Municipalities Find Success With Building Broadband Networks
High-speed broadband networks can work through retail and open access methods when communities decide they want to control their own digital futures, said community broadband network leaders during a NATOA webinar Monday. Communities need to look at all of the costs of building a broadband network, with costs of $5,000 to $20,000 per institution to interconnect buildings, performance guarantees and redundancy costs adding up, said Thomas Asp, Concurrent Technologies technology and energy principal analyst.
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The institutional model enables fiber networks to serve the economic interests of private sector, said Asp. “This model has low costs to construct and operat[e], which leads to dramatic savings in cost.” Greenlight Community Broadband offers up to 1 Gbps of service and triple-play services directly to customers in Wilson, N.C., said General Manager Will Aycock. These types of services need to be self sustaining and provide a service to most members of the community, but also keep costs down, he said. “Delivery of services needs to be improved and assets need to be determined to find the purpose of the network.”
Danville, Va., runs an open access model, where the city provides a connection as the service provider for the city government and the schools and allows other ISPs to use the network, said City Manager Joe King. The city created a 160-mile network that connects 165 businesses and 70 households, he said. The development of the fiber network went in stages, with the government and schools getting connected to the service in 2004, followed by businesses starting in 2007, said King. The city started last year to provide fiber to the home connections, he said. The project started with a $2.5 million fund from the city’s electric fund, which has been paid back in full with interest, said King. The program adds $300,000 back into the city’s operating budget each year, which it’s using to build fiber-to-the-home connections, said King. The project has a $1.8 million annual operating and capital budget, which it’s able to achieve with $1.2 million from the E-rate program, 23 percent gross revenue shares from the retail service providers and an $8.80 monthly equipment fee, said King. Utilities can also play a major role in getting these community networks off the ground, said Asp. Wilson and Danville also own the utilities networks, said the managers. “With the public rights of way, working with the electric utility can have its advantages,” said Asp.
Over-the-top content could also impact how these communities use their broadband in the future, said Asp. OTT appeals to the younger tech-savy generation, so “we would be apt to look at it,” he said. The model would change from triple play to data play in this kind of situation, which depends “on who controls the content,” said Asp. He said there could be fundamental changes in the way these companies do business in five to ten years. These communities are also seeing competition from large telcos, said Aycock. “North Carolina passed a bill just after we were created to now allow municipalities to build networks.” Other states are making referendums on the ballot to make citizens decide whether or not to build broadband networks, said King. (sfriedman@warren-news.com)