In February, Arkansas eased restrictions on municipal broadband. I had a quick look at the text of the bill, and it appears that municipalities must get grant funding as opposed to issuing bonds or using general funds.
A somewhat related development in Arkansas is electric co-ops, which were started to provide electric service to rural areas, starting telecommunications subsidiaries with rather firm plans to build FTTH over their entire service area. Several of these have been started in the last few years. Arkansas could see some remote rural areas without paved roads or public water get symmetrical gigabit internet before many urban centers.
Electrical coops are a good solution and in many cases, there are such organizations other than the incumbents who are better suited than the city to build and run operations. I’ve been in the fiber business for a long time (though never for an incumbent). There have been numerous times in my experience where cities and incumbents have such a poor relationship that managers within the cities start to convince themselves it can’t be that hard - we are just talking a few miles of fiber. And yet for every misinformed city manager who thinks they can do it all, there’s one who seems to be able to make fiber work. I guess if I were at the state level, would I want cities to just run around deploying tax dollars Standing up telco operations when we have generally decided in the US that telecom is a private enterprise? Cities tend to make short term decisions that aren’t always the best - take for example the reluctance of cities to share resources with adjacent cities (fire, police, schools). That said whenever a hole is dug I don’t think it would hurt to drop fiber in it. Having reasonable incentives for civil and private works projects to be dual purpose would help to propagate fiber. In combination with reasonable rules for access and build backs this would generally help the situation.
EDIT: If I'm reading this correctly, then this point is no longer true for CO.
> As of 2018, the state is moving forward with a new bill (HB-1099) that will remove this problem. This bill is expected to pass in the coming months, but is not official at the time of this writing.
I'm in Centennial Colorado - Several years ago we voted to allow commercial companies to lease the city's fiber. As a result, I now have symmetric gigabit fiber from a company named Ting running into the house for around $89 a month.
Also Fort Collins CO - they recently (last year?) passed city approval to roll out municipal broadband. it is actively laying fiber now and expected to be live by start of 2020 or earlier. Gigabit speeds. It would be great if Boulder were next to get this. Comcast fought VERY hard to prevent it...
AFAIK, they're already laying the lines along highway 7. As of last year, I no longer live in the area, but you may be able to find out more through the Estes Park EDC.
I would take this article with a big grain of salt. It uses "26 states" as a headline figure, but seems to categorize any sort of regulation on the process by which municipal entities deploy broadband as an improper "restriction." For example, look at California:
> California state laws do not prohibit municipalities from offering broadband service, but up until to 2018 they did prevent “community service districts” (CSDs) from offering broadband unless there was no private company willing to offer service in the area. CSDs are independent local governments formed by residents of rural and unincorporated areas. CSDs were also forced to lease or sell their broadband infrastructure to any private telecom company that enters the market.
> In 2018, lawmakers passed legislation that removed state restrictions on limiting publicly-owned broadband networks for CSD residents. The new law enables CSDs to create enhanced infrastructure financing districts (EIFDs), which can be used to pay for public broadband infrastructure. The new law also removed the requirement to determine whether a private company would be willing to offer service, and ensures CSDs do not have to lease or sell public broadband infrastructure to private telecom companies that enter into the market.
So prior to 2018, you could build municipal broadband, but you couldn't set up a special taxing district for it, and then they got rid of that restriction in 2018. Should California count in the "26 States?"
The description of some of the other states' restrictions seem copy-and-pasted and do not match the underlying regulations. Look at Wisconsin. The article says that Wisconsin requires municipal broadband providers to include "phantom costs" in their accounting, and prohibits charging less than what incumbents charge.
If you look at the cited section, https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/statutes/statutes/66/IV/042..., the only requirement seems to be that municipalities must hold a public hearing, must perform a cost-benefit analysis, and reimburse the municipal treasury for the preparation of that analysis from from service revenues. And even that requirement is subject to numerous exceptions. For example, a municipality can construct municipal broadband without even a hearing or a cost-benefit analysis where (1) the municipality offers wholesale infrastructure to companies that directly offer service to end users, and (2) there is not two or more competitors in the municipality already.
That's an extremely reasonable set of requirements for municipal broadband, and in fact 66.0422(3m) basically lays out the "municipality builds the pipes, other companies offer service" model that folks on HN love so much. But this article deems that a "bureaucratic barrier to municipal broadband."
The problem with this sort of reporting is that it’s based on an extremely pro-government/anti-private-sector viewpoint. It doesn’t evaluate the rules on their merits, but assumes that every rule that restricts the municipal government and benefits the private sector must be bad, even if it’s otherwise a good idea. We know that’s not true.
State I'd be less surprised at, they've got quite a few large Comcast offices dotted around Seattle and Everett, and one in Vancouver. Very likely "leaned" on them about municipal broadband rules
Bureaucratic Barriers To Municipal Broadband:
Direct Sale Prohibitions On Municipal Broadband: Prohibitive Referendum Requirements On Municipal Broadband: Population Caps On Service Areas For Municipal Broadband Networks: Excessive Taxes On Municipal Broadband Services: Other Tactics Used To Roadblock Municipal Broadband: (this was really annoying to format with HN's terrible formatting rules)