Communities in Kansas and Colorado Look to Build Their Own Public Broadband Internet

The problem companies face when communities lack competition for services like Internet? The community might try to roll their own.

There are laws on the books in twenty states preventing communities from building out their own public high speed and fiber broadband, but communities in Kansas and Colorado are looking to move forward on their own local offerings.

Seven cities and counties in Colorado voted during the last election to exercise an escape clause in their anti-competition legislation. All that was required was allowing a community to take a vote on the matter, and every community that put it up for a vote had it pass by a large margin. Boulder Colorado passed their measure with 84% of the voter turnout supporting it.

While Colorado’s situation is fairly straightforward, the climate in Chanute Kansas is a bit more contentious. AT&T is seeking to block the town from building a gigabit network for the population of just over 9000 residents. Maybe not the best PR move for Big Blue as the fastest service they offer in the area is 6Mbps DSL with a 150GB per month cap, which costs $35 a month for the first six months. Chanute’s proposed pricing would offer up internet speeds 167 times faster for only $40 a month. This would also undercut Google Fiber in Kansas City by around 40%.

We’ve mentioned Chattanooga TN several times in various posts as an example of publicly funded internet working really well for a city, and the Department of Energy is still examining fiber internet communities as the beginning of the country’s next generation power grid. Areas that build out early will likely be valuable participants in managing the future of the nation’s energy.

As cable companies talk about mergers, and competition evaporates for citizens, it’s having the unintended consequence of bolstering discussion of offering Internet as a public utility. The main areas where we’ve seen traditional ISP’s and carriers improve their offerings are in areas where they face an outside threat like Google Fiber. The discussion for a number of areas is moving out of “experiment” and towards actual deployment.

(via Wichita Eagle)