incumbent

Despite a coordinated campaign by cable incumbent Charter that offered little honest debate or accurate claims, the citizens of Opelika voted yes on their referendum to allow the city to build a broadband network. The City's public power utility will use the network for smart-grid services and a private company will likely contract to deliver triple-play services.

Opelika's Mayor had this reaction:

Mayor Fuller also said:

It’s a great day for Opelika. It’s a great day for our future. It’s a terrible day for Charter,”

One gets the sense that the Mayor took some umbrage at Charter's tactics to prevent the community from building its own network.

The day before the election, Stop the Cap! ran a fantastic article about Charter's manufactured opposition to the community network.

Phillip Dampier investigated the background and claims of prominent opponents, including Jack Mazzola, who might as well have written some of the articles in the local paper about the Smart-Grid project for how often he was quoted by the reporter (who often failed to offer a countering view from anyone in support of the network).

Jack Mazzola claims to be a member of Concerned Citizens of Opelika and has become a de facto spokesman in the local press.  He claims he is “30 years old and have been a resident of Opelika for almost two years.” During that time, he evidently forgot to update his active Facebook page, which lists his current city of residence as Atlanta, Georgia.  Suspicious readers of the local newspaper did some research of their own and claim Mr. Mazzola has no history of real estate or motor vehicle taxes paid to Lee County, which includes Opelika.

Any community considering a referendum on this issue should read this Stop the Cap! post and learn from it because massive cable companies like Charter all use the same tactics in community after community. When communities do not have a response ready, they can suffer at the polls.

If you are suspicious about the viability of municipal fiber, simply ask yourself if they are such failures, why do phone and cable companies spend millions to lobby against them?  Why the blizzard of scare mailers, robocalls, astroturf opposition groups, and lawsuits — all to stop what many opponents continually claim are competitive and operational failures?

The answer is, most municipal projects, like co-ops and community owned utilities, are more than viable. 

At any rate, Opelika's citizens did not fall for Charter's astroturf campaign.

Opelika is the latest to refute any notion that community broadband networks are a partisan issue. The City Council President noted:

“As a council we have never been more unified on a single matter than we have been on this,” Smith said. “Now we’re going to go to work, do things right and do things transparently.”

When it comes to these local issues of self-determination, Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives agree that self-reliance is far superior to continued dependence on absentee-owned incumbents.

This is a great inside look at how one community built a globally competitive broadband network (probably the best citywide network in the US) and the barriers they faced from incumbent providers Cox and BellSouth.

Terry Huval, the Director of Lafayette Utilities System in Louisiana, spoke to the U.S. Senate Committee on Small Businesses Entrepreneurship on April 27, 2010, on the topic of: "Connecting Main Street to the World: Federal Efforts to Expand Small Business Internet Access." Huval's full testimony is available here.

Huval's presentation told the back story of LUS Fiber, focusing on the barriers to publicly owned networks in Louisiana.

The FCC National Broadband Plan, on page 153, includes Louisiana as one of 18 states that “have passed laws to restrict or explicitly prohibit municipalities from offering broadband services.” While the Louisiana law did not prohibit Lafayette from providing broadband services, its mere presence provided, and continues to provide, a fertile playground for BellSouth (and its successor AT&T), Cox and their allies to create mischief, resulting in discouraging local governments from stepping in to provide these services even when the private telecom companies refuse to do so.

Louisiana, as with many other states including North Carolina, has powerful incumbents that claim there is an "unlevel playing field" and that local governments have too many advantages in building broadband networks (incomprehensibly, they simultaneously claim that local governments are incompetent and publicly owned networks always fail). But state legislators - who hear constantly from the lobbyists of these wealthy companies, have passed laws to discourage publicly owned networks.

Huval details just some of the disadvantages the public sector faces in comparison with the private sector (we detail many other disadvantages in our "Breaking the Broadband Monopoly report).

