3 Out Of 4 Americans Support Community Broadband, Yet 19 States Still Ban Or Hinder Such Networks

from the getting-out-of-our-own-way dept

For years a growing number of US towns and cities have been forced into the broadband business thanks to US telecom market failure. Frustrated by high prices, lack of competition, spotty coverage, and terrible customer service, some 750 US towns and cities have explored some kind of community broadband option. And while the telecom industry routinely likes to insist these efforts always end in disaster, that's never actually been true. While there certainly are bad business plans and bad leaders, studies routinely show that such services not only see far better customer satisfaction scores than large private ISPs, they frequently offer better service at lower, more transparent pricing than many private providers.

Undaunted, big ISPs like AT&T and Comcast have waged a multi-pronged, several decades attack on such efforts. One, by writing and buying protectionist laws in dozens of states either hamstringing or banning cities from building their own networks, often in cases where private ISPs refuse to expand service. Two, by funding economists, consultants, and think tankers (usually via proxy organizations) happy to try and claim that community broadband is always a taxpayer boondoggle -- unnecessary because private sector US broadband just that wonderful.

Of course if you ask actual American consumers, they generally support towns and cities building better, faster broadband networks if they've been historically underserved. And they most certainly don't approve of Comcast buying state laws that eliminate their voting right to make local infrastructure decisions for themselves. A recent Consumer Reports survey found that three out of four Americans support community broadband efforts:

"Three out of four Americans feel that municipal/community broadband should be allowed because it would ensure that broadband access is treated like other vital infrastructure such as highways, bridges, water systems, and electrical grids, allowing all Americans to have equal access to it."

The survey also found that the subject somewhat splits along partisan lines, despite not technically being a partisan issue (more on that in a second):

"A larger percentage of Democrats (85%) than Independents (74%) and Republicans (63%) say municipal/community broadband should be allowed."

Here's where I'll note that wanting to maintain your local voting rights to make infrastructure decisions for yourselves isn't really a partisan issue. Wanting better broadband isn't a partisan issue. A disdain for regional monopolies like Comcast isn't partisan. Most community broadband networks have been built in conservative cities (the most popular being Chattanooga). The subject is often only partisan because regional monopoly lobbyists and policy folks like to frame it that way in policy conversations to sow dissent, stall consensus, and undermine anything that challenges their regional monopoly power.

ISPs could easily derail the movement by offering better, cheaper, faster broadband in more markets. But the reality is they've found it easier and cheaper to throw campaign contributions at state and federal lawmakers, letting them effectively buy laws banning meaningful challenges to their dominance. As a result, 83 million Americans currently live under a broadband monopoly, and in a long line of states, cities and towns have their hands tied when it comes to actually doing something about it.

Having tracked the US telecom sector for a while, most of the exciting progress in the space is happening on the local level. There's a massive grass roots coalition of utilities, co-ops, governments, small ISPs, local businesses, and public/private partnerships doing most of the heavy lifting in this space. And it remains aggressively idiotic that state leaders continue to block such efforts, often under the misleading claim of "market freedom," simply because AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast don't like a challenge or competition.

Filed Under: broadband, competition, fcc, municipal broadband, state laws

Charter Spectrum Funds Front Group To Try And Kill Small Maine Town's Plan For Better Broadband

from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept

For decades regional U.S. telecom monopolies have often refused to deploy broadband into low ROI areas, despite billions in subsidization. At the same time, they've fought tooth and nail against towns and cities that attempt to improve their own regional broadband infrastructure. Often by using a bunch of sleazy and disingenuous arguments, or, in some cases, literally buying and writing state laws that block locals from deciding what they can and can't do with their own local infrastructure. The only real goal: protect giant regional monopolies from disruption and competition.

In Maine, Charter (which sells broadband and TV under the Spectrum brand) has been waging a not so subtle war against the town of Leeds, which is contemplating a community broadband network. Charter took the time to help create a phony grass roots group dubbed Maine Civil Action, which bombarded locals with pamphlets telling them such a project would be an inevitable taxpayer boondoggle resulting in worse service (that's false, if you were unaware, not only do plenty of community broadband operations operate in the green, data suggests they routinely provide significantly cheaper, better broadband):

"McLean says town officials suspected that the pamphlets were linked to the broadband provider Spectrum, owned by Charter Communications, which has 31 million customers in 41 states, with revenues of nearly $50 billion last year. "There's little precedent for this on any other town issue. Very small town. And so to have the expense of a color, double-sided pamphlet being hand-delivered to people's homes was surprising for a lot of people," McLean said."

