Why your town can’t build its own fiber network
If you think your cable bill is high, wait a month. Comcast is coming for what’s left in your wallet. The behemoth will again raise prices beyond the rate of inflation, bringing the cost of most customer’s internet access to nearly $80 month. According to published reports, “tens of millions of Xfinity customers will see their bills rise 3.6% nationwide, on average …”
While it’s true that costs to carry various networks have increased, this doesn’t explain Comcast’s surging internet fees, which have more to do with epic salaries doled out to executives, vast lobbying expenditures, and the expense of building two enormous priapic monuments to themselves in Philadelphia.
It’s not just Comcast. All providers share blame in turning what is essentially a public trust into a privately tolled, for-profit highway. Their efforts to block net neutrality legislation make sense in this context, too. But if this makes you mad as hell, you don’t have to take it anymore. There’s a way to get internet access without having to go through corporations – which regard us more as thralls than customers. We could follow the lead of Kutztown, Pennsylvania, or Kentucky or any other state that has built out or allows “municipal fiber.”
Back in 2000, when none of the big corporate Internet Service Providers (ISPs) were willing to bring highspeed internet to their area, Kutztown officials decided to do it themselves, creating a “municipal authority” to build a fiber optic network they call “Home Net.” In so doing, they provided such affordable access that when other providers did eventually come to town, their prices had to be much lower as a result in order to compete. To pay for the infrastructure, the Kutztown authority issued bonds that are paid down by subscription fees, which have saved households hundreds of dollars each year while also greatly benefitting the Kutztown area economy. And with no profit motive built into the Kutztown model, internet access is delivered at just a hair above cost. The small overage is then plowed back into the system in the form of capital improvements and additional buildout as a municipal water or sewer authority would do.
Unfortunately, when it became clear that Kutztown was succeeding at providing affordable internet access to its residents, big ISPs lobbied our General Assembly in
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the early aughts to make it illegal for municipalities to follow Kutztown’s lead. The majority in the Pennsylvania Legislature obliged, giving Big Cable the gift that keeps on giving. While grandfathering Kutztown’s fiber authority, the state passed laws blocking other municipalities from building fiber networks. They even went so far as to prevent Kutztown from getting any federal stimulus money in 2009 even though corporate ISPs themselves were dipping their snouts into that trough.
How could that majority of elected state officials act so contrary to the public interest? Campaign finance reports hold the answer: Telecom industry cash – in other words, part of your cable bill – has stuffed the campaign coffers of many a legislator. Moreover, according to PC newsroom@delcotimes.com
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Magazine, AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Sprint and T-mobile have spent more than
$1.2 billion on lobbying state and federal officials since
1998. Kutztown’s municipal authority, by contrast, has no lobbying expenses, tumescent skyscrapers, or obscene executive salaries to pay. They do, however, pay their employees a living wage – more than you can expect if you’re a rank-and-file worker at Big Telecom.
Pennsylvania is one of only 19 other regressive states preventing towns from building out their own municipal networks. But the practice is gaining momentum in other states where more than 800 communities nationwide are served by either municipal or coop fiber because of the recognition that ratepayers – as with sewer and water
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service – are better served when there is no profit motive.
There is an irony here that Big Telecom would prefer you didn’t grasp. In the ‘60s and
‘70s, taxpayers paid for the research and development of the original internet, which grew out of a project by the Defense Department’s “ARPANET.” When universities continued the research in the ‘70s and
‘80s, they were heavily subsidized with federal tax dollars. Then in 1989 while working at CERN, the taxpayer-funded nuclear research facility in Europe, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. After decades of taxpayers shelling out to develop the internet, for-profit corporations have commandeered our access to it. Now they’re using the profits from your cable bill to prevent your town from building out its own fiber network and to block commonsense regulation of their control of the internet.
In the event voters in Pennsylvania come to their senses next year and restore democracy to Pennsylvania, where the public interest is once again put before corporate profits, this prohibition of municipal fiber networks could be repealed. If municipalities were able to do what Kutztown has done, they wouldn’t just create lower-cost internet access. They could also lower municipal property taxes as well by plowing a bit of the bill into other services. In this way, municipalities would receive funding from all residents, not just property owners.
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