Google’s Hometown Of Mountain View, CA Eyes Potential Muni Fiber Build
Home to one of the wealthiest and most successful companies in America, you wouldn’t expect residents of Mountain View, California to find themselves on the wrong side of the digital divide.
Yet the city of nearly 82,000 – frustrated with spotty and expensive service by AT&T and Comcast – is considering a municipal broadband network to deal with the deficiencies of the duopoly.
Last year, Mountain View officials hired the consulting firm, Entrust Solutions, to take a closer look at the city’s broadband availability metrics and device potential options for the city.
The finished report and accompanying technical memorandum note that Comcast enjoys a monopoly over vast swaths of the city, resulting in expensive, slow, and spotty access.
“Although most of the City is considered ‘well-served’ by federal and California state standards, most residents have only a single option for Internet service and are essentially subject to a cable monopoly,” the authors wrote. “When it comes to modern gigabit Internet services, only 42% of the serviceable addresses have fiber access.”
The study similarly found that despite ongoing taxpayer subsidization, AT&T has historically failed to upgrade its older DSL customers to fiber across large swaths of the city.
“AT&T provides legacy copper-based service for most of the city, but that technology is not capable of meeting the State of California’s minimum broadband speeds of 100 Mbps download and 25 Mbps upload,” the consulting firm found.
“And while AT&T also provides fiber-to-the-premises (FTTX) services in limited neighborhoods of the City, this means that much of the City is effectively a Xfinity/Comcast monopoly, leading to an uncompetitive market for City residents seeking broadband service.”
