More Details from the Incredible Santa Monica City Net

Santa Monica's approach to building community owned broadband that puts the community first has been wildly successful. They have not focused on providing residential connections, and likely will not in the future, focusing instead on meeting their municipal needs and businesses to spur economic development. They can deliver up to 10Gbps to businesses that need it and they have connectivity throughout the City for whatever projects they choose to pursue. This includes free Wi-Fi in parks, controlling traffic signaling (prioritizing mass transit, for instance), and smart parking applications. On top of all that, their investments have saved more than a million dollars that would have been wasted on slower, less reliable connections provided by leased lines. In the matter of controlling traffic signals, Santa Monica wants all intersections with fiber-optics.
Arizona Avenue, the Mid-City area and the city's office district will all be getting makeovers if the City Council approves two contracts that will connect 40 signalized intersections to City Hall's centralized traffic control system. The work represents the fourth phase in a five-phase effort to connect all of Santa Monica's intersections using fiber optic cables. Some signals will need to be fully replaced, while others can get by on smaller upgrades, according to the staff report.
Don't miss this hour long interview between Craig Settles and Jory Wolf, the brains behind Santa Monica's success.
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Around 45 minutes into the interview, Jory Wolf talks about the ways the free Wi-Fi network promotes local businesses in partnership with a Buy Local campaign. I was thrilled to hear this as a colleague of mine at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance is a great friend of buy local campaigns because they are proven to help the small, independent businesses that contribute so much to communities. If you want to learn more, particularly about how Santa Monica's approach has created many new jobs (that's right, smart public investments in broadband create jobs!) check out . For more information about Santa Monica, check out this article from Broadband Communities Magazine.
-Though the city provides Internet access directly, it also makes the network available to third-party providers on an open-access basis. “The incumbents have chosen not to use our assets,” Wolf says, explaining that larger providers are often reluctant to operate over networks where they cannot control the user experience and that their marketing and support organizations are not geared to using other companies’ networks. 
 However, other ISPs have shown interest in the network now that it is becoming successful. Currently, two ISPs offer services generally over the network, and other ISPs serve the Santa Monica offices of businesses that they deal with in other locations. Wolf says, “We have the opportunity to handle the business any way they prefer. … We’re not an obstacle; we’re an enabler. We don’t see ourselves as competitors, but as filling a void.” 
 City Net’s revenue from current business customers totals about $300,000 per year, enough to fund network operations and maintenance and to support an extensive system of free Wi-Fi hot spots throughout the city. Wi-Fi is now available at parks, beaches, libraries, public buildings and other open-space areas. On any given day, about 2,000 of Santa Monica’s 87,000 residents use the 27 Wi-Fi hot spots. 
 The city also has $190,000 of its capital funds remaining, which it uses as a revolving capital improvement project account. This account funds construction for network expansion, which is repaid by customers as the network is extended to their premises. 
 An indirect benefit of City Net is that it has forced competing networks to lower their prices. Wolf’s office estimates that nonparticipating providers have lowered their bandwidth prices by 20 percent or more, making bandwidth generally more affordable throughout the city. “If that’s all we had accomplished, we’d feel that we’d done what we intended,” Wolf says.
See also a
webinar hosted by Broadband Communities [Cisco WebEx] where Jory discusses Santa Monica and nearby Long Beach talks about a similar approach they are using. Finally, check out a recent segment of Santa Monica Update that discusses Santa Monica City Net (fast forward to 9:20 in the video to skip right to it).