Image
Fast, affordable Internet access for all.
Ruston, Louisiana Gives Up, Will Sell City-Owned Fiber Network
By
on
Ruston, Louisiana officials say they’re throwing in the towel, and will be selling a city-owned fiber network that has existed for the better part of 15 years.
City officials say they finalized the decision at a city council meeting earlier this month, though they’d already sent out a Request for Proposal (RFP) for potential bidders as early as February.
The network was first constructed back in 2010, and consists of over 136 miles of fiber connecting roughly 300 area businesses. The network doesn’t currently service residential customers, though that could change under new ownership.
The city had briefly considered expanding the network in 2018, but scrapped the idea two years later. Ruston Mayor Ronny Walker tells the Lincoln Parish Journal that numerous factors went into the city’s decision, including new broadband construction currently being funded by a historic new wave of federal broadband infrastructure subsidies.
“Six years ago we did a study and thought about getting into the private/home internet service,” Walker said. “We were moving along that track and then four years ago, when the federal government starting putting so much money into broadband across the United States — billions of dollars to the state of Louisiana — that’s when we decided as a staff it was time to exit that business because there were so many other large companies doing that.”
Image
Like countless communities, Ruston sees little meaningful broadband competition. Cable giant Optimum enjoys a monopoly over broadband access across much of the city, with AT&T DSL and fiber scattered across some neighborhoods. This muted competition has resulted in spotty access, slow speeds, high prices, and substandard customer service.
Whereas many U.S. communities saw massive federal subsidies as the perfect opportunity to build or expand public networks that might otherwise be financially untenable, Ruston’s Mayor appears to have headed in the exact opposite direction.
“I am a firm believer that if we can’t be number 1 or number 2 in a business, then we need to get out of it,” Walker declared last February. “Fiber is not our strong suit. We don’t have the (manpower). We depend on contractors. Before the government got into it, we were in pretty good shape. But when the government started throwing out hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars to provide fiber throughout the state, we backed off. It’s a whole different ball game now.”
Walker is referring to the more than $1.3 billion in federal BEAD broadband funding Louisiana is slated to receive sometime in the next year.
Image
There’s no guarantee that money reaches the unserved and underserved locations in Ruston given the lion’s share of it will be given to regional telecom monopolies – many with a history of empty promises when it comes to even broadband deployment. Similarly, there’s no guarantee the Ruston network’s new private owner sees uniform expansion and affordability as priorities.
Other municipalities with similar networks have taken the exact opposite approach. Martinsville, Virginia, for example, saw the flood of federal funding as the perfect opportunity to dramatically expand a fiber network it had under-utilized for decades, and is now working to extend affordable fiber broadband to every last city resident.
Meanwhile, what Ruston’s connectivity future looks like remains decidedly unclear. Walker states that more than 10 companies are interested in buying the city’s underground and fiber optic network, and responses to the RFP are due by April 25.
Inline image of cyclists on N. Vienna St in Ruston courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, CC0 1.0 DEED CC0 1.0 Universal
Inline image of Pat Patterson Park in Ruston courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International
Related Stories
Broadband Champion Jim Baller Presented With Lifetime Achievement Award
James (Jim) Baller’s trailblazing career was honored at the 50th Anniversary Gala of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) in Washington D.C. this week where he was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award.
Cabot, AR Deploys 10 Gbps Capable City-Owned Fiber Network
Construction on a new city-owned fiber network in Cabot, Arkansas will soon bring affordable broadband access to every city resident and business in the state’s “Strawberry Capital.” The network comes courtesy of a partnership with Connect2First, the broadband subsidiary of local power company First Electric Cooperative Corporation, which continues to build on its significant presence across Arkansas.
Anti Muni Broadband Budget Amendment Gets Nixed in New York
Advocates for better Internet access are breathing a sigh of relief in New York as the State Assembly nixed a budget bill amendment that would have undermined the state’s municipal broadband grant program.
Broadband Bills To Enhance Local Autonomy Thwarted By Wisconsin State Senate
In a setback to efforts aimed at enhancing broadband access across Wisconsin, the state Senate this week dealt a blow to three key bills aimed at improving various aspects of broadband provision.
Joplin, Missouri Strikes Partnership With ALLO Fiber To Beef Up Local Broadband Competition
Joplin, Missouri has announced a new broadband public-private partnership (PPP) with ALLO Fiber that should help boost competition and lower rates across the city of 52,000. The partnership poses a particular challenge to regional cable giant CableOne, which currently enjoys a monopoly over broadband access across a whopping 83 percent of the city.
New Resource Alert: Rising Tide of Municipal Broadband Networks Fact Sheet
As the municipal broadband movement continues to gain momentum, here is a new fact sheet that highlights the dramatic surge in the building of publicly-owned, locally controlled high-speed Internet infrastructure. We also unveil a new map of municipal broadband networks across U.S.