In the wake of a bill in Georgia to revoke local authority and substitute it with state say-so over whether a community can build a broadband network, multiple outlets have covered the situation.

As usual, Stop the Cap! was quick on the ball, offering original in-depth commentary. Phil digs into the campaign cash history to find the real motivations behind this bill:

Rogers’ legislation is exceptionally friendly to the state’s incumbent phone and cable companies, and they have returned the favor with a sudden interest in financing Rogers’ 2012 re-election bid. In the last quarter alone, Georgia’s largest cable and phone companies have sent some big thank-you checks to the senator’s campaign:

• Cable Television Association of Georgia ($500)
• Verizon ($500)
• Charter Communications ($500)
• Comcast ($1,000)
• AT&T ($1,500)

A review of the senator’s earlier campaign contributions showed no interest among large telecommunications companies operating in Georgia. That all changed, however, when the senator announced he was getting into the community broadband over-regulation business.

Phil also refutes the supposed failures cited by those pushing the bill. Not only do such stories misrepresent what really happened, some actually cite EPB's incredible 1Gbps service as demonstrating that munis are out of touch. What else would you expect from the Heartland Institute, which made its name fighting against the radical claim that cigarettes are linked to cancer?

Government Technology's Brian Heaton also covered the story in "Georgia Community Broaband in Legislative Crosshairs."

In addition, Mitchell [me] said that SB 313’s requirement of the public entity paying the same taxes or the same cost of capital as the private sector is another red herring. He said that while the provision looks reasonable on the surface, it would critically hamstring any effort to establish government-owned high-speed broadband services.

“That’s like telling me I have to pay the same taxes that another American would,” Mitchell said. “Are we talking about my middle-class neighbor, or Mitt Romney? Whose taxes am I going to pay a similar rate to? These are all issues that are left open-ended intentionally so that it’s uncertain for a community and they are more likely to end up in court, which is possibly the most devastating situation.”

Fierce Telecom riffed on the GovTech story here.

Karl Bode at DSL Reports asks if "Georgia wants to be a broadband backwater."

As noted, ISPs particularly love bills that require endless public hearings and votes, where deep-pocketed carriers can can out spend supporters by millions of dollars on (often incredibly sleazy) PR campaigns aimed at shouting these services down. That same money could be used to upgrade last mile connectivity, but isn't thanks to the uncompetitive markets these companies are trying to keep uncompetitive. The result? Continued slow speeds, high prices and poor service, all protected by the very government ISPs claim they don't want involved in the market.

And finally, Slashdot got the point of the bill wrong (ignoring many of the provisions of the bill) but did start a conversation about Georgia "Prohibiting Subsidies for Municipal Broadband. One of the commenters lives just outside one of the towns that Majority Leader Rogers cited as a bad example. This commenter disagrees with that assesment. Strongly.

Until the city implemented a broadband plan with cable TV, we had ONE choice for cable TV and virtually NO high speed internet especially in the county (Bellsouth/AT&T DSL is a massive joke to anyone who lived in the county and so was high speed internet connections). Suddenly, when the city decided "We want to attract more business to the area and also supply all of our schools with high speed internet services..." then WHOA! the local cable company went into overdrive. They started expanding their high speed internet services much faster and pushed them out into the county. They offered better bundle rates AND dropped their cost for cable TV alone. The move by the city _incentivized_ the local cable MONOPOLY to get off their ass and start offering the services to both city and county that they had been promising for a while and to bring their price down to a more competitive level.

And finally, the Augusta Chronicle covered the proposed bill and the increased campaign contributions from telco and cable companies to those pushing the bill:

The telecom companies have beefed up their lobbying forces this legislative session. Many lawmakers have received campaign contributions from them, including Rogers, who rejects any suggestion that they might have motivated him.

Unfortunately, the Augusta Chronicle again repeats the false claim that the public will be under the same rules as the private sector. The bill explicitly creates new rules that will only apply to public sector providers. It is right in front of them and they print blatantly false claims.

Counties in northeast Georgia are among the latest to examine their options to improve access to the Internet in local communities due to the massive failure of the private sector to adequately invest in essential infrastructure needed for economic development and maintaining a high quality of life.

Those involved may include Stephens County, Hart County, Franklin County, Rabun County, and Habersham County. However, Franklin County refused to contribute to a feasibility study, with some arguing that the "utility owners" should do it - though it is not clear which "utility owners" are referenced here. Others found this troubling:

“I think some of the other commissioners maybe feel like it’s more of a private matter, that some of the commercial businesses should be putting in infrastructure,” he said. “However, someone like Windstream, if they have a potential customer for a data center, they’re going to steer that customer to where they have infrastructure. They don’t care about Franklin County.”

It’s important to understand, he added, that high-quality jobs will not come to Franklin County if it is not up-to-date with its infrastructure.

This is exactly correct -- what does a private sector provider care about a single county in Georgia? They care about a fast return on their investment, not about a community's vitality.

