community broadband networks

One of the reasons we so strongly support local, community owned broadband networks over European-like regulations on private companies is that large institutions regularly game the rules. We wrote about this last year, when Free Press called on the FCC to stop Verizon from ignoring the rules it agreed to for using certain spectrum.

Senator Franken, who has taken a strong interest in preserving the open Internet, has just reminded the FCC that creating rules does no one any good if it refuses to enforce them.

Not only has Comcast announced that its own Netflix-like service does not count against its bandwidth caps, some researchers found evidence that Comcast was prioritizing its own content to be higher quality than rivals could deliver. Comcast has denied this charge and proving it is difficult. Who do you believe? After all, Comcast spent years lying to its own subscribers about the very existence of its bandwidth caps.

The vast majority of the network neutrality debate centers around whether Comcast should be allowed to use its monopoly status as an onramp to the Internet dominate other markets, like delivering movies (as pioneered by Netflix). Comcast and many economists from Chicago say "Heck yes - they can do whatever they like." But the vast majority of us and the FCC have recognized that this is market-destroying behavior, not pro-market behavior.

So when Comcast was allowed to take over NBC Universal, it agreed to certain conditions imposed by the FCC to encourage competition. But the FCC has a long history of not wanting to enforce its own rules because it can be inconvenient to upset some of the most powerful corporations on the planet. Plus, many of the people working in telecommunications policy for the federal government will eventually make much more money working for Comcast, Verizon, and other carriers.

The FCC often ignores or delays action on many of these apparent violations, which Comcast expected when it agreed to them. In waltzes Senator Franken, who just wrote this excellent letter to the FCC and Department of Justice [pdf]:

... It has now been more than a year since the merger was approved, and a number of complaints regarding Comcast's compliance with the merger conditions have been filed with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Several of these have languished before the Commission for extended periods of time. As I wrote last August, I am concerned that if the Commission fails to address conditions disputes in a timely manner, it will only incentivize Comcast to challenge future conditions and delay resolution of disputes through a protracted complaint process. It will also dissuade other companies from seeking relief before the Commission, if they believe Comcast has violated a condition. This ultimately undermines the conditions that were imposed by your agencies to promote the public interest and to foster competition, and it raises serious questions about whether it is appropriate to rely on behavioral conditions to prevent anticompetitive conduct.

Even if the FCC had the courage to restrain Comcast's anti-competitive actions (which would require a new Chair to replace Commissioner G), Comcast could delay any implementation of proper pro-competition rules with lawsuits and a strong lobbying campaign because Americans continue to vote for politicians that want to give more power to the biggest corporations while reserving less of it for local communities.

What are your Senators doing on this issue? Senator Franken is demanding accountability from the FCC and DoJ - you should call on your elected representatives to do no less. Today.

Radio and television are totally dominated by a few massive corporate interests. The only thing to stop the Internet from being similarly controlled is smart policies and government agencies that actually enforce them. Oh, and communities that own their own networks.

Susan Crawford on the importance of government policy. People who are concerned about the future of the Internet need to pay attention or the cable and telephone companies will take over the Internet (or at least access to it). Not because they are evil, but because what is best for them (or what they think is best for them in the short term) is not what is best for the rest of us or the vast majority of businesses that depend on access to the Internet.

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Recently, we let you know about the situation in Siloam Springs, Arkansas, population 15,039. The town is now investigating the possibility of building their own fiber network. They have had several community meetings and a "vote of the people" is set for May 22, 2012.

Pamela Hill is investigating the twists and turrns in a series of articles about the vote. In one of her articles, Hill looked into another Arkansas community, Paragould, home of the annual "Loose Caboose" Festival.  This community, located in the northeast corner of the state, has successfully operated their own cable network since 1991. Unlike Siloam Springs, the people of Paragould weren't focused first on generating new revenue for the local government, they just wanted to be able to watch tv for a reasonable price.

