Municipal Networks

Fifteen Mississippi rural electric cooperatives have won a combined total of $65 million in rural broadband funding through the CARES Act passed earlier in 2020 in response to the COVID-19 crisis. The money came indirectly through the state, which carved out $75 million for rural broadband from a larger pool of funding it received through the act. The rural electric cooperatives must spend the funding they were awarded before the end of the year and must invest an additional $65 million of their own in the broadband projects.

The most likely scenario for success is the addition of broadband service to an existing electric or telephone cooperative’s portfolio. In this case, an entity with experience in running a customer-facing operation and network for decades simply expands its service. The cooperatives are already serving mostly rural customers and do not crowd out for-profit cable and telecom providers. The Federal Communications Commission has recognized this and has explicitly included electric cooperatives in the Connect America Fund II initiative.

Hamilton County Schools (HCS) is joining with EPB of Chattanooga (TN) and other community partners to ensure all students can access the internet for online learning as the COVID-19 crisis continues. Made possible by support from local private and public partners and by having a community-wide fiber optic network in place, HCS EdConnect powered by EPB is a new initiative that will provide internet services to about 28,500 economically challenged students in Hamilton County Schools in the greater Chattanooga area—at no charge to the family.

Advocates for municipal broadband are, if anything, persistent.

In comments submitted to the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee as they develop their party platforms for 2020, New America’s Open Technology Institute (OTI) made recommendations on the following:

A description of five viable models for municipally enabled broadband. Eight percent of US markets are “well served” with broadband are “municipally enabled.” The other 92% of well-served municipalities get broadband from private service providers. Moving forward, however, public and hybrid networks may be a viable alternative for bringing broadband to communities that are not well served, researchers said. The researchers estimate that there are 6,500 such communities nationwide. The five models for municipally enabled broadband:

Big Valley is a living postcard of Pennsylvania. But they had slow, unreliable, and expensive internet. The government couldn’t help. Private suppliers have long said improved speeds were too costly to provide for such a sparsely populated area. So a group of mostly retirees banded together and took a frontier approach to a modern problem. They built their own wireless network, using radio signals instead of expensive cable. “We just wanted better internet service up our valley.

As states are considering whether and how to use federal CARES Act funding to improve Internet access, Idaho is poised to enact counter-productive limits on who can use that money by excluding community-owned solutions. Though many states have been under pressure from big monopoly providers to only fund for-profit business models with broadband subsidies, those voices seem largely absent in this Idaho fight.

During the COVID-19 school building closures, big equity problems around internet access emerged. But one layer of this equity issue went largely unexplored: Some households have access to the Internet, but only at slow speeds that make school tasks like videoconferencing or completing homework assignments next to impossible. That's especially true for families with multiple children, or for parents using the home internet while forced to work remotely during the pandemic.