During the 20-year on-again-off-again relationship between Palo Alto and a possible fiber optic municipal network, the people of the community have waited while plans have changed, leadership has shifted, and city staff has researched potential infrastructure plans. For the people of the city, it’s a long time to be patient. In a recent opinion piece, resident Jeff Hoel described his long wait and expressed why his city needs to finally move forward and create a citywide municipal Fiber-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network.

Knows of What He Speaks

As a retired electrical engineer who has intimate knowledge of technology and networking, Jeff writes in his piece that one of the reasons he moved to Palo Alto in 1998 was because the city was considering deploying a community network. At the time, Palo Alto had already invested in dark fiber, which they have used to generate approximately $2.1 million per year through leases. The revenue has been held in a fiber optic fund, which has grown to around $26 million.

Over the years, the city has commissioned studies and community leaders have publicly advocated for an expansion of the network to a citywide utility for residents and businesses. Palo Alto’s residents have supported the idea, but stumbles in securing funding, difficulties locating private sector partners for a P3, and a failed bid to bring Google to town, have all left the city with no fiber optic network.

At a Lancaster City Council meeting on May 14th, community leaders voted unanimously to take a step toward establishing several municipal utilities, including a publicly owned fiber optic network.

Good Experiences with Their Public Utility 

Lancaster Choice Energy (LCE) is the city’s municipal electric utility, but in the future may be one of several publicly owned utilities. LCE has a Community Choice Aggregation (CCA) program, which allows individual users within the community to join together for purchasing power and gives them more control over matters such as the source of their energy. Lancaster wants to become a net-zero city and is exploring a range of approaches to reach that goal.

The community also underwent traffic signal upgrades like many other California communities and has installed additional fiber as the city has started to implement Smart City initiatives. At the city council meeting, City Manager Jason Caudle noted that using the fiber optic assets to develop a community network was a strong possibility.

In an article in the Antelope Valley Press published prior to the meeting, Caudle also noted that they plan other uses for the fiber, “As part of our smart cities effort, we’ve installed fiber-optic networks already throughout our city, and then we’re looking at putting our streetlights into Wi-Fi hotspots as well as 5G networks,” he said.

In his report to the council, Caudle wrote:

The establishment of a municipal utility is the next step in continuing to ensure that citizens and businesses are provided with utility services that meet the current and future needs of the community. As a municipal utility, Lancaster will have the opportunity to utilize advanced technology, provide utility services at rates and charges that are fair and reasonable, provide high quality customer service, and provide alternatives to existing providers of utility services similar to what the City achieved through the development of the City’s CCA.

Local communities continue to search for ways to tackle the digital divide and in San Francisco, the city is making strides by working with a local Internet access company. The City by the Bay and ISP Monkeybrains have adopted a new model to bring high-quality connectivity to residents in public housing. The approach not only creates new opportunities for people who were once denied economic and educational opportunities, but does so in a way that is financially self-sustaining. With modest maintenance and start-up costs, Monkeybrains and San Francisco has found a way to bring the same high-speed Internet access to low-income households at an affordable rate. Read our new report, A Public Housing Digital Inclusion Blueprint: Monkeybrains and San Francisco Deliver a Sustainable Gig, to learn how the partners found a way to shrink the digital divide in public housing facilities.

Download A Public Housing Digital Inclusion Blueprint: Monkeybrains and San Francisco Deliver a Sustainable Gig [pdf], here.

A few national ISPs offer programs for households considered low-income, but those services only offer slow and typically unreliable connections. The program that Monkeybrains and San Francisco has created provides high-speed Internet access to public housing units at no cost to the end user. In some cases, the ISP does receive a monthly payment of $10 per unit from building management. No matter what, each user receives the same level of customer service and support as those who pay standard monthly rates. From the beginning, the goal was to bring the same level of service to subscribers in public housing as Monkeybrains subscribers throughout the city.

In recent years, an increasing number of local communities have started looking into the possibilities of developing broadband infrastructure. One of the reasons they often cite for their investigations is the desire to increase competition for broadband services. In California, public interest groups recently put out the alarm about AB 1366, a bill introduced in February that will strengthen the power of monopolies in the state.

Wrong Direction

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) posted an article about the bill in March, in which they described AB 1366 as a state-level version of “the Federal Communications Commission’s lead to abandon oversight over a highly concentrated, uncompetitive market.”

