SCN: NYTimes.com Article: Bypassing the Carriers, a Burg Goes Broadband

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Bypassing the Carriers, a Burg Goes Broadband

April 25, 2002 

By PETER WAYNER


 

CUMBERLAND, Md. -- DURING the Civil War, Cumberland built a
fort on the hill overlooking the center of town as a
bulwark against the Confederate forces just across the
Potomac. Today, the city is trying to use the same high
ground to strategic advantage in a different campaign:
keeping pace with the Internet age. 

After years of waiting for the phone company, Verizon, to
offer high-speed Internet service here, the local
government wants to take on the job. And the hill above
downtown, now the site of Fort Hill High School, has
already proved to be an opportune spot for a crucial
station relaying Internet traffic. 

The quandary facing Cumberland, population 21,000, and
surrounding Allegany County is not unusual in rural
America. Businesses and residents here in western Maryland,
far from any urban center, are so scattered that upgrading
the telephone system's copper wires to offer the high-speed
data service known as D.S.L., or Digital Subscriber Line,
is prohibitively expensive. High-capacity lines like T1's
and DS3's are sometimes available, but at prices steeply
higher than those offered in big cities and technology
corridors. 

Verizon and other phone companies prefer to invest where
population density guarantees a return on that kind of
investment. (One cable company, owned by Charter
Communications, offers high-speed Internet service to homes
in Cumberland and has started taking orders for businesses
but does not serve surrounding areas of the county.) 

As it happens, the foundation is already in place for a
system that may provide the answer. In 1996, four network
administrators from the county government established the
first link in a wireless network that has come to encompass
the schools, the police, the fire department, the libraries
and nonprofit organizations like the Y.M.C.A. Built at an
estimated cost of $320,000, largely through grants, the
network carries traffic to more than 85 buildings and 4,000
individual workstations. Now attention is focused on
extending the network, known as Allconet, to serve homes
and businesses. 

"We're doing such a successful job with the nonprofits,"
said Beth Thomas, one of the network administrators who
organized the effort. "We want to help the businesses that
are already here and use it as a way to attract other
businesses." 

Making the leap from providing services to the government
to providing for everyone is as much a political challenge
as a technical one. The county is, in essence, going into
competition with Verizon, even if the phone company is not
aggressively pursuing the business. "I'm a little surprised
that Verizon hasn't come after us yet," said Jeffrey Blank,
another of the network's organizers. 

That worry is not unfounded. When the city of Bristol, Va.,
grew tired of waiting for fast Internet connections and
rolled out its own wireless broadband service to residents,
the state's telecommunications companies protested and the
Virginia legislature passed a law effectively forbidding
municipalities to provide Internet services. Similar
battles are taking place in several other states. 

Bristol sued the legislature, arguing that the federal
Telecommunications Act of 1996 prevented the states from
banning "any entity" from providing telecommunications
services. Last year the city convinced a federal district
court that it qualified as such an entity and should be
free to offer services. The state is appealing. 

"If local governments are not free to fill some of these
gaps, what we'll see happening is what happened in the
electric power industry," said Jim Baller, a
Washington-based lawyer who represents Bristol as well as
the American Public Power Association, an alliance of more
than 2,000 community-owned utilities. Electrification
"flourished in the major centers," he added, "but it took
government in the most rural areas." 

Link Hoewing, an assistant vice president for Internet
policy at Verizon Communications, declined to discuss
Cumberland's situation in detail but defended his company's
efforts. "About 55 percent of our customers are connected
to a D.S.L.-capable office," he said. "We're trying to ramp
it up and sell it as fast as we can, where it makes
economic sense to do so." 

Phone companies argue that it is unfair for governments to
compete with them. "They clearly have access to government
revenues," Mr. Hoewing said. "We have to go to Wall Street
and ask our investors." 

Casper R. Taylor Jr., Allegany County's representative in
the Maryland legislature, where he is speaker of the House
of Delegates, disagrees. He calls the new wireless network
"salvation." 

Mr. Taylor helped to secure $2 million for improving and
extending the county's wireless network in the next state
budget to make rural townships "viable as economic
communities for the future." 

Mr. Blank, the network administrator, said that the county
would supply another $600,000 and that he expected the
remaining $2.1 million to come from the federal E-Rate
program, which redirects some billing revenue from phone
companies to help wire schools and libraries. 

David Farber, a former chief technologist for the Federal
Communications Commission and professor of computer science
at the University of Pennsylvania, agrees that local
governments will need to take part in extending broadband
availability. "Cities and towns provide highways, sewers
and infrastructure," he said. "In a world where it's pretty
clear that telecommunications companies aren't in any rush
to provide infrastructure, it's rational for the cities to
get into the business." 

The structure of the network in Cumberland may temper
opposition. Mr. Blank said that rather than sell broadband
service directly to homes and businesses, the county
planned to sell some of the wireless network's capacity in
bulk to Internet service providers to resell, much the way
county landfills are made available to private
garbage-hauling services. 

Mr. Blank said the goal was to make the wireless network
and Internet connection available to commercial providers
at 80 percent of what it would cost to establish similar
links through conventional means. That would enable the
companies in turn to offer high-speed service locally at a
low rate, he said. (Residential customers typically pay $50
a month for D.S.L. service.) 

In the end, though, the vital issue is availability. "We
wouldn't be doing this," said Ms. Thomas, the network
administrator, "if they were providing the service in the
first place." 

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/25/technology/circuits/25BROA.html?ex=1020931771&ei=1&en=3a0167bd1eff0cf8



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