community broadband networks

Folks in Princeton, Massachusetts have anxiously awaited better broadband for about two years as community leaders explored ways to deploy fiber in the community. According to the Telegram, the wait will be even longer than expected. The tentative deal between Princeton and Matrix Design Group for a public private partnership is over.

As we reported last December, 90 percent of voters attending a special town meeting approved a measure to borrow funds to get deployment started. Princeton planned to use $1.2 million for make-ready measures to pave the way for Matrix to install its FTTH network. The town would not have to pay any more to construct the network, but they would be sacrificing control over the infrastructure.

Apparently, it is this lack of control that soured the proposed deal. From the Telegram article:

But while the town authorized borrowing the money, the broadband light plant commissioners could not secure authorization from bond counsel to borrow the money without an operating agreement that said the town had control over the design, construction, operation, maintenance and pricing of the network.

In a Princeton press release [PDF]:

“Matrix, citing its business model, was not willing to discuss or negotiate its position of network control for a period of 20 years before turning it over to us,”[said Stan Moss, Princeton Selectman and one of the leaders of the initiative].

As part of the agreement between Princeton and Matrix, the city would have obtained control and ownership of the network after 20 years.

Another wrinkle in the plan appeared when Princeton learned that they would not qualify for grant money available from the Massachusetts Broadband Institute (MBI). The organization is handling distribution of state and federal funds to assist in local deployments. Handing over control of the network to a private party in such a fashion is against the criteria established for grant eligibility.

The Princeton Broadband Committee will petition bond counsel to move forward to approve $1.2 million so the community can continue with make-ready plans. In the mean time, Princeton will get back out there and seek another partner.

While we are sympathetic to the people in Princeton who must wait longer to get fast, affordable, reliable broadband, we are somewhat relieved they have another chance to develop a partnership with more local control. The community may have felt protected because they were not investing in the full cost of a network, but without ownership the community would be unable to ensure it had the level of service it will need.

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Last month, we highlighted the story of Seth, a Washington state homeowner forced to put his home up for sale due to a perfect storm of sloppy customer service, corporate bureaucracy, and terrible Internet policy. Now meet Dave Mortimer from Michigan.

Dave in another person in a similar situation, reports Ars Technica. In 2013 incumbent AT&T told Dave three separate times that the house he had his eye on in rural Lowell had U-verse fiber network capabilities. Their website verified what customer service represenatives told him. Dave is an IT professional and wanted the opportunity to work from home. He must be on call while not in the office and so requires a fast residential Internet connection. 

After buying the home and moving in, AT&T backpedaled. Actually his best option was DSL offering 768 Kbps. Oops!

Working from home was a struggle. After Dave complained to AT&T, the FCC, the FTC, and the state Public Service Commission, the provider eventually updated their website but that didn't help Dave. He limped along but seldom worked from home as he had planned to do from the start. His office is 30 minutes away.

Finally, AT&T billed him for a phone line he never requested leading to an auto-payment error and a shut-off of his Internet service. That was enough for Dave. He approached a local wireless provider Vergenness Broadband and, working with the installer, attached the receiver to a tree some distance from his house and buried the extra long cable in cracks in his driveway to his house. Dave now pays $60 per month and gets the 3 Mbps download / 1 Mbps upload he was promised.

Dave is no where near the 45 Mbps he had hoped to obtain from the phantom U-verse, but he has this to say about his local provider:

“This is a night and day difference since switching from AT&T," he said. "Everything that AT&T did wrong, this small local company is doing right.”

Dave was fortunate to have a local company able to bring him service, even though it is not broadband as defined by the FCC. Nevertheless, he considers this a temporary fix and the best he can get for the time being.

This small company lured away Dave from AT&T but the Telecom Death Star is probably not worried about a massive customer exodus in Lowell. The Lowell Ledger recently reported on an April City Council meeting where Dave discussed his problems with AT&T and hte lack of broadband competition in Lowell:

Ryan Peel, owner of Vergennes Broadband LLC, said that his company had no plans to offer Internet service within Lowell city limits.

“We go head-to-head with Comcast and AT&T and it is very difficult to compete, basically because their prices are so low,” Peel said. “We basically don't have a presence in the city of Lowell because of that..."

That leaves few options for rural dwellers. Peel continues:

"...They cover just about everybody that's here. The outlying townships, that's a completely different story. That's part of my vision, has been to cover the more rural areas and not focus so much on town, just because of the options that already exist.”

Which leaves few options for town dwellers. Two options - DSL or cable with no choice of providers - verges on being no options at all.

AT&T has no one to blame but themselves as Dave's idea, the Lowell Fiber Initiative, takes off. He has presented his idea to the City Council and assembled a collection of resources to educate others in the community. Lowell already has its own electric utility, much like Michigan's Sebewaing, that fired up its own gigabit FTTH network late last year.

Michigan is one of the 19 states with restrictions on the books but, in light of the FCC's February ruling striking down restrictions in Tennessee and North Carolina, the future for places like Lowell may be brighter. As long as AT&T continues to offer business as usual, more Daves will continue to build movements like the Lowell Fiber Initiative.

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Ookla finds the third fastest Internet access in the U.S. is located in Longmont, Colorado, reports the Times Call. NextLight, Longmont's gigabit municipal fiber network, is the source of the increase in speeds, driving Longmont's Internet access speeds far beyond any other service in the state.

Ookla clocks average download speed in Longmont as 105 Mbps, which includes all providers in the community. Incumbents Comcast and CenturyLink are dragging down NextLight's average download speed of 221 Mbps. Statewide, Colorado's average is 40 Mbps.

According to the article:

Ookla shows Internet speeds in Longmont shooting up in January and February, when LPC crews began hooking up customers to NextLight in earnest. 

