Tired Of Being Ripped Off By Monopolies, Cleveland Launches Ambitious Plan To Provide Citywide Dirt Cheap Broadband

Broadband

from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept

Cleveland has spent years being dubbed the “worst connected city in the U.S.” thanks to expensive, patchy, and slow broadband. Why Cleveland broadband sucks so badly isn’t really a mystery: consolidated monopoly/duopoly power has resulted in a broken market where local giants like AT&T and Charter don’t have to compete on price, speeds, availability, customer service, or much of anything else.

Data also shows that despite billions in tax breaks, regulatory favors, and subsidies, companies like AT&T have long refused to upgrade low-income and minority Cleveland neighborhoods to fiber. These companies not only engage in this deployment “redlining,” but data also makes it clear they often charge these low income and minority neighborhoods more money for the same or slower broadband.

Last week I spent some time talking to Cleveland city leaders and local activists about their plan to do something about it. On one hand, they’ve doled out $20 million in COVID relief broadband funding to local non-profit DigitalC to deliver fixed wireless broadband at speeds of 100 Mbps for as little as $18.

On the other hand, they’ve convinced a company named SiFi Networks to build a $500 million open access fiber network at no cost to taxpayers. SiFi Networks will benefit from a tight relationship with the city, while making its money from leasing access to the network to ISPs.

We’ve noted (see our Copia report on broadband competition) that such open access networks routinely lower the cost for ISP market entry, boost competition, and generally result in lower prices. Monopolies like AT&T, of course, have long opposed the idea, even if they would technically benefit from lower access costs, because it chips away at their consolidated monopoly power.

Local activists like DigitalC CEO Joshua Edmonds tell me they hope the project teaches U.S. towns and cities that there are alternatives to being feckless supplicants to regional telecom mono/duopolies:

“This is a major victory, and I hope that people don’t look at it as just a major victory for Cleveland. Every city where there’s a prevalent digital divide, where there’s political will and ability to execute, people should be paying close attention to what happens in Cleveland, paying close attention to how DigitalC was able to fight and navigate with our coalition of stakeholders.”

We’ll see what the finished network looks like. And now that Cleveland is challenging monopoly power, it will be interesting to see if local monopolies focus on challenging Cleveland. Big ISPs like AT&T and Charter want to have their cake and eat it too; they don’t want to uniformly upgrade their broadband networks to next-gen speeds, but they genuinely don’t want others to do so either.

It’s a lot easier and cheaper to throw a bunch of campaign contributions at corrupt policymakers (remember with the GOP wanted to ban all community broadband networks country-wide during the peak of the pandemic? or how the telecom and GOP worked in concert to pass laws in 20 states effectively banning towns and cities from making these choices for themselves?).

Community-owned broadband networks aren’t a magical panacea. Such efforts are like any other business plan, and require competency in design and implementation. But the community-owned and operated networks in more than 1,000 U.S. cities can (and routinely do) prompt a very broken and federal government-coddled status quo to actually try for once, much to its chagrin.

Filed Under: broadband, cleveland, community broadband, digital divide, digitalc, high speed internet, municipal broadband, telecom