Editorial: Scrap state law restricting broadband options - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

A shortsighted state law may block southwest Pennsylvania from effectively using tens — maybe hundreds — of millions of dollars in federal assistance to improve broadband access in underserved areas.

The culprit: State restrictions on municipally owned broadband systems that steer federal investments to private telecom companies, while restricting them for innovative public solutions. The law has no purpose aside from protecting Verizon, Comcast and other conglomerates from competition and the public benefits that derive from it.

Now, about 36,000 homes and 15,000 businesses in the 10-county region — covered by the Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission, the regional infrastructure planning agency — don’t have access to even rudimentary 25 megabit-per-second broadband. That’s barely fast enough to take a video call. Thousands of people are cut off from the modern economy, especially in the age of streaming video and remote work.

Publicly owned and operated internet service, such as found in Chattanooga, Tenn., can be models for reliable, ultra-high-speed, low-cost public broadband. The history of the Chattanooga system goes back nearly a century, to the New Deal’s Tennessee Valley Authority. It demonstrates how bold federal investments can have long-term benefits for a community.

The public TVA project has given eastern Tennessee a legacy of reliable public electricity utilities, including the Electric Power Board in Chattanooga. The EPB started the broadband project in 2010 with $280 million in federal grants and loans. Those investments resulted in a decade-long benefit to the region of nearly $3 billion, reports a 2020 study conducted at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

By 2015, the EPB had raised the internet system’s standard speed to 10 gigabits per second, more than 1,000 times the national average. The economic impact study estimated the project created nearly 10,000 jobs in southeast Tennessee, including a massive Volkswagen production facility.

Nearby Knoxville hesitated to build its own system until it saw Chattanooga’s success. The Knoxville Utilities Board’s broadband network is expected to go live this fall.

Unhappily, such recipes for success can’t happen in Pennsylvania. Here, local governments can set up a municipal system only if a private company hasn’t already done so or wouldn’t do so within 14 months if asked. Pennsylvania is one of 18 states that erects major roadblocks to these public systems

To its credit, the SPC is considering how much it would cost to bring everyone in the region up to 100 mbps. But that’s still 100 times slower than what Chattanooga rolled out in 2015.

Pennsylvania must stop protecting telecom oligarchs and clear the way for federal investments in innovative public uses. Southeast Tennessee has already shown how they can transform a region’s economy.

First Published April 27, 2022, 12:10pm

source: https://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/editorials/2022/04/27/municipal-broadband-chattanooga-pennsylvania/stories/202204260084

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