NextLight continues to attract residential and business customers. In February, NextLight announced it would be hiring more install crews to meet the high demand for connections. Places without the speed, affordability, and reliability NextLight can offer will find themselves at a disadvantage as economic development increasingly relies on next-generation networks.

The Times Call spoke with Bret McInnis, vice president for information technology for Circle Graphics. The local business switched from CenturyLink to NextLight because it needed better connectivity. Before taking service from NextLight, their maximum capacity connection was 50 Mbps download or upload and it wasn't enough:

Because the images for the canvases use high-resolution photos, they are sent in large files that can range from 100 to 300 megabits in size. The company prints anywhere from 5,000 to 20,000 canvases a day during the busy holiday season.

"We've got more bandwith," McInnis said, standing in front of the five tall black towers of computing equipment that make up the business's data center. "So the NextLight fiber feeds right into this and we used to see peaks with CenturyLink ... you would see periods when we were bursting at our capacity."

Switching to NextLight, McInnis said, means employees can download and upload the high-resolution images much more quickly.

"Now, we can't really overuse it and you don't see peaks like you used to," McInnis said. "That reduced latency, which means we get the files faster, which means we can print faster and get it to the customer faster. So that's the end result."

Tom Roiniotis, Longmont Power and Communications Manager, notes how the Ookla recognition brings the community one step closer to a  critical goal:

"One of the reasons we're doing this project is to strengthen us from an economic development perspective," Roiniotis said. "There are people who access this (Ookla) information when deciding where to locate." 

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Indiana County, Pennsylvania's County Commission recently voted to use its fiber optic network for telephone service reports the Indiana Gazette. The change will allow the county to save $67,000 over the first five years. Indiana County is located on the west side of the state and is home to approximately 89,000 people.

The upgrade will allow the county to eliminate two-thirds of its phone lines by taking advantage of the network that was installed as part of Indiana County's public safety radio system. Phones in the courthouse, jail, district justices’ offices, a convalescent facility, the Indiana County Airport, the county parks and the departments of Children and Youth Services and Human Services will all be on the new system.

From the Gazette article:

“This is just the beginning of the savings we’ll see from the fiber optic network,” Baker said. Coming soon will be lower costs for county government’s Internet service.

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This week, we are focusing on security concerns for community networks. Community networks tend to be small, with limited staff to keep track of the many challenges of running a network. Our guest this week on Community Broadband Bits is Weston Hecker, Senior Systems Security Analyst and Pen Tester for KLJ.

After defining what penetration testing is, we discuss why small ISPs need to be concerned with security and some of the options available to them.

You can also see Weston talking at DEFCON about burner phones and DDOS attacks.

This is a more technical show than we ordinarily produce. For those who are confused but interested in learning more about security or just the nuts and bolts of how the Internet works, a good weekly show on this topic is Security Now. Look back in the archives for a wealth of relevant topics.

We want your feedback and suggestions for the show - please e-mail us or leave a comment below.

This show is 16 minutes long and can be played below on this page or via iTunes or via the tool of your choice using this feed.

Listen to previous episodes here. You can can download this Mp3 file directly from here.

Thanks to Persson for the music, licensed using Creative Commons. The song is "Blues walk."

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Community leaders from Huntington, West Virginia, are the latest to announce they are determined to bring publicly owned infrastructure to town. The Charleston Daily Mail reported in April that Mayor Steve Williams described fiber as a "game-changer" for the city and is determined to find a way to bring it to Huntington.

From the article:

“This is something we need to have to compete at the level we expect to compete at in the city,” Williams said. “This is necessary for us to have Huntington transformed and frankly, to show that this can transform the region for the next 25 years. We intend to do this. What we have to determine is how do we use this study to define how we can get there. That’s what we’re in the midst of assessing right now.”

Huntington received a grant from the West Virginia Broadband Deployment Council in 2014 that it used to conduct a feasibility study. The study estimated that the cost of a network would be approximately $25 million. The city considers the study a working document and is currently seeking out grant funding to move forward. They aim to bring gigabit Internet access to Huntington for $70 per month for residents and $100 per month for businesses.

Like many other moderately sized communities, Huntington wants to capitalize on the higher quality of life attributed to small town life coupled with a high capacity next-generation network. Huntington's population is around 50,000 but it is also part of the larger Huntington-Charleston metro area of about 365,000.

Williams said the city is looking into the feasibility of forming a public-private partnership to develop the fiber network. Williams said it would be cost-prohibitive for the city to build and manage the network itself, but a public-private partnership would allow the city to retain ownership over the fiber while letting an outside company sell the service itself.

No matter how the city decides to approach building the network, Williams said it will happen.

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On May 5th, Christopher participated in a panel conversation presented by the City of New Haven and the Connecticut Office of Consumer Counsel. Video of the event, Moving Towards A Gigabit State: Planning & Financing Municipal Ultra-High-Speed Internet Fiber Networks Through Public-Private Partnerships, is now available.

You can watch it from the Connecticut Network website. The final panel has, in order of appearance, Bill Vallee, Joanne Hovis, Christopher, Monica Webb, and Jim Baller. It begins around 3:18 and Christopher begins his presentation at 3:36. The entire video is approximately 4 hours, 30 minutes.

The event included a number of experts from the industry. From the event announcement:

A conversation on the “Nuts and Bolts” of Internet Fiber Networks targeting municipal officials and other public officials to provide information for municipalities interested in creating ultra-high-speed networks. The networks would be created via public-private partnerships through Connecticut to enable innovations in areas such as health care, education, business development and jobs creation, and public safety.

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State-by-State Community Network Coverage

Maine

Bangor panel argues state must invest in broadband or fall behind by Nick McCrea, Bangor Daily News