The expansion of high-speed Internet service is akin to how electric service expanded nationwide nearly a century ago and, like the Tennessee Valley Authority and Rural Electrification Administration, may require government involvement or at least more regulation to ensure it expands to all persons, the author of a new study on fiber argues.
Susan Crawford, author of “Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution – and Why America Might Miss It,” said the major investor-owned incumbent telecommunications carriers are too often sticking with older technologies or business practices and slowing down the growth of fiber technologies employed around the globe. Crawford said the five major U.S. telecom providers – AT&T, Verizon, Spectrum, Comcast and CenturyTel – resist public options much like how investor-owned utilities once fought against public power in delivering electricity.
“TVA came about only because of presidential leadership (by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933) but we don’t yet have that on the national level for fiber,” Crawford said Thursday during a visit in Chattanooga. “Our telephone system was once the envy of the world and reached everyone because the rich areas were allowed to subsidize the poorer, less dense areas. There was a basic fair price for phone service set by the FCC.”
Because phone companies were once required to share their lines with independent service providers, the internet was able to take root first in the United States.
“Now we’ve been leapfrogged by other countries,” she said.
A half dozen countries around the globe, including Japan, Korea and Sweden, have already installed fiber-to-the-home for all persons and China has committed to such connections soon to 80 percent of its population.
In 2004, U.S. telecom companies were largely deregulated and no longer required to provide certain services at regulated rates. The hoped-for competition from deregulation, Crawford said, has instead led to divided markets, monopolies and high prices.
Absent a national effort, cities like Chattanooga through its Electric Power Board have taken the steps to build a fiber-to-home network across its 600-square-mile territory. EPB launched its Fiber communications network a decade ago and now offers the capability of 10G service across its footprint.
“What EPB has done here makes other city leaders shift in their seats and say, “what are we doing?” Crawford said. “That gives mayors and city leaders the political cover to take on the forces that are coming in the other direction that insist this should only be a private venture and available where businesses can make a return on their investment.”
Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke said EPB’s high-speed internet and smart grid technology continues to attract businesses, research and global attention.
“In the 1950s, we built our interstate highways to allow our goods and services to travel at a speed and in a way that people have never connected before, and that’s what fiber does today,” Berke said. “No matter what your business is, you care about having a solid, fast and reliable internet connection.”
Berke said “one strand of fiber can theoretically carry all the data of the world and once you realize that it changes your evaluation of the return on fiber.”
Crawford said existing telecom providers need to stop relying upon their old copper wire networks and the government needs to incentivize the installation of blank fiber that will be overseen by the public and then leased out to private providers.
“If you want this technology as a means of social mobility, you want the infrastructure to touch every home and business,” she said. “Chattanooga is a place that has shown in a nonpartisan way that government can be a force for good to enable the private sector to move ahead and provide this vital service at an attractive price.”
EPB still charges higher rates for broadband service than does Comcast or AT&T, however. But that is due, in part, to the state’s requirement that EPB and other municipal utilities not sell their services to any customers below their actual costs, Crawford said.
“That is why Chattanooga is at once both the poster child for a great network and still a place where there is a significant digital divide,” she said.
Crawford called the state limit on where municipal utilities may offer broadband services in the state “ridiculous” and designed “to hobble the ability of a city to provide for social mobility through communications.” A larger footprint would help municipalities like EPB realize more economies of scale while bringing the Gig services available in Chattanooga to neighboring areas that often lack even basic broadband connections.
“When needed and as needed in an office, a doctor’s office or a classroom with eye contact and no delay, that’s what fiber makes possible and that is not possible with non-fiber technologies,” she said.
Contact Dave Flessner at dflessner@timesfrepress.com or at 757-6340