Tucows Hopes To Kickstart U.S. Broadband Competition One Town At A Time

from the baby-steps dept

Last month I noted how longtime domain registrar Tucows had decided to try and kick-start stagnant broadband competition by buying a small Virginia ISP by the name of Blue Ridge InternetWorks (BRI). Operating under the Ting brand name, the company said the goal was to bring a "shockingly human experience and fair, honest pricing" to a fixed-line residential broadband market all-too-often dominated by just one or two giant, apathetic players. Ting promised to offer 1 Gbps speeds at a sub-$100 price point, while at the same time promising to respect net neutrality.

Fast forward a month and Tucows/Ting have announced the company has struck another deal, this time to operate a municipal broadband network being built in Westminster, Maryland. Westminster began construction on the network last October with plans to serve roughly 9,000 homes and 500 businesses. I've confirmed with Ting that unlike many initiatives (including Google Fiber, who initially paid lip service to the idea then backtracked), this effort will be an open network, meaning additional ISPs will be able to come in and compete with Ting over the city owned-infrastructure.

In a blog post, Ting notes that like a growing number of U.S. communities, Westminster simply got tired of waiting for better services from a regional duopoly with no incentive to improve. Westminster City Council President put it this way:

"We want to blow this thing up, and we want disruptive services at disruptive pricing," Robert Wack, Westminster's city council president, told me. "We've got Comcast and its usual suite of services, Verizon DSL, with its patchy service areas, and dish and satellite services. Nobody is happy with any of it, and none of it has the capacity we need to take this city into the future."

Again, if the the United States broadband market is going to evolve beyond stale monopolies and duopolies, it's certainly not going to be a product of Congress or the incumbent ISPs politicians are beholden to -- it's going to have to happen from the roots up, a handful of towns at a time. Regardless of the small scale of such efforts, as we've seen with Google Fiber, these builds at least open up a dialogue about the lack of competitive options, and inspire cities to demand more than the slow, over-priced, and badly supported services we've grown accustomed to.

The first step in allowing that to happen is to start eliminating the miserable, protectionist laws written and lobbied for by incumbent ISPs in nearly two-dozen states nationwide. Under the pretense of concern for the taxpayer, ISPs like Comcast, AT&T, CenturyLink and Time Warner Cable have been allowed to write laws that either restrict or outright ban community broadband improvements (or in some cases even public/private partnerships), even in neighborhoods these companies refuse to upgrade. Ting joins Westminster as part of a slow-but-growing movement to stop whining and actually do something about it.

Filed Under: broadband, muni broadband, municipal broadband
Companies: ting, tucows