My colleague in Portland, Maine, and I wrote this commentary for Maine's Portland Press Herald. Last January, as the economy spiraled downward, Time Warner did what no other company could have gotten away with under the circumstances: It imposed a price increase of as much as 5.5 percent on its Maine customers. Meanwhile, the state's other major broadband Internet provider, FairPoint, has amassed a stunning track record of mismanagement and abysmal customer service, including leaving many customers without Internet service for weeks. While FairPoint's predecessor, Verizon, was a better-run company, we should not forget that it too gave Maine short shrift by refusing to invest in upgrading its networks throughout much of northern New England. When it comes to large, absentee-owned corporations, profits invariably trump community needs. Combine that with a lack of competition and you get what we now have: slow, over-priced, inadequate and often unreliable broadband service. How can Maine's economy thrive when our basic infrastructure is so poor by global standards? Maine lags many states even as the entire United States falls farther behind other countries. In Sweden and Japan, people pay much less for connections that are many times faster. And they have many providers from which to choose. OTHER OPTIONS Maine ought to do what a growing number of communities across the country are doing: break their dependence on monopoly providers by investing in publicly owned broadband infrastructure. One of the best examples is in Burlington, Vt. Burlington Telecom, a city department, built a universal, next-generation, fully fiber-optic network that offers fast broadband, cable television, and telephone services at extremely competitive rates in Vermont's largest city. While the fiber network itself is publicly owned, competitors are welcome to offer their own Internet, telephone, and cable services on the system giving subscribers a choice of providers. Burlington Telecom makes a good financial sense. Its infrastructure delivers ultra-fast broadband to schools and city buildings at a fraction of the cost of what these agencies would pay to lease services, saving taxpayer money. Subscriber revenues over the next 15 years will pay back the bonds used to build the network.

FairPoint's lobbyists in Maine have gone on the offensive, arguing that another group attempting to get stimulus funds is competing unfairly. FairPoint, you may remember, has already accomplished the improbable: it took over the dilapidated networks in New England from Verizon and made them worse. The charge of unfair competition, even if it were true, would be silly because FairPoint has proven it cannot provide these important services. Karl Bode put Fairpoint in its place:

Even if the company was competing directly with UMS, at least Maine residents could be certain the University will even exist a year from now. But as it stands, Fairpoint isn't competing with the University of Maine. They're competing with a public private partnership of which the University is only a member. Applications for Federal funds are open to public entities and private companies. Given recent history, giving taxpayer dollars to somebody other than the regional dysfunctional incumbent might not be the worst idea in the world.

Bangor Daily News argues that rural Maine cannot afford to fight over who will expand broadband access. Unfortunately, Bangor Daily News' why-can't-we-all-just-get-along approach ignores the very real damage Fairpoint has already done to the state. Their suggestion that these competing networks just "be merged" seems like a call for open access but ignores the need for Fairpoint to maximize profits (right after it gets out of bankruptcy) rather than invest in communities. The larger point is ominous: the idea that large institutions should suffer with whatever crummy service Fairpoint provides (at the high prices they will provide it) in order that Fairpoint can expand its poor DSL service to rural areas, misses the important point that Fairpoint cannot and will not offer the services that Maine needs. As Mayor Joey Durel of Lafayette suggested, maybe Maine should just send its jobs down to Lafayette, where they are building the necessary infrastructure for the future.

Last year, Verizon sold all of its landline assets in New England to a tiny company named Fairpoint. Even as Verizon was starting to wire suburban and urban areas with fiber-to-the-home networks, it continued to underinvest in rural communities, where those lucky enough to have DSL generally paid a lot for slow very slow speeds. Rather than continue ignoring these properties, Verizon sold them to Fairpoint in a deal that some questioned as fraught with problems. Fairpoint has since met expectations: it is woefully unable to provide good service to people living in New England. More recently, Fairpoint is hinting at future bankruptcy

In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company warns that if the offer does not go through, it might not be able to make its interest payments due Oct. 1. In a worst-case scenario, it said, this could lead to "an alternative restructuring plan (that) may include a bankruptcy."

If this were a publicly owned network, it would be championed by cable and phone companies as proof that those networks fail. We are not suggesting the opposite - that this is proof that all private networks in rural areas are doomed to failure, but it does offer evidence that a purely private sector-based model in rural areas is foolhardy. Verizon is now getting rid of more rural assets by selling them to Frontier - a company better poised than Fairpoint to handle them, but also a company known for offering slow DSL speeds with a 5GB cap. Communities that want to keep up with the rest of the world should look to themselves to build the networks they need. The private sector is either unable or unwilling to build the necessary networks to compete in the digital economy.