Creating bogus grass roots opposition to improving local infrastructure has long been a favored pastime of regional telecom monopolies. They hide their identity when running such marketing and disinformation campaigns, because if they pushed the pamphlets as themselves, nobody would (quite justly) believe that they have the best interests of the community at heart. Such local town initiatives are often being run on a shoestring budget, so a company with $50 billion in annual revenues can have a meaningful impact on the discourse.

In Maine, as is usually the case, when some local reporter presses the telecom giant about their involvement, they often lie:

"McLean said he confronted Spectrum's government affairs liaison Melinda Kinney about the pamphlets and that she denied that the company had any involvement. Maine Public attempted to contact Kinney, but instead received a statement from Charter's regional spokeswoman Lara Pritchard acknowledging that the company had provided funding to the Maine Policy Institute, the Portland-based conservative advocacy group that created Maine Civic Action."

As we've long illustrated, there are two reasons U.S. broadband is expensive, spotty, and slow: regional monopolies and the state and federal corruption that protects them. As we've also noted, community broadband is an organic response to decades of obvious market failure. If ISPs truly wanted to thwart community broadband, they could offer better, faster, more widely available service. Instead, they resort to dodgy games and scare mongering through bogus proxy organizations, all in a bid to protect the broken status quo. And, thanks to their massive budgets, it often works.

Filed Under: astroturf, broadband, competition, leeds, maine, municipal broadband
Companies: charter, charter spectrum

Community Broadband Dominates List Of Fastest US ISPs

from the if-you-build-it-they-will-come dept

For years, a growing number of US towns and cities have been forced into the broadband business thanks to US telecom market failure. Frustrated by high prices, lack of competition, spotty coverage, and terrible customer service, some 750 US towns and cities have explored some kind of community broadband option. And while the telecom industry (and the lawmakers, regulators, and policy wonks paid to love them) routinely tries to paint such projects as radical socialist boondoggles that always end in failure, that's never actually been true.

The latest case in point: once a year PC Magazine offers a breakdown of the fastest broadband networks in the United States. And this year, as usual, the list is dominated by community-owned and operated broadband networks. Look at the list of the fastest ISPs in the nation overall:

Three of the fastest ISPs are directly owned by the city (Longmont, Colorado’s Nextlight, Chattanooga, Tennessee’s EPB Fiber, and Cedar Falls, Iowa’s CFU). These same ISPs, not coincidentally, also tend to score really well on overall consumer satisfaction studies. And the fastest ISP in the country (Empire Access) makes heavy use of an open access middle mile fiber network funded in large part by the public. Other companies, like Ting and Google Fiber are tightly partnered with local municipalities and regional fiber networks as well.

Data just keeps showing how locally-owned and operated public networks routinely offer better, faster, and cheaper service. But instead of embracing such options, our heavily compromised US regulators have either tried to hamstring them via dodgy state laws, or exploit myopic partisanship to demonize them ("socialism!" "government run amok!" "a terrible affront to the miraculous free market!"). Despite such networks seeing broad, bipartisan public support, House Republicans just this year tried to ban them completely across the entire United States. It's just blisteringly ignorant corruption.

As the Institute for Local Self Reliance notes, it's easier and cheaper for a politically powerful regional telecom monopoly like AT&T to pay off a few lawmakers than it is to actually try harder. But try as they may to demonize such projects, their popularity and effectiveness continues to speak for itself:

"Monopoly providers have often trotted out the claim that modern network infrastructure is too complicated and costly for local communities to build and operate successfully. It’s an argument that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, and even less so given that not only do modestly sized cities beat out the national ISPs for pure speed, they do it twice as fast, lapping the competition."

