Under the terms of the bill, municipalities would be prevented from paying for communication networks with tax or government revenue or from subsidizing subscription prices. The bill also requires that local governments hold public hearings and a special election before becoming a broadband provider.

The special election requirement goes a step further than the North Carolina legislation of the same flavor. Three cities in Georgia, Tifton, Marietta, and Acworth currently provide publically funded broadband networks but, Rogers calls them unsuccessful and the government an unfair competitor to private business. He claims that the bill would “level the playing field.”

“The private sector is handling this exceptionally well,” Rogers said in an Associated Press account. “What they don’t need is for a governmental entity to come in and compete with them where these types of services already exist. We’re not outlawing a local government entity from doing this, but if they’re going to compete, they can play by the same rules and ask the voters if it’s okay before they go out and spend all these dollars.”

Rogers claims are dubious at best. According to the National Broadband Map, Georgia ranks 20th in the nation for broadband access. According to the forward of a report by Rich Calhoun, Program Director of the Georgia Technology Initiative, “As I traveled through the state to talk with leaders in municipalities, counties and community anchor institutions, I found that many places throughout Georgia indicated that they did not have access to affordable or sufficient broadband services. Telecommunications firms who have made significant investments in Georgia indicated that in some areas of the state the return on investment would not qualify for further investment at the present time.”

According to data in a previous CivSource piece on the state of municipal broadband, “just over 50 cities in the US have their own fiber networks and fewer than 100 have cable networks.”

However, incumbent broadband providers have a significant interest in ensuring that they are the only players in the broadband market, despite open unwillingness to build the infrastructure needed to foster a broadband economy in the United States. The requirements of the bill most notably – special elections – will erect high cost barriers to creating municipal broadband networks even for more affluent cities in the state. Ensuring that a market with little to no activity will go uninterrupted by communities attempting to provide needed infrastructure for themselves.

Rogers claims that these requirements only make governments “play by the same rules,” as the private sector. Although we are left to question when was the last time a private sector provider held a special election before it began an initiative or was barred from using or raising capital to start a project.

Public safety and law enforcement officials have been calling for a public safety broadband network for years. Now, they may be closer than ever to having it created. The network has support from the Obama administration and Sens. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), are sponsoring a bill that would get the project off the ground after several roadblocks.

However, Governor’s O’Malley and Mead are raising concerns about the level of involvement from state level officials in the network. State level first responders would be the primary users of the network. In a letter to the Senators sponsoring the bill, the Governors note that the governing body for the network should have the majority of seats filled by state level officials for this reason. That would mean a change to the current language of the bill.

The letter cautions against too much federal power in the bill which would be “a federal intrusion into state and local zoning authority.”

The Governors also want to ensure that any spectrum reallocation or project work is signed off on by state officials so that any existing projects and investments will not be impacted. Reallocating that spectrum to other uses would waste “billions of dollars of taxpayer investments,” the letter said.

South Dakota’s Broadband Initiative, led by the Bureau of Information and Telecommunications (BIT), recently partnered with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) mailed out 6,500 surveys to agricultural producers throughout the state to ask them when and how they use the internet. Agriculture is a core driver of South Dakota’s economy and many organizations are doing millions of dollars of business over dial-up connections, according to a piece in the Tri-State Neighbor.

South Dakota officials hope to provide broadband access points throughout the state in an affordable way for subscribers.

In Alaska, General Communications Inc. is migrating anchor institutions to one of the area’s first terrestrial broadband networks. Previously, access was largely provided through satellites. However, last October the state undertook a massive broadband expansion that laid fiber throughout Alaska’s daunting geographic landscape providing citizens with the first reliable, affordable internet access they’ve had.

By the end of 2012 some 9,000 households in 65 communities will be online throughout Southwest Alaska. More immediately hospitals will reap significant cost savings benefits by being able to send and receive health data online rather than through regular mail.

Last year, Vermont lawmakers passed a $10 million appropriation to facilitate advances in wireless technology that will expand both mobile and broadband access points. The state also received $150 million in stimulus funds for its broadband project. So far over 1,500 miles of fiber has been installed through the project.

Private investors are also contributing to the build-out providing a total capital investment of over $400 million. Additional projects include work on the state’s smart grid system. According to a story in the VTDigger, FairPoint Communication, one of the lead contractors on the expansion has spent $61 million to lay 1,100 miles of fiber and provide 24,000 new DSL broadband connections in the state.

88% of Vermont has reliable mobile services. Service providers have noted that the state’s hilly geography can create challenges for providing a reliable signal. The state is working with providers to overcome this by expanding traditional forms of coverage as well as new forms of signal expansion by utilizing utility poles and other public structures to house signal boosters.

Minnesota Public Radio highlighted this map from the broadband task force report which shows that some areas in the state have already met 2015 goals for broadband access. Still others are using a co-op model to expand access. 57% percent of Minnesota households are meeting the state’s goal for sufficient access to high-speed broadband.

