Tag: Wilson Greenlight

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The Industry

Can You Trust Your Small ISP?

FCC Commissioner Michael O’Rielly recently made a speech at the Media Institute “Free Speech America” Gala in which he made some serious allegations against municipal broadband. From that speech:

In addition to creating competitive distortions and misdirecting scarce resources that should go to bringing broadband to the truly unserved areas, municipal broadband networks have engaged in significant First Amendment mischief. As Professor Enrique Armijo of the Elon University School of Law has shown in his research, municipalities such as Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Wilson, North Carolina, have been notorious for their use of speech codes in the terms of service of state-owned networks, prohibiting users from transmitting content that falls into amorphous categories like “hateful” or “threatening.” These content-based restrictions, implicating protected categories of speech, would never pass muster under strict scrutiny. In addition to conditioning network use upon waiver of the user’s First Amendment rights, these terms are practically impossible to interpret objectively, and are inherently up to the whim of a bureaucrat’s discretion. How frightening.

Let me address the three allegations he’s made against municipal broadband:

Municipalities create competitive distortion. The fact is that most US markets have almost no real competition – they instead have weak competition between a cable company and telco. O’Rielly is repeating a familiar talking point of the big ISPs who don’t want any competition. Customers love real competition whether it comes from a municipal provider or from a fiber overbuilder.  Consumer Reports recently listed the Chattanooga municipal ISP cited by O’Rielly as the ISP with the highest customer satisfaction in the country. I think what O’Rielly and the big ISPs call market distortion, consumers would call real competition.

Municipalities misdirect needed investments from unserved areas.. This is a particularly ironic statement. Wilson, Greenlight used those ‘scarce resources’ to build fiber to the nearby tiny unserved town of Pinetops, NC. Anti-municipal legislation in in North Carolina first required that Wilson not bill outside of their city boundaries. That same legislation then forced Wilson to sell or abandon the network when Suddenlink decided by build in the town.

Anybody who knows the industry knows that the big ISPs are not investing a single nickel of their own money in rural broadband. The big ISPs have been willing to spend the FCC’s tax money to implement 10/1 Mbps broadband from the CAF II program, but otherwise they don’t care a whit about the unserved areas of the country. I’m really not sure who Commissioner O’Rielly thinks will invest in rural America if the FCC precludes rural towns, counties and townships from solving their local lack of broadband.

Municipalities restrict First Amendment rights of customers. This allegation is almost too ridiculous to respond to. Take the example of Wilson, North Carolina, who the Commissioner singled out. The wording of the Wilson terms of service are nearly identical to the terms of service from Charter, the largest ISP in the region. I’ve not done the same comparison for Chattanooga, but I’ve done so for around twenty other municipal ISPs and they all typically mimic the terms of service of their commercial competitors.

A have a lot of clients that are municipal fiber providers, fiber overbuilders and small telcos. I can’t think of one example over the last decade when one of my clients unilaterally shut down a customer for things they’ve said on the web. They mimic the terms of service from the big ISPs, because all ISPs are occasionally asked by law enforcement to shut down a user who is harassing somebody or otherwise engaging in nefarious, illegal or other bad practices on the web. The terms of service give the ISPs the cover to disconnect customers under such circumstances.

Commissioner O’Rielly has it backwards and it’s the big ISPs that daily violate the trust of their customers. Small ISPs don’t use deep packet inspection to read emails or messaging. Small ISPs don’t record and then sell or use customer web search history. Small ISPs don’t track what their customers do on the web. Smalll ISPs don’t monetize their customer’s data.

Commissioner O’Rielly ought to talk with some customers of the two ISPs he’s singled out. Those customers will tell them that they trust their local municipal ISP far more than they trust Comcast or Charter or AT&T. The Commissioner’s talking points come straight from the big ISP lobbyists and he further supports his position by citing a discredited whitepaper paid for by the big ISPs. If the Commissioner spent more time outside the Beltway he’d find out that people love and trust their small ISPs – be that a municipality, a fiber overbuilder or a small telco.

Categories
The Industry What Customers Want

A New Vision of Economic Development

 

Photo by Drew C. Wilson of the Wilson Times


I attended a forum in Wilson, North Carolina last week that talked about how fiber is transforming their city. They talked about how they are trying a new model for economic development.

The traditional economic development model concentrated on searching for big piles of jobs. Communities made efforts to attract major employers and worked hard to keep companies from leaving their town. But it’s pretty obvious when looking around rural America that this model stopped working somewhere along the line. I visit far too many communities that have lost big employers and that are not finding anybody to replace them. This is due to some degree to the overall huge decrease in US manufacturing jobs. But it also is due in part to the general decline of businesses located in smaller communities.

Wilson is a community of around 50,000. Historically the city was known as the ‘world’s greatest tobacco market’ in the 19th century and tobacco was huge in the area until a few decades ago. Wilson was also the birthplace to BB&T bank, which is still the largest employer in the city. But like happened with many US cities, Wilson also went through a decline. Some small manufacturers closed and the tobacco business died. In a scene that is familiar across the country the downtown business district dried-up as retail moved to other places.

