Broadband by the People, For the People - Episode 607 of the Community Broadband Bits Podcast

Gigi Sohn (00:07):
This is about the community controlling their future. Even if Comcast did do something really, really good in your community, they may not the next time, right? So don't you want to have the opportunity to have a network where you can decide who gets access? You can decide at what price point. You can decide what other initiatives you want to do. There is [00:00:30] something about that community control, I think that is very, very attractive to a lot of places.

Christopher Mitchell (00:34):
Welcome to another episode of the Community Broadband Bits podcast. I'm Christopher Mitchell at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. Today I'm back with Gigi Sohn who is the Executive Director at the American Association for Public Broadband. Welcome back.

Gigi Sohn (00:53):
It's always great to be here.

Christopher Mitchell (00:55):
Wonderful to have you, Gigi. And then we have Bill Coleman. Bill who was [00:01:00] memorably, the first person where I recorded an episode and it didn't work. And then Bill redid it with me way back when I went hundreds of episodes without a problem, and then I screwed it up with Bill. Bill's with Community Technology Advisors, your own company. Welcome back.

Bill Coleman (01:14):
Thank you. Chris. I hope I don't make you nervous.

Christopher Mitchell (01:17):
Not at all. Bill's also in Minnesota, which makes him even better than most of the guests that we have on this place. Sorry, Gigi. We are talking about several different [00:01:30] things around the American Association for Public Broadband, one of which is we'll jump into in the middle of the show, which is a paper called Own Your Internet, how to Build a Public Broadband Network that Bill wrote in his capacity with the Benton Institute, which Gigi, you are also a fellow at the Benton Institute for Broadband and Society. We're going to talk a bit about other things that AAPB is working on, and I'm going to poke Bill about one of the pieces of advice I think he gives everyone [00:02:00] that is smart enough to listen whenever we work together, he brings it up. So I want to make sure that we share that with everyone here too. Bill's looking at me like he's not quite sure what it is, but let's start off with asking about the AAPB, the American Association for Public Broadband, which is an organization that you could be a member of. You should be a member of. I am. And it's working on a mentorship program. So Gigi, what is happening there?

Gigi Sohn (02:27):
Thanks Chris. So just let me say a few words about AAPB [00:02:30] for those folks that might not know about it. So I started as the executive director a little over a year ago. I think I started June 1st, 2023. And we are a membership organization that seeks to protect, promote and defend the community ownership of broadband networks. So we believe that communities should have the freedom to decide what kind of network best serves their residents and there shouldn't be any [00:03:00] legal or economic or other barriers stopping them from doing that. So I have spent a lot of my first year defending against a tax, mostly by dark money organizations funded by our friends in the cable industry. It has been a major initiative of mine to try to promote the model and get more communities thinking about, Hey, I could do this, I should do this.

(03:27):
And we want to help you build that network. We want [00:03:30] to help you serve your community with the best broadband available and to serve everybody in the community at reasonable prices, which you don't always get from the incumbents. So that was the motivator behind doing this handbook, to basically give a roadmap for the kind of decisions a community has to make and the steps that they have to take in order to realize that goal. And with the understanding, look, we don't sugarcoat it. Chris, this is not [00:04:00] easy. It takes a long time. We just actually had a webinar with Bill Lodge from Water Loop Fiber, which just launched, and I think from conception to him being hired was 15 years. Now it doesn't need to necessarily take that long, but the point is that you've got to be in it for the long haul. And like I said, we try to give not only the steps you have to take and the decision you have to make, but also the resources you might use.

(04:28):
This is not [00:04:30] 2000 anymore. This is a mature model and there are all kinds of contractors, consultants, and others who can help you. Banks can help you along the way. So that's the purpose. And we did just follow it up. We actually not only had these three webinars over the past three months that Bill ably moderated, we also did a track at broadband communities along a similar theme. And let me tell you something, each webinar was extremely well [00:05:00] attended and our pre-conference track in Houston had over a hundred people there. And that's pretty remarkable for a conference before a conference.

