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Ting Disrupting Mediocre U.S. Broadband By Partnering With Annoyed Cities Like Colorado Springs
from the there's-a-better-way-to-do-this dept
Back in 2015 domain registrar Tucows announced it would hope to modestly kickstart stagnant broadband competition by buying a small Virginia ISP by the name of Blue Ridge InternetWorks (BRI). Operating under the Ting brand name, the company said the goal was to bring a “shockingly human experience and fair, honest pricing” to a broken broadband market dominated by a handful of monopolies.
A lot has changed since then. Ting has subsequently expanded its broadband disruption efforts into six different states, and is currently either operating or building broadband networks in 16 different locations.
In many instances, Ting is partnering with local governments looking to provide better, faster, and cheaper broadband. That includes Colorado Springs, which is currently building its own “open access” fiber network via its existing electric utility, with Ting as the first anchor tenant. The city will be Ting’s biggest partner to date:
“Ting is an interesting type of fiber provider in the U.S., using different business strategies to deliver fiber to customers. Sometimes it builds and owns its own networks. But other times, it leverages municipal-owned backbone fiber and then builds last mile connections to residential customers. Or, in the case with Colorado Springs Utilities, it acts as an anchor tenant on the fiber network of a city or utility.”
The network is open access, meaning that while Colorado Springs owns the underlying infrastructure, numerous ISPs can come in and compete in layers. Everybody wins: the city makes money from lease agreements (and can ensure uniform coverage to marginalized neighborhoods), and ISPs can have access to local residents for a fraction of what it would have cost to build the networks themselves.
In some such deployments, like Ammon, Idaho, customers can switch ISPs in a matter of seconds using an online portal. Locally owned, such providers are usually more responsible to complaints since they actually live in the communities they serve. We discussed this and similar models in notable detail in our Copia report on broadband competition last year.
In Colorado Springs, Ting is providing 2 Gbps (gigabit per second) broadband connections for $89 a month with no caps, no hidden fees, and no long term contracts. Data routinely indicates that community owned, open access broadband networks tend to provide better, cheaper, faster service than regional incumbent monopolies. Such efforts have pushed the cost of gigabit service below $70 in many markets.
Unsurprisingly this model, where numerous competitors drive down prices and spur ISPs to actually try is a nightmare for companies like AT&T and Comcast, which is why they’ve worked tirelessly for years to ban such efforts on both the state and federal level. Such companies, routinely engaged in fraud and slathered in wasted subsidies, insist their opposition is strictly rooted in concern for taxpayer welfare.
Ting is moving cautiously, and currently only serves an estimated 85,500 addresses nationwide (though the Colorado Springs network is expected to serve around 200,000 residents). But the open access model they’ve been embracing is taking root all over the country, driving competition to markets where Comcast has been the only meaningful broadband provider for several decades.
All told, more than 900 communities have built their own broadband networks, either directly as a municipality, as an extension of the city-owned utility, or via local cooperatives. And it’s a trend that’s accelerating for two reasons: the billions now flowing into the sector courtesy of the infrastructure bill, and the widespread frustration communities had with substandard broadband during peak COVID.
Filed Under: broadband, colorado springs, competition, cooperatives, fiber, gigabit, monopolies, municipal broadband, open access, utilities
Companies: ting, tucows
Comments on “Ting Disrupting Mediocre U.S. Broadband By Partnering With Annoyed Cities Like Colorado Springs”
Tucows
Tucows? Is it the same Tucows I downloaded shareware from as a kid?
If so, it’s kind of cool to hear about a 90’s internet company that grew up to be awesome
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Per Wikipedia: “Originally founded in 1993 as a shareware and freeware software download site, Tucows shuttered its downloads business in 2021. Tucows Domains is the second-largest domain registrar worldwide and operates OpenSRS, Ascio, and Hover.”
The domain registration is what they’re mostly known for now, OpenSRS being a wholesale domain management service used by a lot of registrars. If you’ve ever bought a domain name through a web or e-mail host, there’s a good chance they used that.
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Yep. i was sad when they rolled up the sidewalk there. Still doing decent work, apparently.
I’m a little annoyed that a Canadian company is improving American broadband while the third-party ISP situation up here in Canada continues to deteriorate. It’s looking doubtful that the regulators will ever force the incumbents to allow meaningful fibre access (access is technically available, as long as the third-party ISP doesn’t mind paying twice the incumbent’s retail price just to lease the line). And if they ever do, we’ll probably have no third-party ISPs left by that time: they’re all being bought up by the companies they’re supposed to be competing with, somehow without any anti-trust or competition concerns being raised.
This looks like good news for Colorado Springs, but how about Ting’s/Tucows’s home city of Toronto? We could use some help with mobile phone service, too: Canada’s is consistently rated as one of the most expensive and least competitive (coincidence?) in the world. I’d love to see open-access cellular networks too.
Re: Canadian?
FWIW even though Tucows’ head office is in Toronto, it’s a US company, incorporated in Pennsylvania.
I suspect that if you asked, they’d tell you that the legal environment in Canada makes it impossible to compete with the entrenched oligopoly of Bell, Rogers, and Telus. The CRTC is too busy with stuff like shaking down Facebook and Google with link taxes.