In the meantime, Stephen's County has contributed $500 toward a match for the study.
Minutes from the Feb 28 meeting of Stephens County Development Authority [pdf] offer more details of the study:

OneGeorgia’s Nancy Cobb has approached the Joint Development Authority of Franklin, Hart & Stephens Counties and “offered” to fund 80% of a Broadband Connectivity Feasibility Study (expected to cost about $240,000) in northeast Georgia. Her offer is contingent upon us actually officially requesting it and matching it with 20%. We anticipate her next meeting to be sometime in May/June. The more we study this Broadband Connectivity issue, the more we realize that many parts of northeast Georgia are technologically underserved. This study would assess existing broadband resources and their ability to expand in the region and the feasibility of constructing, maintaining and operating a fiber optic backbone through six (Banks, Franklin, Habersham, Hart, Rabun, and Stephens) northeast Georgia counties. The study would take into account existing broadband resources including but not limited to ILECs, CLECs, cable companies, and utility companies as well as other significant NTIA and RUS federally funded projects. The awarding of this contract to qualified consultants is contingent upon receiving both the OneGeorgia 80% and the local 20% match. The consultant work will cost $5,000. Stephens County Development Authority's contribution will be up to $10,000 for the study. Motion was made and seconded to approve SCDA to spend up to $15,000 towards the JDA North Georgia Network feasibility study: Lee Hicks[Tim Ash], All in favor, none opposed.

In January 2001, or about 1 million years ago in tech time, Site Selection Online published "Wired Cities: Working-Class Communities Build Next Frontier of High-Speed Connectivity". I found it years ago when reading up on the Click! network in Tacoma, Washington.

I recently stumbled across it again and thought it might be interesting to evaluate its claims after a decade (or close to it) had passed.

The lead of the article discusses Tacoma its relationship to Seattle. Tacoma had extremely poor connectivity from the private sector and its public power utility decided to build an HFC network to extend broadband to everyone in the community. Tacoma's Mayor notes that over 100 companies poured in after the community solved its own broadband problems - generating some 700 jobs in 18 months.

Fast forward to today, and this paragraph:

As a result, the next frontier of information companies isn't being confined to the Silicon Valleys of the world. It's taking root where you might least expect it: in places like Tacoma, LaGrange, Ga., and Blacksburg, Va.. And in most cases, it's government taking the lead, beating business to the punch by stringing fiber and building networks in working-class communities that most bottom-line corporations would otherwise ignore.

The principle of self-reliance is timeless. And we see the same idea in news articles today: local governments bringing broadband to areas the private sector cannot. In 2010, the fastest and more affordable broadband networks in the US are not in Silicon Valley -- they are in Lafayette, Chattanooga, Wilson, Utah, and other places where the community decided to prioritize big broadband.

Because of the competition in Tacoma, prices for telecom have remained lower than in nearby Seattle - as I quoted a Tacoma resident previously:

I have Comcast in Tacoma and all I know is since there is competition down here Comcast is about half the cost as it is in Seattle. They give you a rate good for a year. When your year is up you call up and just say Click! and bam back down you go. A friend in Seattle once called Comcast with both of our bills with similar service and mentioned my price and they said I must live in Tacoma and they wouldn't match the price.

Seattle continues to be plagued with traffic jams, one of the factors that had previously led some businesses to relocate to Tacoma when the bandwidth had become available. Now, Seattle has asked Tacoma for broadband advice on building a network.

In Georgia, LaGrange was noted by Site Selection for its fiber-to-the-business infrastructure (which helped it win the "Intelligent City of the Year" award. A Wired article noted:

"The city could have died when its textile industry faded. But instead they built fiber-optic networks, and offer(ed) low-cost broadband services to local businesses and the town's citizens. They should be commended. Too many small towns simply build an industrial park and offer relocation assistance to lure companies in. LaGrange offers all of that, and sophisticated Internet infrastructure. They understood that big bandwidth wins business for small cities."

Communities similarly afflicted by the loss of textiles and tobacco have used public investments to build impressive broadband networks, reversing their decline -- most notably Bristol and Danville in Virginia and Wilson in North Carolina.

Back in 2001, LaGrange had also snagged headlines with an experiment - offering free Internet access to everyone in the City via a TV-web interface. These are the kind of experiments communities are free to do when they control the infrastructure.

Once again, the trends we see today have changed little over the previous ten years - quoting again from the Site Selection article:

Like most rural towns its size, LaGrange faced a choice in the early 1990s: either build this network itself or get bypassed by the New Economy. "The big telecom companies in Atlanta made a business decision not to provide broadband service here," says Jeff Lukken, mayor of LaGrange and operator of the local Chevrolet dealership. "We approached BellSouth about partnering with them to build such a network, and they said no."

According to Martin Gidron, managing editor of the UT Digest in Silver Spring, Md., LaGrange is far from alone. "Generally, the small towns around America tend not to be able to get the broadband networks from the big companies," he says. "But for the towns it's a matter of economic development and economic survival. The tier-one cities are already pretty well served, so the movement now is toward second- and third-tier markets."

The Site Selection article also discusses Virginia's strategy for expanding broadband access:

Virginia also deregulated its power industry last year -- a move Upson says will encourage companies like Virginia Power to accelerate the growth of broadband services throughout the state. "Unlike some other states, we rely completely on private networks and encourage the building of those," he adds. "Virginia Link is the answer for businesses. There has to be that private-sector initiative."

How well did that work out? Virginia's hopes for the private sector to build the infrastructure has hardly distinguished the state. Over the last ten years, investments in next-generation networks have come from the public sector where they are able as Virginia has since preempted local authority to duplicate the successes of BVU in Bristol. One wonders if another ten years have to pass before the state legislature understands the private sector has no interest in building the networks Virginians need to be competitive in the modern economy.

Too often we fail to look back and see what lessons we can learn. Communities that help themselves tend to succeed whereas those dependent on absentee businesses tend to suffer.