Minnesota received $200 million in federal stimulus money to expand broadband throughout the state, focusing on providing access to anchor institutions in rural areas. Companies involved in the expansion include Paul Bunyan Communications which received a $17 million loan from the US Department of Agriculture to work on the project. Enventis, a subsidiary of HickoryTech, is also working through the Greater Minnesota Broadband Collaborative Project to support statewide access.

Massachusetts is working toward a similar goal and just today chose Lightower Fiber Networks which provides network and bandwith services throughout the northeast. Lightower will connect the MassBroadband 123 network to the major Internet connection point in Boston. The company will also work on providing redundant network capabilities throughout Boston.

Clackamas County has been in negotiations with Oregon City for months over the franchise fees to run broadband through the city. Cities collect franchise fees from utilities wishing to use the cities right of way infrastructure. After the last round of negotiations ended without a deal, county officials threatened to bypass Oregon City completely, leaving its anchor institutions without high-speed access.

According to county officials, the fee is too high to run fiber through the city. City officials argue that if they suspend the franchise fee for this project they’ll face calls to do the same for any other project in the future.

According to a piece in The Oregonian, the city offered to discount the fee 50% bringing the overall bill down to just over $100,000. But that still represents a sizable bill for the county which is already investing over $3 million of its own funds in the project in addition to federal grant awards. The county also argues that the project is meant to be profit-neutral and paying franchise fees provides a profit back to the city.

Oregon’s broadband expansion hasn’t been easy. As CivSource reported earlier this year, the city of Portland recently overhauled its own expansion project after realizing they lacked the capital to complete a more ambitious version agreed to in 2007. The city has been mired in disputes over both the old and new plans and still hasn’t moved the ball forward very far on how to bring down cost and improve access for Portland residents.

According to the terms of broadband funding, Cities and states that have won federal grant money for broadband have to use most of their funds by 2013 or risk losing unspent money.

The Center for Economic Development (CED/CSU, Chico) and the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) have been approved for a broadband project covering 11 of California’s northern counties. The $900,000 award comes in several small grant awards split between the counties.

The funding will be used to identify gaps in the existing broadband infrastructure in each consortium’s region. The project will also make available more robust last-mile service offerings to customers.

Beginning in January 2012, CED/CSU, Chico, will begin work on assembling stakeholders and designing deployment plans. The funding will go for a three year planning period to finalize designs, requirements and get the projects underway.

In Ohio, where work is already underway, contractors are faced with a four to six month delay as suppliers have been unable to fulfill fiber cable orders at a rate that meets current demand. Fiber orders have increased nearly 30% according to local suppliers which is creating a backlog as suppliers scramble to fill orders.

Federal broadband officials claim that the problem is not widespread although CivSource reported earlier this year that West Virginia was also having difficulties sourcing enough fiber.

West Virginia’s broadband plan has been harshly criticized since it was put forward. The state is working with Frontier Communications to lay fiber and provide broadband access to anchor institutions statewide. Anchor institutions are considered to be public schools, libraries, state offices, and hospitals.

As CivSource reported earlier this year, the state originally proposed providing high-speed broadband access to over 1000 of these anchor institutions. However, that plan was revised after officials became aware that several of the sites listed already had high-speed access. This led state officials to ask the federal government if they could submit a new list of sites without access while simultaneously providing new wireless routers to sites that already had access.

West Virginia has until February 2013 to spend their $126.3 million award or they will lose all unspent funds. The newly approved plan sets updated deployment benchmarks to bring the project back on track to spend the award by the deadline. Frontier has also pledged to assign more workers to the project in order to move it along.

WK&T was awarded $123.8 million through the Broadband Initiatives Program of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. WK&T is the largest stimulus-funded project in the country focused on wireline services. The project is focused on fiber expansion throughout the two-state cooperative area.

WK&T plans to offer advanced telecommunications services over fiber to 21,000 homes and businesses across the company’s 9-county service area in west Kentucky and northwest Tennessee. Construction has begun on three of the 22 exchanges within the serving area with completion scheduled within the next three years.

The Gig U. project follows an earlier public-private effort which will bring high-speed broadband to the growing Pioneer Square neighborhood in Seattle. In 2009, the Mayor made a promise to provide broadband access to all of Seattle and the concentration of high-tech jobs in the Pioneer Square neighborhood made this the logical starting place.

Seattle has almost 500 miles of so-called “dark cable,” fiber optic lines already embedded throughout the city but not in use. The city plans to offer private companies leases for this unused fiber to build broadband networks.

The partnership will start by soliciting proposals, for Dec. 2. The proposals will focus on expanding networks in the university district in line with Gig U requirements. Many of the neighborhoods surrounding the university are only wired with copper wire, the city hopes that by making the dark fiber available through these initiatives, the copper wire will be upgraded to extend the broadband network to more parts of the city.