Christopher Mitchell (05:11):
Yeah, it's excellent and I'm excited for all the things that you've done in the past year. I think this handbook is terrific. There's more than one occasion where I slapped my head and I was like, why didn't we do this in terms of providing a lot of the materials? We'll talk about some of that in a second. But [00:05:30] your next perhaps big event is around a mentorship program. It

Gigi Sohn (05:35):
Seems to me the next and my board that the next logical follow up here is to pair leaders and communities who've actually done the thing, right? They've gotten the community support, they've done whatever studies are necessary, and they've built and operated the network. They may not actually operate it themselves, but they have a community owned network. They've done it, they've done the thing. And to pair them [00:06:00] up with those communities that, well, I'm thinking about it. What are the first steps I'm concerned about my bond rating? Who can I talk to? Who's done this before? Who can maybe help push me along? So actually Bill had a really good idea this morning is that maybe rather than just Willy-nilly pair folks with other folks, it's just, okay, I'm interested in learning the basic steps. [00:06:30] I'm interested in learning about community support. I'm interested in learning about marketing and pair people up that way by the skill that they want to learn. I want to know about design build organizations. And I thought that was a great idea, bill. So I'm going to steal it from you and you're not going to charge me for it. Thank you very, it was a gift. So we are still formulating it. And Chris, I will be asking you to help along those lines, but I think again, [00:07:00] the next goal for us while we keep beating back the attacks is to actually grow the field and get more and more people serve by public broadband networks.

Christopher Mitchell (07:12):
Excellent. Yeah, I love the idea. We've been working on that in Indian country in a similar vein to help share some of that expertise and just give people a sense of the questions they don't even know to ask if they spend a little bit of time at the other operation to see what it's like and how they run things.

Gigi Sohn (07:30):
[00:07:30] Ian, you're doing God's work by the way. Kudos to you.

Christopher Mitchell (07:33):
Well, mostly helping other people to do God's work, but that's a good enough for me. One of the things that I saw in the paper that I wanted to bring out Bill, was a piece of advice that you've often given, which is what I'm going to say,

Bill Coleman (07:50):
Not yet.

Christopher Mitchell (07:50):
Alright, so you always say don't tell people you don't want to build your own network. Keep that a secret

Bill Coleman (07:58):
Communities, especially [00:08:00] prior to bead. But I think in terms of rural areas, but in cities that are quasi served, they always ask for better broadband. And the incumbents always say, well, maybe someday, essentially.

(08:16):
But communities way too often say, the last thing we want to do is build a broadband network and operate to be an ISP. And so much of that, of course is fear. They're just afraid [00:08:30] of having to hire people or to do marketing or as Gigi talked about, the risk, their bond rating. And they just don't really realize despite the work that AAPB has done, the work that Institute for local self-Reliance has done for years is showing these successful community examples. And I think now we have more and more of 'em that are smooth sailing [00:09:00] from almost start to finish that people too quickly give up that option. Maybe they don't want to be one because they just don't believe in it, or that's just one more thing. They hope that somebody else will solve the problem, but they are too quickly giving up really the only lever that they have in terms of getting a provider to improve services.

Christopher Mitchell (09:27):
And I love that the language of the lever. And I think that [00:09:30] it's important, the idea of leverage. One of the things that I think I've found, and I don't know Gigi and Bill, if either one of you has seen this, but I feel like if you have someone in your community that's been looking at this for 15 years, you're kind of an anomaly. Most places you have someone who's recognizes it's a problem, they started getting into it, they're still trying to learn a lot about it. And frankly, you don't know in the early stages if it's the last thing you want to do or not. I certainly understand if you're like, that seems too intimidating, but you shouldn't be [00:10:00] writing that off because it just removes that lever as you said, bill.

Bill Coleman (10:04):
Yeah, and we often know that there's always room for two providers, the incumbent phone company, the incumbent cable company. But when you bring that third wire into a community that really changes the marketplace, suddenly those incumbents feel the heat. They recognize they're not going to have enough market share to make a profit to maintain their network, they become [00:10:30] totally irrelevant. So that's why we see such a strong competitive response in terms of pricing or service improvements. We all know when a community decides to launch a network, the incumbents immediately send out flyers with new ads and new pricing and try and lock people into a long-term contract. And so if you can keep that lever and get them to reduce all these prices without having [00:11:00] to build a network, well then maybe your part way to your community objective. But one of the things I realized, and I think as I researched this handbook, is the myriad of other benefits besides just quality service and lower pricing to having a municipally owned, a public sector network where the network is really the partner to the community for an innovation platform. And certainly Chattanooga has been [00:11:30] the model for that over the years, but I think even in smaller communities, this network can be strong for economic development, smart city kind of applications, digital equity. Without that municipal network, you just really even couldn't consider those innovations.

