Palo Alto Embraces A Community-Owned Multi-Gigabit Broadband Network After Decades Of Talk

For all of the hype Silicon Valley gets as the birthplace of American technological innovation, the broadband networks in cities like Palo Alto have never kept pace. Like most towns and cities across the U.S., Palo Alto residents have long complained about the slow speeds, high prices, and comically terrible customer service they get from their regional broadband monopolies: Comcast and AT&T.

For twenty years, Palo Alto officials had talked about potentially building a city-owned fiber network with an eye on improving speeds, expanding service, and lowering prices. And after a lot of ups and downs and dead ends, the city is finally moving forward on the plan, which will involve delivering cheap, multi-gigabit fiber access via the city's existing electrical utility:

Palo Alto officials tell ILSR that the project will be spearheaded by the city-utility, and deployed in coordination with a major upgrade of the city's electrical systems. Phase One of the city's planned fiber deployment should begin later this year, delivering fiber access to around 20 percent of the city-or 6,500 homes and businesses.

Phase One will be funded entirely from the utility's existing cash reserves. Profits from that deployment will then be used to expand affordable, multi-gigabit fiber access to all of the city's 63,210 residents.

Anger at America's shitty telecom monopolies long ago birthed a grassroots, movement toward locally-owned and operated broadband networks, which take on a range of forms including city-owned municipal networks, cooperatives, or broadband delivered via the city utility. Over 800 such networks now exist, and contrary to federal narratives, have broad bipartisan support.

The COVID home education and telecommuting boom added fuel to the fire and painfully showcased the downsides of monopolized broadband access. Like when a photo of two kids in Salinas, California forced to huddle in the dirt outside of a Taco Bell just to attend online class went viral.

With federal policymakers in both Congress and the FCC lobbied into a feckless stupor by telecom giants, communities are increasingly taking matters into their own hands, which often means treating affordable broadband like the essential utility it clearly always was. The one bit of federal help they have received has come courtesy of the billions now flowing their direction via the infrastructure bill.

Data consistently shows that community-owned and operated broadband networks provide better, faster, cheaper service. Numerous community-owned ISPs, like Chattanooga's EPB (delivered via the city's electrical utility) have one repeatedly won awards for both speed and popularity. Owned and operated by locals, such networks are generally more directly accountable to locals.

Palo Alto still faces numerous hurdles. To complete the network, they'll need access to many of the utility poles the city co-owns with AT&T, a would-be direct competitor. AT&T has a history of exploiting its control over utility poles to slow down any attempt to disrupt the monopoly status quo (Google Fiber ran into this very problem when they tried to expand fiber into Nashville).

While ISPs (and the consultants, think tankers, and lobbyists paid to love them) like to whine incessantly about how such networks interfere in the operation of the free market," it's important to remember U.S. broadband was never really a free market. It's a government pampered, hugely taxpayer subsidized coagulation of duopolies that long ago gave up on innovation or consumer welfare.

Instead of battling community broadband by offering better, cheaper, more uniformly available broadband, companies like AT&T turned to a corrupt government to protect them. That resulted in 16 states passing laws banning or hamstringing community-owned broadband networks. The GOP even attempted to ban such networks nationwide during a pandemic.

The corruption and market failure have never been particularly subtle.

What Palo Alto and hundreds of other communities are engaged in has been a long time coming. Instead of waiting for regional monopolies to behave, or for federal policymakers to grow a backbone, they've increasingly been taking matters into their own hands. It's a local, grass roots attack of a very broken status quo, and U.S. monopolies have earned every last iota of disruption headed their way.