But it's also important to note that community broadband isn't some either/or option. Many areas are creating a healthy symbiosis between municipalities, cooperatives, community broadband networks, public/private partnerships, and private companies. COVID just got done educating us as to the essential nature of broadband connectivity. Efforts to hamstring or ban productive regional solutions continue to be ignorant and counterproductive.

Filed Under: broadband speeds, competition, municipal broadband

Detroit The Latest City Forced To Cobble Together Working Internet Thanks To Telecom Market Failure

from the so-heartwarming! dept

Frustrated by slow speeds, high prices, and spotty broadband availability (read: market failure) more than 750 US towns and cities have explored some kind of home-grown broadband option. Sometimes that's a local cooperative. Sometimes it's an extension of the locally owned power utility. Sometimes it's a public/private partnership with an existing internet provider. And sometimes it involves building an entire local broadband network from scratch. But always it's motivated by one thing: an ever growing, multi-decade frustration at the lack of competition and options in the US broadband market.

Enter Detroit, which is the latest city where annoyed users are being forced to build an entirely new ISP block by block:

"Detroit has historically been one of the least connected cities in America, with about 40 percent of Detroit residents lacking any home internet access at all. Things are changing, though, thanks in large part to projects like the Equitable Internet Initiative (EII), a collaboration between the Detroit Community Technology Project and a network of community organizations."

The effort involves relying on voluntary bandwidth provided by local enterprise provider 123Net. From there, locals are getting speeds of 25 Mbps via point to point wireless. That's a notable improvement for the 40% of the city that has no access to broadband at all. Or other major chunks of the city, where aging AT&T DSL may be their only option. If you're really lucky, an expensive Comcast cable line is your only broadband option.

But there's something that grates on me about these stories and it's this: for whatever reason, most major press outlets covering broadband in 2021 act as if the "digital divide" is this thing that just dropped from the sky one day. But the reason it still exists in 2021 is due to the regional monopolization and the corruption (federal and local) that protects it. Consumer groups have repeatedly showcased how with no competition and feckless regulatory oversight, AT&T just often simply refuses to upgrade its aging network. They've also shown how this impacts marginalized and low-income communities the hardest:

But for whatever reason, The Hill writes an entire story about Detroit's broadband problems and... doesn't mention AT&T's regional monopolization or political and regulatory corruption at all. There's just no shortage of stories like this that cover America's broadband dysfunction and the ad hoc solutions people are forced to come up with to get online, yet just fail completely to explain why this is happening. And kind of like stories where a local kid has to crowdfund his open heart surgery because our medical system is broken, the press tends to frame these efforts as heartwarming.

But it's extremely rare you see major outlets clearly explain that US broadband dysfunction was an active policy choice. It's the direct result of 25 straight years of prioritizing the interests of regional monopolies, and coddling giants like Verizon, AT&T and Comcast. It's the direct result of signing off on mindless consolidation and harmful megamergers. It's the direct result of choosing not to embrace pro-competition policies. It's the direct result of repeatedly neutering telecom regulatory oversight under the (false) promise this somehow results in telecom Utopia (despite 25 years of evidence this isn't true).

At this point our broadband failures aren't a matter of technology, or cost. After all, we've thrown countless billions of dollars at these incumbent broadband giants for fiber networks that mysteriously always wind up half completed. They're the result of leadership failure and corruption. But instead of clearly acknowledging and fixing these problems, we seem obsessed with (as the Trump era made fairly clear) doubling down on the bad choices that created them. Then dismissing the high prices, spotty coverage, and substandard service as just something that appeared one day, utterly free of any meaningful causation.

Filed Under: community broadband, competition, detroit, fcc, municipal broadband

Cable Lobby Working Hard To Ensure Biden Broadband Plan Doesn't Encourage Real Competition

from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept

While the Biden administration's $2 trillion American Jobs Plan set aside $100 billion for broadband infrastructure, the details of how that money is to actually be spent remains murky. Enter cable industry lobbyists, who are hard at work attempting to dictate who gets access to those funds, while also trying to make sure the funds aren't used for anything that could threaten their regional monopolies. They're particularly worried about the Biden administration's promise that a big focus of the effort will be on giving aid to locally owned and operated broadband networks, as detailed in this good piece by Issie Lapowsky at Protocol:

"Comcast, Charter, AT&T and their respective industry associations have spent years beating back municipal broadband networks in states across the country, lobbying for laws that prohibit such networks and arguing that government-funded broadband puts the thumb on the scale of competition. With potentially $100 billion in federal funding on the line, the last thing the cable lobby wants is to see those restrictions lifted and funding diverted to cities, not their own coffers."