Gigi Sohn (11:52):
Yeah. Mean I would add those price reductions are probably temporary, number one

Christopher Mitchell (11:57):
From the incumbents.

Gigi Sohn (11:59):
Yes. [00:12:00] When I went out to Cape Cod in February end of February, which I would never recommend to anybody, it snowed like eight inches. Three of my speaking gigs had to be virtual, but that was my pitch is just like, look, if you want to monitor traffic, so Cape Cod has terrible traffic coming in from the mainland. A lot of the workers come in if you want to monitor environmental conditions, which obviously Cape Cod has a lot of interesting [00:12:30] with the ocean and everything. If you want to deal with public safety issues, you need that platform. So it really is more than can I watch Netflix? It's like, can I more efficiently run my city at a lower cost? And that's going to seem to have resonance with some of the city councilman, but oh, I can actually do my job better for a lower price, save millions of dollars a year.

(12:59):
That was something [00:13:00] that kind of turned the light bulb on. Lemme just say one other thing, maybe I scared a living daylights out of people talking about Waterloo and it took 15 years. 2009 is very different than 2024 in terms of the availability of companies who can help the availability of better technologies, of greater demand, obviously. And then obviously the pandemic proved that you can't do without a universally accessible and [00:13:30] affordable broadband network. I mean, Chattanooga will probably come up 55 times, but when their kids had to stay home because schools were closed, they just provided free Internet service to families that couldn't afford it, that had kids in K through 12. So it is a very, very different circumstance. And I don't think if a community has the support and they have good leadership and they're decisive, it shouldn't take nearly that long. Just maybe a couple of years.

Christopher Mitchell (13:59):
Yes. And I think [00:14:00] often I hear people being like, oh, well it was easier in 2009 or it was easier in 2015. It was easier in 2019 and it was easier and harder. Things change in a number of ways. If I was building a network, I might wish that I could have gotten it in before Comcast did the mid split, and now Comcast offers better upload services. But there's still other ways to compete against a company like that. I do feel like [00:14:30] if you have communities who are like, oh, if only we had done it last year or we've missed our window, I just think that that's foolish. There's always, this is an infrastructure that will last many decades. So you can make it work in a variety of circumstances. And that's something I felt like I saw in your paper was a real desire to say there's not one path. There are many paths. And when I say that, there's still more paths that I'm even suggesting there. There's a lot of paths. Well,

Bill Coleman (14:57):
I think we've seen the emergence [00:15:00] of organizations like UTOPIA Fiber that come in to assist Yellowstone Fiber where you don't have to do everything, and especially that's always been vendors, but when it's another community partner, you feel a little more secure that your interests are going to be preserved, are going to be at the top of the heap as opposed to below the vendors desires. And so I think that [00:15:30] where we see these examples of organizations helping other organizations get into the public sector broadband. I think Vermont is another great example of that with the utility districts where they are helping each other, they meet regularly, they plan network connections and so on. And again, strengthen numbers, reassurance that the model works. I think there's a lot of great benefits there.

Christopher Mitchell (15:59):
Yeah, bill, you [00:16:00] end the paper with a series of case studies and those are examples you just listed. There's more details for people that want to check that out.

Gigi Sohn (16:07):
I mean, UTOPIA not only does what they did with Yellowstone and also with Bountiful, right, with basically we'll build a network for you and you own it, we'll run it, we'll build it, design it, build it, run it, run it, but you own it. And I think the same thing with Yellowstone, but they also obviously have their open access network in Utah where they basically, because [00:16:30] in Utah there's a law that says that communities can't provide last mile service. So they just basically open up their network to whatever ISP wants to provide last mile service. And in some towns they have a choice of 10 ISPs, which kind of hearkens back to the old days of dial up when the average American had 13 ISPs to choose from. You not only have sort of the sort of Chattanooga Wilson [00:17:00] Lafayette model of, okay, we had an electric utility, so let's just add on broadband.

