Principles of Community Broadband

  • Universal Access: Every business and home should have the same level and quality of service. This is an economic development imperative as more and more people work and learn from home.
  • Geographic Equality: Every area of the community should have the same level and quality of service.
  • Level Playing Field: Every service provider should be able to play by the same rules. True competition creates more and better kinds of service and lowers the cost of services for all users, including governments and schools.
  • Public/Private Partnerships: Public telecom investments should create private sector business opportunities. We can manage telecom just the way we manage roads, which is a mature and time-tested public/private partnership. Communities build and maintain roads, but private sector businesses are free to use those roads to sell goods and services directly to their customers. We need to build digital road systems.
  • Fiber and Wireless: Wireless is essential for mobile access. Fiber is needed for high bandwidth applications. The good news is any community, even in a rural area, can afford a world class, fully integrated fiber and wireless network that will support business attraction and retention.
  • Community Control: Communities should have control over their economic future. Public development of shared digital roads, managed just as traditional roads are managed, lowers cost for private sector service providers and creates new opportunities for startup companies and incumbent providers that have said they cannot afford to build fiber networks in rural areas.
  • Multi-Service Networks: Multi-service open networks create true competition and lower prices. In a multi-service network, each category of service has multiple service providers offering many different service packages and bundles at a variety of price points. The community digital road system makes this model easy to implement and to manage, encourages innovation in service offerings, and lowers the price of telecom services because all providers share a single high performance digital road system.
  • Symmetric Bandwidth: Upstream and downstream data capacity should be equal. Limits on customers chokes off economic development, entrepreneurial activities, and work from home opportunities.
  • Unlimited Bandwidth: Every home and business should have the capacity to use any service. Bandwidth should be defined in terms of the lower acceptable capacity, not the upper limit on capacity. Limits on network capacity and use simply tell some businesses, "Don't put your business in our community."
  • Time is of the Essence: Communities can't wait any longer. Virtually all businesses, large and small, now use the Internet. Affordable access to telecom services is now a business essential, and many kinds of new job opportunities require broadband.