With Google Fiber pausing deployments to consider a pivot to wireless, San Francisco is one of several cities left standing at the altar. The city had been part of an effort by Google Fiber to deploy service to a few key locations where fiber was already deployed. But with Google Fiber apparently now fascinated with next generation wireless technologies like millimeter wave, the city is considering one of the biggest municipal broadband deployments ever conceived.
Like Seattle, San Francisco is tired of broadband being defined as being forced to choose between two companies whose service pricing and quality clearly reflect a disdain for paying customers.
As such, the company is promising to connect every single home and business in the city to fiber optic broadband. A consultant's report (pdf) recently released by the city indicates that the cost of doing so would be somewhere around $1.9 billion. But the cost of that investment would result in numerous, direct benefits to the city, the report concluded.
“The opportunity The City is about to present to the private sector is unprecedented,” reads the 195-page report by Maryland-based consultant Columbia Telecommunications Corporation in partnership with financial advisory firm IMG Rebel. “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.
The effort has moved on to the bidding and planning stages, with several local companies like Monkeybrains vying for the city's attention.
"We recognize that if we win, Monkeybrains customers in San Francisco will be fully consumed by the municipal fiber project and Monkeybrains as you know it will cease to exist,” Monkeybrains founder Rudy Rucker tells the San Francisco Examiner. “Alex and I are thrilled to evolve our operations into a city wide project.”
A decision on who'll win the project is expected on April 30.
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. And incumbent ISPs' recent attacks on net neutrality and privacy have only driven an even stronger interest in community owned and operated broadband networks.