(17:05):
But now you even have cities like Fairlawn, Ohio and Pharr, Texas who are just like, we're going to build a broadband utility from scratch, which is fabulous. Or then you have the Colorado Springs model bill. You probably could talk about it better than I can, even though I should be able to, since I sit on two cows as board. And Ting is the anchor tenant in the Colorado Springs Municipal Network, but it's a sale lease back [00:17:30] situation, which maybe Bill you can describe better than I can. So there's so many different options that a city, depending on how much they want to control, but though I will say that is what this is about, this is about the community controlling their future. And that's why I would say even if Comcast did do something really, really good in your community, they may not [00:18:00] the next time. So don't you want to have the opportunity to have a network where you can decide who gets access, you can decide at what price point, you can decide what other initiatives you want to do. There is something about that community control. I think that is very, very attractive to a lot of places.

Bill Coleman (18:19):
There's so many different levels at which a community can participate from just owning the network and having that fiscal asset be yours. [00:18:30] Or even owning half a network that is a shared build with another private sector provider that a community can use for its own purposes or for any kind of public entity purposes, leaving the private retail market to a different provider knowing that you have fiber to enhance competition later on. I think there's a model there, but then we also see any number of companies ready to come in and operate [00:19:00] either as the open access model or just as a sole utility model over a publicly owned network. So I think there's a lot of ways for communities that if they just want to own the network, that's essentially writing a check, right? Let's finance it, make sure we get cash flow to pay back the whatever financing tool we use, bonds or whatever, and then let the private sector operate.

(19:28):
I think that's a great model [00:19:30] all the way to the far Texas where the IT director didn't have enough to do. So all of a sudden now he's starting up a whole new public utility, which as complicated as that sounds, they didn't seem to really have many issues to date in making that happen. They just hired some more staff, hired some technical folks to go out and install. And essentially [00:20:00] as a startup, ISP, I'm sure there were problems, but we sure didn't hear about 'em. And they sure have no trouble selling their service within their community. It's not that big a place, and I think they're doing 30 installs a day. So that was kind of what I recalled as part of that story.

Christopher Mitchell (20:19):
They have like 70,000 people, a lot of them in apartment buildings, but one of the things they do have is they have a champion. Their mayor is wildly charismatic and people really, [00:20:30] really love him. And I think he's really helped to, when he made it a priority, other people fell in line. But that's something that I think we've seen is that you need to have a champion. This can't be something that, I'll just give you an example. Harold Dre was at Chattanooga. He was running the electric utility: EPB, and I think he and many of his staff thought it was a great idea, but they didn't run with it at that point. They did a public relations campaign to talk with people about it, to spread [00:21:00] the word. I think they did more than a thousand community meetings to explain what they were up to in order to make sure that they had people that were bought in. This is something that I think we're going to talk about a little bit later, Gigi, but it fits right now. You're seeing this as you go around the importance of building that local support.

Gigi Sohn (21:16):
Yeah, I won't name names, but I was approached by somebody when I was speaking in Iowa, which by the way has the most municipal networks 29, and actually the most ISPs period in [00:21:30] the country who said, yeah, a bunch of us just decided to do this, and now we're being attacked by the incumbents. What do we do? And I said, well, where's your community support? And she was like, well, I guess we have to do that now. No, no, no, no. That's the first step. And what was interesting, again, sorry to kind of keep tooting our horn on the webinar, but somebody said that actually is your first marketing. [00:22:00] Your first marketing plan is how do I get the community on board with this entire idea?

Christopher Mitchell (22:09):
We call that education at that level, but it's marketing.

Gigi Sohn (22:12):
Exactly. And look, if you can find a person who's on the city council, the mayor or somebody who's in a position of power, we all know about Bob Wack in Westminster, Maryland was on the county council and he made their open access network happen in [00:22:30] a tiny town of 10,000 people. But if not in Bountiful, it was grassroots. It was a grassroots campaign came up from the bottom and the city council had no choice but to go along. So leadership doesn't need to come necessarily from the top down. It can come from the bottom up.

