Tired Of Being Ripped Off By Monopolies, Cleveland Launches Ambitious Plan To Provide Citywide Dirt Cheap Broadband::Cleveland has spent years being dubbed the “worst connected city in the U.S.” thanks to expensive, patchy, and slow broadband. Why Cleveland broadband sucks so badly isn’t really a mystery: consolidated monopoly/duopoly power has resulted in a broken market where local giants like AT&T and Charter don’t have to compete on price, speeds, availability, customer…
Countdown to the lawsuit by AT&T and Charter followed by Republicans trying to ban municipal broadband.
Seriously, something like that is going to happen. Tacoma, a city near Seattle, had their own broadband. The city broke all kinds of laws to give a contract to another provider so they don’t own the service anymore. Seattle was fighting for their own internet at the time and used Tacoma as an example. Guess what happened next.
Since it appears there’s precedent for this falling apart, hopefully Cleveland’s government will have done their research and be prepared, albeit I’m not necessarily optimistic either.
It’s not a precedent, it’s a playbook and telecos have been following it for decades. If you have one of the big telecoms in your city, they will sue to block municipal broadband. These suits win more often than not and even when they lose the rollout is usually delayed long enough as a result that they break even on legal fees.
This is actually Cleveland’s second attempt to expand municipal broadband after their prior effort in 2021 was thwarted when the Ohio state government banned Cleveland and other cities from offering a public option – obviously at the behest of lobbying from ISP special interests. Correction: the broadband provision was struck from the budget bill before it was signed by the governor. It appears that the 2021 effort to build out municipal fiber failed for other unrelated reasons.
This new initiative is actually a bundle of public-private partnerships as opposed to true state-owned infrastructure:
SiFi and CircleC, not the city, will own the finished networks. With little to no taxpayer money being spent, it’s a tradeoff city leaders say they felt made sense.
“They already have a right to use our right of way—we’re not providing any special access to it, the agreement is just us all getting organized for how permitting for such a large scale project will go,” Davis said of the SiFi partnership. “Since the city’s [not] paying for it or putting anything in, it’s not getting an equity stake.”
Similarly, Davis noted that DigitalC will also maintain ownership of their finished wireless network.
“We at the City are not contracting for infrastructure,” Davis noted. “We’re contracting for DigitalC to take 23,500 households–about 50,000 residents–that don’t subscribe to at-home broadband today and get them to become at-home internet subscribers, and provide digital adoption services and training to 50,000 residents. Basically, we’re paying to halve our present unconnected rate of 32 percent.”
NOTE: The original article has a typo where they misquote Davis as saying “Since the city’s paying for it or putting anything in, it’s not getting an equity stake.” This has been corrected in my quoting of the article
I grew up in Cleveland. Family still lives in the area. I am not expecting anything good to actually happen