Wilson started its fiber optic business in 2008 under the tradename of Greenlight. They were one of the first cities in the country to offer gigabit broadband to residents. And that fiber network was the linchpin for the city in developing their new vision of economic development.

The concept behind Wilson’s vision sounds simple. They figure that that the best way to attract jobs to the community is by working to make their community a place where people want to live. They want visitors to the city to like it enough that some of them will want to move there. And they figure that when they reach that goal that businesses will naturally want to locate there. So they are looking to grow their economy by concentrating on and improving the assets they already have.

Of course, this is anything but simple. Many cities have tried this and only a few have found a way to rebound from the decaying downtowns we see all over the country. Wilson is making the turn by concentrating on the downtown area. They lured the Wilson Times, a local daily newspaper, to refurbish an old building and move back into downtown. They raised the money to renovate an old theater to create the Edna Boykin Cultural Center. There is a project to build new housing downtown next to the whirligig park (the picture accompanying this blog). They attracted Peak Demand to make a $2.6 M investment to manufacture electrical components in an old tobacco processing plant. And these investments are bringing back other businesses. There are new restaurants and two brew pubs that have opened in the downtown.

Wilson is using an approach that other cities should consider. They involve all of the stakeholders in the community in the effort to improve quality of life there. That includes working with Barton College, a 1,200-student liberal arts university and nursing school. They challenged the arts community to move and grow downtown and have a thriving art scene. They put an emphasis on buying local, which we all know has a tremendous local economic multiplier effect. The various constituencies in the city meet often to discuss ways to make the city better.

But they credit the fiber network for being the change that started everything. While big companies and big employers are important to every community, Wilson understood that the work-from-home entrepreneur movement is creating a lot of jobs and a lot of wealth. And so they foster innovation in a number of different ways and strive to make small and new businesses successful.

The big shame is that the North Carolina legislature passed a law to prohibit other communities in the state from following the Wilson model. Cities are no longer allowed to become retail ISPs in North Carolina. If they build fiber it has to be operated by somebody else – and we know that is a far harder model to make work. One only has to look at what’s happening in Wilson to understand that fiber is an important component these days for economic vitality. But fiber alone is not a guarantee for economic success. It takes a community-wide effort like the one in Wilson to take advantage of what fiber offers. Wilson still has a way to go, but you can feel the excitement in the community – and that is what makes any city a place where people want to live.

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Current News Regulation - What is it Good For?

The Plight of Pinetops, North Carolina

Most of my readers are probably aware that last year the FCC voted to overturn the restrictions on municipal competition in Tennessee and North Carolina. Specifically, the FCC gave permission to the Electric Power Board of Chattanooga and to the City of Wilson, North Carolina to extend their fiber networks to provide broadband to nearby communities.

But both states appealed the FCC decision and this past August the courts overturned the FCC order in favor of the states. The FCC has decided to not appeal that court decision.

During the time when the FCC order was in effect, the City of Wilson extended their Greenlight fiber network and brought fiber to the tiny town of Pinetops, NC. This is a small town that had a population of 1,374 in the 2010 US Census. When the Courts overturned the FCC rules, Wilson’s City Attorney interpreted the reversal of the FCC ruling to mean that Wilson had no authority to serve broadband in Pinetops.

The local governments of both Wilson and Pinetops have appealed to Governor Pat McCrory to allow the broadband service to continue. The mayor of Pinetops reports that 31% of the households in his community are below the poverty line and that the network had brought the opportunity for the town to do better economically. The town has been hoping to grow by attracting new residents.

In the telecom world we are often faced with similar situations, where the industry will react to a regulatory ruling that might eventually be overturned. We just saw this recently as the FCC took actions related to net neutrality in 2016 at the same time that the net neutrality rules were under appeal. The large incumbent telcos and cable companies routinely appeal decisions they don’t like from the FCC, and it has become somewhat common practice for parties to act as if the new rules are in effect, even during the appeal process.

It seems that Chattanooga took a conservative approach and did not expand their network, waiting for a resolution of the Court appeal. But Wilson expanded their network when the FCC said they had the right to do so, with the uncomfortable result that we now have a  small town that has lost access to fast broadband. Customers have been disconnected as Wilson turned off the network.

One would hope that the powers-to-be can find a way to keep the broadband going in Pinetops. It’s very easy for lawmakers and regulators who live in urban areas with good broadband to fail to understand how hard it is for rural households to live without broadband. It’s particularly cruel to provide broadband to a small town like Pinetops and then withdraw it.

Wilson constructed the network using regulations that were in place at the time of the construction. It’s also true that today, after the appeal the same fiber construction would no longer be allowed.  But common sense would say to grandfather the broadband in Pinetops while restricting Wilson from constructing fiber to any additional communities.

Unfortunately, common sense often doesn’t prevail in these situations. I’m sure that AT&T and Comcast have put pressure on the state to rollback the broadband, even if those companies are not providing a decent alternative in Pinetops. But these big companies have taken the position that all competition is bad and they take extraordinary measures to stop competition when they can. I just hope that somebody in North Carolina uses some common sense and compassion to let the folks in Pinetops keep the broadband they were recently given. To not do so would be inhumane. It would be surreal if the people in Pinetops are denied broadband when the fiber is already on their streets or connected to their homes.

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