The fog of telecom

There is a fair amount of disinformation being bandied about on the issue of community-managed telecom infrastructure. Read this article [link no longer available] by the deceptively name "Heartland Institute" for an example of a very one-sided view of community investments in telecom.

Here's another view. The context here is a proposed community telecom project in Illinois, where the incumbent telecom providers have spent millions to try to convince citizens and community leaders that the sky will fall if communities make investments.

Part of the disinformation campaign involves selective reporting. Bristol, Virginia's widely cited fiber to the home project has been misleadingly reported as bleeding red ink, but the way this is done is by looking at only the first two years of the project, where capital costs were correctly projected to be high. By looking at just the first two years, it's easy to show the project is "losing money" and cheating taxpayers. But the real facts are a bit more difficult--as the project moves into year three, Bristol has a big backlog of consumers and businesses clamoring for service, and the project expects to move into the black ahead of schedule.

Another problem with community infrastructure projects is that they fall into several different categories in terms of business models and levels of investment. Some articles that purport to "prove" that community projects are moneylosers by comparing two entirely different business models--one theoretical and one actual. It's very confusing unless you know what is going on.

We just are not far enough along in most real projects to have reliable data, and that's one of the tricks being played--it's entirely too early to tell if most of these community efforts are going to work over the long run or not. But if anecdotal reports from happy customers are any gauge at all, I'm not greatly worried.

And you always have to compare these theoretical doom and gloom stories with the actuality of most rural communities--little or limited DSL service, lack of choice, high prices, poor service, or some mix of all four.

Finally, the biggest trick of all is to take private sector ROI measures and use them as a yardstick for community projects, claiming that if these projects "don't make money," they aren't worth doing. When was the last time any community used ROI to develop support for a community project? The answer is, "Never." Because it just doesn't make sense in the context of "community good," which is why these things get started in the first place.

What's the ROI on a town park? What's the ROI on the community library? What's the ROI on garbage collection? We don't try to measure community services based on return on investment because that's not why we do them in the first place.

Should community telecom infrastructure projects be based on sound business models? Absolutely, and they should not require long term injections of funding from general tax funds. But that's not the same as trying to treat them as a private sector business.

Don't fall for the tricks.

Technology News: