The city of San Francisco is not only building the biggest community broadband network in the nation, but it's promising that the new network will adhere to net neutrality. Driven by consumer annoyance at high prices and limited competition, the city has been exploring the option for a while, a recent consultant's report (pdf) indicating that the city could build an open access (where multiple ISPs come in to compete) citywide fiber network for around $1.9 billion. The city's plan so far is to forge public/private partnerships with interested parties to help build and fund the network.
The network is still in the planning stages, but the city last week
began looking for potential network partners.
The city will then narrow down the top bids to just three potential teams. And it has mandated that any successful bid (or any ISP that utilizes the network) must adhere to net neutrality in the wake of the FCC's rushed repeal of federal rules at incumbent ISP behest.
“The opportunity The City is about to present to the private sector is unprecedented,” reads the 195-page consultant's report by Maryland-based consultant Columbia Telecommunications Corporation. "There has never before existed in any American community an opportunity for a private entity to lease fiber or broadband infrastructure to reach 100 percent of the homes and businesses in the community," it adds.
Harvard Law Professor Susan Crawford over at Wired notes that San Franciso hopes to use the open access model where the city works to build the network, then numerous ISPs and other companies come in later to compete over the top. The FCC's own data (data promptly ignored by the agency over the years) has shown that this approach often results in faster, cheaper service.
"What’s great about this suggestion is that it removes any political argument that the city is somehow undermining the private market for internet access services," Crawford argues. "At the same time, a dark fiber public-private partnership would dramatically lower the cost for the private market to do what it does best: directly serve customers in a competitive environment that, on its own, produces low costs and innovation."
As is often the case, these cities wouldn't be exploring this route if they were happy with existing broadband service. Instead of offering a cheaper, better product, large ISPs like Comcast and AT&T have worked tirelessly to quite literally
write and buy protectionist state law preventing locals from being able to decide on these local infrastructure issues by themselves.