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Idaho Town Builds Incremental, Open Access Network

Tue, May 17, 2011 | Posted by christopher

A small Idaho town near Idaho Falls in the eastern part of the state, Ammon, is creating a new approach for a small open access fiber-optic network. When the vision is fully realized, all businesses and residents will have affordable, fast, and reliable access to the Internet and other telecommunications services via a multitude of independent service providers.

The town has adopted a new ordinance spelling out its vision and began building the backbone of the network. The purpose is well written and could serve as a model for others, excerpted here:

To protect the public right-of-way by improving both the management and regulation of competing demands through the elimination of duplicate fiber optic facilities within the public right-of-way.

…

To reduce the cost of maintaining the sidewalk, pavement and public facilities located within the public right-of-way by minimizing the number of pavement cuts and dislocation of other public facilities necessitated by the construction or installation of fiber optic facilities.

To foster competition among retail broadband service providers by providing open Access to the City Fiber Optic System.

Ammon had previously applied for broadband stimulus funds but was not awarded a grant or loan. Undaunted, they continued to examine how they can build the network their community needs to attract economic development and maintain a high qualify of life. An article in the Boise Weekly profiled the network and the man behind it:

Bruce Patterson is the one-man IT department for Ammon, a small town of 13,000 near Idaho Falls. He is fed up with companies overlooking the town when they discover the cost of Internet is prohibitive.

…

"The City of Ammon wants to be the road, not the traffic," Patterson said. "Nondiscrimination is what we believe is the right thing. We wanna be completely open to every consumer and provider."

As we see time and time again, this community has Internet access from at least one provider, but it does not meet the needs of the community. And while this community wants more choices, it does not want local government to offer retail services directly -- in keeping with the western libertarian stereotype. So the town has started building a network that will be available to independent service providers.

open-access-flickr.jpg

In keeping with several other recent open access approaches, they have started an incremental effort to avoid the difficulty of growing too fast in an effort to meet debt payment schedules. The network started with a short stretch that will be expanded opportunistically -- as roads are already open or other projects present a low-cost option for increasing its reach. As much as possible, they plan to finance the network up front.

Interestingly, they want to deliver multiple fibers to the edge of the network. As a business or resident, I would be able to subscribe to multiple service providers, each over their own dedicated fiber. While some may argue such an approach is unnecessary, it certainly leaves plenty of room for future growth no matter how technology changes -- and the additional cost is quite low when that is now the network is designed from the start.

The following explanation comes from the City's newsletter:

On Friday, May 6th, the City lit the first 2.5 mile section of its new City-owned and operated fiber optic system and quietly took its first steps towards fulfilling a commitment made over 2 years ago to assure that broadband services in our community meet our needs, are competitive and provide the broadband access that our vision of the future will require.

The City fiber system is a local private network spanning numerous locations within the City. This has become necessary due to increasing demand for network communications required to support essential City services and functions. The City stands to realize a return on its investment in the reduction of monthly operational costs and improved ability to provide for future services at almost no additional expense. However, while this financial reality is reason enough for us to invest in a community network; it is not the only benefit we expect to realize.

The Ammon fiber system will be operated as an open access network for the benefit of the entire community. We expect the early beneficiaries of this ‘open’ policy commitment to be community anchor institutions, such as law enforcement, public safety, emergency responders, and our local schools. We are already working to help a number of these agencies meet their broadband needs. It is our hope that creating this open network will also entice businesses which require robust and affordable broadband services to consider settling their operation in Ammon. We also anticipate being able to give you, the Ammon residents, more choices in broadband services and providers and at better rates and much faster speeds than currently available through fiber technology.

These are the many reasons why the City of Ammon will soon own and operate its very own fiber optic, open access community network. The result will be a win – win for everyone.

Update: The article quoted above from the newsletter should be credited to Brian Powell of the City Council.

Photo used under creative commons license, courtesy of Gideon Burton on Flickr

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Qwest Renews Push to Gut Local Authority over Cable Television

Mon, January 24, 2011 | Posted by christopher

It's 2011 and time for Qwest to renew a push to gut local authority in a number of states - Idaho and Colorado to start. An article for the Denver Post explains the argument:

Phone companies say state-level oversight of video franchising fosters competition because it is less cumbersome for new entrants to secure the right to offer services.

Many states have also eliminated the condition that new video competitors must eventually offer service to every home in a given municipality, a requirement placed on incumbent cable-TV providers.

