Tired Of Being Ripped Off By Monopolies, Cleveland Launches Ambitious Plan To Provide Citywide Dirt Cheap Broadband

[bnew]

Tired Of Being Ripped Off By Monopolies, Cleveland Launches Ambitious Plan To Provide Citywide Dirt Cheap Broadband

Cleveland has spent years being dubbed the “worst connected city in the U.S.” thanks to expensive, patchy, and slow broadband. Why Cleveland broadband sucks so badly isn’t really …

www.techdirt.com

Tired Of Being Ripped Off By Monopolies, Cleveland Launches Ambitious Plan To Provide Citywide Dirt Cheap Broadband​

Broadband

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

Mon, Oct 23rd 2023 05:29am - Karl Bode
Cleveland has spent years being dubbed the “worst connected city in the U.S.” thanks to expensive, patchy, and slow broadband. Why Cleveland broadband sucks so badly isn’t really a mystery: consolidated monopoly/duopoly power has resulted in a broken market where local giants like AT&T and Charter don’t have to compete on price, speeds, availability, customer service, or much of anything else.

Data also shows that despite billions in tax breaks, regulatory favors, and subsidies, companies like AT&T have long refused to upgrade low-income and minority Cleveland neighborhoods to fiber. These companies not only engage in this deployment “redlining,” but data also makes it clear they often charge these low income and minority neighborhoods more money for the same or slower broadband.

Last week I spent some time talking to Cleveland city leaders and local activists about their plan to do something about it. On one hand, they’ve doled out $20 million in COVID relief broadband funding to local non-profit DigitalC to deliver fixed wireless broadband at speeds of 100 Mbps for as little as $18.

On the other hand, they’ve convinced a company named SiFi Networks to build a $500 million open access fiber network at no cost to taxpayers. SiFi Networks will benefit from a tight relationship with the city, while making its money from leasing access to the network to ISPs.

We’ve noted (see our Copia report on broadband competition) that such open access networks routinely lower the cost for ISP market entry, boost competition, and generally result in lower prices. Monopolies like AT&T, of course, have long opposed the idea, even if they would technically benefit from lower access costs, because it chips away at their consolidated monopoly power.

Local activists like DigitalC CEO Joshua Edmonds tell me they hope the project teaches U.S. towns and cities that there are alternatives to being feckless supplicants to regional telecom mono/duopolies:

“This is a major victory, and I hope that people don’t look at it as just a major victory for Cleveland. Every city where there’s a prevalent digital divide, where there’s political will and ability to execute, people should be paying close attention to what happens in Cleveland, paying close attention to how DigitalC was able to fight and navigate with our coalition of stakeholders.”

We’ll see what the finished network looks like. And now that Cleveland is challenging monopoly power, it will be interesting to see if local monopolies focus on challenging Cleveland. Big ISPs like AT&T and Charter want to have their cake and eat it too; they don’t want to uniformly upgrade their broadband networks to next-gen speeds, but they genuinely don’t want others to do so either.

It’s a lot easier and cheaper to throw a bunch of campaign contributions at corrupt policymakers (remember with the GOP wanted to ban all community broadband networks country-wide during the peak of the pandemic? or how the telecom and GOP worked in concert to pass laws in 20 states effectively banning towns and cities from making these choices for themselves?).

Community-owned broadband networks aren’t a magical panacea. Such efforts are like any other business plan, and require competency in design and implementation. But the community-owned and operated networks in more than 1,000 U.S. cities can (and routinely do) prompt a very broken and federal government-coddled status quo to actually try for once, much to its chagrin.

Filed Under: broadband, cleveland, community broadband, digital divide, digitalc, high speed internet, municipal broadband, telecom

 

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Another US state repeals law that protected ISPs from municipal competition

With Minnesota repeal, number of states restricting public broadband falls to 16.

arstechnica.com

Another US state repeals law that protected ISPs from municipal competition​

With Minnesota repeal, number of states restricting public broadband falls to 16.​

JON BRODKIN - 5/24/2024, 2:25 PM

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Getty Images | Yuichiro Chino

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Minnesota this week eliminated two laws that made it harder for cities and towns to build their own broadband networks. The state-imposed restrictions were repealed in an omnibus commerce policy bill signed on Tuesday by Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat.

Minnesota was previously one of about 20 states that imposed significant restrictions on municipal broadband. The number can differ depending on who's counting because of disagreements over what counts as a significant restriction. But the list has gotten smaller in recent years because states including Arkansas, Colorado, and Washington repealed laws that hindered municipal broadband.

The Minnesota bill enacted this week struck down a requirement that municipal telecommunications networks be approved in an election with 65 percent of the vote. The law is over a century old, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance's Community Broadband Network Initiative wrote yesterday.

"Though intended to regulate telephone service, the way the law had been interpreted after the invention of the Internet was to lump broadband in with telephone service thereby imposing that super-majority threshold to the building of broadband networks," the broadband advocacy group said.

The Minnesota omnibus bill also changed a law that let municipalities build broadband networks, but only if no private providers offer service or will offer service "in the reasonably foreseeable future." That restriction had been in effect since at least the year 2000.

The caveat that prevented municipalities from competing against private providers was eliminated from the law when this week's omnibus bill was passed. As a result, the law now lets cities and towns "improve, construct, extend, and maintain facilities for Internet access and other communications purposes" even if private ISPs already offer service.

“States are dropping misguided barriers”​

The omnibus bill also added language intended to keep government-operated and private networks on a level playing field. The new language says cities and towns may "not discriminate in favor of the municipality's own communications facilities by granting the municipality more favorable or less burdensome terms and conditions than a nonmunicipal service provider" with respect to the use of public rights-of-way, publicly owned equipment, and permitting fees.

Additional new language requires "separation between the municipality's role as a regulator... and the municipality's role as a competitive provider of services," and forbids the sharing of "inside information" between the local government's regulatory and service-provider divisions.

With Minnesota having repealed its anti-municipal broadband laws, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance says that 16 states still restrict the building of municipal networks.

The Minnesota change "is a significant win for the people of Minnesota and highlights a positive trend—states are dropping misguided barriers to deploying public broadband as examples of successful community-owned networks proliferate across the country," said Gigi Sohn, executive director of the American Association for Public Broadband (AAPB), which represents community-owned broadband networks and co-ops.

There are about 650 public broadband networks in the US, Sohn said. "While 16 states still restrict these networks in various ways, we're confident this number will continue to decrease as more communities demand the freedom to choose the network that best serves their residents," she said.

State laws restricting municipal broadband have been passed for the benefit of private ISPs. Although cities and towns generally only build networks when private ISPs haven't fully met their communities' needs, those attempts to build municipal networks often face opposition from private ISPs and "dark money" groups that don't reveal their donors.