Across the country, hundreds of local governments, public power utilities, non-profits, and cooperatives have built successful and sometimes pioneering telecommunication networks that put community needs first.

These communities are following in the footsteps of the publicly owned power networks put in place a century before. We watch history repeat itself as these new networks are actively being built across the country.

Cities like Lafayette, Louisiana, and Monticello, Minnesota, offer the fastest speeds at the lowest rates in the entire country. Kutztown’s network in Pennsylvania has saved the community millions of dollars. Oklahoma City’s massive wireless mesh has helped modernize its municipal agencies. Cities in Utah have created a true broadband market with many independent service providers competing for subscribers. From Washington, DC, to Santa Monica, California, communities have connected schools and municipal facilities, radically increasing broadband capacity without increasing telecom budgets.

Overcoming Obstacles
More and more cities are building these networks and learning how to operate in the challenging new era in which all media is online, and a high-speed telecommunications network is as much a part of the essential infrastructure of a modern economy as electricity was 100 years ago.

Communities that have invested in these networks have seen tremendous benefits. Even small communities have generated millions of dollars in cumulative savings from reduced rates -- caused by competition. Major employers have cited broadband networks as a deciding factor in choosing a new site, and existing businesses have prospered in a more competitive environment.

Residents who subscribe to the network see the benefits of a network that puts service first: they talk to a neighbor when something goes wrong, not to an offshore call center. At the municipal fiber network in Wilson, North Carolina, they talk of the “strangle effect” -- if you have problems with their network, you can find someone locally to strangle.

Perhaps the greatest benefit communities have gained from owning their telecommunications networks is self-determination. Recent court rulings enable private network owners to set their own rules, including increased charges for accessing some sites -- much like a cable bill charges more for some programming. The rules are made far from where the customer resides and the criteria used to design such rules maximizes benefit to the private firm, not the community.

There is no one model for community broadband. Communities vary greatly in their needs, assets, desires, and culture, not to mention a regulatory environment that varies from state to state. This article highlights the lessons learned about the most important issues in network builds as communities evaluate the possibility of building their own networks for the 21st Century.

Lessons Learned: Network Planning
Communities can solve their own problems. With smart investments, communities can call all the shots on their own broadband network.

Years of experience have offered many lessons from community networks. Given their complicated nature, there is no way to avoid problems when building a network. However, by proactively addressing common issues, these problems may be minimized. One of the benefits of community networks is the public can evaluate the tradeoffs of different approaches and weigh in on challenges.

The network planning stage is incredibly important. The decisions made about the physical design of the network will define its strengths and weaknesses. A cost-cutting decision in the short term may greatly increase costs over the life of the network. For a variety of technological reasons, the actual location of fiber in the ground may foreclose some network designs.

The trade-offs of building and operating networks are well known to technically savvy network architects. For example, placing aerial fiber on poles is usually less than a third of the capital expense of buried fiber, but requires yearly rental fees to the pole owner. Furthermore, the cost of annual maintenance is significantly greater. Equipment to support television (e.g., video head ends, transponders, etc.) comes in a vast array of capabilities and costs. Less knowledgeable consultants may encourage specific solutions without fully considering future service offerings or the impact of coming trends in Internet-provided video. Communities should require consultants to provide understandable explanations of those tradeoffs, rather than offering a single approach.

Many communities have started their network with a modest foray into an I-Net or providing some manner of broadband services to a few businesses or technology centers. Not all such networks will result in citywide FTTH, but they still should be built to support future growth to ensure maximum flexibility. Though the costs of planning for future expansion do add upfront costs to a project, they will reduce future costs when expansion is necessary. As an added benefit, networks ready for future expansion often offer greater redundancy from the start.

Community networks often grow as needs change, and the community gains confidence in offering services. Even if a community decides not to offer retail services, it will improve its negotiating position with incumbent providers by reserving the capability of adding that capacity in the future. Service providers will approach franchise negotiations differently, having to respect the additional options available to the community.

Chattanooga Case Study
A strong model for communities considering this option is The Electric Power Board (EPB) of Chattanooga, Tennessee. They recently announced a citywide 1 gigabit per second (1 Gbps) broadband tier, by far the fastest citywide broadband tier available in the U.S. By the end of the year, 170,000 households and businesses in the region will have access to the fastest speeds available -- at affordable rates.

Christopher Mitchell, Director of the Telecommunications as Commons Initiative with the New Rules Project of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR), recently visited Chattanooga to tour and commented on their community-owned fiber network.

Earlier this year, Google announced they were going to build a 1 Gbps network, and several of the largest telecom companies in the country said it was too difficult. Almost one year later, Chattanooga has built such a network before Google even decided with whom to partner.

The network will leave no one behind; even the most rural areas served by EPB will have access to the same speeds as those in the city. Entrepreneurs in rural Tennessee will pay far less for far greater speeds than even those in Silicon Valley.

EPB has long offered some telecom services. Starting nearly 10 years ago, the power utility stepped up to ensure businesses had access to the telephone and broadband networks they needed. Those services clearly scratched an itch as they had more than 2,300 customers before beginning to expand the network to everyone. One of EPB’s first subscribers was a radiology clinic located in a strip mall, where 10 radiologists help rural hospitals, who may lack such specialists, to diagnose problems. The burgeoning area of tele-medicine requires next-generation networks to transmit very large data files quickly.

