An article in the San Francisco Bay Guardian about public opposition to AT&T's further cluttering the right-of-way with 726 metal boxes to start delivering their super DSL U-Verse alerted me to people getting organized for community fiber.

AT&T's U-verse upgrade would enable it to offer connection speeds three times faster than current service — but not nearly as fast as what fiber proponents envision. Several members of the tech industry interviewed by the Guardian cautioned that another AT&T upgrade might be necessary after less than a decade to keep pace with technological advancement.

Ha! Considering that AT&T U-Verse tops out at 24Mbps downstream (if you are lucky and live close to the key electronics) and a piddling 1.5 Mbps upstream, it is already obsolete. Cable networks offered considerably better performance last year -- suggesting that AT&T should stop wasting everyone's time in SF with this approach.

We have previously written about efforts to use the City's fiber to bridge the digital divide and the SFBG article introduces us to new ideas using that asset.

Meanwhile, Board of Supervisors President David Chiu recently asked DTIS to examine the possibility of leasing excess capacity on city-owned dark-fiber infrastructure, which is currently in place but not being used. This could boost bandwidth for entities such as nonprofits, health care facilities, biotech companies, digital media companies, or universities, Chiu said, while bolstering city coffers. "There are many places in town that need a lot more bandwidth, and this is an easy way to provide it," he said.

Sniezko noted that other cities have created open-access networks to deploy fiber. "This is really effective because it's a lot like a public utility," she explained. "The city or someone fills a pipe, and then anyone who wants to run information or service on that pipe can do so. They pay a leasing fee. This has worked in many places in Europe, and they actually do it in Utah. In many cases, it's really cool — because it's publicly owned and it's neutral. There's no prioritizing traffic for one thing over another, or limitation on who's allowed to offer service on the network. It ... creates some good public infrastructure, and also allows for competition, and it sort of revives the local ISP. Chiu's proposal is a little bit in that vein, it sounds like. But he hasn't released a lot of details on it yet, so we're still looking."

The article links to a newish web site SF Fiber, which has some impressive people involved, including Tim Pozar. They are also on twitter and Facebook.

An article on SF Fiber about potentially leasing city fiber mentions that the City has some conditioned fiber (where they are restricted in how they can use it) as well as unconditioned:

There may be some complexities to this process, as the city network sometimes uses underground conduit from utilities, which may be restricted to government or educational use, but it also possesses miles of unrestricted assets — notably fiber under MTA trolley and bus lines, and conduit in the AWSS, San Francisco’s emergency firefighting water network.

Once again, we like to point to Santa Monica as a great example communities can look to for expanding unconditioned fiber networks, the smart approach that leaves the most flexibility for the future.

After a long time, it seems that there is new energy behind expanding publicly owned fiber in San Francisco, including from a candidate for mayor. We hope that if he wins, he doesn't disappear on the issue like Seattle's Mayor seems to have …

This is the first in a series of posts by Rita Stull -- her bio is available here. The short version is that Rita has a unique perspective shaped by decades of experience in this space. Her first post introduces readers to the often misunderstood concept of the Right-of-way, an asset owned by the citizens and managed mostly by local governments.

In the process of knitting a baby blanket, a whole ball of yarn became tangled into this mess. . . .

. . . reminding me of the time, in the early eighties, when I was the second cable administrator appointed in the U.S., and found myself peering into a hole in the street filled with a similar looking mess—only made of copper wires, instead of yarn.

Why talk about yarn and copper wire in the same breath on a site dedicated to community broadband networks? Because it was the intersection of ‘art and cable’ that got me started in the ‘telecommunications policy’ arena, the same kind of thinking that continues today in our tangled telecom discussions: Is it content or conduit, competitive, entertainment, essential, wireless, landline, gigahertz, gigabits?

I transferred from the Recreation Department to launch the city’s cable office as an experienced government supervisor with a Masters in Theater. My employer and I thought cable TV was the ‘entertainment’ business and I had the requisite mix of experience and skills to manage one of the first franchises awarded in 1981.

Yikes. Imagine my surprise on discovering that cable was a WIRE LINE UTILITY using PUBLIC LAND, which each citizen pays TAXES to buy, upgrade and maintain! And, our three-binders-thick, cable franchise was a ‘legal contract’ containing the payment terms for use of our public rights-of-way, as well as protection of local free speech rights. I was thirty years old, a property owner who had never thought about who owned roads, sidewalks and utility corridors.

Rights-of-way are every street plus about 10 feet of land on each side. That land belongs to everyone in the community. Rights-of-way are a shared public asset—sometimes called part of our common wealth.

