Jamestown Mayor Eddie Sundquist and Entry Point Networks’ Jeff Christensen discuss municipal broadband (April 21, 2022)
Just over a dozen people came out Thursday night to hear about the City of Jamestown’s ability to create municipal broadband.
Mayor Eddie Sundquist said that municipal broadband was something he had been looking at before even elected and with the Pandemic found out from families how important access to the internet was, “In many cases, they had a lot of trouble accessing it. There were issues with providers. And in some cases, families were just sharing cell phones to get onto Zoom. So there were a lot of challenges that we saw along the way. But we saw this as an opportunity to say, ‘How could we as the utility, either the Board of Public Utilities or the city itself, potentially provide an internet service?'”
Consultant Entry Point Networks‘ Jeff Christensen said the company had been working with the city for almost a year. Entry Point Networks is currently working with 35 other cities around the nation on municipal broadband.
Christensen said there are six priorities to solve, “Improve affordability, you know, that’s commonly going to be in the top three. Second, foster competition and choice. Three, improve speed and reliability. Four, local resilience and control, and I’ll talk a little about what that means. I know you know what it means but what does it mean in a network sense. Five, foster economic development and then six, digital divide.”
Christensen said Jamestown is unique in that there are two competing companies for broadband right now with Spectrum and Windstream, whereas cable has 95% of the market share in the rest of the country.
He shared what the average price per subscriber would be if the city created a municipal broadband program without federal or state grants. The breakdown is $18.64 for monthly infrastructure expense, $25.50 for monthly maintenance and operation, and $10.00 for monthly Internet Service Provider (ISP) for a total monthly cost of $54.14.
Sundquist said that total monthly cost could come down if Federal funds like the American Rescue Plan or Federal infrastructure monies were used toward building the project.
Christensen did briefly mention the broadband survey, but only 324 individuals had responded to that, which is not a large enough sample size.
The city is now looking for folks to serve on a Broadband Commission. Sundquist said, “This commission will learn of potential next steps and be the leaders Jamestown needs as we contemplate the next steps towards implementing low cost and high speed broadband in Jamestown.”
More information, including the Broadband Master Plan and the application to be on the commission can be found at www.jamestownfiber.com.
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