America Tires Of Big Telecom’s Shit, Driving Boom In Community-Owned Broadband Networks
from the I-guess-I'll-do-it-myself dept
For decades, frustrated towns and cities all over the country have responded to telecom market failure by building their own fiber broadband networks. Data routinely shows that not only do these networks provide faster, better, and cheaper service, the networks are generally more accountable to the public — because they’re directly owned and staffed by locals with a vested interest in the community.
Despite relentless industry lobbyist efforts to paint these networks as some kind of socialist boondoggle hellscape, such community ISPs continue to see massive, bipartisan popularity. Case in point: The Institute For Local Self Reliance, which tracks community networks, says they saw a dramatic uptick in such networks after COVID lockdowns highlighted the importance of affordable access.
According to a database of such networks tracked by the organization (disclosure: I’ve worked with the nonprofit researching municipal broadband projects), there are now 450 municipal broadband networks in the U.S. Since January 1, 2021, at least 47 new networks have come online, with dozens in the planning or pre-construction phases. And this may be an undercount given the FCC’s failure to track them all.
There are now more than 400 communities all over the country served by such networks, which can take a variety of forms, whether it’s a local cooperative, a city-owned broadband utility, an extension of the existing city-owned electrical utility, or a direct municipal build. Closer to a thousand if you include local public-private partnerships.
In rural North Dakota, local cooperatives have driven the kind of affordable fiber access many city residents in more populous states still haven’t seen. In Vermont, numerous municipalities have fused to create Communications Utility Districts to deploy affordable fiber to long neglected rural markets. In Tennessee, the city-owned utility in Chattanooga has created one of the most popular ISPs in the nation providing speeds upwards of 25 gigabits per second to local residents.
They all represent local, grass roots’ responses to local market failure caused by often-mindless consolidation, stifled competition, and feckless federal policymakers unwilling to address (or often even acknowledge) the problem of unchecked monopoly power. ILSR’s Chris Mitchell put it this way:
“The monopoly cable and telephone companies frequently claim that there are no problems with broadband in the U.S., even as millions of students cannot access the Internet from their homes, whether in rural or urban areas. These cities remind us of the work that has to be done to make sure everyone can take advantage of modern technologies.”
During peak pandemic lockdowns, a viral photo made the rounds featuring poor kids forced to huddle in the dirt outside of Taco Bell, just to attend class. As somebody who has covered U.S. broadband policy for decades, I watched as that photo did more to move the needle on U.S. telecom policy and broadband affordability than any activism campaign or press release crafted in the last quarter century.
Many of these municipalities have been greatly buoyed by billions in both COVID relief money (The American Rescue Plan Act) and infrastructure funding (The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act). As a result, countless communities are now deploying cutting edge, affordable, gigabit-capable fiber networks for the first time to customers long trapped on the wrong side of the digital divide.
It’s a movement that could have been pre-empted at any time by the likes of Comcast and AT&T if they’d been willing to expand service, improve speeds, and compete on price. Instead, such companies quickly got to work trying to pass anti-democratic state laws banning such networks, spreading disinformation via fake consumer groups, or flinging lawsuits at towns and cities across America.
Even during the peak of the pandemic, when such networks were busy showcasing their benefit to affordable access for telecommuting and home education, the telecom lobby convinced House Republicans to try and ban such networks nationwide. It didn’t work, again, because nearly everybody in America dislikes Comcast, and these locally owned alternatives have significant, bipartisan support.
Our collective disdain for the local cable and broadband monopoly is one of the few things that bridges America’s ugly (and intentionally well cultivated) partisan divide. And this kind of local activism is going to be increasingly important as corporate efforts at the Supreme Court to unravel what’s left of federal corporate oversight gain steam in the months and years to come.
None of this is to say community broadband is a magic panacea. Such efforts require competent leadership, a good plan, plenty of money, and public support. But it is a very cool example — 100 years after a similar backlash played out with rural electrification — of locals banding together to combat regional monopolies (and the corruption that protects them) to dramatically improve their quality of life.
Filed Under: broadband, community broadband, digital divide, gigabit fiber, high speed internet, monopoly, telecom
Companies: institute for local self reliance
Comments on “America Tires Of Big Telecom’s Shit, Driving Boom In Community-Owned Broadband Networks”
Big corporations do not want freedom to be shared. They want to confine freedom to the ultra-rich and enslave everyone else.
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I mean competition is good but let’s not kid ourselves. You think these locales aren’t looking to steal and exploit data just as much as the big players?
Who knows maybe the big guys are charging too much for the data so the locales are trying to cut out the middle man and go right to the data.
Re: FUD?
Spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt… straight out of the corporate handbook for opposing local broadband.
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Found the FUD!
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In a twist of irony, the smaller, local networks would be more vulnerable to oversight (and less likely to do so, since the spying would be much closer to home) than the larger telecoms.
Further more: the scope of their snooping is going to be very limited. Any buyers may be less interested simply because it’s not the giant firehose they are used to.
And even then. If one small network decides to snoop, the scope of that damage is MUCH more limited.
So yes, competition is good even here FUD world.
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That you think ISP exploitation of the data stream is what consumers care about when it comes to Big Telecom’s shit, you have already highlighted that you are completely disconnected from the average consumer.
The article focuses on cost to the consumer and customer service, not Data privacy, because the issues most consumers care about is cost and the ease of resolving issues in billing and service.
A refocus onto data privacy when Telecom is seemingly as bad at data privacy in a “better the devil you know” arguement really highlights the effort you’ve had to take to avoid looking at issues that matter to consumers.
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Oh yah? You got any on data on this or are you just making shit up?
“Local underserved communities banding together to get their own internet is bad because they’re no better than big ISPs!” is a thing ISPs wants us to believe.
