NCET Biz Tips: What is community broadband?

NCET helps you explore business and technology

Andy Jorgensen

We have long conceded that access to the Internet is absolutely vital for people and organizations to even participate in society at this point. In Nevada, we often describe the dearth of quality, affordable connectivity options as a “rural broadband” issue. As a person that has managed the IT needs of many organizations in the Reno/Sparks/Tahoe region and assisted public school districts around the state in my capacity at the Nevada Department of Education, I can tell you that the challenge is not just a rural one.

What hundreds of communities around the country have done to achieve universal access to low-cost, high-quality broadband is to treat it as they would a utility such as water or sewer access. Think TMWA, but instead of a publicly-owned, not-for-profit organization for providing clean water, it provides internet. Because public utilities have a public board they have to be transparent and responsive to the public and because they don’t have to worry about turning a profit, they can provide the services they are tasked with providing without having to also produce extra revenue for investors or stockholders. Prices can be set closer to the actual cost of providing the service to the community as profits cannot be taken and as a universal service provider they have to serve everybody, sort of like the old phone companies or the U.S. Postal Service.

This can and has been accomplished either by using an existing public telephone utility, as in the case of CC Communications in Fallon, or by creating a new public utility. CC Communications (cccomm.net) is apparently the only county-owned telephone company in the country. It started in 1889 as the county-owned telegraph company and has evolved into a state-of-the-art telecommunications provider that offers fiber broadband to 70% of Churchill County addresses. They have other methods of reaching the remaining 30% of addresses.

Another of the first communities to implement community broadband was Chattanooga, Tennessee. Chattanooga used its municipal phone company to achieve its goal of providing 1 gigabit-per-second fiber-optic internet service in 2010. This made Chattanooga the first city in the United States to be wired by a municipality to provide gigabit internet. Five years later, it began offering 10 gigabit-per-second service. These services are – amazingly – symmetrical, meaning they have the same high-bandwidth in the outbound or upstream direction as downstream, and are able to deliver the advertised rate basically all the time. Businesses in Reno pay a lot for that kind of service that isn’t even offered to residences in most cases. All this and it is affordable too.

In 2022, Chattanooga’s public utility, EPB (epb.com), launched America’s first community-wide 25-gig internet service. Their 1 gigabit by 1 gigabit fiber-optic internet service currently costs about what we pay for a 300 megabit by 10 megabit connection on average. This has helped the post-industrial city attract dozens of tech firms that use the fast and affordable connections for bandwidth-intensive operations such as telemedicine, app development, and 3D-printing. As you might imagine, this has created innumerable business opportunities for its residents and revived its downtown at a time when most such cities have experienced decline.

To learn more about community broadband, check out Community Networks at communitynets.org, a project of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

Andy Jorgensen is a local IT director and NCET’S VP of Creative Services. NCET produces education and networking events to help people explore business and technology.