Houston, Missouri’s Municipal Fiber Network Revs Up City’s Economic Development Engine With Big City Connectivity

In the Show Me State – cradled in the center of the Ozarks – Houston, Missouri is the biggest small city in Texas County.

And what local officials have shown its 2,100 or so residents over the last four years is that it can build its own modern telecommunication infrastructure to help spark economic development and offer big city Internet connectivity at affordable rates.

It began with a citizen survey in 2019, asking residents if they would be interested in a municipal broadband service, given the inadequate offerings of the big incumbent providers. Since then – not only has the city built an 18-mile fiber ring for an institutional network (I-net) to connect the city’s facilities – it has built a fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network that now covers 95 percent of the 3.6 square-mile county seat.

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“The project started in 2020 and we went live in the spring of 2021,” Randon Brown, Technology Director for the City of Houston Fiber Department, tells ILSR. “Construction of the project has taken approximately four years. (Today) 95 percent of the town (network) is operational and can be serviced.”

The city has spent $3 million of its own money to fund construction of the aerial fiber network, Brown said.

The network passes 1,200 premises with 272 subscribers now getting service from Houston Fiber, “which encompasses a mixture of residential and business customers” – though that number will soon rise to 364 (30 percent take rate) in the near future as more residents and businesses are in the pipeline waiting to be connected, he added.

“Our main network is fully finished. We are now just working on drops and getting customers hooked up as quickly as we can. The demand has been steadily increasing and, at times, we struggle to keep up. It's a good problem to have.”  

Between Rock and a Hard (Competitive) Place

And while the city’s two-man operation is still in its infancy, getting to this point was no small task.  

“The amount of programming and engineering coordination was absolutely staggering. At one point, we were working with nearly 60 different engineers on the programming aspect. I will say that this is not for the faint of heart,” Brown candidly acknowledged.

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“I would highly recommend not trying to do this during a pandemic. The pandemic really slowed us down getting supplies (and) materials. Fortunately, it has gotten a lot better,” he said.  

What has kept the city from reaching 100 percent build-out is being stuck between literal rock and a hard place.

The residential area of Remington Circle/Cleveland Drive "is, unfortunately, on top of solid rock. This makes installation incredibly cost prohibitive due to the need of a boring machine and the requirements for underground vaults to house the dome enclosures,” Brown said.

“We quoted out around $300,000 for this area to finish the build out. However, the Board of Aldermen directed us to price out a wireless solution that may be more financially feasible. (And) since we fund this project with 100 percent local funds, costs do become a concern,” he added, noting how that sliver of the city has 20 addresses that do not yet have service.

Still, he said, business is picking for the first municipally-owned fiber network in Texas County, even in the face of competition with the dominant duopoly of Sparklight (formerly Cable One) and BrightSpeed’s DSL service. (Wave, Whisper, and Sho-Me Technologies also offer city residents fixed wireless service).

Hometown Advantage

Despite the various challenges the city has faced, Houston did have some things working in its favor. Chief among them is the fact that the city owns and operates its own electrical utility. Or as Brown noted, “attaching to poles and having access to the right-of-way makes all the difference.”

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In many, if not most, communities that do not own the utility poles, one often challenging and potentially costly part of network construction is the pole attachment process and the make-ready work that needs to be done for aerial fiber deployments.

While utility pole owners cannot legally prevent Internet service providers (ISPs) from attaching their equipment to the poles, they often slow-walk the process, reluctant to allow a competitor the space necessary on the pole to deploy their own network. In some cases, the cost of those delays can add significant costs to network construction.

Another challenge in building a network is finding the skilled labor needed to do the construction work. But in Houston, Brown said, “we are very fortunate to have highly skilled workers and contractors that work day in and day out on making Houston the very best it can be.”

That has allowed the city to stay lean and nimble in operating its fiber network – with Brown handling the inside plant and administrative duties while the department’s only other technician, Doug Sutton, oversees the outside plant and home installations. Meanwhile, the city relies on an outside contractor (Complete Splicing Solutions) to handle subscriber drops, splicing needs, and to respond to emergencies to ensure the outside plant is working as efficiently and reliably as possible, Brown said.

However, the biggest advantage Houston Fiber has is being first to market in offering fiber service – the gold standard of Internet connectivity. As a matter of physics, fiber offers the fastest download and upload speeds and is widely regarded as the most reliable kind of broadband service when compared to other connectivity technologies (cable, DSL, wireless, or satellite-based Internet service).

‘One of The Best Things To Come in Recent Years’

When superior technology is combined with a focus on affordability – as is the hallmark of municipal broadband projects which treat broadband like a utility and not as a profit-maximizing venture to line shareholder pockets – the service is even more attractive to local residents and businesses often frustrated with the expensive spotty service of the big incumbent providers.

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Houston Fiber subscribers now have a range of service tiers and pricing options from which to choose, ranging from a symmetrical 25 Megabits per second (Mbps) “Bronze” package for $30/month to the “Platinum” symmetrical gig speed package for $90/month.

“Other area providers have definitely taken notice of our efforts. The competition has been cutting prices to match ours and has beefed up their advertising campaigns,” Brown noted, pointing to yet another benefit of bringing choice and competition to a market long-dominated by monopoly providers – lower prices even for those who do not use the municipal network.

Ultimately, having a city-wide fiber network is a vital part of Houston’s economic development vision.

“We have a bit of a mini housing boom going on in the area at the moment. We are hoping that the momentum continues, and that businesses and residents choose Houston as their home,” Brown said.

While the benefits of municipal broadband are clear in Houston, Missouri is one of 16 states with preemption laws on the books designed to protect monopoly incumbents from competition.

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According to the Coalition for Local Internet Choice, which tracks municipal broadband preemption laws across the nation, the Missouri law (Mo. Rev. Stat. § 392.410(7)) outright bars municipalities from providing telecommunication services, though it does allow towns or cities with an existing municipal utility to provide broadband service within their service territory “on a nondiscriminatory, competitively neutral basis, as long as their price cover their costs, including the imputed costs that the municipality would incur if it were a for-profit business.”

Currently, Missouri has a total of eight municipal broadband networks offering fiber-to-the-home service, according to our database of municipal networks.

“Fiber is definitely the future. We are in a lower income area and for the City of Houston to offer the same type of amenities as a larger city, it is truly a blessing for the residents and businesses who otherwise don't have good Internet,” Brown said.

“Fiber Internet," he said, "has been one of the best things to come in recent years.”

Header and inline images courtesy of City of Houston Fiber Department