Christopher Mitchell (22:46):
One of the things you ask in the paper that I think is useful to note is you say, what problem are you trying to solve? And I've asked that question before as well, and I usually follow up by saying the answer is not broadband. [00:23:00] What are you trying to solve here? And for some city it might be we want to have competition, and for another it might just be we want a low income service for people living in public housing. And those could be very different models that you would address based on that.

Gigi Sohn (23:17):
Yeah, I mean, one, it's not an example in the handbook, but there's a gentleman who came and spoke in Houston from East Carroll Parish. It's one of the poorest areas in Louisiana, and they're building it because they [00:23:30] have a lot of poor folks that have absolutely nothing, right? And they can't get bead funding it not a rural area. And I'm sure even though it really is unserved some cable company or some telecoms going to claim or fixed wireless, Verizon going to claim it's served.

Christopher Mitchell (23:48):
Yeah, we've talked about them with spark light. And so it gets into a question that I know you've dug into in your past, Gigi, is if you can deliver a gigabit on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, is it served? [00:24:00] You can't do anything the other days when it's off.

Gigi Sohn (24:03):
Exactly. But again, this is the poorest of the poor. So they want to have just about anything that's affordable, and also they want their kids to be able to do their homework. So it is that basic. I don't think they're quite talking about smart cities yet. So yeah, you're absolutely right. It's all about what broadband enables. It's not about the wires, it's not about the speeds, it's about what it enables, [00:24:30] and that's what the community's got to look at. But Bill probably has more to add about that.

Bill Coleman (24:36):
I think there's, social justice is certainly a big part of this, where in order to serve a predominantly low income community, you definitely have to defer some profitability. It costs the same to build a network, whether it's to rich neighborhood or to a poor neighborhood. So what's the revenue opportunity, [00:25:00] the ARPU revenue per customer that's going to come out of that? And certainly that requires a different financial model than one that where the private sector is going to say, look at all the money to be made from there. We can get $300 a month per customer as opposed to the, I think it was $39 or something today that we heard about Waterloo for a gig. And so maybe that's maybe a little low, but just a entry [00:25:30] level price of $29 for a hundred megabit connection. That's a community decision to say we want everyone to have broadband.

Christopher Mitchell (25:39):
That's a decision that often will come with a 10 year or 12 year payback. The way that it typically works is that you build a network to someone, you lose a thousand or $1,200, something like that, and then you got to figure out how to make it up before you lose them as a customer. And so what you're saying, bill, is something that I've long supported, which is you could go out there at 39 or [00:26:00] $29 offer, but the question is what are you getting back? And if the answer is we're going to make sure that kids are well connected so there's opportunity and then hopefully that's going to have less crime, it's going to have have better long-term growth for the city and all kinds of other benefits, well then maybe the network doesn't have to fully pay for itself. Other cities are coming in saying, absolutely the city has to pay for itself. And our position has always been, yeah, you do [00:26:30] whatever is appropriate locally. You set the rules.

Bill Coleman (26:33):
Yeah. I often talk about how different providers have different balance sheets. So what's an asset to a community compared to what's an asset to a broadband provider? And not that a private sector broadband provider can't say, oh, it's great to do community development and economic development, and isn't this wonderful, but a prime purpose of a community is to support its residents and to build assets [00:27:00] in the community and a private sector provider that may be on their balance sheet, but that's kind of as down a few lines as other. Whereas for the community, that's a top line item.

Gigi Sohn (27:14):
Well, the communities say, well, we can't make a profit on our water, so we're not going to provide water to our residents. We're not going to provide electricity to our residents. I think the debate over whether broadband is a utility or not, that got solved. Many of us [00:27:30] have thought that for years, but once the pandemic hit, it kind of became academic. The debate in Washington DC if anybody cares, is whether it should be regulated as a utility or not. And we can talk about that, although I prefer not to, but to the extent that people view this as an essential part of living a good life or living a life period and being part of the economy and society and civic discourse, there's no question [00:28:00] you don't want to bankrupt the town or the city, but if you lose a little bit of money, it means everybody gets connected and everybody can. It is a matter of social justice and everybody can participate. It's certainly worth it. It is interesting when you hear some of the opponents of public broadband saying, well, taxpayer dollars shouldn't be spent on this, and taxpayer dollars are spent on roads and pipes, and why shouldn't it be? To me,

Christopher Mitchell (28:29):
People assume [00:28:30] they are. This is one of the thing when I go to public meetings, one of the things I hear, and I heard this down in LA Sewer bill among many other places, is that a person that is not in this industry will say, I pay my taxes. Why don't I have better service? And they equate the two just like you're saying, Gigi, it's exactly like that. Yeah.