Back in 1986, Cablevision was the only provider in Paragould. Hill spoke with Rhonda Davis, CFO of Paragould Light, Water & Cable:

"The public wasn’t happy with Cablevision’s service or rates,” Davis said. “We took it to a public vote and did it.”

Prior to Paragould's decision to build their own network, the City had a nonexclusive franchise agreement with Cablevision. The town was dissatisfied by the service they received and, in 1986, Paragould voters approved an ordinance authorizing the Paragould Light and Water to construct and operate a municipal cable system. Three years later, there was a referendum that authorized the city to issue a little over $3 million in municipal bonds to finance the system.

That same month, Cablevision filed suit alleging antitrust violations, breach of contract, and infringement of first and fourteenth amendment rights. The district court dismissed the antitrust and constitutional claims and Cablevision appealed unsuccessfully. The case attracted attention from lawyers and business scholars across the country.

By 1998, the City had purchased Cablevision's remaining service and began offering Internet service. The City has continually upgraded their investment, which now consists of fiber lines that run to nodes throughout the city. Coaxial cable delivers signal and data from nodes to homes.

Paragould Light, Water, and Cable now serves approximately 11,000 retail cable television customers, and 6,550 retail Internet customers. Their fiber infrastructure is over 50 miles in the town of 26,113. From the Hill article:

Davis said the city does still run a debt for the cable and internet systems. The $3.2 million bond issue for cable in 1989 has been refinanced and increased over the years. It should be paid off in 2014, she said. But the system has been paying for itself since the sixth year of service, according to Davis.

During the first five years, the city increased property taxes by $100,000 a year to help make payments. The extra taxes amounted to $1 to $2 a month for most households and still allowed customers to get cable “way cheaper” than what they paid the private company, Davis said.

Paragould customers can get cable television for as low as $14.30 per month and  Internet access varies from as low as $24.95 for residential service to $62.95 for business class. 

Photo used creative commons license

We apologize for the last week of glitches and errors you have been having in trying to use our site. Our thoroughly incompetent web hosts have been sacked and we have transitioned to a different hosting provider, which should be much better.

Some glitches are still being worked out, but we hope the site is generally around. For all your hosting needs, whoever you go with, don't make it Westhost.com

On April 28, I gave a presentation as part of the Economic Development track of the Broadband Communities Conference in Dallas regarding the role of community networks. The full panel presentation is here (along with links to all the other presentations over 2 days of economic development).

My presentation is excerpted below:

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We have brought you news about DC-Net before and have even highlighted the community network in our report, Breaking the Broadband Monopoly. Now we want to draw your attention to some videos they have produced.

Free WiFi hotspots all over town, secure indoor WiFi for government staff, and hundreds of miles of fiber throughout town are just a few of the advances DC-Net has made toward ubiquitous and reliable connectivity. DC-Net is a tremendous example of a publicly owned network providing the highest levels of performance for its subscribers.

DC-Net has released a video highlighting their advancements in DC and how their work has positively impacted the community.

The second video is from Don Johnson, Director of DC-Net, presenting some info on DC Community Access Network (DC-CAN) to a Ward 5 audience. DC-CAN is an initiative to bring broadband to the underserved areas in DC with middle-mile connections. From the DC-CAN website:

The DC Community Access Network (DC-CAN) will bring affordable, value-added broadband services to over 250 health, educational, public safety, and other community anchor institutions primarily in broadband underserved areas of the District. It also creates a high speed middle mile network for last mile service providers to deliver affordable broadband access to residents and businesses in underserved areas.

DC-CAN already has 67 miles of fiber laid as a backbone and four city MegaPOP sites are now connected to the 100G backbone. From Ciena, one of DC-Net's private sector partners:

With this new infrastructure in place, DC-Net has already connected 49 new Community Anchor Institutions to the network and upgraded 52 existing anchor sites. Community anchors include charter schools, health clinics and other health care providers, community-based training programs, after school and early childhood development programs, libraries, and public safety sites.

