Municipal Broadband

Municipal Broadband is a wide umbrella covering a number of different configurations for internet service provided within a city, county or even a coalition of cities.

Currently, the technology most frequently used to build a municipal network involves fiber optic cable, wireless, or a combination of the two, but supplying broadband via the electrical powerlines themselves is also technologically possible and will likely become common if the significant radio interference issues can be overcome.

Cleary, broadband over powerlines (BPL) would offer significant savings to public utility companies designing their own broadband networks as the infrastructure is already in place. Based upon my own experience using the electrical outlet to connect to the internet in my last apartment (due to lack of a phone jack where I wanted to locate my computer), the homeowner would simply require the proper router and could connect their computer to any electrical outlet located in the home.

In addition to the variety of technological implementations possible, there are a number of ways in which municipalities have chosen to deliver broadband services to their customers. Generally, municipal networks are overseen by the local public utility company and the utility company may offer retail broadband services to its customers directly, or it may lease the fiber at wholesale rates to private providers who then offer it at retail prices.

For example, iProvo, the broadband project under development by the city of Provo, Utah, is being built by the city, but the city will not be offering retail services. Its network will be leased to private companies at wholesale rates.

The deployment by the public utilities board in Coldwater, MI however is a retail deployment, with the utility offering services directly to their customers, with the exception of Voice-over-IP which is offered in partnership with Vonage. The Coldwater , MI utility offers the following services to their customers:

• Cable television services
• Digital cable television services
• HD cable television services
• Dial-up Internet services
• High Speed cable modem Internet services
• Wireless Internet services
• Web Hosting services
• Long Distance telephone services
• VOIP telephone services

A third option that a municipality may consider in developing its broadband strategy is forming a public/private partnership that outsources the infrastructure building to a private company, but so far the major attempts to do this have failed.

Earthlink in particular was pursuing this marketplace aggressively at one point, with major deployments in both Philadelphia and Anaheim. But at this point they have pulled the plug on both cities. In other cities in which Earthlink was involved, they have either handed the wireless network off to other providers or handed it over to the municipality.

Earthlink isn't the only company to stuff things up. Google had also thrown their hat into the muni wifi ring with a bid to provide wireless to San Francisco, but that effort has been abandoned as well.

This article at GovTech talks a bit more about why Earthlink and Google failed, and how smaller municipal efforts are succeeding.

This article was originally written for a course I was taking at UMass/Boston.  If you have great content to share that hasn't been published online elsewhere, you should consider joining Hubpages and sharing it here. Not only will you get some great readers, you can make some money as well.