Christopher Mitchell

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ILSR Receives Community Broadband Advocacy Award

on Fri Jan 17, 2014

The Southeast Assocation of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors has announced Christopher Mitchell will receive its 2014 Community Broadband Advocacy Award at its upcoming conference on March 24 and 25 in Raleigh, North Carolina. I am honored to receive this recognition alongside Jim Baller and the Georgia Municipal Association, with whom I have worked on several occasions to further the public interest. I've long wanted to attend the SEATOA conference and hope readers will join me there. SEATOA is a regional chapter of NATOA - the National Association of Telecommuniations Officers and Advisors. I am excited to travel back to North Carolina after several years away from the state, to see how networks like Wilson's Greenlight have progressed and to learn more about efforts to expand universal access to fast, affordable, and reliable Internet connections.

Christopher Mitchell

on Thu Dec 5, 2013

On November 25, the Baltimore Sun ran this opinion piece by me regarding Baltimore's approach to expanding Internet access in the city. Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake recently spoke the plain truth: “You can’t grow jobs with slow Internet.” This simple statement is the best explanation for why Baltimore is examining how it can use existing City assets and smart investments in the near future to expand access to fast, affordable, and reliable Internet access. It is also a slap across Comcast’s face. The big cable and telephone companies have insisted for years that they already deliver the services residents and businesses need. But they also claim to offer reasonable prices that just happen to increase year after year with few customers having other options to choose from. Baltimore’s reality is that Comcast does indeed offer speeds that are faster than many in rural Maryland can access. But they are not even in the same league as cities like Chattanooga, where every address in the community has access to the fastest speeds available anywhere in the nation, and at some of the lowest prices. There, as in hundreds of communities across the country, the local government built its own next-generation network. Whenever a city announces the possibility of investing in a network, the cable industry public relations machine kicks into high gear. They argue that we have a plethora of choices for Internet access. The sleight of hand behind this claim is to include LTE wireless networks as a replacement for cable – something almost no household does because replacing your home wired connection with LTE will break your budget. According to bandwidth-management firm Sandvine, the average household uses more than 50 gigabytes of data each month. Between the data caps and overage fees from AT&T, that will cost over $500/month. Meanwhile, the overwhelming majority of community owned networks are doing exactly what they intended – breaking even financially while providing a valuable public service. Big cable companies argue that these networks have failed if they aren’t making big profits each year, a misunderstanding of public accounting. Community owned networks aim to break even, not make a profit. When Windom, Minnesota, ended a year with a $50,000 deficit from a network that kept many local jobs in the community, few complained.

NATOA Keynote Panel Discusses Role of Local Governments in Improving Internet Access

Christopher Mitchell

on Mon Oct 28, 2013

In September, I joined the keynote lunch panel at the annual NATOA Conference to discuss what local governments can do to improve Internet access. Joanne Hovis moderated a discussion between Rondella Hawkins of City of Austin, Milo Medin of Google, and myself.

I have embedded the video below so it starts with the panel discussion. However, if you go back to the beginning, you will also be able to watch the annual award presentations, including one to Longmont in Colorado, as well as Milo Medin's 10 minute presentation prior to this panel discussion.

We discuss many important issues, particularly the various actions local governments can take to either build their own networks or to make the community more tempting to others who might build a network.

Christopher Mitchell

on Fri Oct 25, 2013

WUNC, a public radio station out of Chapel Hill in North Carolina, covered community owned networks and broadband availability on its recent "State of Things" midday program. I was a guest along with a local resident and a public relations executive from Time Warner Cable to discuss North Carolina's broadband compared to other states and its law that effectively bans local governments from building networks.

The discussion is good, though I certaily could have done a better job. Ultimately I thought the host did a good job of bringing in each guest to make their points, though Time Warner Cable was totally unprepared to talk about how North Carolina can expand access. Instead, they talked about the cable giant's requirements to invest in networks in rural areas.

We are going to follow up on these points but for now wanted to make sure you have a chance to listen to the show. Our coverage of the bill discussed in the radio show is available here.

