For Rural Broadband, Sometimes Cities Must Step In

A few years ago, Tuttle (OK) suddenly found itself without cable or internet service after a local broadband provider went bankrupt, leaving behind unpaid bills to the power company. Like the majority of cities in the US, Tuttle residents accessed broadband through private companies rather than through a city-run system. With the town of a few thousand growing quickly and attracting professionals from nearby Oklahoma City who were used to high-speed internet, Tuttle city officials began meeting with new private telecommunications companies to fill the gap. Every one of them expressed the same concern: the population wasn’t big or dense enough to garner much of a profit. So city officials changed strategies and began taking tours of other OK cities that had set up municipal broadband networks. “We began to realize that this is something that we could do ourselves and began to go down that path,” said one city official, noting that no taxes or rates were increased to pay for the upstart loan provided by a local bank. “From my standpoint, I’ve been more surprised by how easy and simple it is to put the system in.”