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The biggest obstacle of running a municipal fiber broadband network is the high cost of entry and the legal red tape.
The first step is to pay the appropriate incumbent for a space on the utility poles or underground, so-called ‘make-ready’. That incumbent defines the conditions of their infrastructure and charges you at their labor rates for their crews to ‘improve’ their poles to allow you access, including replacing stuff they should have replaced themselves years ago, and for moving everybody else on their poles or right of way. This may be a quarter of your costs and you have nothing to show for it other than legal rights. And there are lots of hands in your wallet.
After that lengthy process, you can hire somebody to design the network, and then somebody to build it. It’s been a while since I priced it but $30k/mile might be ballpark. Once built, you can start providing connections to users including ONTs. If you were foolish enough to put switches and mirrors on the roads you would further need to contract the local power company for power.
Now you have a network. You need network monitoring and a crew or contract for maintenance, you need billing, you need a site for electronics and you need a contract with a provider from a greater network office for total bandwidth. The good news is that the cost of wholesale broadband has been decreasing year over year.
It will take at least 3 years from start to finish with luck if you know what you are doing, have capable contractors, have no fiber/equipment backlogs and work your way through the signup process. Along the way, to get to reasonable service costs per drop/premises, you will face opposition from state regulations, the local competition, and from the taxpayers who don’t like paying and having to wait. And since most munis need to borrow to do capital projects like this, some approval by the bond watchdogs.
Take rate will be a key because you need enough users per mile to pay back the bonds taken out to build and run the system. Competition, since they are already in place, can out price you and out wait you because operation is very inexpensive as is maintenance at ~1% yearly, assuming no natural disasters.
And you need folks in town to oversee all the contractors running the various aspects of the network.
The bottom line is that municipal networks are very good for citizens. But it is a slog to get to it. It is not a ‘kingdom’ for a pol and his/her buddies or it will fail. It will be vastly less expensive for users, even users that stay with the incumbents (cf. competition). What is the threshold of ‘shit’ that your citizens need to put in the effort and investment? There are numerous failures of munis, but they all had one thing in common: they spent on stuff that did not matter before they had a real business, like new maintenance trucks and new buildings. This can be done. Chattanooga was one; Leverett was another. Both had ‘potholes’ along the way.
New fiber install here
OpenInfra just buried fiber in my FL neighborhood. OI lays the cable and installs the ONT but doesn’t provide service. Instead they make the network available to competing ISPs.
It competes with Spectrum who sells 1Gb/40Mb for $129/mo. My fiber provider (SumoFiber) offers 1Gb/1Gb for $59/mo, 2Gb/2Gb for $79 or 8Gb/8Gb for $199. It’s an established ISP; their techs respond to my emails minutes after I send them.
In case what anyone wonders what meaningful competition looks like, it looks like 2Gb/2Gb low latency (2ms to 1.1.1.1) for $79/mo.
Just for fun
Cause I aint heard.
HOW much does the cable/internet IP provider PAY for access to the net?
Esp. after they bought out the Tier 1, part, Which they are finding Does not make lots of money, IF you arnt selling it.
I get the idea that those that bought the Tier 1 section, Probably dont pay anything.
Accusations
Accusations abound of Comcast and AT&T and verizon having ‘destruction’ teams that will literally go to a town with municipal broadband and ‘fuck up their shit’ by damaging cabinets, cutting fibre etc. then making it look like vandalism by spraying ‘tags’.
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Comcast is on record of having sabotaged a small ISP to steal and lock away all its customers. You can bet that if Big Telecom’s legal efforts to stop these grassroots networks fail, it will resort to physically sabotaging or destroying them in order to maintain its regional monopolies, with absolutely no meaningful penalties.
If there’s one thing Republicans and Democrats (who aren’t in Congress) can agree on, it’s that Comcast fucking sucks.
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But also that they should be the only ones who can provide broadband for millions of people.
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No no, those are the ones who are in Congress (with a few honorable exceptions, like Wyden).
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What a disgusting, vulgar, low-brow headline.
In other words, par for the course for this trash site.
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The facts don’t care about your feelings, shitflake.
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We’re not here to tap dance around your sensibilities, bitch.
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Nobody cares what words you like.
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aw you got triggered by the bad word 😖 poor guy
Does this database not count local coops? I have gigabit fiber from a local coop, but it doesn’t show on the map.
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Chicken coops? Or did you mean co-ops? The hyphen was invented for a reason, you know.
I love the smell of schadenfreude in the morning...
The best part is that none of this would be happening if the ‘super-duper competitive, free market-driven’ broadband industry had done even the bare minimum, cities are only stepping in because the current providers have such an abysmal record of service and pricing and in the process highlighting just how badly the major ISP’s have been screwing people over.
It’s no wonder they scramble so hard to block and/or sabotage such efforts, actual competition in the market is something the major ISP’s haven’t had to deal with for years if not longer and since offering good service at reasonable rates would cut into their all important quarterly profits all they can think of is to try to buy enough politicians and lie to enough people that they won’t have to.
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The only real competion in this market (and increasingly others) is the one for the biggest executive compensation package.
The only thing you can get where I live is 6 down and 1.5 up. I’ll never see fiber in my life.
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I’ve got 300Mbps through Comcast. About once a month, I get a flyer from AT&T trying to get me to switch to their fiber. When I actually call, the only thing the can offer me is 6 down, 1.5 up.
Anyone remember Cingular Wireless?
In my experience Cingular Wireless was the worst telecom to deal with in any capacity. It bought AT&T in 2004 and changed its name to AT&T given that entity’s somewhat better reputation. Not surprising that present day AT&T has been a big player in attacking municipal networks.
I got mine
66 times more bandwidth, $133 per month savings.
If a local ISP with 800 subscribers in a rural county can do this you know the telecom is gouging…