DC-Net anticipates having 291 of these Community Anchor Institutions connected to the DC-CAN infrastructure by June, 2013.

Christopher Mitchell recently spoke with Marcie Sillman on Seattle public radio KUOW's Weekday. Christopher and Marcie talked on May 8, 2012 about recent developments in local and national broadband, including the April 29th end to Seattle's free Wi-Fi network. Christopher and Marcie also discussed challenges and strategies involved in building a community network.

The interview is just about 13 minutes.

In 2005, Seattle started offering free Wi-Fi to several neighborhoods, hoping to increase usage among businesses, residents, and passers-by. While the effort was hailed by some, and criticized by others, it was an experiment in community broadband. An experiment that ended on April 29th.

The City still considered the free Wi-Fi a pilot project, even though it had been in operation since 2005. Areas served were the University District and Columbia City neighborhoods, and four downtown parks. There will still be free Wi-Fi in public libraries and in a few hotspots around town as well as in some city facilities, including City Hall and the Seattle Center.

The theory was that municipal WiFi was a workable and cheaper way to get more people online. But Wi-Fi is only cheaper in the short run -- something fiber critics tend to ignore. As Seattle has found, most of the network has to be replaced every 5-7 years.

Technical issues and geography also create unique problems for citywide Wi-Fi. Where to put transmitters, interference from buildings, foilage and water, are all barriers to offering a service that is worthwhile to potential users. David Keyes, Chief Information Technology Officer for the City of Seattle noted these problems where there have been complaints of spotty and unreliable reception. Keyes talked to Brian Heaton of Government Technology:

Seattle would be open to someone taking over the system, but Keyes felt that anyone coming in to do a fresh deployment of Wi-Fi might install it a little differently in regard to wireless access point placement. The actual equipment would also need to be replaced.

Seattle's plan for municipal WiFi has been debated from the beginning. In 2008, Government Technology reporter, Chandler Harris, spoke with Bill Schrier, who was Seattle's Chief Technology Officer at the time. Schrier was also one of the harshest critics of the plan to spread Wi-Fi all over Seattle, saying:

"We found significant problems with the technology," Schrier said. "First of all, if you put up a Wi-Fi point, it will work outdoors, but radio waves don't go through walls. If you put the Wi-Fi points down low, it reaches to the back of restaurants and buildings, but you don't get a wide coverage, but if you put the Wi-Fi points up high, you get a broader footprint, but don't get the interior coverage you want."

The study also found users were monopolizing bandwidth by sending spam and participating in Internet gaming, while other users attempted to hack into the system. The study also found numerous benefits to free citywide Wi-Fi, including increased revenue for businesses situated in the service area, improved access to users who had no other means of access, a reduction of road congestion from users who claimed Seattle Wi-Fi helped reduce driving time, and an increase in Seattle.gov services.

The Wi-Fi in Seattle website credits the wireless network with aiding in the revitalization of the neighborhoods that were served by the service. The announcement lists factors leading to the decision as:

- The existing equipment has passed its end-of-life and can no longer be maintained effectively.
- The cost to buy and install new commercial-grade equipment and to support continuing Wi-Fi service and support are high at a time when the economy has forced the city to make budget cuts.
- An increasing number of people have Internet access with their mobile cell plans (“smartphones “), and there is greater availability of Wi-Fi in neighborhood cafes and businesses that provide alternatives to a City-managed Wi-Fi program.

More concerning to us is Seattle's failure to expand its large wired footprint to better benefit local businesses and residents. Thus far, it seems the only beneficiary of its new policies to lease access to private companies will be Comcast -- strengthening its grip over the city's telecom needs. Mayor McGin once campaigned on smart public broadband investments, but his vision appears to have blocked by the City Council.

At present, Seattle is stuck with Comcast and CenturyLink whereas some of its suburban neighbors have FTTH, largely due to Verizon's FiOS. Who is planning to construct a 21st century network in that period?  No one, apparently.  Perhaps Seattle thinks it can still be competitive with only last-generation DSL and cable but time will tell.

