Knoxville Is Building The Biggest Community-Owned Broadband Network In U.S. History

Broadband

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

Knoxville, Tennessee is making progress on an ambitious, $700 million plan to deliver $65 gigabit fiber connections to every last city resident. With no usage caps, weird fees, or long-term contracts. Once completed, the city-owned fiber network, run through the city’s existing city-owned electrical utility, will be the biggest community-owned broadband network in the U.S.

The Knoxville Utility Board (KUB) says it has managed to deploy 1,100 miles of fiber infrastructure and connect more than 50,000 local residents so far as it makes headway on what’s expected to be a seven year project. In addition to gigabit speeds for $65, KUB is also offering locals symmetrical 2.5 Gbps service for $150 a month; and symmetrical 10 Gbps service for $300 a month.

In 2021 the city-owned utility decided to offer locals residential fiber after decades of complaints by locals about a lack of competition. Like many cities, Knoxville broadband is largely comprised of just two giant regional monopolies (AT&T, Comcast), resulting in slow speeds, spotty access, and high prices.

AT&T and Comcast attempted to undermine the project at every opportunity (Comcast sued Chattanooga for building a similar network), and tried their best to get locals to sign long-term contracts before the city-owned network is completed. Locals weren’t particularly impressed:

“Comcast thanked me for being a customer for 23 years, but it’s not because I’ve had the option to go anywhere else,” said local entrepreneur Tyler Roy, who said he had once driven across town during rush hour because that was faster than uploading a file to his home device. “They have had 23 years to fix these problems and they haven’t.” 

Knoxville is one of more than 900 communities that have decided to build their own community broadband networks in response to obvious market failure. Data routinely shows community-owned networks result in lower prices, faster speeds, and better customer service. And as locally-owned operations, they’re more directly accountable to their neighbors.

In many regions, it’s the local city-owned utility, or a cooperative that’s leading the charge. Elsewhere, it’s exclusively the municipality. And in many regions, municipalities that can’t handle the cost or logistics of building fiber networks will partner with an existing, usually a smaller private operator (see Fort Worth’s recent partnership with Sprocket Networks or the work Ting has been up to).

In many cities, municipalities are eyeing open access fiber networks (see our recent Copia report on this subject). Such networks allow numerous ISPs to come in and compete in layers on a centralized city-owned infrastructure, reduce access costs for new entrants, and drive down broadband costs for residents and local businesses alike via a strange concept known as competition.

Federal regulators, who’ve largely turned a blind eye to the way politically powerful regional monopolies drive up costs for consumers, haven’t been particularly helpful. Republicans, you might recall, tried to pass a bill banning all community-owned broadband networks at the peak of the pandemic when such networks were busy showing their utility and benefit.

Democrats, in contrast, often pay empty lip service to the digital divide. Not only can they not openly admit monopolies are a problem, but they’ve also largely avoided lending even basic messaging support to what’s become a massive grass roots movement of pissed off locals — again, for fear of upsetting politically powerful companies tethered to our domestic surveillance operations.

What has dramatically helped the community-owned broadband movement has been a historic round of new subsidies and loans made possible by the infrastructure bill. More than $45 billion in broadband subsides are now headed to the states, and while a lot of that money will be thrown in the laps of monopolies, a sizeable chunk is winding its way to local community-owned networks.

I’ve spent most of the last two years talking to and writing about a different community every week. Many of them are not only building affordable fiber networks, they’re delivering what amounts to free access to low-income residents thanks to the FCC’s Affordable Connectivity Program (at risk of being defunded due to Congressional incompetence).

Most of these communities aren’t building broadband networks because they think it’s fun. They’re building broadband networks because decades of federal regulatory incompetence and regional monopolies have resulted in market failure and costly, substandard service, giving them no other choice.

Large, entrenched regional monopolies could have responded to this movement by building faster, better, cheaper networks. Instead they found it less expensive to sue cities trying to build better infrastructure, or pass state laws banning municipalities from even pondering the idea. That hasn’t worked, so they’re increasingly facing the first meaningful challenge to their power in a generation.

And because such networks have widespread, bipartisan public support, and the animosity for regional monopolies runs so deep after decades of dysfunction, Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, and Charter are having a hell of a time trying to spin this extremely popular movement as a negative.

Filed Under: broadband, competition, fiber, gigabit, high speed internet, knoxville, knoxville utilities board, municipal broadband, tennessee