Municipal Networks

Electric cooperatives want to help bridge the digital divide between rural and urban America as more federal funding becomes available for rural broadband. Mississippi is among the states that rely most heavily on rural electric cooperatives, nonprofits that deliver power to their members in rural areas. Yet since 1942, Mississippi state law has restricted its cooperatives to working in electric services -- a 77-year-old law may prevent Mississippi from fully tapping into millions of new federal dollars to expand high-speed internet service to needy rural communities.

California, Washington and Indiana recently enacted legislation to help facilitate community broadband networks: 

Underserved communities can provide broadband for themselves through nonprofit, cooperative entities. Many co-ops that were originally set up to provide phone service and distribute electricity now deliver broadband as well. Rural electric and telephone cooperatives are fiberizing rural America. Following are a few examples of the hundreds of successful cooperative projects. 

Regional efforts to develop broadband infrastructure are becoming more common.

Two years ago I wrote that community broadband builders have two options for network deployment: they could use the problem-solving approach or the creation orientation approach. The problem-solving approach is typical when people deal with the government. The goal is often to make something go away.

High-speed internet access is now a critical part of life, but a lack of reliable internet access is hurting rural communities. That’s the case in parts of Washington County, Hyde County, Beaufort County and many other rural areas in eastern North Carolina.  Greg Coltrain, the vice president for business development at TriCounty Broadband in Belhaven (NC), said technology isn’t the issue.  "We've put people on the moon,” said Coltrain. “But we're still trying to get rural broadband developed across our country.

Most Americans do not have much of a choice in Internet service providers, even in big cities. But for a lucky few, they have not only a robust gigabit connection but also a choice of many providers. This is most common in an arrangement called “open access.” Some 30 communities spread across the United States have embraced this model — where the local government builds a fiber-optic infrastructure and acts as a wholesaler, allowing independent Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to offer the actual service to households and businesses.

Many small communities across the country struggle to bring advanced broadband to their residents. What they lack in size, they often make up with diversity of their economies, populations, geography, and technology providers. Public-private partnerships (PPP) can help local government and businesses pool their resources and technical expertise to deliver cutting-edge services to citizens.

Local governments in Colorado want to buy better broadband and are pooling their resources to do it. It's called Project THOR, the brainchild of the Northwest Colorado Council of Governments. It's designed to deliver faster internet at lower costs around the region. Project THOR has two main goals: 1) To make broadband better and faster across Northwest Colorado's rural areas. 2) To improve reliability of the regional broadband network, which is currently prone to mass failures when a fiber line goes down in a single place.

In Oct, Federal Communications Commissioner Michael O’Rielly accused municipal networks, including Chattanooga’s EPB Fiber Optics, of violating the First Amendment by limiting subscribers free speech. Journalists and organizations who know better were quick to correct him. In a Dec 13, 2018 blog post, he lashed out at his critics and tried to defend or explain his earlier comments, but once again missed the mark.