Gutting local authority is the best way to increase the disparities between those who have broadband and those who do not. Qwest and others are only interested in building out in the most profitable areas -- which then leaves those unserved even more difficult to serve because the costs of serving them cannot be balanced with those who can be served at a lower cost.

The only reason that just about every American living in a city has access to broadband is because franchise requirements forced companies to build out everyone. Without these requirements, cable buildouts would almost certainly have mirrored the early private company efforts to wire towns for electricity -- wealthier areas of town had a number of choices and low-income areas of town had none.

In Idaho, those fighting back against this attempt to limit local authority are worried that statewide franchising will kill their local public access channels - a reality that others face across the nation where these laws have passed.

The channels, which are also used to publicize community events, provide complete coverage of Pocatello City Council, Planning and Zoning and School District 25 board meetings, as well as candidate forums before elections.

Without these local channels, how could people stay informed about what is happening in the community? Local newspapers are increasingly hard to find. In many communities, these channels are the last bastion of local news. 

This fight over statewide franchising goes back a number of years, but the general theme is that massive incumbent phone companies promise that communities would have much more competition among triple-play networks if only the public ceases to derive benefits from its Right-of-Way.  Statewide franchising laws limit local authority to negotiate for access to this valuable asset that is managed by the local government. The laws strip communities of the power to negotiate with video providers, creating a single franchise process in the state government (which typically has very little or no oversight). Communities lose public access channels, fees for creating local content, and often oversight to require certain levels of customer service.

The states that have gutted local authority in this way have seen very few benefits -- the increase in competition is negligible - because the real barrier to competition has nothing to do with local or statewide franchising. The only barrier worth addressing is the massive advantages incumbents have -- a result of the high cost of building these networks. When a competitor builds a network, it is often competing with an incumbent that has amortized the costs of its network and will be able to cut its prices while cross-subsidizing its operations from non-competitive markets. A number of incumbent providers have engaged in predatory pricing, taking a loss on their customers in an effort to prevent the network from generating the necessary revenues to operate and make its debt payments.

The price of gutting local authority to benefit Qwest, a company with no capacity for the upgrades necessary to match the speeds and prices of DOCSIS3 cable networks, is far too great.

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Stimulus Denies Excellent Projects in Idaho

Fri, March 12, 2010 | Posted by christopher
Though I did not spend a lot of time following stimulus proposals, two excellent proposals did catch my eye from Idaho and I hoped that at least one of them would be funded. Alas, neither was funded by NTIA or RUS. These are exactly the networks we need throughout the country, and Idaho is exactly the state that could benefit greatly from federal assistance. I hope these projects have better luck in the second round or in securing future funding from RUS outside the stimulus project. (This is not to suggest I disapprove of the Coeur d'Alene Reservation Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) Project that received funding - I am not as familiar with it and therefore have no comment on it.) The town of Ammon, some 13,000 people near Idaho Falls in eastern Idaho, developed a proposal for an a type of next-generation open access network in that it would offer greater flexibility to subscribers and service providers than many current open access networks. The other project, to serve the Northern Panhandle area, was designed with Ernie Bray, who previously consulted on the Powellink network in Wyoming. The Boise Weekly briefly discussed these projects a few weeks ago, noting their open access approach that would serve residents, businesses, and key institutional anchors with fiber-optics:
"Every entity we need to work with is already a stakeholder; we're ready to go," he said. "And we will use revenues for expansion and build out. We're trying to expand the concept of a service provider and services beyond just the triple play, voice-video-data," he said. "Telemedicine is a service, hospitals are service providers. We want to take fiber to every home and every business, then connect them to libraries, schools and job services so they can take advantage of programs to help lift them up."
Local jobs are at stake and incumbent providers are doing little to help:
Quest [Aircraft], who builds the Kodiak airplane, they've gotta exchange large engineering files in real time; 250 jobs are at stake.
Verizon is busy trying to offload all of its rural territories on Frontier (a company famous for slow and poor service) so it isn't about to upgrade facilities in Idaho. More recently, Boise Weekly revisited these projects because they have been officially rejected. At the time of that article, it seemed that projects would have to turnaround a new application in 2 weeks. Fortunately, deadlines have been pushed back in recognition of the difficulties for those projects that were in due diligence until recently receiving a rejection letter. Both Ammon and the Panhandle Project should be funded under the stimulus, but the rules for Round 2 seem to focus more on middle mile infrastructure (an approach that is less controversial than funding a network that "gets all up" in an incumbent's "grill"). Without these networks, who knows when these communities will get the infrastructure of the 21st century?
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