Municipal Networks

In Fort Collins (CO)—a town of about 150,000 north of Denver—Big Telecom has contributed more than $200,000 to a campaign opposing a ballot measure to simply consider a city-run broadband network. It's the latest example of how far Big Telecom is willing to go to prevent communities from building their own internet and competing with the status quo.

"It's been wild," said Glen Akins, a Fort Collins advocate for municipal broadband. "We're overwhelmed by the amount of money the opposition is spending." When the residents of Fort Collins vote on November 7 they'll have a couple of ballot measures to consider, including one on city-run internet. If that measure is approved, Fort Collins will be able to change the city charter to allow it to run a municipal broadband utility. This doesn't mean it will happen for sure, and the city still hasn't finalized what that utility would look like, but it opens the door to further discussions.

A state lawmaker in Michigan wants to prevent cities and towns from using any government funding to provide Internet service. Michigan state Rep Michele Hoitenga (R-Manton) submitted a bill that says cities and towns "shall not use any federal, state, or local funds or loans to pay for the cost of providing qualified Internet service." State Rep Hoitenga's bill does say that a city or town "may enter into an agreement with one or more private parties to provide qualified Internet service," as long as no government funds are used. Even with that exception, the bill could discourage cities and towns from pursuing public-private partnerships, according to an analysis by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance's Community Broadband Networks project.

Many of the power cooperatives that helped electrify rural Tennessee in the 1930s and 1940s are gearing up for a similar effort to bring high-speed broadband to rural areas not connected to today's information superhighway. But similar to electrification of the South in the early 20th century, the telecommunications upgrades for rural broadband are likely to be costly and take years or even decades to fully implement.

"We know that in rural America there is a lack of broadband and that is holding back many communities and residents from fully engaging in today's economy," Jim Matheson, CEO of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA), said. "It's just like electricity in the 1930s. The economics make more sense in the densely populated areas and it's far more challenging to serve sparsely populated areas with capital-intensive services." But Matheson and Tennessee power co-op leaders insist membership-owned cooperatives are well suited for the challenge, even if they are likely to need government help and subsidies to bring broadband everywhere

[Commentary] Public-private partnerships, or PPPs, are a popular way to build community broadband networks. These networks typically are the result of local government entities finding ways to partner with private companies. But what if communities “think differently” about how to form PPPs?

Ammon (ID) (pop. 13,800) today celebrates its success at thinking differently to produce a city-owned gig network. The city built the network with no debt and got an impressive 70% of the potential customers to sign up for service. One key is new technology. The other is that the “private” in this PPP structure is citizens themselves.

[Craig Settles is a broadband industry analyst, consultant, and author of “Building the Gigabit City.”]

Kentucky's plan to build one of the country's largest publicly owned broadband networks was touted as a cornerstone of the effort to save the Appalachian economy by bringing high-speed internet to some of the poorest counties in America. It was supposed to take a year to finish, but three years later only a fraction of the 3,000 mile network of fiber optic cables known as Kentucky Wired has been built.

Construction has been plagued by delays, forcing the state to pay $7 million in penalties to its private-sector partners with the potential of "tens of millions" more. State officials had been counting on public schools and libraries to help pay some of the bills but that plan has fallen through, and project officials plan to ask state lawmakers for millions of dollars in taxpayer money to make up the difference. Now, some of the state's most influential lawmakers want to pull the plug, and have asked project leaders how much that would cost.

Google failed to deploy gigabit internet and video service to parts of the Kansas City metro area in the timeframe it promised. The Kansas Corporation Commission confirmed that Google missed deadlines to bring service throughout four Kansas cities — Mission Hills, Westwood, Westwood Hills and Kansas City. Google said in 2012 that it planned to bring service throughout those cities within five years.

The Kansas City Star has taken its watchdog role quite seriously with regard to Google Fiber. The report about the Google missed deadlines was followed a few days later by an editorial from the Star’s editorial board questioning the benefits Google Fiber had brought to the Kansas City area. The editorial noted, for example, that Google’s commitment to install free high-speed internet service for non-profits in the area is expected to end by January, even though 40 non-profits have not yet been connected. According to the editorial, Google Fiber “has changed Kansas City but hasn’t transformed it.” This attitude is quite different from what Telecompetitor experienced in another gigabit city — Chattanooga, where local utility EPB was the first U.S. network operator to undertake a citywide gigabit rollout and where local supporters helped leverage the gigabit rollout to attract numerous high-tech companies to the community, bringing new jobs and generally helping to revitalize the community.

More and more rural electric cooperatives are learning that their existing distribution networks can lend themselves to highly efficient deployment of broadband for their member-owners. Based on the distances that define rural America, one of the surest ways to effectively build a broadband network is to use an existing electric co-op infrastructure. Many co-ops have found that building out a broadband network is a productive way to serve customers, and can actually be profitable as well. But the challenges they face are numerous, and every build-out brings a new set of circumstances. With that in mind, CoBank interviewed leaders from six co-ops that have launched successful broadband initiatives in order to find out what works – and what doesn’t.

As CenturyLink rolls out new ‘price for life’ services and invests in its network to improve internet speed to nearly 700,000 people in Colorado, it’s also trying a new approach to bringing broadband to areas that lack it — public-private partnerships with local communities. The company has been negotiating partnerships with some Western slope communities and at least one on the northern Front Range to expand its fiber-optic network into areas it previously considered uneconomical to do so.

The approach resembles one used in Centennial by Mississippi-based Ting Inc. in partnership with the south-metro area suburb's municipal government. The company has been polling Centennial neighborhoods to find where the strongest demand for services exists, with the aim of announcing this fall where it will build high-speed lines to homes. CenturyLink, the main local landline phone company in most of the state, receives Federal Communication Commission subsidies for providing internet service in qualified rural areas.

Here, a look at three rural counties, in three different states, demonstrates how country folk are leading their communities into the digital age the best way they know how: ingenuity, tenacity, and good old-fashioned hard work.
The 'Silicon Hollow', Letcher County (KY)
Internet on the TV, Garrett County (MD)
Ahead of the Curve, Coshocton County (OH)

Beginning in 2013, the city of Opelika (AL) became the state’s first “Gig City,” offering broadband Internet services to its 11,000 households over a $43 million fiber-optic network constructed and operated by the city’s electric utility, Opelika Power Services (“OPS”). How is Opelika’s system doing financially?

According to Mayor Gary Fuller, the city’s network, in its fourth year of operation in 2016, is “on pace with our five-year plan to be at break even.” As explained in this perspective, this rosy assessment is entirely at odds with the city’s own books. The city’s telecommunications service has experienced large and continuing financial losses through 2016, accumulating millions in financial losses during its four years of operation. Before “break even,” these millions in losses must be recovered and the $42 million in debt paid. In this persepective, I conduct an analysis of the OPS broadband network’s financial health using the city’s financial statements. By any meaningful financial metric, OPS’s broadband network is unlikely ever to be “profitable.”