Granted as we've noted for years, these communities aren't getting into the broadband business because it's fun. They're doing so as an organic, voter-backed response to decades of market failure and regional monopolization. Said monopolization is obviously hugely profitable, and the cable industry lobby is working overtime to prevent anything upsetting that broken status quo. As Lapowsky notes, Charter and Comcast alone spent $7 million on lobbying Congress last year, and that doesn't including the millions in additional dollars spent by their policy and lobbying organizations like the NCTA (run by former FCC boss Mike Powell).

Nor does that tally include the millions spent annually by AT&T and Verizon on an army of consultants, lobbyists, think tankers, academics, and astroturfers, all of whom are now working overtime to ensure a lot of that money goes into their pockets, and not the pockets of regional community broadband networks threatening to bring real competition to bear. Networks that wouldn't exist if America's entrenched telecom monopolies actually cared about things like competition and consumer welfare.

Historically, the telecom lobby has had success after success when it comes to ensuring the U.S. government doesn't take regional monopolization and corruption seriously. But as Protocol notes, COVID (specifically news stories showing toddlers having to huddle in the dirt just to get online for class because home broadband either isn't available or is too expensive) has changed the dynamic and really showcased the harm of monopolization and corruption:

"But as this fight moves from the states to the federal level, local broadband proponents have some advantages they haven't had before. They don't just have the backing of the White House and support of Democrats who control Congress. They also have more than a year's worth of examples of how people on the wrong side of the digital divide in both cities and rural America have struggled during the pandemic — and how cable giants have failed to fill the gap."

Even then, some community broadband proponents are expressing concern that the telecom lobby is already having a negative impact on the important terminology being used at departments like Treasury to dictate where U.S. government funding is going to go:

"Earlier this year in March, the Biden Administration signed the American Rescue Plan Act, which included, among many other things, multiple sources of funds for broadband infrastructure. The U.S. Department of Treasury was tasked with writing the rules of how local governments can spend the various funds. The Interim Rule has been published and it appears to significantly limit local ability to invest in needed networks."

While community broadband is framed by telecom as "socialism run amok" or a "government takeover of the internet" to try and encourage partisan division, being pro-competition and pro-accountability is yet another subject that isn't actually partisan. Most community broadband networks have been built in conservative areas with the support of local voters. And again, the telecom lobby has a 25 year history of fighting tooth and nail against all broadband competition, not just community-run broadband. While getting slathered in tax breaks and subsidies for networks they routinely half deliver.

It has taken a quarter century to even get the U.S. broadband policy conversation to the point where we can admit (barely!) that monopolization and regulatory capture (corruption) are the two primary reasons U.S. broadband is expensive and mediocre. It's not clear how many more decades it will take to actually do something about it.

Filed Under: american jobs plan, broadband, community broadband, competition, infrastructure, joe biden, municipal broadband

Only 14% Of Americans Think Communities Shouldn't Be Allowed To Build Their Own Broadband Networks

from the listen-to-the-people dept

A new poll from Morning Consult indicates that only around 14% of Americans think that communities should not be allowed to build and operate their own, local broadband networks:

That of course operates in pretty stark contrast to the 18 states that have passed obnoxious laws, usually written by incumbent broadband providers, that hamstring such efforts or ban them entirely. That total used to be 19 (Arkansas eliminated many of their restrictions earlier this year), and will soon be 17 (given Washington State just passed a law eliminating its restrictions as well).

The survey found that Democrats and urban residents are more likely that rural and Republican residents to support such options. But that too runs a bit in contrast with reality, given that the majority of community built broadband networks exist in more conservative leaning cities. Like a lot of tech subjects (net neutrality comes to mind), entrenched business interests have successfully framed community broadband as a "partisan issue," which is a great way to stall consensus on a subject you oppose for purely selfish, successful reasons.

