Chattanooga's community owned EPB Fiber Network continues to get positive reviews from subscribers in the local paper. And Comcast's customers continue to complain. The Times Free PressChattanoogan presents a tale of two providers.
The longer letter details the frustration in dealing with Comcast following the failure of their on-demand service. After Comcast didn't resolve the problem over the course of several phone calls, the subscriber was told she would have to pay $30 for a Comcast technician to come to their house, even if the problem was entirely caused by Comcast's network and/or equipment.
The second letter, from Leah, notes that she too suffered at the hands of Comcast's customer service but became EPB customers after a long absence from their home due to damage from the tornadoes of 2011. When they returned home, they went with the community network rather than Comcast.
This is how she reflects on her experience with EPB:
We have had one instance where we needed to contact customer service, and the problem was fixed quickly and easily by the most polite customer service rep I’ve ever dealt with.
Comcast came by recently to offer us a “substantial savings” if we’d make the switch back to them. My question was, why now? I was a customer for years and treated poorly as rates increased exponentially. Now the offer the discount? No thanks.
For the $5 extra per month that we pay for EPB, we receive better features, prompt and polite customer service, and an all around trouble free experience. Thanks EPB!
The Georgia Senate is considering SB 313, a bill that would overrule local decision-making authority in matters of broadband. Even as connections to the Internet have become essential for communities, the Georgia Legislature is poised to make it harder for communities to get the networks they need.
Community networks spur competition -- it is why Chattanooga got Comcast's xfinity service before Atlanta, despite Atlanta having long been prioritized over Chattanooga previously. It is why Cox Cable, which is headquartered in Atlanta, launched its upgrades in Lafayette, Louisiana -- they felt the competition pressure from a community fiber network.
"The private sector is handling this exceptionally well," Rogers said. "What they don't need is for a governmental entity to come in and compete with them where these types of services already exist. We're not outlawing a local government entity from doing this, but if they're going to compete, they can play by the same rules and ask the voters if it's okay before they go out and spend all these dollars."
As for whether the private sector is providing enough competition or high enough capacity networks, I leave that to individual communities to decide.
SB 313 effectively removes such decisions from local communities. It purports to just set additional terms that the public sector must meet, but many of these terms are sufficiently onerous (especially when taken all together) that communities will not be able to build the network they need.
The bill first requires communities to ask the private sector to build the necessary network. This ignores the basic fact that community networks are operated with different incentives that privately owned networks. Due to the scarcity in the market, private providers tend to keep prices higher than necessary to maximize their short term profits. Publicly owned networks lower prices (while still paying their costs) in order to spur job creation and increase digital inclusion.
The bill requires communities to pass a referendum before building a network and requires inaccurate, damning language be included on the ballot. Broadband referendums tend to invite deep-pocketed incumbent providers to spend heavily to buy the votes necessary to stop competition - see the Longmont saga for an excellent example of how hard it is for a community to stand up to these big cable corporations.
Communities that somehow get this far are then subject to all the regulations as are private providers in addition to numerous additional regulations imposed on them by this legislation and their inherent duty to operate in an open and transparent manner. Despite being nonprofit, they are required to pay taxes and still face additional barriers that private operators do not.
They will be restricted in how they price their services and where they offer services in ways the private sector is not.
In short, this bill will make it all but impossible for communities to build networks -- even in areas that are presently unserved. The bill purports to exempt some unserved areas, but does so in a cynically evasive way. The only way a community could meet the unserved exemption is if it vowed to only build in the least economical areas -- meaning it would have to be significantly subsidized. Serving unserved areas and breaking even financially almost always requires building a network that will also cover some areas already served (because that is where you can find the margins that will cover the losses in higher expense areas).
The bill is presently in the Senate Regulated Industries and Utilities committee. We will continue covering it and attempt to learn which interests are pushing to revoke local authority and replace it with what distant legislators think best.
Prior to Chattanooga's gigabit announcement, Amazon had no considered that region as a location for the distribution center they would looking to put in the southeastern U.S. But they saw the announcement, talked to the City and Boom! Over 1,000 jobs.
I've long known of this economic development example but did not fully appreciate how important access to the Internet is for an Amazonian Distribution Center. But this article about its coming expansion (more on that in bit) offers some context.
The distribution center is the size of 17 football fields and hosts 700 Internet access points connected by 7 miles of fiber-optic cables within the facility. So access to the Internet is pretty important for a distribution center of an online retailer.
