ILSR is excited to announce a new short video examining an impressive municipal broadband network, Glasgow Kentucky. Glasgow was the first municipal broadband network and indeed, seems to have been the first citywide broadband system in the United States.

We partnered with the Media Working Group to produce this short documentary and we have the material to do much more, thanks to the hard work of Fred Johnson at MWG and the cooperation of many in Glasgow, particularly Billy Ray.

People who only recently became aware of the idea of community owned networks may not be familiar with Billy Ray, but it was he and Jim Baller throughout the 90's and early 2000's that paved the way for all the investment and excitement we see today. 

I'm excited to be helping to tell part of this story and look forward to being able to tell more of it.

Monticello Minnesota may be located 40 miles outside Minneapolis, but it is the center of the planet when it comes to FTTH competition. We have tried and cannot identify another community localed on planet earth with two separate FTTH networks going head to head across the entire community. We have long written about Monticello, most recently to look at hypocritical criticism of the project (which gives me an opportunity to note a similar dynamic in Lafayette, Louisiana). And we have covered the disappointing news that the network has not produced enough revenue to make full bond payments. Short explanation for how Monticello came to be unique in having two FTTH networks: Monticello had poor Internet access from Charter and telephone company TDS. Each refused to invest after local businesses and elected officials implored for better networks. Monticello started building its own FTTH network (Monticello FiberNet) and TDS sued to stop the project while suddenly decided to upgrade its slow DSL to fiber. Lawsuit was tossed out and Monticello finished its network. In most community fiber networks, the DSL provider seems to fade away because it cannot offer the fast speeds of fiber or cable, so the market basically remains a duopoly with the community network replacing the telephone company (which continues to offer cheap, slow DSL to a small number of customers). But in Monticello, Charter and TDS engaged in a price war, which has really hurt the City's ability to generate enough revenue to pay its debt. Price wars are very hard on new market entrants because they have to amoritze the cost of their investment whereas the incumbents often have already done so. This means incumbents can almost always offer lower prices if they are determined to do so. In many communities, we have lacked clear evidence of predatory pricing - that is pricing below the actual cost of service to run competitors out of business. This would violate federal law (if any agency bothered to enforce it).

Catharine Rice gave a terrific presentation detailing the ways Time Warner has responded to the municipally-owned Greenlight fiber-to-the-home network: raising the rates on everyone around them and cutting great deals to Wilson residents. I saw the presentation on the Save NC Broadband blog which also has a link to her slides - make sure you follow along with the slides. She details how Time Warner has raised rates in towns around Wilson while lowering their prices and offering better broadband speeds in Wilson. Once again, we see that a community building their own network has a variety of benefits: a superior modern network that is community owned, lower prices on the last-generation network from the incumbent, and some investment from the incumbent. Now the question is whether Wilson's residents will be smart enough to support the publicly owned network in the face of Time Warner's low low prices - a recognizing that a few short years of low prices (for low quality) are not worth abandoning the publicly owned network and the benefits it has created in the community.

Cable pricing in the Raleigh-Durham-Cary NC Market from City of Wilson, NC on Vimeo.

We are seeing increasing evidence that competition alone is not sufficient to keep prices low. Though some communities (Monticello, MN; Powell, WY) have seen major prices drops as a result of competition from a publicly owned network, other communities have seen only price freezes or more modest increases when compared to non-competitive areas. In Lafayette, Cox has just raised prices despite the new competition in the community. Despite the recession, we have seen Comcast, Qwest, and others continue to profit handily as people scrimp to continue connecting to the Internet. The best method of ensuring Internet access becomes or remains affordable is with a network that is directly accountable to the community - one that puts community needs ahead of profits.

Monticello Minnesota, the small community located 40 miles northwest of the Twin Cities, recently returned to the news when its telephone incumbent, TDS, began offering a fast 50/20 Mbps residential broadband connection for $50/month. Nate Anderson, of Ars Technica, covered both the story and backstory (something he has extensively reported).

But the entire congratulatory press release glosses over a key fact: the reason that Monticello received a fiber network was the town's decision to install a municipal-owned fiber network to every home in town… spawning a set of TDS lawsuits that went all the way to the Minnesota Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the town.

I might also note that the press release and much of the coverage also glosses over a one-year contract and early termination fee (though it isn't clear if this is applied in all circumstances). However, Nate nails the story by framing it with the title "Want 50Mbps Internet in your town? Threaten to roll out your own."

We spoke to TDS about the situation last year, and its director of legislative and public relations told us that TDS didn't act earlier because it didn't actually know that people really, really wanted fiber; once the referendum was a success, the company moved quickly to give people what it now knew they wanted.

Of course, TDS did not start rolling fiber after the referendum. They waited. It was only after the City successfully bonded for the project that TDS acted (first by filing a lawsuit to block competition and second by investing in their network to be competitive when the doomed lawsuit would inevitably be dismissed). TDS did not change course because they suddenly realized that people wanted better broadband, they did it because they knew that they would have to invest or perish when confronted with actual competition. Nate's article looks at other communities that have followed a similar trajectory.

For another real-world example of how companies respond to public entry into the telecom market (as opposed to theoretical arguments about crowding out investment), let's look back down to Lafayette and how cable incumbent Cox responded:

“Cox froze the cable rates in Lafayette, and they didn’t freeze the rates in other areas,” said Terry Huval, director of LUS, a municipally owned utility company which fought major incumbent opposition before building an FTTH network in Lafayette and starting to offer service earlier this year. “We figured our citizens saved over $3 million in cable rates even before we could offer them service.”

I have yet to see a cable company leave a market or reduce investment following the introduction of a public competitor. The opposite tends to happen - they increase investment and often drop prices or leave them lower than in surrounding, non-competitive areas. Often, the rates are not really advertised but if you call from the competitive area, they will offer a better deal:

Trae Russell, communications manager for EATEL, the local telephone franchise in Ascension, La., and some surrounding communities, had seen the same thing happen in his area, when EATEL started offering FTTH-based services in 2006. In fact, EATEL went so far as to take out an ad in the Lafayette newspaper, alerting cable customers there to the discounts that Ascension customers were getting and forecasting similar lower rates in Lafayette once the LUS network was in the works. “It was an incredibly bold move on our part,” Russell said. “Cox came in with an incredibly aggressive promotion for TV service with every bell and whistle you could imagine. We couldn’t figure out how they could even make money on it. So we took out an ad in the Lafayette newspaper that basically said, ‘Hey Lafayette, look at the great prices you are going to get from Cox.’ Cox was not amused.”

This is also a lesson for those who want to build a public network. Don't expect to win just because you have a better service and you offer lower prices from what was available before a competing network is built. The incumbent has often already paid off its network. Additionally, incumbents are often larger companies that pay less for their television contracts, so they can lower prices farther than one might expect initially.