Tired of the high prices, spotty coverage, and slow speeds of regional monopoly broadband providers, the remote West Texas city of Monahans has spent the last decade taking matters into their own hands.
Now, thanks to hard work, determination, and local philanthropy, the city’s 7,500 residents are headed for the right side of the digital divide.
Carroll Faulkner, who consulted with the city on its project, and Teresa Burnett, executive director of the Monahans Chamber of Commerce, told ILSR the project to bring Monahans into the modern era has been a challenging labor of love.
It has recently culminated in the completion of the first phase of the project, bringing affordable fiber to around 2,000 residents in city 36 miles southwest of Odessa.
“We are very passionate about this project,” Burnett told ILSR. “It's been a lot of ups and downs, and it's been 10 long years.”
The city’s network build is in partnership with Hosted America, which is acting as the first last mile ISP serving residents, and View Capital’s American Fiber Infrastructure Fund, which technically owns the finished network. Hosted America enjoys early exclusive usage of the network, but the duo say the network will ultimately be open access, allowing numerous partners.
Phase one of the network plan was completed roughly a year ago, bringing affordable fiber for the first time ever to around 2,000 locals. The full cost of phase one was expected to be around $4.5 million, said Faulkner, of which around $1 million was funded by the 2020 Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act.
The remainder of the funding was obtained from View Capital and a coalition of philanthropic organizations.
“The Murray Hall Foundation out of Midland-Odessa put a million dollars into this project and the King Foundation put a hundred thousand into it,” Faulkner said. “We also got some assistance from the Stillwater Foundation of Austin.”
Self-Empowerment As The Solution To Monopoly Logjam
Like countless U.S. communities, Monahans sees very little in the way of serious broadband competition, resulting in spotty access, slow speeds, and high prices. AT&T DSL and Optimum cable service inconsistently peppers the city, and while AT&T does offer fiber to some downtown businesses, it’s at prices most local business owners can’t really afford, Faulkner said.
Redundancy has been historically poor, and outages have been common.
“You have outages quite a bit,” he noted. “We just picked up a subscriber last week because when the University of Texas was playing Texas Tech – and this is a big Texas Tech town – the broadband went out in the middle of the softball championship game. That's the kind of thing that happens on a regular basis.”
Frustrations with substandard broadband during the COVID home education boom only motivated the city further, but investment in the rural community was hard to come by. Faulkner and Burnett say they looked for investors from California to London before finally striking a partnership with nearby Dallas-based View Capital.
“We were looking far and wide, trying to find equity partners to come back in and help fund the remaining piece of it, and I'll tell you it is every bit of Shark Tank,” Faulkner joked.
Around 250 local residents have subscribed for service so far. Phase one also allowed the city to connect key anchor institutions, Faulkner stated.
“We designed and built in a metro loop that runs through the town and goes past all the schools, the courthouse, the police department, all the major facilities in town so that we can take a cut on that line anywhere and still get up relatively quickly,” Faulkner said.
Locals in reach of service are being offered three fiber tiers that rival or exceed what’s available in many more populated cities, including a symmetrical 300 megabit per second (Mbps) offering for $60 a month; a symmetrical 500 Mbps offering for $100 a month; and a symmetrical 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) option for $109 a month.
The city is now trying to expand the subscriber base as it examines the finances and logistics needed to expand into phase two, which Faulkner says will likely expand the network to an additional 2,000 locations – depending on funding.
Left High And Dry By BEAD
Like many communities, Monahans was left high and dry by Broadband Equity Access And Deployment (BEAD) restrictions prioritizing purely unserved markets, something determined by notoriously unreliable federal broadband maps that often overstate coverage, often to the direct benefit of regional telecom monopolies looking to downplay competitive gaps.
So while BEAD is promising more than $42.5 billion in broadband grant funding – with Texas originally slated to receive $3.3 billion – the town’s $5 million grant request to fund Phase 2 was rejected.
“Under the current guidelines that have been adopted by the Texas Broadband Development Office (BDO), Ward County is not eligible for a single penny of state or federal funds because the state has determined, based on their criteria, that Ward County is 100 percent covered by reliable, high-speed broadband,” Faulkner recently told the Texas Standard. “It's a big sticking point, and a slap in the face to West Texas right now.”
The city’s efforts to fund access ran into similar logjams with other state and federal programs that insisted Monahans was well-served with next-generation broadband access. The city even got their local representative to support a bill that would have improved the city’s chances of seeing its fiber ambitions funded, but those efforts were shot down by AT&T lobbying.
“We have tried to fight it but we get knocked down every time,” Burnett told ILSR. “It’s a bunch of excuses that just make no sense whatsoever.”
To date the FCC’s purportedly improved broadband map for Monahans still insists the city is awash with broadband options, something contradicted by real world evidence.
“It’s very frustrating because [governments] want to go off of what the providers say, and I've worked hours and hours and hours of going to people and businesses individually in our community, gathering speed test data, getting calls saying that their internet's down and they haven't had internet for 24 hours,” Burnett said. “So we are the actual boots on the ground working on this, and we know without a shadow of a doubt that it's not good.”
In the interim, Faulkner and Burnett are ramping up their marketing efforts to boost subscription rates and working on shoring up funding for phase 2, which they expect could be as much as $7 million.
They’re also planning on opening a downtown innovation center that can help educate locals as to the benefits of broadband-enabled connected home technology from streaming video players to smart-home doorbells.
“This is a world-class Network that we're able to provide to Monahans, Texas and boast about it,” Faulkner says.
“We tell everybody all the time: this is not about Monahans getting to see the rest of the world, but the rest of the world truly getting to see Monehans through this broadband network. It’s been a long-term labor of love.”
Header image of Hosted America ribbon cutting event courtesy of Monahans Chamber of Commerce Facebook page
Inline image of oil rig in Sandhills State Park courtesy of Trevor Huxham on Flickr, Creative Commons, Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic
Inline image of Hosted America event in Monahans courtesy of Monahans Chamber of Commerce Facebook pageI
Inline image of Monahans TX community event at night courtesy of Monahans Chamber of Commerce Facebook page
Inline image of windmill in Monahans Sandhills State Park courtesy of Allen Sheffield on Flickr, Creative Commons, Attribution 2.0 Generic