EPB’s footprint now includes more than 168,000 electrical customers scattered over 600 square miles that reach into northern Georgia. In September 2009, EPB rolled out fully fiber-powered Triple Play services to 17,000 households. One year later, the network had passed over 100,000 premises, making it the largest muni fiber network in the country. EPB expects to pass everyone in the territory by the end of 2010.

Interestingly, one of the reasons publicly owned fiber networks are commonly built by public power companies is because power companies already need fiber to reliably transmit data in real-time to monitor areas of the grid. In this particular case, this fiber network will be used extensively for electrical uses, which is why the electricity side of EPB is paying for $160 million of the $220 million expected expense. EPB received a $111 million from a Department of Energy’s Smart Grid stimulus grant. The grant allowed them to cut the expected completion time for the project down to 3 years from 10.

Though many utilities are turning to wireless for Smart Grid data transmittal, EPB fears its topology will interfere with long-range wireless solutions. EPB views the fiber solution as far more reliable and a stronger long-term solution despite the higher upfront cost.

EPB is not actually running fiber to every home for Smart Grid applications, just to those who are taking telecommunications services. Those who do not take telecom services will have an electric meter wirelessly connected to a mesh network that uses a nearby fiber-connected home to send and receive usage data.

Some critics have claimed the electrical side of EPB should pay less for the fiber network but the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI – a trusted source in these matters) has validated the EPB numbers.

EPB hopes to recoup its investment primarily from not having to continue to manually read its 160,000 meters, cutting the theft of power from altered older-design meters and generating extra revenues from new video and telecommunications services made possible by the fiber optic network. In addition, EPB expects to sign up at least 35% of its footprint for its telephone, Internet, or television services over the next 3 years.

The competition has now made Chattanooga a priority for investment with both AT&T and Comcast upgrading their networks. Comcast offers its “up to” 50 Mbps down cable network (often paired with a paltry 5 Mbps upstream connection). EPB’s prices are comparable to Comcast’s prices (the real prices that kick in after the promotional rates expire).

On the contrary, publicly owned networks typically resist using such gimmicks.

Katie Espeseth, Vice President of EPB Fiber Optics, explained why: “We’re entering the market with a consistent and clear price -- it is not a temporary, promotional price... Because of our fiber optic infrastructure, our picture quality is clearer and more consistent and our ‘Fi speed’ Internet service is consistent and more reliable.”

EPB’s strategy is to promote local content and faster services rather than engaging in a price war. They are actively looking for local content to put on the television, including youth sports that they will put on video-on-demand.

Note the slowest broadband connection is 30 Mbps/30 Mbps -- speeds faster than those available in most communities around the country. EPB is offering services that will ensure any subscriber can use multiple modern applications simultaneously -- an increasingly common need as households continue getting more bandwidth hungry devices.

As a result of this network, Espeseth has estimated 2,600 new jobs will be created in the greater Chattanooga area from the fiber network and resulting economic development.

EPB has hired 70 full-time installers and more temporary workers in order to add 100 subscribers a day to the network. Another article puts a number on the projected economic development, expecting “…almost $850 million in value from both communications and Smart Grid services, including things like jobs and energy savings.”

Coming Full Circle
In the 1990’s, the United States had few peers in the infrastructure of the 21st Century -- broadband networks. Over the past decade, several peer nations have surpassed the U.S. by instituting regulations and policies that recognized the important role of the public sector.

Many communities have realized the benefits of publicly owned broadband networks, from lower prices and faster speeds to creating a meaningful choice between providers. These communities do not have to worry when Comcast arbitrarily blocks content and the Courts prevent the FCC from protecting the public.

Communities can protect themselves by building and owning the infrastructure they depend on for education, economic development, and even entertainment. Ownership is about setting the rules, not about operation -- a number of communities have built networks that are leased to one or more companies that offer the services.

As with all infrastructure, building a network requires significant up-front investment and planning. However, as we’ve shown in this article, the difficulties have proven well worthwhile for the Chattanooga community who has built its own network.

Every generation likes to imagine its burden is bigger than those who came before. Expanding fast and affordable broadband access to everyone is a daunting task, but surely not harder than electrifying farms during The Great Depression and The Great War. The Rural Electrification Administration ran a wire to nearly every rural home, creating an infrastructure essential to the many boom years that followed.

By recognizing the power of public ownership, we can run a new wire to every home that will deliver high quality, affordable, and competitive broadband services. Acting now, during the transition from copper to fiber optics, public ownership offers the best opportunity for building the infrastructure of the next century.

Portions of this article were excerpted from Christopher Mitchell’s comprehensive report on community broadband networks, Breaking the Broadband Monopoly: How Communities Are Building the Broadband Networks They Need. It is available as a pdf via this link: http://www.muninetworks.org/reports/breaking-broadband-monopoly.

 About the Author
Christopher Mitchell is the Director of the Telecommunications as Commons Initiative with the New Rules Project of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR). He is an expert on community broadband networks. For more information, email him at christopher@newrules.org or visit www.muninetworks.org or www.ilsr.org.

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