Gigi Sohn (28:49):
Yeah, that's funny.

Bill Coleman (28:50):
It's interesting because in so many states now they would say, well, if you're going to do broadband, it has to be self-supporting, right? You can't take money from [00:29:00] the electric revenues or the water revenues to build broadband as we think about it, and there's many parts of a community that don't pay for itself. Parks don't pay for themselves. Most roads certainly don't pay for themselves because we're constantly shifting money from the state and federal government

Christopher Mitchell (29:20):
Into, since we got rid of child labor, the schools don't pay for themselves.

Bill Coleman (29:24):
And so this idea that this public good, this public benefit should be restricted [00:29:30] to the cashflow that it generates is something that I think as we think about promoting public networks, it's a public good. I think that phrase public good or something has to be much more strongly emphasized. And I think now people recognize it, and we certainly see how much we've spent on the affordable connectivity program where we give billions of dollars to large [00:30:00] publicly traded companies or that we paid during the pandemic for hotspots to major wireless companies. The public is paying for this. Maybe we should just pay ourselves as opposed to paying a publicly traded company. And that's where I think, and I'm really excited with a's really embrace of cooperatives as a public network [00:30:30] that we've seen that as a successful model for so long, and we've seen it now with electric co-ops coming in on the broadband market and the more traditional telephone co-ops in Minnesota. We don't have that many public networks, but I think it's because we have so many telephone cooperatives that have gone into partner with communities in a formal and informal way to bring that cooperative model [00:31:00] more broadly across Minnesota.

Christopher Mitchell (31:03):
Yeah, your paper, you note with CTC, which is a cooperative that serves Northern Minnesota more central Minnesota, they expanded into the Arrowhead region in that direction with help of the Northeast Service cooperative, NESC. So whenever people ask you about btop like, oh, is all that money wasted? No. Lots of people are being served by CTC because of just one network that the Btop [00:31:30] investment created and network has generated a lot of value across Minnesota. So I wanted to work that in. I'm glad you gave me the opportunity.

Bill Coleman (31:37):
No, that's great. And just CTC relatively small telephone cooperative in Minnesota. They've partnered with cities and counties on builds. They've partnered with tribal governments to build networks and operate them, help local organizations build their capacity for this. [00:32:00] Tribal governments, they've worked with electric co-ops to help them jump in, and so I really give them credit for promoting this public broadband model in Minnesota that has been so successful and covered so many households now across rural Minnesota.

Gigi Sohn (32:22):
One of our board members is Satin Gupta, who's with CentraNet, and he's at this very interesting map showing how all the cooperatives cooperate with each other, [00:32:30] right? Diamond States networks, Doug McLaughin is similar. So they're not just these tiny little rural entities. They're all helping other to connect the state, and I just found that really interesting and really a terrific way to operate that you can get economies of scale if you work together.

Bill Coleman (32:51):
Yeah, cooperatives have a marvelous set of principles, seven principles and cooperation among cooperatives is one of those. [00:33:00] So it's really fun to see that in action.

Christopher Mitchell (33:04):
I will note though that those are not self-enforcing, and people need to be involved in their co-ops governance to make sure that you continue having those great things. We've seen some co-ops go a little bit off the rails when they are perhaps run by the same group of people without any meaningful oversight at times. So I just feel like that's an important note. Co-ops were a magnificent way of [00:33:30] magnifying local power, and generally that's good. Every now and then we have an example. It's not so good. Gigi, I wanted to ask you about your travels then. Oh, and I also wanted to remind people the paper, you can find it on the Benton Institute for Broadband and Society's website, but you probably just open up a search page and go and type in own your Internet, how to build a public broadband network. You'll find it pretty quick. Gigi, you've been traveling around. Any last observations before we bring this to a close?

