SHARE TWEET MOTHERBOARD Follow NEWSLETTER Sections Machines Discoveries Power Futures Culture Earth Videos About Hundreds of Cities Are Wired With Fiber—But Telecom Lobbying Keeps It Unused Written by JASON KOEBLER June 4, 2014 // 05:30 AM EST In light of the ongoing net neutrality battle, many people have begun looking to Google and its promise of high-speed fiber as a potential saving grace from companies that want to create an internet fast lane. Well, the fact is, even without Google, many communities and cities throughout the country are already wired with fiber—they just dont let their residents use it. The reasons vary by city, but in many cases, the reason you cant get gigabit internet speeds—without the threat of that service being provided by a company that wants to discriminate against certain types of traffic—is because of the giant telecom businesses that want to kill net neutrality in the first place. RELATED: Why Its So Hard to Bring Gigabit Internet to the US Throughout the country, companies like Comcast, Time Warner Cable, CenturyLink, and Verizon have signed agreements with cities that prohibit local governments from becoming internet service providers and prohibit municipalities from selling or leasing their fiber to local startups who would compete with these huge corporations. Because ISPs often double as cable and telephone companies, during contract negotiations with governments, theyll often offer incentives to the government—such as better or faster service, earlier access to (their companys) cable internet for residents, and the like—in exchange for a non-compete clause. To be clear, these are often strictly local agreements between cities and cable giants. In Washington DC, for instance, the countrys first 100 Gbps fiber network has been available to nonprofit organizations since 2006—but not to any of the citys residents. During a re-negotiation with Comcast in 1999 in which the company threatened to cut off cable service to the city, Comcast agreed to provide some of its fiber access to the city for the governments exclusive use. WATCH: Motherboards documentary about the hackers trying to build a distributed network The 1999 agreement was conditioned in important ways, former Obama administration assistant and Harvard University researcher Susan Crawford wrote in a recent paper examining the citys fiber network. First, the city agreed not to lease or sell the fiber. Second, the contract required that the city not engage in any activities or outcomes that would result in business competition between the District and Comcast or that may result in loss of business opportunity for Comcast. Comcast never even made its fiber available to the city, but that agreement, and a future one with Verizon, has, in part, kept the citys DC-NET fiber network out of residents homes. “The intent was never to take the business away from Verizon or Comcast,” Anil Sharma, director of operations for DC-NET, told Washington City Paper last year. “Our target audience always was community anchor institutions.” What happened in DC is not uncommon. According to MuniNetworks, a group that tracks community access to fiber nationwide, at least 20 states have laws or other regulatory barriers that make it illegal or difficult for communities to offer fiber access to their residents. Even in states where there are no official rules, non-compete agreements between government and big business are common. These are the cities and towns where residents can access community fiber. Image: MuniNetworks What happens then are so-called middle-mile projects, where government buildings, schools, and nonprofit groups can be wired up, but expanded access to consumers is met with stiff lobbying opposition and threats from larger ISPs. A full fiber-to-the-premises model, on the other hand, might attract the attention of the entire national communications industry and related industries, New America Foundation researchers wrote in a May report called The Art of the Possible: An Overview of Public Broadband Options. That is because the competition enabled by a high-capacity fiber-to-the-premises infrastructure would be perceived as a direct challenge to the interests of incumbent players in the current market structure. There are, however, glimmers of hope. Cities are beginning to see the importance of providing their residents with cheap, fast, and open broadband networks, and at least 89 cities and towns nationwide now offer fiber to their residents as a publicly owned utility. Patrick Lucey, one of the authors of the New America report, told me that the number of communities that actually offer fiber doesnt capture the amount of conversations and attention that broadband infrastructure is getting.
Posted on: Wed, 04 Jun 2014 18:57:22 +0000
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