Seattle leasing dark fiber: a good start, but more needs to be done

Govtech reports that “Seattle is thinking about leasing some of the city’s 500 miles of unused dark fiber to private companies, hoping that ultra-fast broadband connections will result.” (italics are mine). The most important word in that sentence is “hoping”. Why? Because getting each home and business in Seattle to have access to fiber optic broadband connections will take more, much more, than leasing dark fiber to broadband companies.

It is true that a city which leases its dark fiber to service providers for a low fee will lower the cost for these service providers, allowing the latter to offer lower cost higher speed broadband service. However, it does not address the cost of the last mile or literally, the last hundred meters. What is to be done about that? Digging up streets and sidewalks is very expensive, but using the fiber network as backhaul and utilizing wireless as the “last mile” has proven to be successful. Case in point: Webpass in San Francisco.

I had the good fortune of living in a high-rise condominium tower in San Francisco from 2008 to 2011 in one of the buildings served by Webpass. They have a wireless base station at the top of my building which is connected to each of the apartments, and the backhaul is fiber. They use the fiber “drops” around San Francisco to connect our building wirelessly. As a result, I paid US$45 per month for consistently good, fast service (downstream: 35-45 Mbps; upstream: 60-85 Mbps). Webpass serves only buildings — businesses and condominiums — in the SF Bay Area.

What I am trying to say is this: with the huge improvement in wireless technology over the past 5 years, it is really possible now to use a city’s dark fiber to enable high-speed broadband connections similar to the one I had from Webpass, but it requires a population density to make it profitable for an ISP like Webpass. Digging up streets to lay down fiber to the home is nice and preferable but in this economic climate, not the quickest, most efficient way to bring high-speed broadband to each home and business.

I still believe in the wireless model as the cheapest, quickest way to bring broadband. Municipal wireless networks, as I envisioned them to be when I started this site, MuniWireless back in 2003, was supposed to do that using the city’s dark fiber as the low-cost backhaul for the network.

Unfortunately, many cities, including San Francisco and Philadelphia, decided to follow the old “franchise” model, the only one that politicians know well because it comes from the old world of cable franchises, to roll out these networks. Under the franchise model, both cities selected EarthLink and in the end, EarthLink dumped the municipal wireless business because it proved to be too costly, and the return on its investment would have taken years. At the time they made the decision, the iPhone and the iPad, and many other smartphones and tablets, had not yet come on the market. It was too early for a penny-pinching company like EarthLink to envision that future (although one has to give credit to its late CEO, Gary Betty who died much too young at the age of 49 and who saw the future more clearly than anyone else), which most of us in this space, had foreseen so many years ago.

Today, we are at the point where iPhones and iPads are bringing down the quality of cellular networks, the very networks that were supposed to be better (according to the mobile phone carriers useless PR) than WiFi for supporting the heavy data use of people who own smartphones and tablets. There is a huge demand for high speed wireless broadband.

Yet, most municipalities have given up on using their broadband assets, notably dark fiber, or they are proceeding at a snail’s pace in leasing out those assets to wireless providers like Webpass. Most munis have lost not only the vision of the future, but even the vision of the present. And here we are today, paying more than US$50 per month for abominable cellular (voice and data) service from companies like AT&T, and praying that there’s WiFi wherever we’re going to be because only WiFi seems to guarantee the kind of speed and quality we need.

Here’s what cities need to do to address the demand for fast broadband service, not just to smartphones and tablets, but to homes, businesses and government entities:

• Lease out dark fiber NOW to ISPs for a very low fee.
• Encourage wireless providers to use the fiber network and set up wireless connections as the last mile: this means granting wireless ISPs like Webpass rights to put base stations on city-owned buildings for a very low fee or for free.
• Fund wireless last mile connections to low-income neighborhoods, public schools and colleges.
• Set up a citywide WiFi network for the city’s own use following either the Minneapolis model; or the city setting up the network itself and owning the network, and selling excess capacity to other ISPs.

Wireless equipment has come down in price dramatically over the last five years and it has already improved significantly.
The roadblock to all this is the one we have seen for more than 7 years now: the cable and telco incumbents. Each city has to deal with its incumbents and put them in their rightful place. Some cities have balls, others are just doormats.

Which category does your city belong to?