Posted by:
Steve Dubb
Municipal broadband leads the way
Want high speed internet? Wilson, North Carolina, a city of just under 50,000 people located about 35 minutes east of Raleigh, initiated its high-speed internet service this month and will roll out service citywide over the next year. Financed by a $28 million investment, the city-owned fiber-optic network offers some of the fastest Internet speeds available nationwide. Customers of its Greenlight community-owned all fiber optic cable pay $34.95 a month for 10 Megabytes-per-second service. For business users, speeds of up to 100-Megabytes-per-second service are available.
According to a five-page report, issued in April 2008 by the trade group Fiber to the Home Council, Wilson is among 44 public providers of fiber-to-the-home systems, which serve a total of 60 cities throughout the United States. As Fiona Morgan notes in an article in the Durham-based Independent Weekly, the city’s broadband investment strategy provides a possible model for closing a growing gap between the United States and many other nations, such as Japan and South Korea, in the adoption of broadband service.
As Jim Baller and Casey Lide of the Baller-Herbst Law Group note in a report commissioned by the state of North Carolina’s e-NC Authority, the United States, once the world leader in broadband, has fallen behind in recent years. “During the last seven years,” Baller and Lide point out, “the United States has dropped steadily in nearly every measure of success in broadband deployment compared to other industrialized nations in the 30-member Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Currently, depending on which study one consults, the United States now ranks between 15th and 25th in broadband deployment (broadband lines divided by some measure of population), 14th in average advertised download speed; 9th in fiber connections as a percent of total subscribers; 22nd in average monthly price for broadband; 11th in price per unit of bandwidth (Megabits per second); 18th in price of the fastest available broadband services; and 17th in growth of broadband penetration. In the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF)’s new composite global ranking, which takes into account penetration, speed, and price, the United States ranks 15th.”
Baller and Lide argue that a public national broadband strategy is needed to close the growing broadband adoption gap and help support on-the-ground efforts like the one in Wilson. According to the nonprofit group Connected Nation, a statewide strategy based on similar principles was implemented successfully in the state of Kentucky. Largely due to its implementation of a public broadband strategy, Kentucky enjoyed an 83-percent increase in broadband adoption in three years, compared to 57 percent nationally. Connected Nation argues that the net positive economic impact of implementing a national broadband strategy based on these principles could be as great as $134 billion a year.
The Baller and Lide report was publicly released on June 23rd at a conference sponsored by the New America Foundation. Video of the event and a copy of the report are available here. The day following the report’s release, House Res. 1292, a resolution calling for universal availability of next-generation broadband networks with transmission speeds of 100 megabits per second (Mbps) by 2015, was introduced by Anna Eshoo (D-CA) (with cosponsors Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Rep Mike Doyle (D-PA)). It is the companion bill to Senate Res. 191, introduced in the U.S. Senate last year by Senator John D. Rockefeller IV (D-WV) and cosponsored by Senator Barack Obama (D-IL).