and focused solutions. They get into the effect of corporate concentration of power and how it undermines our democracy. The group ponders monopoly power and lobbying forces, and how they influence decisions that impact the ability for local communities to make decisions. The conversation touches on media and perception, economic analysis and language, and other factors that influence how people who may have opposing political beliefs may still be able to organize for a common local policy.

“Talking about economics is one way to get there, but also, there are these shared values that we have around democracy, local control, liberty,” says Stacy Mitchell of organizing for better local solutions to national problems. “Those are things that are widely all American. I think, also, going back to those basic values and motivations are really helpful in getting past being trapped in an unhealthy partisan conversation.”

The conversation is free flowing and last about 34 minutes. You can also read the transcript of the show.

Thousands of delegates, politicians, and media personnel flocked to northeast Ohio in July to attend the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. A lucky few stayed in the bedroom community of Fairlawn at one of two hotels now featuring gigabit Internet connections (1,000 Megabits per second). 

FairlawnGig, the town’s new municipal network, hooked up Hilton Akron-Fairlawn and DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Akron-Fairlawn in time for the convention. Guests could seamlessly stream video, upload content, and communicate with coworkers and family, despite the hotels’ full occupancy. The fiber-optic network will soon be available to residents and businesses across the community. 

More than just the RNC

Fairlawn has a lot to gain from a faster, more reliable network. On a typical workday, the community swells from an overnight population of 7,500 to 40,000, putting a sizeable bandwidth burden on slow-moving incumbent network providers. According to Ernie Staten, Deputy Director of Fairlawn’s Public Service Department in Community Broadband Bits Podcast Episode 201, a typical connection in Fairlawn measured in at 15 Mbps (Megabit per second) download and 1 Mbps upload before the municipal network.

Incumbent Internet service providers clearly weren’t doing enough for families or businesses in today’s connected economy. As we wrote earlier this year, FairlawnGig will be delivering symmetrical gigabit speeds (download and upload speeds up to 1 gigabit per second) at affordable prices. The ability to send data at high-speed is increasingly becoming a critical feature, especially for business subscribers.

Municipal networks have a profound effect on customer-ISP relationship. The hotels will feature the fastest connection within the Hilton hotel network. Tim Winter, Vice President/Regional Manager of the Hilton Akron-Fairlawn and DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Akron-Fairlawn, was quoted by FairlawnGig: 

“We put a lot of trust into the team Ernie Staten and the City of Fairlawn brought together and we are already seeing the results. Our guests and RNC delegates are...