For example, while Cox Communications can make rate decisions in a private conference room several states away, Lafayette conducts its business in an open forum, as it should. While Cox can make repeated and periodic requests for documents under the Public Records Law, it is not subject to a corresponding obligation – a “show me your plans, but don’t dare ask to see mine” mentality. Louisiana law limits the ability of a governmental enterprise to advertise, but nothing prevents the incumbent providers from spending millions of dollars in advertising campaigns. An important focal point of the legal challenges involved the right or ability of Lafayette to pledge assets of the utilities system as security for the bonds, something that the private corporations do all of the time without the slightest scrutiny. To be sure, the “playing field is not level,” but it is the government which is disadvantaged, not the private companies.

Additionally, Cox and BellSouth engaged in many activities to break the will of the community to build a network. Common tactics are "push polls" and glossy mailings with inaccurate claims to scare people - particularly before a referendum. Usually, they are not this silly, but a Lafayette resident recorded one call:

One of the questions alluded to the city requirements for lawn watering during dry summer conditions. The question generally was phrased as “Since the city only allows you to water your lawn only three days per week, how do you feel about the city offering you cable TV service where you could only watch television three days per week?” The community member and, ultimately, the out-of-state questioner in this push-poll, are both heard chuckling at the ridiculous nature of the questions.

Make no mistake though, these polls are often effective at confusing and scaring people away from publicly supporting a community network.

Lafayette, along with other cities like Chattanooga, Tennessee; Bristol, Virginia; and Monticello, Minnesota, had to spend a lot of time in the courts before building the network.

By the time the Louisiana Supreme Court rendered its decision in 2007, almost three years had passed since the city’s first announcement of this project in 2004. The political and legal battles brought and promoted by the incumbent telecoms cost the city of Lafayette nearly $4 million. Interestingly enough, Cox Communications, which had been increasing its rates several times a year prior to Lafayette’s initial announcement to explore its offering of telecommunications services, decided to freeze its rates in Lafayette between 2004 and 2007. At the same time, Cox continued to increase its rates in other parts of the state. Estimates indicate that Lafayette citizens and businesses saved nearly $4 million due to these deferred cable rate increases, so in a roundabout way Lafayette’s citizens saved in reduced cable TV rates the amount the city spent defending itself in this extensive litigation process.

This quote reveals that quantifying the costs and benefits of publicly owned networks is difficult. Communities often see lower rates from all providers when they build a competitive, publicly owned network. The lower rates to everyone in the community are a tremendous benefit of public ownership.

However, the incumbent companies do not always advertise the lower rates directly. These companies can cross subsidize - using their massive profits from communities with no competition - financing large efforts to go door to door, offering special discounts to subscribers to starve the publicly owned network.

Cox has increased its rates in the multi-parish area, which includes Lafayette, and is going door-to-door to offer lower customized pricing to regain customers already being served by LUS Fiber. Apparently the notion of “fairness” espoused by the private companies does not include the increasing of rates to customers in non-Lafayette areas who have very few competitive options which allows Cox to use the resultant higher revenues to offer much lower pricing in Lafayette areas where there is now meaningful competition from LUS Fiber.

Then there is the simple matter of payback. These are powerful companies with massive resources.

In addition, Cox representatives were recently active in attempting to undermine the future of the city’s century-old electric, water and sewer utility system. During a recent rate increase effort for these traditional utilities, Cox representatives were lobbying Lafayette council members to oppose the rate increase in order to adversely affect the utility system’s future viability. All of these examples indicate an underlying strategy to hurt the city simply because the city voters dared to choose to authorize the building of their own telecommunications system.

Building a publicly owned network is a difficult task, but certainly beats the alternative of relying on these companies and their dirty tactics to prevent any competition.

Update: Thanks to Lafayette Pro Fiber for providing time stamps on the video of the committee hearing when Huval speaks.

I was briefly checking out the Open Internet Workshop when I got into a short tweet-argument with someone I did not know. Bear with me as I recount the discussion then explain why I think it worth delving into for a post. This person caught my attention by tweeting, "Which means the Net is already open, right?"

