Digital Cities: Dalton, Georgia Case Study

Ray Buzzard, of Dalton Utilities, spoke about the Dalton, Georgia community broadband project. Dalton's community fiber project, only about two years old, has already had very positive economic development effects by keeping hundreds of manufacturing jobs in the community. The high performance, low cost network persuaded some local manufacturers to stay in the community rather than moving elsewhere.

Local government was a key anchor tenant by making an early commitment to use the system.

Dalton adopted a retail business model, in which the utility sells services directly to customers (voice, video, data). They had to do this because they could not attract service providers with the low number of potential subscribers. The project has achieved a 45% take rate in less than two years, and 47% is their break even point--they expect to meet that before the end of 2005.

Some of the advice Buzzard had included:

• Don't spend years getting projects going....it simply gives the incumbents time to affect the market and/or to get legislation enacted to stop you. He recommended moving quickly (their project was up and operating in less than 150 days).
• Customized service beats the incumbents, who often rely on poorly trained staff in far away call centers. Dalton Utilities makes housecalls and will generally do whatever it takes to keep customers happy. This has resulted in excellent word of mouth and customer referrals.
• You have to compete on price, and he recommended having prices below the incumbents. This has worked well as they are about to break even.
• Side services and business opportunities like ad insertion on the television programming side can help cover costs, and the ad insertion lets local businesses reach a wider local audience.