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Hmm. It seems weird for an American company to have a Canadian headquarters. Is that kind of thing common?
No, even when they weren’t distracted, they just kept giving Bell et al. whatever they asked for.
Is the USA any better, in terms of wired internet? As I understand it, new network operators are basically getting no help from government regulators in either country, nor do they have any real regulatory burden.
For both countries, I sometimes get the impression that the incumbents don’t even really want to be in the infrastructure business. They’ve historically been quite slow to upgrade anything. I wonder whether one could ever be convinced to sell their network, and lease it back under open-access terms. (Seems dumb, but who knows? Such things happen in real estate all the time; states have even sold their capitol buildings.)
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I can’t say about the international border crossing, but the number of companies that are incorporated in Delaware and have their headquarters in Overland Park, Kansas is staggering.
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They really don’t want to be infrastructure business. But they do want to be in the business of shaking down the general population using monopoly tactics that the last three decades of leadership at the federal and state levels of government have enabled. And I completely lay blame at both parties’ feet.
Democratic solutions of throwing money at ISPs to build and/or expand networks has often resulted in half-hearted deployments that skip whole neighborhoods, implement legacy technology that technically satisfies the funding requirements, or see the ISP outright pocketing the funding through loopholes and clever manipulations of the rules.
Meanwhile, Republican solutions that suggest competition might work if last mile infrastructure weren’t a natural monopoly. And their support of incumbents attempting to block competition through legal means (i.e. pole ownership and fighting One-Touch-Make-Ready) are just as counterproductive.
Personally, I think all utility poles should be publicly owned — either by the state or the municipality they are located in. No private entity should be able to claim ROW over your property, put their pole there, then tell every other utility they can’t use it or only if they pay up. Either it’s open to everybody by default, or the public needs to own it and make sure that competition isn’t locked out of being allowed to compete within rights-of-way that are designated by the government.
The better solution than either of these would have been building open access, publicly-owned networks using publicly raised funds. In my view, the USF-style funding model that got electricity and telephone service to every home and business at the turn of the 20th century worked well, and should be the means to get fiber to every home and business. From there, if we want to allow private operators to lease access to the open network, I’m fine with it. We can keep upgrading optics for more capacity and better speeds using the same glass. But getting the physical infrastructure in the ground/air will effectively future-proof us for another century.
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Ideally, ISPs should be able to lease only network access—with transceivers, routers, backhaul, etc. supplied by the builder—or, at their option, install their own equipment and just lease whatever they need (maybe just the fiber). That way, they can get started cheaply, which should enable competition, and also have a viable path to maybe lower costs or provide services better than what the builder thought was necessary.
Who wants to have to go to a public meeting and convince everyone that the city should upgrade from 1 to 25 Gbit/s, if there’s an ISP willing to just do it? See, for example, init7 in Switzerland.
News like this is the best Ting to hear!
Anyone seen Richard Bennett lately? Or is he too drunk on “winning”?
I live in a Florida community where OpenInfra is deploying fiber. Our choices until now have been Spectrum or nothing. I’m super glad it’s us but really wish this was part of nationwide trend.
I used Ting for a while for cell service, and to this day they were the only cellular company I never had a complaint about. I only switched to Project Fi because (at the time) it was head and shoulders above anything else offered for wifi/cellular calling. I could get calls and texts on my phone or computer, at plants in the middle of nowhere, that were directed to my cell number. People didnt need to know where I was and not once was it blocked by a firewall. And, it would integrate my chats with texts seamlessly in a single conversation. It made iMessage look like sending semaphore. But, given googles ability to fuck up a good thing, all of that has been fractured and destroyed. By a different Google Chat. And a new SMS tool. That doesn’t even support RCS they so desperately want Apple to support. Fucking ugh. Maybe I should move back.
I also use hover, and not once have I had a problem, and I’ve easily used it with things like squarespace, Google workspace, etc.
If I were in their potential service area, I’d be first in line to try their internet products.
An economically sound approach. Basic infrastructure is a natural monopoly like roads, best built and maintained by a government or utility. And furthermore, it can be unprofitable to build infrastructure to serve some customers so the private sector has left them without adequate broadband. However, once that infrastructure is in place, the barrier to entry is low and competition can thrive. Much better than dumping billions on big telecoms and expecting them to use that money to expand access when it’s in their interest to pocket the money and hem and haw about why they didn’t.
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It’s also an approach that was tested and worked in the early days of the internet. A common form of early ISP was some BBS operator that decided to offer internet, and just kept adding phone lines. Sometimes they got overwhelmed and the service got bad, but it took all of 5 minutes to switch. Some local calling areas had like a hundred ISPs, all based on phone lines with no per-minute charges at either end.
(The telcos actually had to re-design their networks for all these continually-occupied lines, and hated it because they couldn’t get any extra income: the rates were set by law. They did get a bit anti-competitive when they started their own ISPs, and “56K” required special digital access with no existing tariff; but those were already the end days of dial-up.)
I work for Tucows. It’s a baller company that’s definitely one that plans things out and cautiously expands. Our CEO is a Web 1.0 vet and every time we have a Town Hall with him I like him more and more. It’s strange to feel affection for my corporate overlord, never felt that before.