In the place where “Texas history lives,” the City of Granbury followed a fellow Texas city in delivering a Tropos wifi system that covers all 10 square miles of the city.  Less than a decade ago, Granbury had no functional IT department and after hurdles with a private public partnership, established a functional and successful publicly-owned wireless network.  Initially created to support city functions and mobile police, the network is available to the public, elevating the rural town outside of Fort Worth to the mobile age.

When Granbury hired IT Director Tony Tull in 2003, the technology capabilities of the city were dire: no staff, a budget of $6,000, and only two buildings with access.   Tull quickly brought city and council officials on-board to his ambitious technology plan to deploy wireless WAN to all city buildings in partnership with their existing ISP, Texas-based Frontier Broadband (now acquired by KeyOn).  The initial needs were to equip city personnel with mobile access which focused on police officers, firefighters, and city inspectors.

Other goals included general public and tourist broadband access, reading utility meters, perform live web casts, and connect to nearby governmental networks.   After the City received a Homeland Security grant, $70,000 was earmarked to outfit over 10 police vehicles with wireless laptops.  In 2004 Tull attended the Public Technology Institute’s National Summit for Local Governments in Corpus Christi where he reviewed the city’s 147 square mile wireless network by Tropos.  Convinced the technology was right, Granbury deployed a test run of 40 routers across half the city and eventually 100 more to cover the roughly 10 square miles.

The initial returns on investment came eight months after launch when the police department returned $78,000 in budgeted police salary overtime.  The department later reduced its 2005 budget by $100,000.  The City has also saved time and money with the network reading digital meters, assisting building inspectors and providing cheaper connections to municipal buildings.  The total start-up costs were $325,000 which included acquisition costs, infrastructure, and the Tropos price of $68,000 for each square mile of the network.  City departments continue to streamline with the system and since 2007 public users have been accessing the network for $5.95 daily or $19.95 monthly.  Signal repeaters are available to boost signals in homes.

Though the project began as a public private partnership, Granbury found it’s private partner, Frontier Broadband, not living up to their bargain.  

Unfortunately, Granbury’s private partner did not respond to network performance problems as quickly as the city would have liked. In March 2007, the city bought the 10-square-mile network for $225,000 to maintain more control over its performance. The Granbury wireless network is now live with the city managing it and selling service to the public. “Be careful how you pick your partners,” Tull said. “Things that are a problem for you may not be a problem for the provider.”

Like officials of many cities who invest in infrastructure, Tull sees the network additionally for its important impact on every citizen and the social or indirect benefits that come back to the city and to the citizens.

“Is subscription sales the only way our municipality is going to see a return on our $500,000? Not really. We see other benefits. Police on the street longer because they can do their reports from the cars rather than the squad room. More information to our firefighters before they make scene on a possible structure fire. AMR project. Tourist access to city wide internet. These are all hard dollar and soft dollar returns that are real.”

Harford County, in northeast Maryland, is planning to bond for an $8 million wireless network to service local government, public safety, education, health care, and both commercial and residential needs. It will be called the Harford County Metro Area Network - HMAN.

The current plan envisions a free tier as well as a low-cost tier intended for residential access.

The network builds on fiber connections built with stimulus dollars, likely the OneMaryland network that touches every county in the state. This project will make those connections available to far more people and businesses.

But the Baltimore Sun is asking some difficult questions - including whether it makes sense to use long-term bonds for wireless networks, where the technology may change significantly in a few short years.

The problem for Harford County is that while the wireless technology may change rapidly, the private sector is not meeting their needs and they need better access to communications now.

We are generally skeptical of solutions that envision wireless as the sole delivery mechanism for broadband to the home or business, given the much higher capacity and reliability of fiber-optic connections, but as long as the County is already building a network needed to ensure public safety departments and other local government mobile needs are met, it may certainly make sense to spend a little extra to offer residential and business access.

Ponca City, Oklahoma, has long allowed residents to use a city-owned Wi-Fi network at no charge. They make no promises regarding speed or ability to access the network inside the home because the network primarily serves the needs of police, fire, and other municipal departments.

We briefly wrote about this network in our Breaking the Broadband Monopoly report:

Ponca City, with a population of 25,000, took a different approach to their wireless network than Oklahoma City. With some 75% of their staff having at least one responsibility outside the office, building a wireless network was an obvious decision. The network provides additional safety to police officers – who have cameras that may be monitored from the station in real time in case of problems. City employees can now use VOIP phones instead of the cellular network, which has significant gaps in coverage throughout the city. Like Oklahoma City, reducing cellular charges has created considerable savings.

They also chose a Wi-Fi mesh system because it provides durability even if some of the nodes fail – the network routes around the problem. They started with some 500 wireless nodes to cover thirty square miles but have since decided to expand the network across a larger footprint.

Ponca City is somewhat unique in its decision to open spare capacity on the network to the public for no charge, in an effort to help those who could not afford Internet access on their own. Like Oklahoma City, they too received an award for their network – the 2009 Municipal Innovations Award from the Oklahoma Municipal League.

The City upgraded the network last Tuesday night to double the available capacity:

Since the City of Ponca City installed free Wi-Fi, the number of users and the amount of Internet used has surpassed anyone's expectations.

The current number of unique users is more than 10,000 a day with more than 800 Gigabytes of Internet used in one day.

This is more wireless Internet than anywhere else in the United States, Ponca City's Technology Services Director Craige Baird said.

The continuing saga of H129/S87 in North Carolina has proved at least one thing, Time Warner Cable knows how to pull the puppet strings. The bill was written by Time Warner Cable and pretends to be about creating a level playing field while it effectively outlaws community networks (and some public safety networks) -- much to Time Warner Cable's financial benefits.