When Amazon announced its investment in Chattanooga, it predicted some 1400 jobs with additional seasonal employment opportunities. After cutting back seasonal employees with the end of the holiday season, it was still employing 2000 workers.
With its expansion, it will add hundreds of jobs -- hundreds of jobs that would not be in Chattanooga without the community fiber network. Massive national providers like Comcast regularly claim they can deliver any level of service to big customers but the reality is that they are not willing to charge reasonable prices for such services and they are much harder to work with (partially because the bureaucracy at any massive cable corporation is worse than that of any local government).
Provo built a city owned FTTH network after its public power utility started connecting its substations with fiber-optic cables in the early 2000's. iProvo ultimately developed along similar open access lines as UTOPIA, but unlike UTOPIA, Provo did not actually want to operate on a purely wholesale model.
iProvo was forced into the wholesale-only model, where the publicly owned network offered wholesale services to independent ISPs that then resold service to residents and businesses. Comcast and Qwest (now CenturyLink) recognized the threat posed by municipalities building next generation networks -- particularly in communities that did not even have full DSL and cable coverage from the giant providers that long delayed upgrades, knowing that subscribers had no other options.
UTOPIA had long had a vision of making the open access, wholesale-only model work (that proceeded to largely fail, for a variety of reasons -- only to start turning around in recent years) but Provo, with its public power utility, was denied its preferred model of offering services directly.
iProvo was built at a cost of $40 million and has operated in the red since, though a number of postive externalities from the network was not included in those calculations. For instance, City Departments had access to much higher capacity connections than were available previously and were not charged for them (a poor practice in our estimation). For more details on iProvo, I recommend a video of a discussion in 2011.
At any rate, iProvo was then sortof sold off to a private provider (sort of because the city is still on the hook for the debt) in large part because private providers are not as crippled by state law. Unfortunately, the network has already developed a bad reputation for many (thanks to the state law preventing Provo from being able to ensure a good subscriber experience).
The new "Telecom Debt Charge" is set to run 15 years — until the iProvo bond is repaid — and costs homeowners $5.35 per month and commercial customers $10 per month plus 2.3 percent of their electricity bill.
This is not a done deal - the City Council will decide the matter on January 17, so the citizens still have an opportunity to raise their voices on the matter.
The history of iProvo suggests a few things.
State laws that cripple local authority to build essential infrastructure are poor public policy. Unfortunately, it is great policy for a few giant companies that use their lobbying power to restrict competition any way they can.
Even with its advantages (not being crippled by state law), a private provider could do no better than the public provider. Surveying community networks nationally, which are often built it the areas hardest to serve with broadband, community networks have a better track record than the big privately owned cable and phone networks.
We have been trying to keep close track of the recent group of communities building incremental, publicly owned, open access fiber networks -- which often starting with connections to businesses. A recent article from the Cortez Journal provides a window into the Cortez, Colorado network that we have previously covered here.
After the city finished building the first phase of the project, at least 150 companies, according to the city, purchased and are now connected to the city’s fiber optic backbone via private service providers, such as Brainstorm Internet and Farmers Telecommunications.
One of the service providers (Farmers Telecommunications) has a long experience in the area -- having offered telephone services for 91 years. It is now able to provide much faster services with a much lower investment because of the public investment.
“This will have a huge impact on the local economy, and it will keep citizens’ spending dollars in Cortez,” said City of Cortez Department of General Services Director Rick Smith. “And feed more money here, potentially, from around the world.”
The businesses previously had access to the slower, more expensive broadband connections but now have more choices between independent service providers can use the infrastructure built by the local government to benefit the local economy.
The city’s new, open-services network allows companies to offer advanced services, such as broadband Internet and voice and communication systems, said Farmers Telecommunications General Manager Doug Pace.
“What we’re seeing is that more and more businesses are requiring that upload speed to be increased,” Pace said as an example of the kind of cloud computing Farmer’s offers on the city’s Fiber to the Business network.
“We already said in the first four years, we would not break even,” City Councilman Brian Miller said. “That’s not a surprise to anyone.”
According to documents, the city expects Fibrant to become cash-flow positive after four years. The city billed the first Fibrant customers one year ago in December 2010.
The city expects Fibrant to eliminate its deficit as more people sign up and revenues increase. The utility, which competes with private providers like Time Warner Cable, has a 13 percent market share, interim City Manager Doug Paris said, and is billing about $200,000 a month.
“We’re growing in what is an extremely tough market,” Paris said.