Industries, and the captured regulators and lawmakers who love them, adore demonizing such efforts as "socialism run amok" or automatic taxpayer boondoggles. But that's again not based on reason. Such efforts are an organic, grass roots reaction to market failure and monopolization. The efforts aren't pursued because their fun, they're pursued because Americans have, over thirty years, grown increasingly frustrated at the high cost, slow speeds, and terrible customer service that's the direct result of regional monopolization.

Christopher Mitchell, one of the country's top experts on the subject, tells me that COVID has really highlighted how stupid and unnecessarily punitive such restrictions are. But overall, it has proven harder and harder for regional monopolies to buy laws restricting community broadband:

"No new state has added a barrier in 10 years,” said Christopher Mitchell, director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. “The more recent dynamic has been states removing them."

Interestingly, the survey did show that many Americans trust the private sector more than they do their local government when it comes to actually running the networks. Roughly 54% of respondents said they had either "a lot" or "some" trust in local governments to provide the best at-home internet service, while 75% said the same about private internet providers. Cable lobbyists were quick to then claim this is because US telecom providers are akin to "LeBron James":

"James Assey, executive vice president at cable lobby NCTA – The Internet & Television Association, said adults are aware of the potential failures of public infrastructure, such as electric grids or bridges. "In the same way if I was playing basketball, I’d want LeBron James on my team — I would want the people who do this day-in and day-out to help us bridge the divide that we know exists today,” Assey said."

I imagine if you really sat Americans down and asked them if they view Comcast and AT&T as the tech equivalent of LeBron James you'd probably see some... pointed responses to that comparison. Again, community broadband is a direct, organic response to failures by the private sector, which routinely hoovers up millions in taxpayer subsidies, tax breaks, and regulatory favors in exchange for networks only half completed. Such networks aren't a silver bullet, and of course depend on the competency of your local government and the quality of the business plan.

And while the Biden broadband plan leans heavily on community broadband, it's not really an either or scenario. In the absence of functional regulatory oversight or competition, community broadband often acts as a way to pressure industry into trying harder, lowering prices, and upgrading their networks. If industry wants to avoid the "vile socialism" that is communities offering better, faster, cheaper fiber broadband, there's an easy option that doesn't involve buying shitty state laws that undermine the will of voters: do better.

Filed Under: broadband, community broadband, competition, municipal broadband

New Bill Tries To Ban Community Broadband. During A Pandemic.

from the you're-not-helping dept

Having covered telecom for twenty years, I've found there's a good shortcut to determining if somebody's really serious about fixing US broadband issues: can they admit that (1) monopolies exist, and (2) that this results in a lack of competition. The data is indisputable on this point. US broadband is heavily monopolized, and as a result is mediocre on nearly every metric that matters, whether we're talking about availability, speed, price, or customer service.

And yet, there's a parade of lawmakers, regulators (like former FCC boss Ajit Pai), think tankers and others who are, for either financial or rigid ideological reasons, still incapable of acknowledging that reality. As a result, they can't really fix the problem.

Take the lion's share of the GOP, for example. The party just spent four years gutting most meaningful oversight of America's broken broadband sector under the completely false claim that this would somehow result in monopolies like AT&T and Comcast doing a better job, expanding access, and boosting overall network investment. That simply never happened, and anybody claiming otherwise is lying to you.

Now, with Covid shining a bright light on the essential nature of broadband, the GOP has been forced to at least pretend they care about the problem. As a result, they've ushered forth a series of bills professing to "bridge the digital divide." Not too surprisingly, not a single bill acknowledges that private sector monopolization, limited competition, or high prices are even a problem.

Instead, the focus of all of the GOP's bills are focused exclusively on placing the blame entirely on the back of local governments. And while governments can sometimes be a pain in the ass to work with (not that working with Verizon, AT&T or Comcast is any real treat for governments either), the problem at this point isn't really local government. We've spent twenty years hamstringing local government authority and giving all the power to incumbent private players through a litany of policy. And the result has been: precisely the shitty, Comcast-dominated market we all know and love. "More of that," is not a serious solution.