It remains unclear whether Representative Avila, who is championing this TWC power grab, truly knows what she is doing or is simply ignorant and blindly trusts the TWC lobbyists actually running the show.

After Legislators received a torrent of phone calls opposing TWC's bill, Rep Avila promised to negotiate with communities to find some middle ground and ensure the legislation at least grandfathered existing community networks. Instead, she turned the meetings over to TWC to run -- rather than negotiating, they set their terms. She has made multiple public claims about being reasonable but in private, she has made it clear that this is Time Warner Cable's bill.

Communities are dead set against this bill, noting the many ways in which it creates unique barriers for their networks while giving a free pass to TWC. Hardly shocking as TWC wrote the bill and is calling the shots via Rep. Avila (whose own district opposes the bill).

Now Asheville has passed a resolution against the bill [pdf], fearing its passage would derail their public safety network. The staff report explains why:

The stated purpose of the bills is to protect jobs and promote investment in North Carolina. The mechanism for protection is structured as restrictions on local government on engaging in what governing boards deem to be public-purpose communication and/or broadband projects. While one might assume that the bill’s target of communications services that deliver broadband and other services “to the public, or any sector of the public, for a fee” would rule out Asheville, this is not necessarily the case. The City of Asheville owns and operates assets that support a public safety radio system, a critical need for our officers in the field. Over the lifetime of the communications system, the City has leased surplus communications system assets to the private sector in order to underwrite a cost savings plan for the operations of the system, thus saving citizens from an additional tax burden.

Restrictions of the bills include limiting permanent or temporary subsidy of a broadband enterprise fund by other enterprise funds, as well as making cities liable for taxes that, normally, only private telecommunications corporations would have to pay. The bills state that cities “shall not subsidize provision of communications services with funds from any noncommunications service”, and would rule out a private/public partnership (such as a potential partnership with Google Fiber) or grant funding (such as ARRA or other Federal funding). Such restrictions would significantly harm Asheville.

The restrictions also forbid the financing or leasing of real property (which could be rights-of- ways for a communication network or tower sites) per NCGS 160A-19 and 160A-20. Asheville’s ability to build new public safety telecommunications towers, or relocate them, would be affected. Finally, the bills apply these restrictions to interlocal agreements. While the bills exempt facilities that are “within the city's jurisdictional boundaries for the city's internal governmental purposes,” it is not always clear-cut what an “internal governmental purpose” is, and whether a city that partners with a county or other local government would be subject to these restrictions. It is worth noting that not all of the City of Asheville’s critical public safety telecommunications towers are within the City’s jurisdictional boundaries.

And its fiscal impact:

These bills could have a negative fiscal impact in two ways. First, the City’s ability to accept grant dollars or engage in communication system interlocal agreements would likely be negatively impacted because of the City’s practice of underwriting public safety communications expense with leases to the private sector. Second, if City Council wished to engage in broadband economic development activities to boost the tax base, such as a public- private partnership to build a high speed broadband system similar to Google Fiber, such an action would be significantly more difficult to accomplish than it is today.

Not mention, this bill will kill jobs. There is no evidence that community networks have resulted in a single lost job in North Carolina, but we know it has created many jobs as well as improving the business climate by creating competition and lowering broadband prices.

This bill would also reverse the dramatic improvement in schools in Salisbury due to their community network. Without building their own networks, schools will have to continue relying on last-generation, overpriced connections from… companies like TWC and CenturyLink! Shocker that they are pushing so hard for it to pass!

Quite simply, this bill is a dramatic overreach -- Rep Avila is using the power of the state to overrule local communities to benefit TWC (as well as others, like CenturyLink). This Representative may not understand the impact of her legislation, but TWC does -- that is why they wrote it so expansively.

The bill is going to be discussed next week in the Finance Committee. Stop the Cap! has provided a list of committee members and links to their contact info. Folks in NC need to reach out and tell them to oppose the bill! Continue trying to get resolutions passed in counties, communities, grassroots organizations, etc (download a sample resolution [rtf]). Also, sign the petition and pass it along to friends, family, and neighbors.

The bottom of this post has links to more information about the bill, but the upshot is this: We need more competition in broadband, not state legislators giving more power to Time Warner Cable!

As an example, we are providing Asheville's resolution here. It is a bit shorter than the one from Rockingham County, but again shows the tremendous opposition to Avila's TWC bill.

RESOLUTION OF THE CITY COUNCIL OF THE CITY OF ASHEVILLE TO OPPOSE HB-129 AND SB-87, “LEVEL PLAYING FIELD/LOCAL GOV’T COMPETITION”

WHEREAS, the City of Asheville owns and operates a vital public safety communications system; and

WHEREAS, the City may, from time to time, need or desire to lease unused portions of the communications system, and use the proceeds to underwrite the costs of building and constructing the system; and

WHEREAS, the ability to operate a telecommunications system is a potentially important public service that local governments should be able to provide to their citizens; and

WHEREAS, the Southeastern Telecommunications Officers and Advisors Association as well as the North Carolina League of Municipalities strongly opposes these bills; and

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED BY THE CITY COUNCIL OF THE CITY OF ASHEVILLE THAT:

1. The City strongly opposes House Bill 129 as well as Senate Bill 87.

2. The City Manager, with the assistance of the City Attorney, is authorized to convey this resolution to the North Carolina General Assembly and to submit written comments as appropriate in support of this resolution.

3. This resolution shall be effective on and after its passage.

Read, approved and adopted this 8th day of March, 2011.

Image from AshevilleGrown