The reason we all own rights-of-way, over four million miles of it, is so essential services such as roads, water, gas, electric, and telephone are available, universally—another legal concept—new to me — meaning ‘used by and available to everyone’. We co-own roads and utility corridors to transport ourselves, our goods and services and now our information—essentials required for survival in a developed nation.

Local, state and federal governments manage land assets on our behalf, as follows:

• 75.2%: 3 million miles of rights-of-way are managed by local governments—towns, cities, counties, villages, parishes, townships.
• 20.5%: 820,000 miles of rights-of-way are managed by state governments.
• 4.3%: 172,000 miles of rights-of-way are managed by the federal government.

Important Business Notes Regarding Rights-of-Way

1. To be in business, phone and cable companies must locate their lines in public rights-of-way. Wireless companies must connect towers for ‘signal backhaul’ via landlines. So wireless carriers also use rights-of-way. Customers can’t buy cable, phone, mobile or any Internet services—can’t stream videos—without an Internet Service Provider (ISP) owning or buying ‘landline’ capacity.
2. Telecom is a natural monopoly. The first telecom occupant in the rights-of-way gains tremendous advantage, making it difficult for competitors to finance duplicate infrastructure. In the past, when the threat of competition reared its ugly head, operators used their market dominance, as the incumbent in the rights-of-way, to drastically slash prices, retain customers and force nascent competitors out of business. Once the competitor is eliminated, rates can be doubled or tripled, leaving consumers without the option of changing providers.

Arguably, rights-of-way are the most valuable land asset in the nation. Now that you know you’re the proud owner of four million miles of rights-of-way, what do you think telecom occupants pay to use it?

Do you know that:

• Phone companies generally hold hundred year leases, some in perpetuity, and pay nothing to use rights-of-way. Only the old basic phone rate is regulated. Offered in a duopolist market, most revenues are generated from unregulated phone-line services. Your phone company charges whatever it wants for business and residential service packages, late fees, security deposits, etc., while paying nothing to use your rights-of-way. This reality means that we, as taxpayers, subsidize phone companies by giving them free land.
• Originally, cable operators, because they were offering entertainment services, set the precedent for paying a fair price to occupy rights-of-way. In the late 70’s/early 80’s, as a result of the mostly non-exclusive, franchise competitive-bidding wars, operators agreed to pay the following to use rights-of-way:
  • Up to 5% of gross revenues,
  • Dedicated institutional networks (I-Nets),
  • Public, education and government (PEG) access channels and funding for facilities, equipment, video production training.

From 1980-1985, thousands of local governments monitored the private sector’s deployment of millions of miles of coaxial cable plant in public rights-of-way. In this phenomenal five-year, local, public/private, collaborative undertaking to ‘cable the country for TV’, the U.S. became a ‘wired nation’, as envisioned in Ralph Lee Smith’s seminal book of the same name.

You Did It! … Or did you?

Don’t get all excited about local governments’ successful rights-of-way management – even though it resulted in cable operators wiring the country in five short years. And don’t kid yourself that local governments can effectively leverage their valuable land-use powers in negotiations with telecom incumbents.

Time for a REALITY CHECK:

• Among the wealthiest and most powerful in the country, the telecommunications industry spends tens of millions of dollars, annually, lobbying to retain free use of rights-of-way land.
• Once the country was wired in the early eighties, the cable industry spent the next thirty years lobbying federal and state legislatures to void franchises and eliminate as many payments for using community-owned rights-of-way as possible.

Legal Jargon

Creatively designed telecom regulations confound legislators, confuse consumers, and distort the national discourse. Current regulatory language contorts our understanding of what telecom is and its importance in our lives. Simply stated, telecommunications means the transporting of information on connected networks of boxes (engineering shorthand for computers and switches) and wires, located on poles or under streets.

Today we hear a cacophony of marketers, profiteers, duopolists and plain old crooks – purposely confusing us with: it’s voice - video – data - information – fiber – coaxial cable – wireless - WiFi – broadcast TV – satellite – streaming video - 4G - WiMax - radio – cell phone –- gigahertz – gigabits – megabits – digital - Internet – etc. The list goes on.

As fraught with engineering/marketing jargon as telecom laws are, none address the convergence of digital, Internet and fiber technologies — a convergence that means all information formats—voice, video and data are transported by the same myriad, interconnected wired and wireless networks.

The telecom industry’s lobbying goal is free use of rights-of-way to protect duopolist markets. Twenty states adopted franchising laws depriving local jurisdictions of regulatory authority, thus confiscating communities’ assets and reducing accountability to consumers.

The industry aggressively lobbies for state laws that prohibit or severely constrain jurisdictions use of rights-of-way, specifically to block deployment of next-generation telecom infrastructure: fiber-to-the-premise networks.