Yes, there's the occasional example where cumbersome regulatory underbrush could still be cleared out, or common sense policies to speed up deployment could be enacted (like "dig once" legislation requiring fiber or conduit be run alongside any new highway bill). But again, the real problem isn't local government when it comes to US broadband. The real problem is regional monopolists so politically powerful that nobody on the state or federal level, often from either party, has the backbone to stand up to them. The result is a mish-mash of ass kissing dressed up as real policy.

In fact, one of the bills, Missouri Rep. Billy Long's Communities Over regulating Networks Need Economic Competition Today 6 Act, (pdf) actively tries to ban communities from building their own networks. As we've noted, such networks are an organic, grass roots reaction to obvious market failure, and they've proven to be invaluable during the pandemic. Not only do they deliver some of the fastest speeds in the country, they're a novel way to force lazy incumbent monopolists to try harder.

The Act title makes no coherent sense, as the bill would hinder, not encourage, competition. There are, of course, already twenty odd state laws, literally written by AT&T or Comcast, that hamstring community broadband. The industry has spent years trying to push for a federal ban on such local networks, for no other reason than they would harm AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, or Charter's bloated revenues.

Usually, these bans are piggybacked on the false claim that such community networks are an inevitable taxpayer boondoggle. Yet, not coincidentally, you'll never see these folks complain when AT&T is given a $42 billion tax cut in exchange for absolutely nothing. They similarly have nothing to say when billions are doled out to regional monopolies that repeatedly fail to deliver those networks. Not a peep.

One sad and frustrating aspect of America is how little it costs a company like AT&T to buy proposed legislation. For telecom giants, it's easier to give somebody like Billy Long $60,000 in PAC donations than to upgrade their networks in lower ROI areas (despite billions in tax breaks and subsidies to that end).

Real solutions for US broadband problems start with the understanding that monopolization and corruption are the reasons US broadband sucks. If you can't do that, you're not actually interested in solving the problem, you're engaged in performative fluff and nonsense. Either because you don't actively understand the market you're talking about, or you're working, indirectly or not, to help entrenched monopolists preserve the status quo.

Filed Under: billy long, broadband, community broadband, competition, municipal broadband

Chattanooga Built Its Own Broadband Network. Now It's The Top Ranked 'Work From Home' City In The US

from the build-it-and-they-will-come dept

PC Magazine recently unveiled their list of the best cities to work at home from. To make the list, the magazine examined affordable housing, the availability of fast gigabit broadband, reasonably priced internet connections in general, and the presence of employers with friendly work from home policies. At the top of the list? Chattanooga, Tennessee:

"Our number-one remote-working town in the US is Chattanooga, known as "Gig City," which rolled out a citywide fiber network in 2010. As we recounted in a 2018 story, Chattanooga has been pushing hard to attract tech workers and companies based on its affordable real estate, business-friendly administrations, and widely available broadband internet. In 2019, according to the Census, 6.8% of Hamilton County, TN residents worked from home, compared with 5.7% of all Americans."

One of the city's primary policies was to embrace community-run broadband, offering locals ultra-fast and affordable fiber via the local city's utility. It's an effort that incumbent broadband providers like Comcast first tried to strangle via state law, then attempted to destroy via lawsuit. Neither worked, and now Chattanooga residents have access to some of the fastest and most affordable broadband in the United States (the ISP won Consumer Reports' top ISP award in 2018), which has in turn helped drive business growth and employment in the city.

This is, it should be made clear, the kind of innovation and growth we've crippled by letting incumbent telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast not only carve out geographical monopolies, but also literally write state and federal telecom law. Both companies are predominately responsible for the 20 some odd state laws that hamstring (or ban outright) towns and cities looking to get into the broadband business. They've also spent the better part of twenty years funding a coalition of dollar-per-holler think tankers and academics who try (usually poorly) to smear such efforts.

This farmed opposition to community broadband is usually built on the flimsy premise that it's "unfair" for governments to compete with the private sector. Or that these efforts are inevitable "taxpayer boondoggles" (you're to ignore the billions we throw at giants like AT&T for absolutely nothing). Both arguments are intentionally false and misleading.

