March 8th, 2005
The Broadband wars need recruits
If you lived in Orem, Utah, a town of nearly 100,000 people south of Salt Lake, you’d be able to sign up for 10Mbs symmetric broadband service from a small, local ISP, MSTAR. How did this little ISP pull off this feat? With a lot of help. MSTAR offers the service, but it doesn’t own the infrastructure. The infrastructure is owned by UTOPIA, a consortium of 11 Utah cities and towns that have banded together to offer their citizens better broadband service.
MSTAR isn’t the first provider on the network, which operates as an infrastructure wholesaler (ATT had that distinction), and I’m certain that it won’t be the last. The vision for UTOPIA is not just competition in broadband services (including voice and video), but also new services that simply aren’t possible on networks owned by the service provider. As an example, if you want to start a video-on-demand service in your local community, you’d probably not receive a helping hand from Comcast in getting your business off the ground.
Getting UTOPIA to this point hasn’t been easy. I was first introduced to the idea when I was CIO for Utah. I was an enthusiastic supporter from the start and got the Governor behind it as well. Qwest and Comcast, however, came at UTOPIA hard and the Utah Legislature nearly passed legislation that would have killed it. Fortunately, the bill was amended in a way that saved UTOPIA.
Next, Qwest and Comcast came at the city councils of each town, promising all kinds of upgrades to the networks in their cities, if they’d simply not play. Some cities gave in and some, like Orem, did not.
The latest copy of Wired has an excellent rant by Lessig against one of the arguments that entrenched telecoms use to convince elected officials to stay out of the broadband game: government shouldn’t compete with private industry. It’s a powerful argument and government officials usually fall for it. It takes a lot of talking to get them to see the fallacy in it.
I’ve been a champion of public broadband for four years now. In that time, I’ve had countless discussions with public officials. They are, for the most part, reasonable people trying to make the right decisions. They are not, however, acculturated in the same way that most people reading this are. They do not understand Lessig’s arguments easily. They have a harder time understanding how economic development is tied to things like broadband penetration. It’s almost impossible to get them to see why a symmetric, 10Mbs, open network is fundamentally different than the asymmetric 2Mbs, closed network that Comcast is offering. Some of them, like Mike Leavitt, now Secretary of HHS, and Lewis Billings of Provo, feel it in their gut, but most do not.
For some reason, Utah is a special place when it comes to municipal broadband. In addition, to the UTOPIA project, Spanish Fork, American Fork, and Provo all have municipal networks. Even so, I can tell you that it’s not been easy. Those of us working for municipal networks have had to fight to keep the telecoms from destroying it.
Why do I write about this? Simply to urge you to get in the fight. Start by talking to your city manager or mayor about broadband and see what they’re thinking. Educate them–don’t rant. Help them understand what we understand. Help them see why broadband is important. You won’t get it in one shot–you’ll have to talk to many people over and over–but the benefits in economic development and better communities is worth the effort.
Phil Windley is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Brigham Young University. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