Christopher Mitchell

on Wed Sep 18, 2013

Chattanooga's EPB Fiber, a municipal FTTH system owned by the city's electric power board, has dramatically lowered its prices for the gigabit connection and increased all Internet speed tiers. The slowest connection you can get from EPB Fiber is 100 Mbps symmetrical - and it comes at the same price that most cable tiers start at for much slower connections - $58/month. Want a gig? That is now $70/month. Here is the announcement:
Video streaming by Ustream The Washington Post covered the story, including several quotes from me.

DePriest tells me that EPB's fiber network is "a great profit center." In the four years the service has been active, the utility company has increased its mid-tier speeds three times — from 15 Mbps to 30 Mbps, from 30 Mbps to 50 Mbps and now from 50 Mbps to 100 Mbps. About 2,500 elite users will enjoy 1-gig speeds by the beginning of October.

Phil Dampier has more coverage at StoptheCap.com, including an analysis of AT&T and Comcast competition.

AT&T charges $65 a month for 24/3Mbps service — its fastest — with a 250GB monthly usage cap, currently not enforced. For $5 more, EPB customers get 1,000/1,000Mbps with no usage limits or overlimit fees.

A recent article in the Chattanoogan noted that Chattanooga had surpassed 50,000 subscribers and was on path to surpass Comcast in subscriber base locally.

Mr. DePriest said Comcast had some 122,000 customers on the EPB grid when EPB launched its rival program. He said Comcast is down to around 75,000 and will likely drop to around 60,000 next year.

Following up on our first "Responding to Crazy Talk" episode last month, we decided to publish a second edition this week. Again, Lisa Gonzalez and I respond to real arguments made by those who oppose community owned Internet networks. Today, we used three arguments from a debate in 2011 that included myself, Jim Baller, Jeff Eisenach, and Rob Atkinson. We chose three arguments from Rob Atkinson for this audio show but strongly recommend watching the entire debate as it examines these issues from more perspectives. We deal with the term "overbuilding" and competition more generally to discuss how these arguments are quite detrimental to the best solutions for expanding access in rural areas. The second argument is the classic one that it is simply harder to build networks in the U.S. because we are such a large, spacious country and that statistics from other countries are misleading merely because they are smaller or more dense. And the final claim is that subscribers are generally happy with what they have and do not need faster connections. Read the transcript here. Let us know if you like this format and what questions we should consider the next time we do it. We want your feedback and suggestions for the show - please e-mail us or leave a comment below. Also, feel free to suggest other guests, topics, or questions you want us to address. This show is 20 minutes long and can be played below on this page or subscribe via iTunes or via the tool of your choice using this feed. Search for us in iTunes and leave a positive comment! Listen to previous episodes here. You can can download this Mp3 file directly from here. Find more episodes in our podcast index. Thanks to Eat at Joe's for the music, licensed using Creative Commons.

By on Thu Jun 27, 2013

Our listening audience hears Chris Mitchell interview people every week for the Broadband Bits Podcast. Now it is time for the interviewer to become the interviewee.

Chris took a few minutes to participate in the June 2013 episode of the Whatcha Workin' On Podcast from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. He told us a little about how the Telecommunications as Commons Initiative got started and what we are working on now. This is a nice opportunity to spend ten minutes looking at the inner workings of ILSR's broadband efforts.

You can listen to Chris and subscribe to the the podcast via iTunes. Each month we talk with a different member of the team to find out what is going on at ILSR.

By on Wed Jun 12, 2013

Klint Finley from Wired.com joined a Media Consortium press call that our own Christopher Mitchell participated in regarding community owned networks, Google Fiber, and concerns about the future of Internet access. He wrote about the event and the promise of municipal networks.

Finley referred readers to us:

But there’s no guarantee that Google Fiber will come to the rest of the United States, and many communities may want to start building an alternative right away. Mitchell said the first step towards building a municipal broadband service in your area is to get educated about what other communities have done. That’s the purpose of the site muninetworks.org, which compiles information about municipal broadband initiatives across the country. The goal is to create a comprehensive resource for community organizers. Users can explore the projects in different states through the Community Network map.

We continue to find more local governments moving forward with their own investments to improve local access, suggesting that many understand the folly of hoping some distant corporation will build the network they need to be successful in the digital economy.