Wildly Escalating Telecom Costs for Public Services

When the industry lobbies for state laws that void in-kind services such as I-Nets, the cost can be enormous for the communities they serve. For example: Years ago, a California city, with a population of ninety-thousand, connected thirty municipal facilities, schools, colleges, universities, hospitals and libraries with its institutional network, provided as partial payment for rights-of-way use. When state franchising voided local requirements, the cable operator began billing the city $45,000 a month to use the institutional network. Over the fifteen-year life of the franchise, the operator expects to collect a whopping $8.1 million dollars from the city (thus the taxpayers), instead of paying to use the community’s rights-of-way.

Extorting Future Public Resources

Currently, the industry is lobbying states to PROHIBIT governments from building fiber-to-the-premise (FTTP) networks. Not only do telecom companies refuse to universally upgrade existing wire lines and provide I-Nets, they now want to prevent communities from becoming self-reliant by building their own networks (as in North Carolina and South Carolina, for instance).

Don’t be fooled into thinking that telecom regulations benefit some larger public goal. The U.S. lags behind developed nations in broadband deployment because we are not using rights-of-way to build FTTP infrastructure. We need to ‘catch up’ to competitor nations, where residents, as well as business, buy affordable, bidirectional broadband at gigabit speeds.

We must clean up our tangled regulatory mess, reclaim use of rights-of-way and build the FTTP networks needed to create jobs and compete in a global economy -- starting with JULIET (Joint Underground Location of Infrastructure for Electric and Telecom) [pdf]).

My friend, Geoff Daily at App-Rising.com, has questioned the wisdom of running fiber to all anchor institutions.

There's been a lot of buzz around the benefits and relative viability of wiring all community anchor institutions (schools, libraries, hospitals, etc.) with fiber as the way to get the best bang for the broadband buck. But recent conversations with my fiber-deploying friends have led me to worry that doing this could be a big mistake.

...

The reason is simple: if you build a network to serve community anchors, then those institutions won't be available to serve as anchor customers for a community-wide deployment. Without those community anchors as customers, the economics of deployment, especially in rural areas, becomes much harder and may actually make robust, sustainable broadband impossible in some areas.

This is a question I have wrestled with also, in trying to help communities understand the real impacts of decisions they make on whether to build their own broadband network.

My first reaction is on philosophical grounds - public institutions like schools, police departments, etc., do not exist to prop-up the business models of cable or telephone companies. Large entities like municipal and county governments should own their own network because it will save them money and expand their capabilities. When will the tea-party protesters start protesting government paying exorbitant fees to telephone companies for slow T-1 lines and the like? After all, these are our tax dollars and they should be spent wisely.

My second reaction is that I seriously doubt removing these institutional networks will impact the business model significantly. Maybe it would have last decade, but now we know that Comcast and probably many more have ">massive margins in their broadband operations. Losing the libraries and schools will do little to their bottom lines. Even if it takes a bit out of their profits, they won't go missing meals.

But really, the answer is more complicated. Many municipalities already get "free" services from their cable company as a part of the video franchise. To gain access to the right-of-way, cable companies have often given "free" (meaning paid for by the subscriber base) services via an I-Net. Though this has been helpful for communities it was never a particularly fair, efficient, or rational means of solving connectivity issues for local governments.

It wasn't fair because cable subscribers paid for the costs of local government that should be paid by all citizens. It wasn't efficient because cable companies often did not live up their responsibilities or franchises did not require modernization of networks over the many years of the agreement. And it wasn't rational because neither entity had an incentive to build the kind of network local governments need to do their jobs effectively.

But the right-of-way is a valuable asset and communities should have the freedom to negotiate access to it as they choose. Those choices are also constrained by what state and federal laws allow (I said this was complicated, right?)

So - getting back to the question of whether building fiber to these public buildings is a good idea or not, I say it absolutely is ... if it is locally owned and the local community is responsible for it.

In the unlikely event that such a network causes private companies to cease investing in the community (though continue refusing to invest in the community is likely a more accurate description), the community should take initiative to build the last-mile networks necessary for future vitality.

Either this is an essential infrastructure or it isn't. If it is, local governments must take a stronger role in ensuring everyone has access. If it isn't essential, then we can continue watching private companies deploy networks wherever they decide it is profitable.

Update: In an attempt to be more clear, I will say that I think federal policy should make it a priority to make funding available (loans where possible, mixing in grants where absolutely necessary) so that local communities can connect their anchors. Local ownership is paramount. Statewide networks are a poor approach in that it would de facto prevent communities from building their own networks.

I don't think these networks will interfere with business plans of those private companies who have already made investments - but I also don't think this should be a major concern because local government's mission is to serve the needs of the community, not those of absentee-owned cable or telephone companies. To the extent that people in the community need better networks, local government must be ready to step in -- just as they do with roads, water treatment plants, and other elements of infrastructure.