Cities like Chattanooga aren't getting into the costly business of building broadband networks because it's fun, they really want to spend the money, or they want to make Comcast and AT&T executives cry. They're doing it because of market failure. They're building their own networks because incumbent providers have heavily monopolized the sector, resulting in spotty upgrades, slow speeds, high prices, privacy violations, and dodgy customer service. And when cities have tried to buck this status quo, they're usually sued, misrepresented, bizarrely demonized, or legislatively hammered by state and federal governments in mindless thrall to monopolist campaign contributions.

That's not to say that community broadband is some mystical panacea that fixes every city's ills. Nor is it to suggest that every city has the financial and technical skills or resources to pull off a successful business plan. But community broadband is a useful tool in the toolbox, particularly when it comes to nudging government-pampered regional telecom monopolies out of their comfort zones. Community-owned ISPs also tend to be more responsive to the complaints of locals, because they are locals. It's ignorant and counterproductive to ban such options in a country where 42 million have no access to broadband and another 83 million only have the choice of one ISP. Yet it's still happening.

In Chattanooga, the city has been blocked from expanding its award-winning network because of a Comcast-backed law passed decades ago. A law that served no function outside of protecting entrenched monopoly revenues from disruption. Historically, efforts to get states to dismantle such dumb, protectionist restrictions have been glacial, but as the COVID pandemic illustrates how truly counterproductive such restrictions are in a world were broadband is utterly essential, you can feel awareness and consensus start to shift.

Filed Under: broadband, chattanooga, competition, fiber, gig city, municipal broadband, tennessee, work from hom

State Laws Restricting Community Broadband Are Hurting US Communities During The Pandemic

from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept

We've talked for years about how telecom monopolies like Comcast and AT&T have ghost written laws in more than twenty states, banning or hamstringing towns and cities looking to build their own broadband networks. We've also noted with COVID clearly illustrating how broadband is essential for education, opportunity, employment, and healthcare, such restrictions are looking dumber than ever. Voters should have every right to make local infrastructure decisions for themselves, and if big ISPs and armchair free market policy wonks don't want that to happen, incumbent ISPs should provide faster, cheaper, better service.

As the pandemic continues, some cities have found ways around such restrictions -- by focusing more specifically on serving struggling, low income Americans. Texas is one such state that long ago passed municipal restrictions, courtesy of Dallas-based AT&T. AT&T doesn't want to upgrade or repair many of its DSL lines, but it also doesn't want communities upgrading or building networks either lest it become a larger trend (too late). As a result, in San Antonio, an amazing 38% of homes still don't have residential broadband.

The city's existing network can't really expand commercial service thanks to a law written by AT&T. But that law doesn't prohibit the city from servicing the poor by offering free service, something made possible by the recent CARES Act:

"This year in a number of cities, the pandemic has inspired some narrower versions of municipal broadband that get around these restrictions, focused on creating “affordable networks” that specifically target low-income households. Several of these were born out of the immediate need to bridge the homework gap.

“Pre-Covid there were at most a handful of networks being built to address affordability; now, we’ve started informally keeping a list and we’re over 30,” Siefer says. “The phenomena of setting up a network for that reason, in that way, is new."

In San Antonio's case, the city used $27 million in CARES Act funding to expand its existing network to 20,000 students across the city’s 50 most vulnerable neighborhoods. Entrenched monopolies (and the law makers, policy wonks, think tankers, and academics paid to love them) love to insist that such networks are an inevitable taxpayer boondoggle. Yet those same folks never make a solitary peep as we throw massive tax breaks at companies like AT&T for literally doing absolutely nothing. Or billions more at a rotating crop of companies for networks they, time and time and time again, fail to deliver.

The problem is that these community funding solutions are temporary, and lack funding to continue for more than a year or two, despite our very obvious broadband coverage gaps (42 million without service, 83 million locked under a monopoly). The other problem, of course, is that overpriced, slow, and spotty US broadband is the direct result of corruption and monopolization, problems we often refuse to even acknowledge, much less do anything about.

