Municipal Broadband Slower Than Private? I Don't Think So

While I tend to be someone who's cautious in praising municipal broadband as the ultimate answer I can't allow misinformation about it go by without reacting to make sure the truth gets out, especially when it's as fundamentally wrong as this quote from a recent editorial in the Charleston Gazette:

"But commercial providers generally offer more reliable and faster service - few of their subscribers are likely to switch to a slower municipal service to save a couple of bucks."

The reason this statement stood out to me as so blatantly false was I'd recently finished reading this article from Christopher Mitchell's new site MuniNetworks.org in which he lays out how municipal fiber networks in Lafayette, LA and across the multiple cities in Utah involved with the UTOPIA project are delivering citizens not just lower overall costs but also faster speeds and lower prices per Mbps.

Through UTOPIA you can get 100Mbps symmetrical at home. In Lafayette they're offering 50Mbps symmetrical for less than $60 a month.

Now find me a private provider offering similar speeds and prices. You can't as they don't exist.

I should take a step back for a moment and acknowledge the biases of that editorial's author, Frank Rizzo, who's a council-member-at-large for the city of Philadelphia. He watched his city's municipal wireless project crash and burn, soo I can understand why he may think municipal broadband is a bad idea.

But what I take umbrage with is his conflating municipal wireless with municipal fiber. Saying that all municipal services are slower than those provided by private operators is patently false. And in most cases the reason a municipality took up the challenge of laying fiber is because private providers weren't delivering enough bandwidth to support local economic development so the community took their digital future into their own hands.

Also troubling is assuming that because the wireless Philadelphia project failed that means all municipal broadband is doomed to fail rather than acknowledging that the mistakes Philadelphia made were their own fault and due primarily to a fundamentally flawed business model.

I'm all for a robust debate about the merits of public vs. private broadband, but let's make sure we stay true to the facts and don't muck up the issues with untrue statements like the one made in the editorial linked to above.