Paris said after the meeting Fibrant has about 1,600 customers. The utility needs about 4,500 to become cash-flow positive.
Salisbury has a new mayor coming into office, but he is a supporter of the network, as was the outgoing mayor, who spent a significant amount of time defending the community network from Time Warner Cable's attacks via the state legislature.
The nDanville network of rural southern Virginia has long been a favorite of ours (previous coverage is available here). The network has helped Danville go from being notable for having the highest unemployment rate in Virginia to being ranked as the third top digital city in the nation, according to a recent article.
Danville City Manager Joe King received the Chairman's Award for his leadership in advancing the development of a modern telecommunications infrastructure in the region, a key factor in Danville's economic development renaissance.
King had been the director of the city-owned utility when it drew up plans for a fiber-optic network to be built incrementally until it could connect every home, business, and community anchor institution in Danville Utility's territory. At the time, Danville was suffering tremendously from the loss of tobacco and textile industries.
Today, the nDanville net-work connects hundreds of businesses, has sharply re-duced costs for local gov-ernment, health care provid-ers, and local schools, and has introduced more competition into the telecommunications marketplace.
Danville Utilities has 44,000 electric meters, half of which are located in Danville (44 sq miles). The others are scattered across over 450 sq miles surrounding the city. The Southern Piedmont Technology Council serves the technology industry in Danville as well as nearby counties and another city.
Even in 2004, many in Danville did not have broadband access to the Internet, as outlined in an early document explaining the network. Verizon barely offered DSL and Adelphia offered limited cable modem service.
Andrew Cohill, a consultant assisting the project, has offered more background in a recent article of Broadband Communities. In it, he notes that the network was a piece of a larger strategy of investment in the community to develop local expertise in technology.
Danville was the first municipality to deploy a fully automated, Layer 3 open-access network; nDanville, with more than 135 miles of fiber, passes more than 1,000 business locations, including every parcel in all five business parks. Current customers have access to 100 Mbps fiber connections capable of delivering a wide variety of services, and 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps connections are available upon request.
An interesting resource that Andrew shares are the principles behind the network. Communities just starting to consider a community broadband network may want to adopt a similar statement of principles.
Universal access: The long-term goal of the project is that every business and home should have the same level and quality of service. This commitment supports the open-access business model by aggregating the largest possible number of potential customers for service providers.
Level playing field: Every service provider should be able to play by the same rules. nDanville has a single public price list available to all providers. There are no special deals or unpublished rates.
Public-private partnerships: City investments in broadband infrastructure should create private sector business opportunities. The city sells no services to businesses or residents.
Multiservice network: nDanville is an open-access network that supports multiple providers and a wide variety of services well beyond the traditional triple play to create true competition and lower prices.
Symmetric bandwidth: The availability of services offering affordable symmetric bandwidth was viewed as critical to the economic revitalization of Danville. Any transport service requested by a provider can be configured with equal upstream and downstream data capacity to support business- class services and applications. This early decision is now becoming increasingly important with the rapid increase in the use of business videoconferencing, which requires symmetric bandwidth to perform adequately.
Unlimited bandwidth: Another early design goal was that any home or business should have the capacity to use any service needed to compete in the global economy. nDanville’s active Ethernet fiber network offers 100 Mbps, 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps connections as standard, and DWDM lightpaths are available on request.
Some of the high profile economic development achievements include an Ikea plant and the expansion of CBN Technologies, which produces secure identification documents. While Ikea and CBN did not choose Danville solely for the publicly owned fiber-optic network, they rely upon it and almost certainly would not have picked Danville in its absence.
Exciting times in rural southwest Minnesota, as Southwest Minnesota Broadband Services has turned on its first customer. SMBS is a broadband stimulus-enabled partnership with eight rural communities and WindomNet, the muni FTTH network in Windom.
The Rev. Andrew Schensted and his wife, Lisa, were the first to be connected. The fiber-to-home connection provides “obnoxiously fast Internet,” Andrew Schensted said in a SMBS press release.
The SMBS Internet is “at least 10 times faster” than what they had when living in the metropolitan area, Andrew Schensted added. The couple has been able to streaming video in full HD from TV streaming websites.
So it begins... the Metro around Minneapolis and St Paul have to rely mostly on Comcast for connections to the Internet. CenturyLink's DSL is generally slower and in many places, utterly unreliable. Monticello has had a blazing fast connection (faster than we can get in the metro) at lower prices for more than a year. Communities served by HBC also have faster connections in SE Minnesota. In the coming year, the stimulus-funded networks on the North Shore will also have better connections than we can get. It will be curious to see how development patterns adjust in the coming years.