The solutions here aren't complicated, we just don't want to do them. We could easily ask voters if they want to discard the 20+ protectionist laws written by monopolies, letting local citizens decide local infrastructure issues themselves. We could beef up antitrust enforcement, and refuse to rubber stamp mindless telecom mergers that inevitably lead to more consolidation, less competition, and higher prices. We could embrace policies that upset incumbent monopolies by driving additional competition to market. We could reform campaign finance laws so AT&T and Comcast don't all but own countless state legislatures.

But we don't do that. Instead, we let monopolies write state and federal policy and laws with an eye on protecting the status quo. Laws that make disruption by smaller players expensive, cumbersome, and often impossible. We then throw billions of dollars at said monopolies for networks they routinely only half deploy. We rubber stamp harmful mergers and fail to hold monopolies accountable for much of anything. Once that's done, we then stand around with a dumb look on our collective faces wondering why US broadband is utterly mediocre in nearly every single metric that matters.

Filed Under: broadband, competition, covid, municipal broadband, pandemic, state's rights

Broadband Market Failure Keeps Forcing Americans To Build Their Own ISPs

from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept

For decades now a growing number of US towns and cities have been forced into the broadband business thanks to US telecom market failure. Frustrated by high prices, lack of competition, spotty coverage, and terrible customer service, some 750 US towns and cities have explored some kind of community broadband option. And while the telecom industry routinely likes to insist these efforts always end in disaster, that's never actually been true. While there certainly are bad business plans and bad leaders, studies routinely show that such services not only see the kind of customer satisfaction scores that are alien to large private ISPs, they frequently offer better service at lower, more transparent pricing than many private providers.

The latest case in point: Ars Technica profiles one Michigan resident who had to build his own ISP from scratch after "the market" couldn't be bothered to service his address with anything even close to current generation broadband speeds:

"I had to start a telephone company to get [high-speed] Internet access at my house," Mauch explained in a recent presentation about his new ISP that serves his own home in Scio Township, which is next to Ann Arbor, as well as a few dozen other homes in Washtenaw County."

If you take a gander at a map, it's not like we're talking about the middle of the desert. It's just one of a long line of communities that were deemed not profitable enough, quickly enough by major US ISPs. Granted the price tag of the endeavor was well out of range of most Americans, especially lower income Americans who were already stuck on the wrong side of the digital divide before COVID came to town:

"Mauch said he has spent about $145,000, of which $95,000 went to the contractor that installed most of the fiber conduits. The fiber lines are generally about six feet underground and in some cases 10 or 20 feet underground to avoid gas pipes and other obstacles."

His plight is far from unique. US phone companies have effectively given up on fixed residential broadband to focus on wireless advertising, leaving companies like Comcast with a growing monopoly across countless US markets. Despite billions upon billions in subsidies, tax breaks, and dubious regulatory favors thrown at the nation's telecom monopolies, an estimated 83 million Americans only have the choice of one provider, while 43 million have zero options. This is obvious market failure, yet there's an entire cottage industry of industry allies whose entire function is to pretend that none of this is actually happening.

This obvious market failure, and our complete twenty-plus year failure to tackle it is bad enough (keep in mind Trump FCC and its associated industry BFFs can't even admit the market isn't competitive or that monopolization is a problem). But when desperate and angry communities decide to build their own networks, that's when the fun really starts.

First, such efforts quickly run into lawsuits by ISPs that didn't want to service these areas, but don't want anybody else doing so either. Then, they face a wave of bullshit disinformation (extra heavy if there's an ordinance being voted on), almost always covertly funded by industry, that tries to demonize these kinds of desperate efforts as socialism or even an affront to free speech. If that's not enough, they'll also run into bullshit protectionist laws, passed in more than 20 states and ghost written by industry lobbyists, that make these creative, local efforts as difficult as possible.

Community broadband isn't some mystical panacea. But it's absolutely a valid idea for communities that have been left behind for twenty years to improve their own infrastructure if that's what the community wants. Better yet, such efforts almost always result in lazy monopolies trying a little bit harder than they usually would under the one/two punch of limited competition and feckless, chickenshit regulators. But instead of embracing these efforts, our industry-captured regulators have chosen to demonize communities as the US FCC pretends that blind taxpayer subsidization, mindless deregulation, and more mergers are somehow going to fix rampant monopolization.

Filed Under: broadband, community broadband, competition, municipal broadband