Imagine paying $40 per gallon for gas when people in a nearby town pay $4. Well, a similar disparity is commonplace when it comes to paying for Internet access here in the United States. Our rate of broadband access trails some former Soviet-bloc countries such as Romania. In fact, as many as one in 10 Americans cannot get Internet connections that are fast enough for common online activities like watching video.
Many communities have responded to this digital divide by creating their own municipal broadband networks as an alternative to the slow services offered by cable and telephone companies. Chattanooga, Tennessee, has built the nations biggest municipally owned fiber optic network, which offers all of its residents access to a one-gig connection, at speeds a hundred times faster than a regular cable connection and 500 times faster than your typical DSL. This means equal access to education, healthcare, even jobs. Other examples of success include a rural area of Georgia thats been connecting people for more than a decade. But these efforts could soon be blocked. Some 19 states have passed laws to stop these communities from making such investments, and now Georgia could be next.
community broadband is the concept that the community gets involved in building the infrastructure to bring broadband to their residents and their businesses.
companies admitted in public that in a lot of these areas they feel that there are not enough homes per mile or that the people dont make enough money, and so its really not worth their investment to bring broadband to those communities.
community typically study the environment very carefully. They have town-hall meetings. They ask their own citizens and their businesses how they feel about investing in this kind of infrastructure. And then they make the step. Typically, they also talk to the incumbents and ask them if they would like to partner on the infrastructure. Incumbents are AT&T, Time Warner Cable.
The thing to keep in mind is that we still have over 2,000 communities that provide their own electricity. So, this isnt totally weird. We have a situation in which, in a number of communities, we have the equivalent of a dirt road, and we have the private companies are providing a dirt road, and a community says, “We would like access to the interstate.” And the company says, “No, the dirt road is good enough. You should not be allowed to choose if an interstate is right for you.”
most of the networks that we see are actually in areas that vote Republican. Its often rural areas. The largest one is Chattanooga, so we dont see the major metro areas doing it. But our map shows 342 communities that provide some level of access. Sometimes thats to everyone in the community, and sometimes its just to local businesses, to make sure that theyre able to do everything they need in the modern economy.
The fight back is that communities have built these networks. Theyre incredibly successful. They provide next-generation speeds. They typically have lower rates, and they dont raise them constantly. And so, they take market share from companies that have very powerful lobbyists, and particularly in state legislatures. So, we havent seen a lot of effort at the national level to ban these networks, but in individual states we see AT&T, Time Warner Cable, other major companies flooding state legislators with talking points that say its unfair, these communities are using tax dollars, every one of these networks fails, and a number of other things. But groups like ours dont have the ability to respond to every state legislator and to get to set the record straight. So the state legislators often make poor decisions.
Thomasville, Georgia, is a fascinating situation. Its a community that I think has somewhere between 18,000 and 30,000 homes, and inpretty rural in nature. And for the last 14 years, Thomasville, Georgia, has had fiber to the home. So its probably one of the longer-standing fiber-to-the-home systems. And in response to a lot of these accusations by the big companies that these systems are an abuse of taxpayer rights, or taxes are being misused, Thomasville, Georgias situation has been so successful that they have eliminated local property tax.
Simply because its keeping the money local. Its generating more revenue locally. Things are being done much more efficiently. And in fact, its also raising the quality of life in Thomasville, Georgia, beyond the expectations of most people. One of the examples that was given by the mayor is that a local doctor, who was outside of the service area of their system, called them up and desperately asked if he could be given fiber to the home, which theywhere they ran a fiber out there, and he could finally upload and download X-rays and contact other specialists from his home. So, for Thomasville, its allowed them to keep world-class healthcare, and for a rural area, thats pretty significant in todays world.
Officials from several rural Georgia cities traveled to Atlanta last week to oppose House Bill 282, which would limit investment in Internet networks. Elberton Mayor Larry Guest argued the bill would hurt economic development. He said, quote, “Georgia should be promoting a pro-business, inclusive approach to broadband deployment, especially in rural areas of the state. … We have to do everything we can to attract jobs. … High speed access is essential to us. … We are not second class citizens because we decided to live in rural Georgia.”
this is the same story that we are seeing in a lot of the Southeast. These are communities who experienced the effects of globalization probably 30, 35 years ago. And as a result, they lostthey saw their communities losing their tobacco, their textile and their manufacturing base overseas. So the local officials did what theyre supposed to do, which is to evaluate the system and figure out how can they keep jobs in the community, how can they keep the quality of life up. And what they realized, as Chris said, is that they needed to build the new roads into their communities so that the world could tap into their labor pool. As a result, they realized they needed to develop fiber to the home. And that started the process.
when Time Warner Cable found out that Wilson, North Carolina, built its own system, they went right to the state Legislature and passedand tried to get bills passed for four years. On the fifth year, there was a big change in the control of the state Senate and the state House. The Republicans took control, and the billwe were successful until that year, and then the bill flew through.
The bills sponsor, on her own website, listed herself as the finance manager for the John Locke Foundation, which is 80 percent funded by a fellow named Art Pope, whos very good friends with the Koch brothers and pretty much funded the takeover of our state by the new Republican Party. And she sponsored the bill, which was actually written by Time Warner Cable and ALEC, which effectively prohibits the municipalities in our state from providing their own broadband services.
the thing to keep in mind is that community broadband does not just benefit the community that build its own network; it puts a pressure on all the other networks. And so, if Comcast or Time Warner Cable wants to raise its rates in a community that doesnt have it, or they dont want to upgrade their speeds, that community can look at some of these networks that have been built by communities themselves, and they know what they should be getting and they know whats possible. And so, we dont need every community to build its own network to make a big difference, but what we do demand is that every community have the authority to make this decision for themselves.
– source democracynow.org
Chris Mitchell, director of the Telecommunications as Commons Initiative of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. He is a national expert on community broadband and recently co-authored a report, “The Empire Lobbies Back: How National Cable and DSL Companies Banned the Competition in North Carolina.”
Catharine Rice, president of the SouthEast Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors, which represents Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. For the past decade, she has been working to plan and deploy local broadband systems. For four years, she led the effort to block an industry-sponsored anti-municipal broadband bill, which ultimately passed in 2012.