Earlier this month,
Multnomah County, Oregon, where Portland is located, announced
that it will adopt a feasibility study to evaluate the prospect of building a
county- and city-wide fiber network. The study is projected to cost $300,000
and early estimations project that the network could cost $500 million to build.
If the network is adopted, it would be
the biggest municipal network in the country.
This week, the
Free State Foundation published a Perspectives
from FSF Scholars titled “Big
City Municipal Broadband: Repackaging Net Neutrality Arguments Won’t Fly,”
which discusses how big cities throughout the country are adopting municipal
broadband projects in the name of net neutrality. While it’s unclear why Multnomah
County is proposing this municipal network, it is the latest example of a big
city considering a municipal broadband project, along with Baltimore, San
Francisco, and Seattle, which we discuss in-depth in the paper.
Of course, before
a city begins building a network, adopting a feasibility study is a necessary
and responsible step for the municipality to weigh the costs and benefits of a potential
network. However, as Ted Bolema and I state in our paper, municipal networks
have a history of financial instability and that likely would continue in
Portland and its surrounding county, where competition already exists.
In Multnomah
County, 83.4%
of residents have access to two of more fixed broadband providers offering
25 Mbps or greater. Therefore, if this county- and city-wide network is
adopted, it will have to compete with incumbent private providers who have a
greater incentive to provide pro-consumer offerings because they cannot subject
taxpayers to the burden on their inefficiencies, while a public provider can.
See our new paper
to learn more about big cities considering municipal broadband projects!
Posts