Gigi Sohn (34:00):
[00:34:00] Yes. Well, first of all, you can also get on AAPB's website. I hope people will join. Like I said, we are a membership organization. We have different levels, and I feeling is the bigger we become, the harder it becomes for the opponents of public broadband to beat us back.

Christopher Mitchell (34:18):
Sorry, let me just build on for a second too, because I think we have California, New York, and a variety of other places where we are seeing a real growth and support from municipal broadband. [00:34:30] I think we are going to see a new level of opposition, and I think AAPB needs to be well connected, making sure it has lots of members to help guide us through responding to that and make sure that the big cable and telephone companies aren't able to blunt the progress that we're seeing.

Gigi Sohn (34:46):
Yeah, I mean, New York has a whole fund. I mean this infrastructure fund that is going to, I thought they were going to announce the awards, but the guy who's the head of the New York State Bourbon office there, Josh Breitbart, is so excited [00:35:00] about what they're doing there. California obviously is building this middle mile that you, UTOPIA is working in, and you're absolutely right. We're already starting to see the rise of more and more and more tech

Christopher Mitchell (35:12):
AAPB.us. So just so people are right, AAPB, American Association Public Broadband dot US United States. Alright, go ahead, Gigi.

Gigi Sohn (35:22):
What I'm seeing around the country, and I've probably been in the past year at least to I think 15 different states, is [00:35:30] just excitement. I mean, people, they want to do this. They're hungry for knowledge. Again, they often dunno where to start, but they see this as a real thing that they want to do. I mean, I am exhausted. I've given so many keynote speeches in the last year, and I think it's because people do want to hear that this is possible and this is a good thing and this is something that their communities have to do. So I always get bombarded with questions and try to follow up as much as one human being [00:36:00] can. But I think you're right, Chris. I think we're going to see an explosion, even though a lot of them won't be able to get the big funding, some will like the Cuds, like the Vermont CDs will, even though some of them can't get the big funding, I think communities are going to find a way because once the bead money is spent, there's still going to be a lot of need for these community networks.

Christopher Mitchell (36:24):
I mean, people make hay about the fact that Chattanooga got $111 million from the Department of Energy that [00:36:30] came after they'd already started building. They were borrowing the money, and that allowed them to build it more quickly and to do some amazing things in the electric side. But many of the networks that we talk about as being successes were funded entirely through local borrowing typically, and then they've always paid their bills. It's only a small number of networks that have struggled to do that, although sometimes, like you said, this is hard. They've come in. I like to talk about Clarksville a wonderful network today. The [00:37:00] early years it looked pretty sketchy and they had to adjust. Many of them have.

Gigi Sohn (37:05):
UTOPIA was sketchy at the beginning too, and that, again, that was a very, very different era for broadband.

Christopher Mitchell (37:10):
Right. So anyway, it is exciting. This is going to publish shortly after Gigi is on the road yet again. We're going to be in San Antonio together, so I'm looking forward to that. We're kind of doing a tour of the nation's largest municipal cities by accident. So we're in la San Antonio. Maybe we'll find ourselves in Seattle at some point. Who knows?

Gigi Sohn (37:30):
[00:37:30] I hope so.

Christopher Mitchell (37:32):
Thank you both for coming on. Thank you, bill. Thank you, Gigi. I appreciate all the work you're doing. Thanks for the opportunity,

Gigi Sohn (37:38):
Chris, and you as well. You're a superstar and you are a tireless advocate for community broadband and you're indispensable.

Christopher Mitchell (37:47):
Thank you.

Ry Marcattilio (37:48):
We have transcripts for this and other podcasts [email protected] slash broadbandbits. Email [email protected] with your ideas for the show. [00:38:00] Follow Chris on Twitter. His handle is at Community nets. Follow community nets.org stories on Twitter, the handles at muni networks. Subscribe to this and other podcasts from ILSR, including building Local Power, local Energy Rules, and the Composting for Community Podcast. You can access them anywhere you get your podcasts. You can catch the latest important research from all of our initiatives if you subscribe to our monthly [email protected]. While you're there, please [00:38:30] take a moment to donate your support in any amount. Keeps us going. Thank you to Arnie for the song Warm Duck Shuffle, licensed through creative comments.