Carol Wilson of Telephony Magazine has an in-depth review of municipal broadband in the United States. She says that despite some high-profile failures, the deep-seated need for broadband is keeping municipalities on the fiber-to-the-home-track.
These projects are being fueled by the falling cost of Fiber To The Home (FTTH) technology and the growing experience in deploying systems, due in no small part to the massive effort Verizon has launched.
It is supremely ironic that one of the nation’s more visible and contentious muni fiber projects, involving the city-owned Lafayette Utilities System in Lafayette, La., is now reaping the benefits of delays to its FTTH construction caused by lawsuits and legal actions launched by incumbent cable and telco operators.
Among the examples she mentions:
- Networks such as iProvo and Utopia found it hard to attract service providers, and without services, customers just weren’t interested. A Utah state law now prohibits municipally owned networks from selling retail services.
“What happened in Utah is something we have been talking about for years — the state law that effectively prohibits retail service is, in my view, a very substantial part of what is wrong with the environment in Utah and particularly iProvo,” said Jim Baller, attorney with Baller & Herbst, which represents municipalities and has done research for e-NC Alliance, among others. “If applications are slow to evolve — and they have been — service providers are left competing with incumbents on traditional services, where they have no advantages.”
- North Carolina’s e-NC Authority is seeking ways to stimulate broadband initiatives in rural areas of that state, while Massachusetts just passed a bill to create a Broadband Institute, using $40 million in state funding to bring broadband to western areas of the state still served only by dial-up.
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In Washington state, the Grant County Public Utilities Department, another FTTH pioneer, still is operating a wholesale-only network in accordance with state law there, although it came under criticism and went through a management change over the $400 million price tag of that network.
Partially in response to that criticism, the Grant County PUD halted its network expansion in 2004, after four years of construction had connected about 11,000 homes — or one-third of the anticipated homes — said Sarah Morford, spokeswoman for PUD. After extensive review and exploration of other technology options, the Grant County PUD commissioners voted in March to press forward, citing public support for its fiber network. Over the next five years, Grant County plans to expand the network to reach 80% of residents and 95% of businesses, or about 3000 homes and business per year.
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In Chattanooga, Tenn., for instance, the municipally owned utility EPB, is economically justifying its fiber build on the basis of creating a “smart grid” that will enable the company to reduce energy consumption and lower the cost of power it buys from the Tennessee Valley Authority. The plan is to reach 80% of the 167,000 homes in the 600-square-mile service area in the first three years and then reach more rural homes in the last two years of the five-year buildout.
- Glasgow Electric of Glasgow, Ky., which built the nation’s first municipally owned broadband network, is now publicly arguing that instead of spending $18 billion to build nuclear power generators to meet future electric demand, the TVA should build FTTH networks to 9 million homes at $2000 each and use those connections to manage in-home electrical use.
- According to Joe Savage, president of the Fiber to the Home Council, there are 14 states where laws either prohibit or limit muni networks. A national Community Broadband Act failed in 2007 at the federal level, but U.S. Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) introduced similar provisions as part of a 2008 bill that also seeks to unlock cell phones from specific mobile networks.
As more cities get more experience and that experience is shared, municipal networks will become more common in the U.S., as they already are in Europe, reports Telephony Magazine.
Private providers, like Integra Telecom, provide voice, data and Internet communications to thousands of business and carrier customers in 11 Western states. The company owns and operates fiber-optic networks comprising metropolitan access networks, a nationally acclaimed tier one Internet and data network, and a 4,700-mile high-speed long haul network (right).
Tim Wu compared U.S. broadband providers to OPEC in a recent New York Times op-ed piece, a charge the CTIA thinks is ridiculous.
Related Dailywireless Fiber articles include; FiOS: Too Risky?, Municipal Fiber: Fits and Starts and Be Your Own Fiber Net.
