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Why towns have built their own broadband

By Jeffrey R. Lee, Medill News Service

Two years ago Princeton, a town of about 7,500 two hours west of Chicago, was staring at a potentially grim future. One of the community’s largest employers had just moved its manufacturing facilities to Chattanooga, Tenn.

LCN, a division of Ingersoll Rand Co. Ltd., had just hired a new plant manager for its Princeton factory, and he had a wake-up call for the town’s industrial board.

“He said that if Ingersoll Rand was looking to relocate a new facility, Princeton would not be on the list,” recalled Jason Bird, superintendent of the town’s electric and telecommunications utility. The town simply did not have the communications capacity that modern companies need.

That conversation was enough to scare the town council and the mayor into action. Last October, the town started construction of a $400,000, 12-mile fiber optic network, and on Dec. 15, it announced it would take the fiber optic cable to any customer that wanted it.

Carol Wilson: “Munis Hit Back at Heartland”

A Heartland Institute study challenging the financial viability of municipal broadband networks is rife with “mistakes, misinterpretations, unsupported and insupportable claims, irrelevancies, innuendos, key omissions and obvious untruths,” according to Jim Baller of The Baller Herbst Law Group, the attorney for both of the municipal networks profiled in the study.

Lafayette responds to second Heartland Institute paper

In its latest “study” entitled Municipal Broadband: Optimistic Plan, Disappointing Reality (June 20, 2005), the Heartland Institute attempts to achieve two purposes simultaneously: (1) attack the municipal fiber project in Bristol, Virginia, and (2) use its criticism of the Bristol system to undermine the Lafayette fiber project. Heartland’s paper contains so many mistakes, misinterpretations, unsupported and insupportable claims, irrelevancies, innuendos, key omissions, and obvious untruths in Heartland’s latest harangue against municipal broadband that it would take a paper many times the length of this one to respond to them all.

Deceptive Myths About Municipal Broadband

By Jim Baller

In October and November of 1906, when electrification was the must-have new technology of the era, Moody’s Magazine invited the leading advocates and opponents of municipal electric utilities to write chapters for a special issue. The opponents contributed the following chapters: “Municipal Ownership Costly and Dangerous,” “Municipal Ownership a Delusion,” “Municipal Ownership Uneconomic,” “Why Municipal Service is Expensive,” and “Municipal Ownership Always a Failure.”

With the benefit of hindsight, we know that everyone on of these claims was wrong.

Seattle Task Force Report

The Internet has sparked a communications revolution that will accelerate as advanced voice, data and video services emerge. Interactive, high-speed broadband networks with the capacity to deliver next-generation applications will become essential to businesses, schools, health care providers, government and individuals. Such a network is not available to most of Seattle today. If Seattle is to compete in the new world of enhanced communications, it must have an affordable, open, universally available, state-of-the-art broadband network.