A Missed Opportunity in Broadband

I recently sat in on a Zoom conference call about broadband opportunities and the funding swirling around them.?There is a lot of money being thrown at broadband.?The question is will we get the best solution for consumers or will it just be more money thrown to an industry with few players that have actually delivered real results.

Don’t?get me wrong, I am big believer in the government helping to drive 21st?century broadband technologies into rural America and the cities where there is a digital divide.?I am actually enjoying a fiber connection today that likely would never have been possible without some matching government funds.?You cannot build the fiber infrastructure to a place where 25 acre soy bean fields are as common as small subdivisions based solely on a quick return on investment.

However, we have to be very careful that this tsunami of well-meaning federal and state funds are not wasted on creating even more mini-monopolies for broadband.?Certainly I am not the only one familiar with those.?I recently moved from a relatively new subdivision on the North Carolina coast.?We really had only one choice for broadband services and it was one of the major cable companies.?We paid for things that we did not want and never got the service we wanted.?

It is a common story that we hear across the country.?Our CEO likes to joke that I probably know more about broadband prices that anyone in the country. We conduct studies that help provide broadband solutions to?cities, counties, and regions.?We focus where the broadband revolution has missed a significant number of citizens. Those citizens desperately need true high-speed broadband to function in this century.?As part of those studies, I prepare a report for each county detailing the broadband services, speeds, and prices available in each county.?So far this year, I have studied pricing in over forty counties.?It is a very frustrating job because broadband pricing for the most part is even less transparent than car pricing.

As a consumer, if I don’t like Kraft American Cheese slices, all I have to do is find a store selling the Borden American Cheese slices that I do like. Switching is not a problem because there are equivalent choices.??The choices that are out there don’t force me to choose a vegan cheese slice that costs more but has a taste not to my liking.

When we lived in our cable broadband subdivision, the only other?“choices” were DSL and satellite.?For a while I worked in a small office about seven miles from home. It only had DSL.?More than once I started a?large file download, then drove home, downloaded the same file via my cable modem, and drove back to the office before the file downloading by DSL was finished.?There is no doubt that cable modems are faster than DSL.?Bicycles are also faster than walking but if I want to go between two cities, I would rather choose a car that travels on an Interstate highway.

Many of us who actually care about the long term future of broadband and the consumers of it actually believe that?broadband is infrastructure and should be treated as such.

When a community spends money building a road, they don’t?hand it over to a company and tell them to determine what trucks can haul goods on it and even what goods can be hauled and how much the vehicles are going to be charged.?That is exactly what is happening with many broadband projects. Large checks are being written to Internet Service Providers. Some will build a network to their own specifications and charge people whatever they can.?If people don’t like the prices or services, well that is their problem.

Our other company builds fiber networks.?It is expensive to install fiber but this is not new technology.??Simplifying it somewhat, you hang fiber on poles or you plow in conduit and blow fiber through it. It is not unusual to use 288-count fiber.??What most people have a hard time understanding is that a good fiber project is like building a data superhighway.?In almost all of the community fiber projects we have built multiple Internet Service Provider happily share the network that our fiber build has created. We have a Montana network that five service providers on it.

The other thing besides fiber that our networks have is real competition which delivers competitive prices for Internet services.?The networks also become virtual innovation centers.?There is no national ISP making the decision to not let a small innovative service provider on the network because at some undetermined future date they might want to get into remote storage backup.

I work for a private company and I am all about private investment helping to make our country grow and prosper. However, I believe that we are at a historic point.?We have to careful that the broadband funding decisions that communities make today do not just push the tough decisions down the road.?Properly-structured public-private partnerships can make a huge difference. Do it wrong and you have just created a stronger monopoly that got a good dose of taxpayer money.

In the rush to get great broadband to everyone,?let’s make certain that we don’t further subsidize all the mini-monopolies that have already carved up much of the country into very profitable fiefdoms.??There is a better way.?Let communities control their own future.?Let them build and own the infrastructure of these networks that will carry us into the very connected future.?Then let?multiple private companies use that infrastructure to deliver competitively priced Internet services.?This is a proven model.?I can provide examples that have been successfully operating for over a decade.

Finally what is the big deal about fiber??Isn’t cable modem Internet services good enough??No, to answer the second question first.??The big deal about fiber is that it lets you do things that you just cannot adequately do on the best cable systems.?When I left our previous home, my cable modem regularly tested at 488 Mbps down and 24 Mbps up.?Run some speed tests with similar results and they will tell you that is "blazing fast."?However, try participating in a few video conferences and see how frustrated you get. Tell me many how many of your business calls get dropped? Try uploading large amounts of information to web servers or collaborative cloud platforms.?Fiber is fast and there is plenty of head room for new services that have yet to be thought of or?developed.?I heard today that 71% people who can work at home are doing it.?54% want to continue to work at home after the pandemic ends.?Fiber is what we need in America if those home workers?are going to reach their full potential.