Photo used under creative commons license from flickr.

We told you how Chanute, Kansas, was using their community network to serve local businesses. Now we want to share a story about how the community network helped bring a new business to Chanute.

Chanute, who is named after Octave Chanute an aviation pioneer, adopts the motto "A Tadition of Innovation." Chanute has proven that they are serious about that mantra with the expansion of their community network. They boast free Wi-Fi in all green spaces and parks, schools that are connected with fiber and wireless, several fiber loops throughout the city, plans for a smart grid, and are even exploring FTTH capability.

Spirit AeroSystems, the world's largest supplier of commercial airplane assemblies and components, just opened a new manufacturing facility in Chanute. The plant is expected to create up to 150 new jobs in the southeastern Kansas community and will include a health clinic on site for employees.

As Spirit was approaching different communities, it had a variety of requirements that included reliable electricity and reliable broadband. Nothing exorbitant -- they weren't asking for a gig or even 100Mbps. But they needed reliability. And Chanute was poised to deliver. Publicly owned networks do not exist in a vacuum; they are often one piece of a well-run community.

If Chanute only had a slow DSL and absentee-owned cable company offering broadband, maybe Spirit still would have chosen them and maybe that would have been the tipping point for a different community. We don't know for sure. 

What we do know is that Chanute is getting more jobs and that owning their own network helped.

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Our own Christopher Mitchell will be speaking at two upcoming events on broadband and the future of the Internet.

First, Christopher will be at F2C: Freedom to Connect in Washington, D.C., on May 21-22nd. Christopher will be speaking on May 22nd on the "Fight for Community Broadband" Panel along with other notables from the Free Press, Harvard University, the Center for Media & Democracy, and the SouthEast Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors (SEATOA). The presentations will be at the AFI Silver Theatre and you can register here. If you can't attend in person, you can sign up for a webcast. From the F2C website:

F2C: Freedom to Connect is a conference devoted to preserving and celebrating the essential properties of the Internet. The Internet is a success today because it is stupid, abundant and simple. In other words, its neutrality, its openness to rapidly developing technologies and its layered architecture are the reasons it has succeeded where others (e.g., ISDN, Interactive TV) failed.

The Internet’s issues are under-represented in Washington DC policy circles. F2C: Freedom to Connect is designed to advocate for innovation, for creativity, for expression, for little-d democracy. The Freedom to Connect is about an Internet that supports human freedoms and personal security. These values, held by many of us whose consciousness has been shaped by the Internet, are not common on K Street or Capitol Hill or at the FCC.

Keynote speakers include Vint Cerf, Michael Copps, Susan Crawford, Cory Doctorow (via telecon), Benoît Felten, Lawrence Lessig, Rebecca MacKinnon, Eben Moglen, Mike Marcus and Aaron Swartz.

Register here!

After participating at F2C, Christopher will be heading over to Arlington, Virginia, to speak at "Creating Sustainable Broadband Solutions for Communities and Anchor Institutions" presented by the Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition (SHLB Coalition) and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). The conference will be May 23-24 at the Sheraton National Hotel in Arlington. Come the evening of the 22nd for a reception to meet the speakers and other attendees. The focus of the conference:

This national conference for anchor institutions, BTOP and BIP awardees, and anyone else (including non-awardees) will explore sustainability strategies for next-generation broadband networks and examine how community anchor institutions can benefit from and leverage these broadband investments to serve their communities.

The keynote speaker at "Creating Sustainable Broadband Solutions for Communities and Anchor Institutions" will be Lawrence E. Strickling, Administrator, National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), U.S. Department of Commerce. The conference will also include several notable pleanary speakers, including community broadband champion Joanne Hovis. The agenda also includes Break-Out sessions for more in-depth discussion. You can view the agenda, and register for the conference online.