If you are looking for fast and affordable broadband Internet service, go to Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Or Lafayette, Louisiana.
Or Cedar Falls, Iowa.
Residents and businesses in these and a handful of other cities enjoy Internet speeds that are nearly 100 times faster than the national average. And the cost of getting online is substantially lower than in much of the rest of the country.
Why?
Because these communities didn't simply rely on big cable and telephone companies to develop broadband networks. Citizens and their elected representatives acted to assure that high-speed, high-quality and affordable Internet service would be broadly available. They did so by investing in infrastructure, developing partnerships with national and international innovators and encouraging genuine competition -- as opposed to corporate monopoly.
The digital divide still exists in much of America. Indeed, the United States has fallen behind other countries when it comes to building out the sort of twenty-first-century communications infrastructure that is vital not just to commerce but to democracy itself.
But there are American communities that have taken charge of their digital destiny -- many of the small, some of them rural -- and they have put themselves on the global cutting edge by developing their own responses to the demand for high-speed, high-quality broadband Internet. In many cases, they have developed municipal broadband utilities -- in what The Washington Post refers to as "efforts by cities to build their own alternatives to major Internet providers such as Comcast, Verizon or AT&T -- a public option for Internet access, you could say."
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In Chattanooga, for instance, the Chattanooga's Electric Power Board (EPB), a municipally owned utility, stepped up in 2007 with a 10-year plan to develop a fiber network that will serve all citizens and businesses on the diverse Tennessee city. In 2010, the EPB began developing the first one-gigabit-per-second (Gbps) service in the United States. That municipal investment has proven to be massively successful not just for citizens and consumers but for the city's economy.
"EPB's investments are reshaping Chattanooga's economic landscape," according to a new report released Tuesday by the by the National Economic Council and Council of Economic Advisers. "The gigabit broadband service has helped the City attract a new community of computer engineers, tech entrepreneurs and investors. For example, local entrepreneurs have organized Lamp Post, a venture incubator that provides capital and mentorship to startups. Lamp Post now has over 150 employees in a 31,000 square foot office space in downtown Chattanooga. CO.LAB, a local nonprofit organization, provides shared working space, access to investor networks and hosts the annual summer GITANK program, a 14-week business accelerator. The investment community has responded in kind. Since 2009, Chattanooga has gone from close to zero venture capital to at least five organized funds with investable capital of over $50 million."
Other communities have done the same.
Everyone's happy, except the telecommunications conglomerates that have failed to invest in infrastructure and embrace innovation. Frightened by the prospect of real competition, they have sought to lock in monopolies -- and slow, costly Internet service -- by lobbying states to limit the ability of local officials and municipal utilities to provide state-of-the-art service. Nudged along by corporate lobbyists, legislatures in 19 states have bent to pressure from the telecommunications monopolies and enacted laws that limit options for local innovation and investment, as well as honest competition. "The industry's monopoly minded efforts to regulate away competition are part of a long history of abusive policies that have left too many Americans stranded on the wrong side of the digital divide," explains Craig Aaron, president of the media reform group Free Press.
Cities across the country are pushing back against the special interests. Chattanooga and another city that has been in the forefront of municipal innovation -- Wilson, North Carolina -- have asked the Federal Communications Commission to prevent states from enacting laws that serve big cable interests but that harm consumers and communities. Prodded by tech-savvy mayors such as Madison, Wisconsin's Paul Soglin and Tucson, Arizona's Jonathan Rothschild, the US Conference of Mayors has weighed in with a resolution focusing on Internet access issues. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio says that "Universal and affordable broadband access, and the free flow of information, is one critical area where we as mayors must focus in an effort to promote equality and close the opportunity gap."
Responding to the calls, FCC chairman Tom Wheeler recently recognized that "If the people, acting through their elected local governments, want to pursue competitive community broadband, they shouldn't be stopped by state laws promoted by cable and telephone companies that don't want that competition." A vote on the petitions from Chattanooga and Wilson is expected in late February.
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