“The demand for higher-speed Internet in our rural area is daunting,” Olsen said. “People not only want faster speeds, they need it for their business operations. If the wireless trial is successful, it could provide a better option to those not on the fiber system. “
Southwest Minnesota Broadband Services (SMBS) is a consortium of eight communities including Bingham Lake, Brewster, Heron Lake, Jackson, Lakefield, Okabena, Round Lake and Wilder. The 125-mile, $12.8 million dollar fiber ring is expected to be completed in September 2012.
The fiber-optic communication network has the capacity to bring fast, competitively priced services for internet, phone and cable TV to residential subscribers as well as businesses and other community institutions. The government grant-supported project is intended to provide southwest Minnesota with the telecommunications connectivity required to remain competitive in the global marketplace.
The new network has bucked a strong trend among community fiber networks of offering symmetric connections to the Internet. Packages and pricing are available here. If I had to guess, the most commonly subscribed-to package will be the 10/2, which is pretty limiting in the upstream (though a tremendous improvement over the status quo).
Update: I have just verified that Windom is limited in what they can offer in the upstream presently due to the limited options they have for connecting to the Internet from rural Minnesota. Over time, we hope they will have more options that will lower those costs for them.
At a certain point, true symmetry becomes an academic point. I don' think many would quibble with a connection that is 21/19 or 33/35. The question is ultimately whether one is limited by the network. Nonetheless, we are strong proponents of networks upstream capacity that is closer to downstream capacity because being on the Internet is about participating, not consuming.
Tullahoma, home to the LightTUBe FTTH network of Tennessee, is starting to roll out smart meters for its electrical and water utilities (owned by the city). They have initiated a series of public meetings to discuss the AMI - Advanced Metering Infrastructure. From a recent press release:
“The meetings are designed to answer any questions the Tullahoma community has about the AMI technology”, said Ernie Hobbs, Communications and Marketing Specialist for TUB. “We want to assure the community that automated meter reading is the next step in providing exceptional customer service. AMI is a step forward for Tullahoma, and it will provide additional opportunities for our customers by allowing them to monitor their own usage of utilities.”
The AMI installation is a replacement of current water and electric meters. The
new meters can transmit usage data through TUB’s secure fiber network. The infrastructure upgrade has been in the planning stage for several years. However, with Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) moving to Time Of Use (TOU) rates, TUB decided it was time to begin the AMI project to align with the TVA rate change.
A recent newsletter from the utility explains further, noting that the Tennessee Valley Authority (a federal agency that produces the power used by Tullahoma and many other public utilities) is going to start charging time-of-use rates starting in fall of 2013. This is because electricity is more expensive to produce and distribute based on the amount being used - time of use pricing will encourage people to use more power when it is cheaper to produce and less when it is expensive.
This time-of-use pricing is one component of a "smart-grid." Unfortunately, some investor-owned utilities have used time-of-use pricing to increase their revenues without substantially benefiting ratepayers -- which is one reason many are suspicious of the entire concept. Hence the public meetings.
Because Tullahoma has its publicly owned network already connecting much of the community, it is better positioned to deal with TVA's changing rates than other communities.
Communities with grassroots movements investigating or encouraging community networks should take a look at the many resources the citizens of Lafayette, Louisiana, developed in their referendum fight in establishing LUS Fiber.
In order to help educate the community, fiber supporters created a short newsletter (if there was more than one issue, I have not been able to locate it) with articles focusing on how the proposed publicly owned fiber-to-the-home network would create benefits in economic development, health care, and education. The newsletter is has a professional layout and comes complete with a glossary.
The newsletter also has a word from the Mayor (the inimitable Joey Durel) and quotes the Greater Lafayette Chamber of Commerce Broadband Policy. Finally, it also explains why the Lafayette Utilities System should build the network and cites successes from BVU in Bristol, Virginia.
Groups that are looking for strategies or a template for a web presence should check out Lafayette Coming Together. This was the organizing site they used in building support for the network, as a complement to Lafayette Pro Fiber. Unfortunately, the Fiber Film Festival web page no longer exists, but the most popular video (Slick Sam Slade) is still around - and embedded below.
An old episode examining the arguments around the network is still viewable (for Windows users) via the Louisiana Public Broadcasting archives -- look for episode #2844.
