Don’t Blame Big Cable. It’s Local Governments That Choke Broadband Competition

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Deploying broadband infrastructure isn’t as simple as merely laying wires underground: that’s the easy part. The hard part — and the reason it often doesn’t happen — is the pre-deployment barriers, which local governments and public utilities make unnecessarily expensive and difficult.

Before building out new networks, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) must negotiate with local governments for access to publicly owned “rights of way” so they can place their wires above and below both public and private property. ISPs also need “pole attachment” contracts with public utilities so they can rent space on utility poles for above-ground wires, or in ducts and conduits for wires laid underground.

The problem? Local governments and their public utilities charge ISPs far more than these things actually cost. For example, rights of way and pole attachments fees can double the cost of network construction.

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It also helped that these local governments had less leverage because the states of Kansas, Missouri, and Texas had streamlined video franchising laws so a provider need only get one license for the entire state. “[I]t’s clear that investment flows into areas that are less affected by regulation than areas that are dominated by it,” observed Milo Medin, Google’s Vice President of Access Services, in summarizing the lessons of Google’s Kansas City experience in Congressional testimony.

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Furthermore, by granting open access to their rights-of-way, local governments can drive competition and innovation in broadband infrastructure overall. After Google announced their plans for Austin, AT&T promised to follow suit — but only if they got “the same terms and conditions as Google on issues such as geographic scope of offerings, rights of way, permitting, state licenses and any investment incentives.”

Some called that hypocritical, but the fact remains that we, they, and other broadband providers do need tech-neutral deregulation. Because broadband providers have repeatedly tried to deploy network infrastructure, but gave up when cities and states demanded excessive rights-of-way fees or slowed the approval process to a crawl. Even when ISPs succeeded in building new networks, they were often delayed by lengthy lawsuits.

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