from the radical-socialism dept

Again in 2008, Chattanooga, Tennessee determined to construct its personal city-owned fiber broadband community on the again of its current electrical utility, EPB. Within the years since, the community has develop into some of the common within the nation, providing inexpensive, 25 gigabits per second fiber access to local residents.

It nearly struggled to be, because of the standard bullshit conduct by regional telecom monopolies like Comcast. Comcast tried repeatedly to sue the network out of existence. As we’ve seen elsewhere, additionally they used co-funded “free market assume tanks,” pretend shopper teams, and for-hire pundits to seed lies within the native populace about how neighborhood broadband was a harmful, inevitable boondoggle.

Spoiler: it didn’t work.

Years later and Chattanooga isn’t simply offering cheap, affordable fiber, it continues to funnel vital monetary advantages again into the neighborhood. A new study by researchers at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga has generated $5.3 billion in web neighborhood advantages for Hamilton County since 2011.

Advantages vary from financial savings on upgraded sensible metropolis meters, native shopper financial savings on broadband entry, free advertising and marketing because of the community’s recognition, improved well being care outcomes, expanded enterprise and distant work alternatives, improved tourism to revitalized elements of town, and direct income from the community itself:

“For the reason that mission was absolutely accomplished in 2011, it has returned greater than six occasions the unique value of the funding,” said Bento Lobo, Ph.D., lead creator and director of the Division of Finance and Economics on the UTC Rollins Faculty of Enterprise – describing Chattanooga’s fiber community as “one among our neighborhood’s most significant and impactful investments.”

Telecom monopolies (and the assorted lecturers, consultants, lobbyists, and assume tankers) spent many years insisting these types of networks can be a socialist nightmare and inevitable boondoggle. They did this, as a result of they know that this kind of method — treating broadband entry as a community-owned utility and public good — is extraordinarily efficient and intensely common.

And whereas telecoms have tried desperately to seed partisan division within the discussions surrounding municipal broadband viability, in actuality they see broad, bipartisan assist throughout the citizens. As a rule, they wind up getting in-built Conservative cities and counties, thanks partially to frustration with Republican insurance policies on telecom (which nearly at all times contain coddling the regional monopoly).

Republicans and their telecom allies (together with pretend “taxpayer safety teams”) will breathlessly insist that is all a harmful waste of taxpayer sources. However when you listen, you’ll discover they by no means have a single dangerous phrase to say concerning the billions taxpayers throw at regional giants like AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon in trade for broadband networks which are at all times, curiously, left half-completed.

Open entry fiber networks come in a variety of flavors, together with immediately municipally owned, an extension of the present metropolis utility, a cooperative, or a public-private partnerships. These artistic, domestically managed options actually do work and are very fashionable; however routinely get derailed as a result of the U.S., when you hadn’t observed, is commonly too corrupt to perform within the public curiosity.

Sixteen states nonetheless have legal guidelines, ghost written by telecom monopoly legal professionals, both banning neighborhood owned networks or limiting how they will fund or the place they will broaden. And on the warmth of COVID lockdowns, when these networks had been showcasing their vital advantages to native communities, Home Republicans responded by trying to ban them country wide.

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