The U.S. government needs to build out fiber throughout the...
The U.S. government needs to build out fiber throughout the public right-of-way corridors just like it once built highways, said Rita Stull, a telecom consultant for municipalities and formerly Cincinnati’s first cable administrator, speaking Monday on a Gigabit Nation live…
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radio show. “We have a mechanism that could serve as a way to start putting municipally owned fiber networks in the right of way,” she said. “And then we need to go one step further and bury everything.” Fiber is often too expensive for private companies to install because it lacks immediately apparent return on investment, she said. Municipalities, contrary to critics who doubt their expertise (CD Dec 11 p7), should play a role in building these networks, which makes sense when considering their already significant relationship to telecom through community anchor institutions, the 911 networks and more, she said. Governments provide a lot of services, and telecom should be no different, she said: “What is it about telecommunications that you can’t handle?” Intimidation about the technology had caused communities to cede certain control in the past, she said. Higher capacity and speeds are needed for the U.S. to stay competitive, she said, pointing to apps developers who can’t test gigabit-speed apps. Google Fiber will give one U.S. city faster broadband speeds, but the nature of the parent company’s competition for where to launch the network created “a looting of public assets as opposed to maximizing for the public interest and for business interest,” she said. Vice President Rick Whitt of Google’s Motorola Mobility cited (CD Oct 1 p8) the openness of Kansas City officials to partnership and active deregulation as leading factors in Google’s choice of the city, where it’s building a network on both the Kansas and Missouri sides of the state border. Municipalities are currently a “built-in captive audience” to incumbent companies that Stull compared to barge and ferry owners of the 19th century who resisted communities’ efforts to build bridges across the Ohio River, set up legal barriers to that potential competition and subsequently hurt the market. “We need to change the paradigm,” she said, suggesting a rallying petition for a federal initiative to establish a network of fiber and electric lines, both of which would be required to sustain a future fiber and smart grid network. She sees the challenge as educating consumers on fiber’s value.