AB 1366 removes the 2019 sunset from a bill passed last year that prohibits state or local governments from taking any steps to regulate or create standards for VoIP or broadband services (“Internet enabled services”). The ban on state and local “laws, rules, regulations, ordinance, standards, orders or other provisions” will be permanent if AB 1366 passes. California will relinquish oversight of the activities of the major national Internet access companies, such as AT&T and Comcast, putting all trust in these companies and removing local and state authority.

Bad News for New Entrants

If California denies itself and its local governments the ability to make policy changes, it will also prevent cities from taking action to encourage new entrants into the marketplace. Californians will suffer and monopoly providers will gain by removing the power to increase choice.

Earlier this month, Redding City Council decided to take the next step toward building a fiber network in a portion of the Northern California city’s downtown. Council members voted unanimously to move forward with exploration of the proposed pilot project after considering the design and cost assessment presented at the April 2nd council meeting.

City staff have been methodically researching the fiber project since May 2017. The exact model of the network is still up in the air; options include retail services from the city to the general public over the fiber infrastructure, opening up the network to multiple Internet service providers (ISPs) in an open access framework, or partnering with a single private provider. Following the approval from council, the city will now conduct further stakeholder engagement and a thorough risk assessment of the proposed fiber project.

Reading up on Redding

Redding (pop. 91,000) is the county seat of Shasta County in Northern California. Local industries include lumber, retail, and tourism, and the city is home to Mercy Medical Center. The community may already be familiar to some as Redding was impacted last summer’s devastating Carr Fire. Residents in outer neighborhoods and nearby towns had to evacuate to escape the wildfire, which killed eight people and consumed more than 220,000 acres and 1,000 homes.

Last July, Culver City finished deploying their fiber optic backbone which they began developing in 2016. Now, the town of 40,000 people is looking for a firm to handle operation and maintenance, as well as marketing and development of the open access infrastructure, Culver Connect. They’ve issued a Request for Proposals (RFP) and responses are due June 27th.

Read the complete Proposal Instructions for Fiber Network Operations.

Economic Development, Education, Efficiency

Local businesses had expressed a need for better connectivity and in 2013, the city worked with CTC Technology & Energy to develop a preliminary design and business plan. With tech-focused employers, such as Apple and Sony Pictures, Culver City is located in the “heart of Silicon Beach.” Fast, affordable, reliable connectivity is critical to attract similar employers and retain the ones that have found a home in Culver City.

The city also developed the network to provide better connectivity to the Culver City Unified School District, serving approximately 6,500 students. Creating administrative efficiencies by connecting municipal facilities is an added benefit.

The city developed a three-ring, underground network; the interconnected rings ensure redundancy. Culver City leases two connections to carrier hotels One Wilshire in Los Angeles and Equinox in El Segundo. In addition to the existing 21.7-mile backbone, the city is in the process of working through plans to build laterals to multi-tenant commercial properties.

The Open Access Model

Culver City will maintain ownership of the infrastructure and would like to keep the open access model, but will consider other options from respondents. They specify in the RFP that they want to maintain dark fiber to lease to institutions and businesses.

Culver City is open to ideas and wants to hear more about innovative proposals that might be out there.

Culver City

When we interviewed folks from Lit San Leandro and San Leandro Dark Fiber for episode 47 of the Community Broadband Bits podcast, the partnership between the local companies and the city was just getting started. Now the city is ready to expand their fiber optic infrastructure. After considering recommendations offered by a consulting firm on the best approach on building out their network to meet their goals, community leaders adopted a fiber master plan in September.

Read the City of San Leandro Fiber Optic Master Plan here.

City Tubes

Local companies Lit San Leandro and San Leandro Dark Fiber collaborate with the city by using publicly owned conduit. Lit San Leandro owns and operates the switch and routing facilities that light up the fiber owned by San Leandro Dark Fiber. 

The existing network connects more than 3,000 businesses within the 2 million square feet of building space that connect to the network. Schools within the San Leandro School District, nonprofits, churches, and other community anchor institutions all use the fiber network. Municipal facilities also connect to the network.

San Leandro has also made public Wi-Fi available in the downtown core and at city facilities. They’re in the process of expanding the service to several city parks and in more of the downtown.

Over the past five years, San Leandro has experienced rapid growth. The 10 gig fiber network has contributed to the city’s reputation as a tech hub, which has attracted both industry and residents. In order to stay ahead of the curve, community leaders consider it time to expand the network with smart city applications in mind. San Leandro has already implemented some smart city technologies, but with an expanded fiber infrastructure, they will be able to use the technology all over town and continue to boost economic development.