We told you how Chanute, Kansas, was using their community network to serve local businesses. Now we want to share a story about how the community network helped bring a new business to Chanute.

Chanute, who is named after Octave Chanute an aviation pioneer, adopts the motto "A Tadition of Innovation." Chanute has proven that they are serious about that mantra with the expansion of their community network. They boast free Wi-Fi in all green spaces and parks, schools that are connected with fiber and wireless, several fiber loops throughout the city, plans for a smart grid, and are even exploring FTTH capability.

Spirit AeroSystems, the world's largest supplier of commercial airplane assemblies and components, just opened a new manufacturing facility in Chanute. The plant is expected to create up to 150 new jobs in the southeastern Kansas community and will include a health clinic on site for employees.

As Spirit was approaching different communities, it had a variety of requirements that included reliable electricity and reliable broadband. Nothing exorbitant -- they weren't asking for a gig or even 100Mbps. But they needed reliability. And Chanute was poised to deliver. Publicly owned networks do not exist in a vacuum; they are often one piece of a well-run community.

If Chanute only had a slow DSL and absentee-owned cable company offering broadband, maybe Spirit still would have chosen them and maybe that would have been the tipping point for a different community. We don't know for sure. 

What we do know is that Chanute is getting more jobs and that owning their own network helped.

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MPR News recently ran two stories on the trials and tribulations of new and prospective broadband networks. Conrad Wilson's story about the continuing Monticello drama and Jennifer Vogel's account of factors affecting the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA) projects give us a good idea of the many hurdles in the way of building new fiber-optic networks.

We have reported many times on the drama that has unfolded in Monticello. The municipally owned fiber-optic network has faced some withering challenges and yet perseveres.

Monticello asked for a modern communications network but the existing service providers, the cable and phone companies, insisted the city was "sufficiently wired." Conrad's reporting suggests otherwise:

Bill Tapper, who owns a cabinet company with clients around the world, recalls a time just a few years ago when the Internet was so slow it hurt business.

"The service we had in Monticello was horrible," he said. "My employees would sometimes take the data home where they had a better Internet connection than we did and do their uploads at night."

Tapper said he lost out on business, but at the time the established Internet service providers like phone and cable TV companies told Tapper and other frustrated business owners in town that the city was wired sufficiently.

After the community voted in favor of a publicly owned fiber-optic network, the incumbent provider, TDS, filed a lawsuit. The lawsuit strategically succeeded in stalling the development of the new network but did not destroy the project. Even though the incumbent provider describes pre-network status as "just fine before the city got involved," TDS took advantage of the delay they caused to began building their own fiber network.

Currently, subscribers in Monticello are benefitting from their high-speed fiber in ways beyond expanded and improved access. Because of the threat of competition, Charter is wooing the community with below rock-bottom (albeit temporary) rates.

But Minnesota has recently considered some legislation from State Rep. Linda Runbeck, R-Circle Pines, that would revoke local authority to decide if a community should build a network. She was quoted in the MPR story:

"You're putting the public sector right up against the private sector," Runbeck said. "It's clearly a very competitive industry ... It's a high risk industry. Why should we put that risk on the taxpayer?"

Why?? Perhaps because local employers were sending employees home to be more productive. Businesses need better connections that the few big cable and phone companies want to provide.

She states she will introduce the same bill next session and though her bill is dead this year, it continues to collect co-sponsors. Not a good sign for Minnesota's rural communities.

Jennifer Vogel's story on what has slowed the completion of some ARRA funded projects is a reminder of how hard it is to work in this space.

Because of the many projects funded by the ARRA, fiber is in demand and hard to obtain. Unsurprisingly, the price has increased, driving up the estimated costs of the 18 approved Minnesota projects. Contributing to the higher prices are problems with manufacturing, due to the earthquake loss of a major Japanese production plant a year ago.

As we often see, the bigger providers were able to jump to the front of the line when fiber did become available:

"[T]he fiber that did show up went to the folks who order more large quantities on a regular basis," said Farmers general manager Kevin Beyer. In other words, the $10 million western Minnesota project couldn't compete with bigger players with more clout. "The first orders filled should have been ours since we ordered ahead of others," he said. "But the game got changed a bit. There was a reshuffling of who mattered."

A bureaucratic bottleneck caused by paper work and insufficient staff at RUS adds to the disruption; the result is major delays in many projects. The situation has left communities and private builders in a tricky situation. Rather than wait for federal funds, some project leaders are striking out on their own:

Halstad [Telephone in northwestern Minnesota] was selected early and chose not to wait for stimulus dollars to be in hand, therefore securing most of the needed fiber before the shortage took hold. "We just jumped on it," said Tim Maroney, Halstad's CEO. "We didn't wait for the money to come. We started the engineering and negotiations. We took a chance."

Not all projects are in a position to take a chance, especially public projects that are under tighter scrutiny and subject to a higher level of transparency. Public networks must also contend with attacks from the private sector, which we have seen several times in Lake County. At $66 million, the project is the largest ARA approved project in Minnesota. Mediacom, which only serves a few towns in the project area, has filed a complaint with the Department of Agriculture Office of Inspector General. (See a PDF of the press release here) and the Minnesota Cable Communications Association has started a fear, uncertainty, and doubt campaign to kill the network for many rural people who Mediacom never plans to serve.

Aggressive and territorial incumbents, material shortages, and bureaucracy, are all hurdles facing the new networks. Municipal networks have the added threat of state preemption which can, and does, put the skids on great ideas to bring high-speed broadband to more people. As these projects are completed and the social and economic benefits of community networks becomes realized, we hope some of those hurdles will disappear.

