Todd Hubler
In late 19th century America, electricity was considered a luxury reserved for the rich. A dozen private electrical trusts controlled most of the country's electricity and cherry-picked the markets they served. It was not until the 1930s and the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt that communities began forming their own public utilities and residents came to view electricity as a necessity that yields economic and social gains.
Today, a similar fight is playing out in a different arena: high-speed Internet access. The market is dominated by a small group of carriers including Comcast and Time Warner Cable -- whose pending merger would result in further consolidation -- and, locally, Charter Communications. Around 100 million Americans do not have high-speed Internet access, and cost is the major reason.
"The parallels are striking," says Susan Crawford, an author and visiting professor in intellectual property at Harvard Law School. "When Roosevelt [came] into office in 1933, 90% of farmers didn't have electricity. Private-sector [carriers] left to their own devices will systematically leave out poor or rural sections of the country and overcharge richer sections by gathering monopoly power."
Fortunately for consumers, there's an alternative: Cities are tackling the connectivity problem by building municipal fiber-to-the-home networks. Political and business leaders in Madison seem to agree that the status quo is unsatisfactory. But they're split in how urgently they want to address the problem, with city hall favoring a wait-and-see approach and a younger class of technocrats wanting to implement short-term, low-cost solutions immediately.
Ald. Scott Resnick is proposing a $100,000 budget amendment to study the feasibility of creating a city-owned cooperative network that would provide wireless Internet to underserved neighborhoods and families.
Resnick, who is running against Mayor Paul Soglin in 2015, says the city can't wait to bridge the "digital divide," where low-income residents don't have access to or can't afford high-speed.
"We are doing one-fifth of what other communities are doing to try to cross the digital divide," says Resnick, who works in the tech field at Hardin Design & Development. "We are failing Madison's residents. I know that's not a positive statement, but that's the reality."
Positioned to move forward
With fiber, information is transmitted as pulses of light that flow through glass tubing, known as conduit. Cable and DSL networks route data over copper wires, which tend to have shorter lifespans than fiber conduit.
Charter and AT&T, the two main private broadband providers in Madison, have both laid "middle mile" fiber in town, but the "last mile" cables that run to households are copper, limiting connection speeds. A municipal fiber network would serve home and business users alike.
The city of Madison owns 132 miles of fiber-optic cable and conduit as part of the Metropolitan Unified Fiber Network (MUFN) that connects hospitals, colleges, universities and other anchor institutions. Paul Kronberger, the city's chief information officer, says that whenever Madison performs a major road project, it puts additional conduit in the ground.
A $5.1 million grant under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 was instrumental in building the network. The city met the grant's requirement that the network be used to provide commercial service by signing contracts with Wisconsin Independent Network and SupraNet, which work with companies to build "lateral" fiber lines off MUFN.
Andrew Hoyos, who used to work at SupraNet and now consults on network design and architecture, says Madison would be well positioned from a technical perspective if it were to move forward with a community fiber network.
"Having MUFN is huge because all that would be required is branching off the network and building out spider webs of connectivity," says Hoyos.
But there's a catch. State law requires municipalities seeking to become Internet service providers to obtain competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC) certification, a process Mayor Soglin says "is made more difficult by the fraudulent excuse for [state] legislation, which has stifled competition and inhibited connectivity."
That law, says Christopher Mitchell, director of community broadband networks initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, forbids cities from offering triple-play service -- Internet, television and phone -- unless each service is independently profitable. Television is very low-margin compared to Internet and phone, Mitchell says, and in many places providers such as Charter run television at a loss.
Soglin says Madison's best hope is that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) adopts rules preempting states from "locking municipalities out."
"The FCC is split one to one on this matter right now, and [Chairman Tom Wheeler] is undecided. We're hoping he'll break the deadlock," says Soglin.
Fiber network a threat?
The legislation hasn't been an issue for Reedsburg and Sun Prairie, both of which received CLEC certification from the state before the Legislature added the triple-play language in 2008.
The Reedsburg Utility Commission completed construction on a fiber network in 2007 that reaches all households and office buildings in its service area. The network has since been extended into parts of neighboring cities.
Brett Schuppner, the utility's general manager, estimates that half of Reedsburg's households take at least one triple-play product. Internet rates range from $40 a month for 40 megabits per second to $275 for gigabit service, 100 times the speed of a basic cable modem.
Sun Prairie is in the throes of debate about expanding its existing fiber network to reach all homes and businesses. Sun Prairie Utilities hired an out-of-state group to perform a feasibility study, and the city's common council is currently considering passing a resolution declaring its intent to offer triple play through the expanded network. Unlike Reedsburg, Sun Prairie would use a public-private model where the city provides the triple play and manages the Internet component but pays private television and phone providers to manage those services. Charter is the dominant telecommunications provider in Sun Prairie. Rick Wicklund, manager of Sun Prairie Utilities, says Charter seems to view the possibility of a community fiber network as a threat.
Wicklund says Charter officials were "adversarial" when he met with them to explore the possibilities of partnering to build a fiber-to-the-home network.
"It took less than 10 minutes to realize Charter wasn't interested in partnering," says Wicklund.
"They told us why we shouldn’t build a community network and that they're going to do everything in their power to make our lives difficult. We're not used to that confrontational, mean-natured behavior."
Charter did not return several calls left for comment.
'Easy wins'
Chattanooga, Tenn., which has about 171,000 residents, has a municipal fiber network. Customers there pay $70 a month for a gigabit of Internet service. That's a good deal.
But Soglin says the city should not pursue fiber-to-the-home until the FCC announces its decision, which he called a "wild card."
"While we wait, what we are doing and should continue to do is plan out a public-private partnership under the existing state law in case that becomes our only option."
Meanwhile, the city of Madison's Kronberger points out that low-income residents can already get access at public schools and libraries, all of which will connect to the city's fiber network by 2015.
But Hoyos, the network consultant, says there are other inexpensive, short-term measures the city could be taking today to narrow the digital divide. One would be to install large routers on building tops and beam wireless Internet over entire residential blocks.
"Wireless would make a ton of sense in low-income neighborhoods," Hoyos says. "Those could be easy wins. You could start getting thousands of households online very quickly."
[Editor's note: This article was corrected to note Franklin Roosevelt came into office in 1933.]
