Another video from the Building Community Capacity through Broadband project (hosted by the University of Wisconsin Extension service) takes a look at how local governments use broadband and the importance of high capacity, reliable connections that they can actually afford. 

Video: 

Santa Monica's approach to building community owned broadband that puts the community first has been wildly successful. They have not focused on providing residential connections, and likely will not in the future, focusing instead on meeting their municipal needs and businesses to spur economic development.

They can deliver up to 10Gbps to businesses that need it and they have connectivity throughout the City for whatever projects they choose to pursue. This includes free Wi-Fi in parks, controlling traffic signaling (prioritizing mass transit, for instance), and smart parking applications. On top of all that, their investments have saved more than a million dollars that would have been wasted on slower, less reliable connections provided by leased lines.

In the matter of controlling traffic signals, Santa Monica wants all intersections with fiber-optics.

Arizona Avenue, the Mid-City area and the city's office district will all be getting makeovers if the City Council approves two contracts that will connect 40 signalized intersections to City Hall's centralized traffic control system.

The work represents the fourth phase in a five-phase effort to connect all of Santa Monica's intersections using fiber optic cables. Some signals will need to be fully replaced, while others can get by on smaller upgrades, according to the staff report.

Don't miss this hour long interview between Craig Settles and Jory Wolf, the brains behind Santa Monica's success.

Around 45 minutes into the interview, Jory Wolf talks about the ways the free Wi-Fi network promotes local businesses in partnership with a Buy Local campaign. I was thrilled to hear this as a colleague of mine at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance is a great friend of buy local campaigns because they are proven to help the small, independent businesses that contribute so much to communities.

If you want to learn more, particularly about how Santa Monica's approach has created many new jobs (that's right, smart public investments in broadband create jobs!) check out .

For more information about Santa Monica, check out this article from Broadband Communities Magazine.

-Though the city provides Internet access directly, it also makes the network available to third-party providers on an open-access basis. “The incumbents have chosen not to use our assets,” Wolf says, explaining that larger providers are often reluctant to operate over networks where they cannot control the user experience and that their marketing and support organizations are not geared to using other companies’ networks. 


However, other ISPs have shown interest in the network now that it is becoming successful. Currently, two ISPs offer services generally over the network, and other ISPs serve the Santa Monica offices of businesses that they deal with in other locations. Wolf says, “We have the opportunity to handle the business any way they prefer. … We’re not an obstacle; we’re an enabler. We don’t see ourselves as competitors, but as filling a void.” 


City Net’s revenue from current business customers totals about $300,000 per year, enough to fund network operations and maintenance and to support an extensive system of free Wi-Fi hot spots throughout the city. Wi-Fi is now available at parks, beaches, libraries, public buildings and other open-space areas. On any given day, about 2,000 of Santa Monica’s 87,000 residents use the 27 Wi-Fi hot spots. 


The city also has $190,000 of its capital funds remaining, which it uses as a revolving capital improvement project account. This account funds construction for network expansion, which is repaid by customers as the network is extended to their premises. 


An indirect benefit of City Net is that it has forced competing networks to lower their prices. Wolf’s office estimates that nonparticipating providers have lowered their bandwidth prices by 20 percent or more, making bandwidth generally more affordable throughout the city. “If that’s all we had accomplished, we’d feel that we’d done what we intended,” Wolf says.

See also a webinar hosted by Broadband Communities [Cisco WebEx] where Jory discusses Santa Monica and nearby Long Beach talks about a similar approach they are using.

Finally, check out a recent segment of Santa Monica Update that discusses Santa Monica City Net (fast forward to 9:20 in the video to skip right to it).

Video: 

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]).

Following 9/11, Washington DC built a muni fiber network for government use.  We wrote about it Breaking the Broadband Monopoly -- noting its strong record of success.  The Washington Examiner has noted that DC-Net is looking for expansion opportunites.  

The city invested $87 million into D.C.-Net to get there. It now has 350 miles of fiber optic cable connecting city agencies at 355 locations in all eight wards. More than 33,000 District employees use it every day, and it handles calls to the emergency 911 call center and the city's 311 information line. The District also hasn't spent a dime on it since 2007. Instead, the network runs on a surplus, which is reinvested into its infrastructure, officials said. Now, the city stands to earn millions by leasing access to the network out to federal agencies.

While private companies constantly claim that local governments have no capacity to run fiber broadband neworks, DC-Net has proven not only can munis run these networks, they can offer faster speeds, lower prices, and better reliability.  Now DC-Net has a $1.6 million contract with US Office of Personnel Management.