Community Broadband Bits (archived)

After anticipating this moment for many months, we have a ruling from the FCC that has restored local authority to build and expand networks in North Carolina and Tennessee. Though we have already pulled out the key passages for readers, we wanted to discuss the decision with Jim Baller of Baller, Herbst, Stokes, & Lide. Jim worked with Wilson and Chattanooga in crafting their petitions and sat down with me last week at the Iowa Association of Municipal Utilities Broadband Conference in Des Moines last week. We went over the key issues in the ruling, including why the FCC had authority to take action, how the state laws limited investment in advanced Internet networks, the impact of the ruling, and what comes next. See our other podcasts with Jim as well as articles that we tagged him in here.

In Montana, local businesses and the city of Bozeman have been working on a public-private partnership approach to expanding Internet access that is likely to involve the city building an open access fiber network. We discuss their approach this week with Brit Fontenot, Economic Development Director for the city of Bozeman; David Fine, Bozeman Economic Development Specialist; and the President of Hoplite Industries, Anthony Cochenour.

After the FCC decisions to remove barriers to community networks and to reclassify Internet access as a Title II service to enforce network neutrality rules, Lisa and I spend some time discussing the decision and reactions to it. We also discuss my presentation at Freedom to Connect, where I offer some thoughts on what communities can do in the long term to ensure we end scarcity and the corporate monopoly model of Internet access.

As high quality Internet has become more essential for business and quality of life, those who realized that the existing telecom providers had no intention to invest in better connections in their rural Missouri communities began to ask their electric cooperative - Co-Mo - to step up and do it. This week, we talk with Randy Klindt, General Manager of Co-Mo Connect, which is building a gigabit fiber network out to its members despite having not been chosen to receive any stimulus funds. We discuss how they have structured the network, why they felt compelled to get into the business, and some of the results from their approach.

Arizona's city of Mesa is one of the largest communities in the nation to benefit from the city taking role in ensuring conduit and fiber are available throughout the area. This week we talk with Alex Deshuk, the city's Manager of Technology and Innovation that was brought on in 2008. We talk about how Mesa has, for longer than a decade, ensured that it was putting conduit in the ground and making fiber available to independent providers as needed to ensure they had multiple options around town and especially to select areas where they wanted to encourage development. Having this fiber available has helped to encourage high tech investment, including the new Apple Global Command Center.

As we near the FCC open meeting at the end of next week, when it will decide on both the Chattanooga and Wilson petitions regarding their wish to expand as well as a proposal to reclassify Internet access a Title II service in order to ensure it can maintain the same open Internet we have long loved. We have mostly focused on the muni petitions, but after hearing some concerns from some munis regarding Title II, we realized we have to delve into the Title II reclassification more deeply. Enter Chris Lewis, VP of Government of Affairs for Public Knowledge. I've always enjoyed talking with Chris on various issues around telecom policy and we asked him to come on and answer some of the questions we have heard.

Last year was the first year I attended Mountain Connect, an event in the Rockies west of Denver that discusses approaches to improving Internet access. Historically, they focused on rural communities but as co-chair of the event Jeff Gavlinski notes in our discussion this week, they are expanding it to include more urban issues as well. Mountain Connect is growing in many ways and I am excited to return to it in early June. As Jeff and I discuss, it is focused on all solutions to expanding access - whether private sector, coop, muni, partnership, etc. Colorado has a lot of activity from munis and especially munis that are looking to partner, but also has a state law that requires a time-and-energy consuming referendum before the community can really do any planning or take action to improve its situation.

Like many states, Minnesota has a major metro area that generally has higher quality Internet access than non-metro communities. The Greater Minnesota Partnership, a coalition of businesses, chambers, nonprofits, and cities from across the state, have made improving Internet access a major priority in their efforts to influence the state legislature. This week, we talk with Dan Dorman, Executive Director of the Greater Minnesota Partnership. He is also a former Minnesota state Rep and remains a small business owner.

OneCommunity is a nonprofit organization in northeastern Ohio that has connected thousands of community anchor institutions with high capacity connections. Created as OneCleveland before expanding, it has remained a rather unique approach to expanding high quality Internet access. This week, CEO Lev Gonick joins us to talk about OneCommunity and its contributions to the region. As neither a private company nor a local government, Lev believes that OneCommunity offers a third way, something they often call a "community-driven" approach. We discuss how a big city like Cleveland needs to think about solving the problem of expanding Internet access broadly.

In recent weeks, we have been excited to see announcements from Ting, a company long known for being a great wireless provider (both Lisa and I are customers), that is now getting into FTTH deployments. The first announcement was from Charlottesville where it acquired another company. Last week they announced a partnership with Westminster, Maryland. This week we interview Elliot Noss, CEO of Tucows, which is the parent of Ting. Elliot has long been active in preserving and expanding the open Internet. We discuss many issues from Ting's success in wireless to cities dealing with permitting and access in rights-of-way to Ting's willingness and enthusiasm to operate on municipal fiber open access networks. We finish with some musings on upcoming over the top video technologies like SlingTV from Dish.