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Lancaster, PA Shutters ‘Free’ Muni-Network In Pivot To Shentel Fiber Partnership
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Lancaster, Pennsylvania is in the final steps of shutting down the city’s fledgling municipal broadband network as it pivots to a new public private fiber deployment partnership with Shenandoah Telecommunications Company (Shentel).
Late last year city officials announced they’d selected Shentel with an eye on ensuring uniform broadband availability to the city of 57,000. The city has been in conversations with various Internet service providers (ISPs) since 2015, when the city struck a deal with Reading-based MAW Communications to build a $1.7 million fiber backbone financed by the city's water fund bond.
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MAW helped the city build and launch LanCity Connect, a city-owned municipal broadband network that began signing up customers in the Spring of 2017. But a legal dispute between MAW and PPL Electric Utilities over MAW’s use of PPL utility poles brought progress on the network to a halt, with only roughly 160 subscribers signed up for service.
In 2021 the city took control of the network from MAW, but there’s been little in the way of progress since.
Back in February, the city emailed the network’s subscribers to inform them the service would be shutting down in April.
"With the Shentel agreement now in place, the city will be discontinuing LanCity Connect," Lancaster Mayor Danene Sorace wrote.
"It is no small feat creating a municipal broadband option and this process has certainly been bumpy. We appreciate the opportunity to provide LanCity Connect services and I look forward to expanding municipal broadband citywide."
The transition hasn’t been without its issues. GovTech recently reported that the network’s remaining 136 subscribers hadn’t been billed by the city in the last three years, costing the city somewhere around a quarter million dollars in potential revenue.
“I liked the service, and heaven knows it wasn't costing us anything. I feel this guilty about it," one local told the outlet, holding their thumb and forefinger close together. "But not extremely guilty."
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The city has spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $6 million on construction and consultation fees with very mixed results.
Enter the city’s relatively-new public-private partnership with Shentel, which was selected from five different responses to a 2022 city Request for Proposals (RFP).
Under the partnership Shentel will lease, maintain, and operate existing city-owned fiber, install additional fiber, and ensure the funding design, installation, and maintenance necessary to ensure universal fiber.
Shentel has three years to deliver broadband to every city resident (around 35,000 homes and businesses) – a service that will operate under the GloFiber brand.
Pennsylvania towns and cities are limited in their options by a state law, ghost written and lobbied for by regional telecom giants, that effectively bans muni-broadband network deployments unless those same unpopular giants sanction the efforts.
PA State officials also ensured that the lion’s share of COVID broadband funding has been directed toward regional telecom giants. Charter again hoovered up the lion’s share of $214 million in Pennsylvania state Broadband Infrastructure Program (BIP) funding last May, with cooperatives, smaller ISPs, and community-owned networks left largely in the cold.
Shentel has not responded to requests for comment on the full cost of its Lancaster deployment, which is currently in the engineering and permitting phase. Full construction is slated to begin in the third quarter of this year.
Shentel’s service will offer users symmetrical fiber tiers of 600 Mbps (megabits per second) for $65 a month, 1.2 Gbps (gigabit per second) service for $80 per month, or 2.4 Gbps service for $135 a month. The company has also started offering a 5 Gbps tier for $235 a month in select markets.
Inline image of Moose Lodge courtesy of Moose Lodge, ATTRIBUTION 2.0 GENERIC
Inline image of downtown Lancaster courtesy of Flickr user Joseph, ATTRIBUTION-NONCOMMERCIAL-SHAREALIKE 2.0 GENERIC
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