Santa Fe Launches Municipal Broadband Project

Santa Fe, New Mexico is the latest city to support its own municipal broadband infrastructure. The city is launching a million dollar effort to build out its own fiber optic infrastructure with the goal of increasing both broadband access and competition among broadband providers.

Santa Fe has slower broadband than large surrounding cities like Albuquerque, which undermines local economic development, and frustrates residents according to city officials who have recently faced backlash from broadband providers. Incumbent providers in Santa Fe say they may consider litigation and that the project won’t drive up speeds. We’ve seen this movie before in municipalities where officials take action when providers fail to provide adequate services.

CenturyLink and Comcast are the major players in Santa Fe, with CenturyLink owning most of the fiber, so even other internet service providers have to run on CenturyLink’s system. City officials leading the project told the Santa Fe New Mexican that they consider the existing system “unregulated and uncompetitive”. The new fiber optic network would be independent and give those other providers a shot at bringing their service to town without paying CenturyLink a toll.

SanSanta Fe has opted to go with a local provider for the project work – Cyber Mesa — which both CenturyLink and Comcast say is unfair. According to the New MexicanCenturyLink told the city not to waste its money trying to support a local free market during the bid process, and now claims that the bid process wasn’t open enough. We imagine a bill in the New Mexico statehouse to ban municipal networks is forthcoming as the existing playbook would dictate. Watch this space.

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About Mark Milliman

Mark Milliman is a Principal Consultant at Inphotonics Research driving the adoption and assisting local governments to plan, build, operate, and lease access open-access municipal broadband networks. Additionally, he works with entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to increase the value of their intellectual capital through the creation of strategic product plans and execution of innovative marketing strategies. With more than 22 years of experience in the telecommunications industry that began at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Mark has built fiber, cable, and wireless networks around the world to deliver voice, video, and data services. His thorough knowledge of all aspects of service delivery from content creation to the design, operation, and management of the network is utilized by carriers and equipment manufacturers. Mark conceived and developed one of the industry's first multi-service provisioning platform and is multiple patent holder. He is active in the IEEE as a senior member. Mark received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Iowa State University and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.
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