We are hearing that SB 313 in Georgia, AT&T's bill to overrule local authority, will be turned into a study bill. Despite the strong support of the Senate Majority Leader, the bill lost support after we and others exposed the frank admission of AT&T's CEO that they had no plans to expand broadband in rural areas.

Given the strength of AT&T's lobbying and the support of the Senate Majority Leader, this is a tremendous victory. Congratulations to the communities in Georgia that successfully organized and defended their authority to decide locally if a network is a wise choice for them.

We do not consider these issues resolved until the ink is dried, but it does look like AT&T lost this round -- which means thousands of local businesses and millions of people won. They can still hope for next-generation networks and a real choice in providers.

Note: the South Carolina bill remains in play and will be discussed on Wednesday by a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee.

We have been collecting some of the news coverage of this broadband debate in Georgia, but have neglected posting until now. Here is a run-down of some of the coverage.

In the beginning of February, the AP covered an SB 313 hearing featuring testimony from rural communities:

Leaders from cities including Elberton, Hogansville, Thomasville, Monroe and Toccoa lined up to tell senators that broadband is necessary infrastructure for the 21st century economic development they hope to attract — and that they are doing what they must to keep their communities competitive.

"We cannot wait for the private sector to ride to our rescue," said Tim Martin, executive director of the Toccoa-Stephens County Development Authority.

Thomasville Mayor Max Beverly said the city's broadband network supports major employers there.

"If we have to cut them off, there's no telling what that's going to do to our local economy," he warned.

The Augusta Chronicle devoted a lot of words to both sides and made the important disclosure that telecom companies had just staffed up on lobbyists:

The telecom companies have beefed up their lobbying forces this legislative session. Many lawmakers have received campaign contributions from them, including Rogers, who rejects any suggestion that they might have motivated him.

Stop the Cap! has continued its in-depth coverage of these important issues. In January, Phillip revealed the sudden increase in telco/cableco contributions to the bill's pusher, most notably from AT&T. He also set the record straight on many of the supposed failures of muni networks in Georgia. For example:

As Multichannel News reported in 2002, “the Atlanta suburb of Acworth, Ga., isn’t selling because business is bad. Rather, officials said they’ve received so many requests for service from outside the city limits that they’ve decided to sell the operation to an independent company that may expand beyond Acworth’s borders.”

That is where the trouble started. The city contracted with United Telesystems Inc. of Savannah, Ga., a private company, first to lease and then eventually buy the cable system, maintaining and expanding it along the way. But in 2003, United Telesystems defaulted on its lease-sale agreement, forcing the city to foreclose on the system and ultimately sell it to a second company.

Acworth’s “failure” wasn’t actually the city’s, it was the private company that defaulted on its contract.

On February 1, Phillip discussed the Columbia County Broadband Network:

If Rogers’ bill passes, the county may have to go back to begging for access from the companies that have repeatedly said it wasn’t worth the investment or their time.

County officials have been more generous, offering all along to share access to the fiber network with the very providers who are seeking to destroy it. So far, that hasn’t changed any minds.

“If we don’t own it, that means we don’t want you to have it” is standard operating procedure for the state’s phone and cable operators, even in the service areas they routinely ignore, even if it means flushing millions of dollars already spent on new networks down the drain.

On February 7, Stop the Cap! covered more of the testimony from towns against the bill:

“We started our cable system not on a whim but on a demand from our citizens to provide a higher level of service for cable TV and Internet,” said Newnan Mayor Keith Brady. “We got into the cable business originally to provide fiber optics and broadband because Charter Communications would simply not invest in our community.”

...

Brady says their community-owned system not only provides broadband where Charter would not, the cable company also was forced to reduce their rates for consumers in nearby communities, saving taxpayers across the entire city and county millions.

In Elberton, the lack of broadband was so pervasive the 4,700 local residents demanded the city provide the service themselves. Commercial providers had stonewalled the county seat of Elbert County for years until the city broke ground on a broadband project in 2001.

...

Don Cope, president and CEO of Dalton Utilities, demonstrated that municipal broadband systems are not the financial risk large telecommunications companies always claim they represent. In fact, Dalton’s system has never received a penny of tax revenue and its accounting is open to public scrutiny to prove it.

Cope noted SB 313 imposes restrictions on community providers, but completely exempts those owned by the companies pushing the bill.

“I would ask that you look at the private providers in the state,” Cope said. “Look at their reports, and you would see how many dollars that are provided to them from the federal government. We are talking about in the billions of dollars. All the [private telecommunications entities] that I know about have some form of government support.”

CivSource also offered an opinion about the bill:

“The private sector is handling this exceptionally well,” Rogers said in an Associated Press account. “What they don’t need is for a governmental entity to come in and compete with them where these types of services already exist. We’re not outlawing a local government entity from doing this, but if they’re going to compete, they can play by the same rules and ask the voters if it’s okay before they go out and spend all these dollars.”

Rogers claims are dubious at best. According to the National Broadband Map, Georgia ranks 20th in the nation for broadband access. According to the forward of a report by Rich Calhoun, Program Director of the Georgia Technology Initiative, “As I traveled through the state to talk with leaders in municipalities, counties and community anchor institutions, I found that many places throughout Georgia indicated that they did not have access to affordable or sufficient broadband services. Telecommunications firms who have made significant investments in Georgia indicated that in some areas of the state the return on investment would not qualify for further investment at the present time.”

The 2012 Broadband Communities Summit will be at the InterContinental Hotel in Dallas April 24-26. I will be there and am excited for the Open Access Program as well as the Economic Development discussions. I'll be presenting on both topics. Early Bird rates appear to still be in play - hope to see some of you there!