I responded, "Yes Internet is open. Trying to keep it that way. Idea that net neutrality is 'new' is absurd."

Shortly thereafter, I got a response that fits a standard script: "Then how about proving actual harm first? Burden of proof to hand Net to govt is on you guys."

I responded, "Comcast, RCN, Cox block applications ... why must we wait for you to break the Net further to fix it?"

The final response was that the market forces will solve the problem and my "examples are outdated."

I later discovered that I was wasting time responding to someone from an astroturf think tank. Odds are that this person was simultaneously tweeting that cigarette smoking is not correlated with cancer and that burning coal actually cleans the air.

But this is a common argument from those who want to allow companies like Comcast and AT&T to tell users what sites they can visit and what applications they can use. Some "free market" advocate (who is actually defending firms with serious market power, the antithesis of a free market) says that no private network owner would violate network neutrality. Then, when presented with companies that have violated network neutrality, the response is invariably that those are "old" examples" or somehow not relevant.

To sum up:

Person A: No company would violate network neutrality.

Person B: What about Comcast, Cox, RCN, and the famous Madison River Communication?

Person A: Those don't count.

Aside from the absurdity, the larger problem is that we do not always know when companies are violating network neutrality. Comcast was violating network neutrality for at least a year before tech journalists successfully outed the practice. Over the course of that year, many subscribers called Comcast and asked why they were having problems with certain applications. Comcast lied to them and said the company was not interfering with them. When finally backed into a corner with incontrovertible evidence, it admitted it was.

These companies know that users have very few choices for broadband. In my case, I have a choice between slow DSL and comparatively faster cable. Though we may soon have access to WiMax in Saint Paul, the speeds will not be comparable to what I need for my communications. I have one option for relatively fast broadband. And that company has no problem lying to me about whether it interferes with my surfing.

Transparency matters. Communities cannot depend on these companies to provide the infrastructure they need. If my city owned the network and treated its customers this way, we would have the power to shake up the management and put local needs before profits.

Photo used under Creative Commons license - thanks to flickr's limonada.

Time Warner continues to fight for monopoly protections in North Carolina with legislation to hamstring municipalities, preventing them from building the essential broadband infrastructure they need. While I was in Lafayette at FiberFete, the North Carolina Legislature was considering a bill to preempt local authority, essentially shutting down the prospect for any cable and broadband competition in the state.

Jay Ovittore has covered this legislation in depth.

Salisbury small businessman Brad Walser, owner of Walser Technology Group testified that North Carolina community’s new municipal broadband network Fibrant would meet his company’s needs for broadband capacity not available from commercial providers. Walser noted Salisbury is suffering from an unemployment rate exceeding 14 percent. Advanced broadband, he believes, could help the city attract new businesses that will help create new, high paying jobs. Fibrant is expected to launch later this year.

Folks from Chattanooga also testified about the benefits of publicly owned networks. The public outcry on the issue has been helpful:

All of your e-mails and calls have been getting through to the legislators. This kind of attention makes them nervous and I ask you to continue. I can assure you that we here at Stop the Cap!, along with Communities United for Broadband, Broadband for Everyone NC, and Save North Carolina Broadband are going to ratchet up attention on this issue.

If you live in North Carolina, definitely read the bottom of the post on how to help.

Unfortunately, the state legislature seems to have more nitwits than anyone who knows anything about networks: one State Senator suggested wireless will be replacing fiber soon - one wonders how the wireless tower will connect to the Internet... magic?

North Carolina could become the 19th state that has created barriers to protect incumbent telecom interests.

The next big decision day is apparently May 5th, according to Save NC BB.

As a side-note, Jay Ovittore filed a complaint with the Ethics Commission because one of the legislators involved in this issue works directly for Time Warner - a conflict of interest. The Rep has since recused himself - an important precedent for battles in other state legislatures around the country.

Photo Credit: Kenny