How Community-Owned Internet Providers Build Digital Solidarity

EPB — Electric Power Board of Chattanooga — was a publicly owned electric utility with a problem. The Tennessee Valley Authority's grid was aging. Smart grid technology was emerging. EPB wanted to build a fiber optic network primarily to manage its electric grid more efficiently — reducing outages, enabling demand response, integrating renewables.

Once you have the fiber in the ground, the marginal cost of offering internet service over it is small. So EPB did the obvious thing: they offered gigabit fiber-to-the-home to every household in their service area, starting in 2010. At the time, Google Fiber was the only other gigabit service in the country, and it was rolling out in a tiny handful of cities.

The economic returns have been studied. Bento Lobo at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga estimated the network's economic impact at over $2.7 billion in its first decade — jobs created, businesses attracted, outages prevented, productivity gains. The Department of Energy and others have looked at the smart grid side and found significant savings on grid operations alone.

Comcast sued. AT&T lobbied. The State of Tennessee passed a law preventing EPB from expanding its service beyond its original electric footprint, even to neighboring counties that begged to be included. The FCC under Tom Wheeler tried to preempt that state law. A federal court struck down the FCC's preemption. Which means: Chattanooga is allowed to have this, but surrounding rural areas are legally forbidden from getting it from the utility next door that already has the infrastructure.

Read that sentence again. That is not a free market outcome. That is a regulated outcome, in which the regulation is designed specifically to protect the incumbent from effective competition.

The Institute for Local Self-Reliance's Community Broadband Networks project, led for years by Christopher Mitchell, tracks these networks. As of the mid-2020s, there were hundreds of community networks in the U.S., of various types:

Municipal networks. Cities or municipal utilities that own and operate the network. Examples: Chattanooga (EPB), Wilson NC (Greenlight), Lafayette LA (LUS Fiber), Longmont CO (NextLight), Fort Collins (Connexion), Ammon Idaho.

Cooperatives. Member-owned, often built on the bones of old rural telephone or electric coops. RS Fiber (Minnesota), Co-Mo Connect (Missouri), Central Virginia Electric Cooperative, Tombigbee Electric Cooperative (Alabama, building fiber to homes where Comcast never bothered). The coop model in rural broadband is probably the single most underappreciated success story in American infrastructure.

Public-private partnerships. The city builds the network, a private operator runs it, or some variation. Results are mixed — the structure matters a lot.

Nonprofit networks. NYC Mesh, People's Open Network (Oakland), Philly Community Wireless.

Tribal networks. Southern California Tribal Digital Village Network, MuralNet-supported tribal LTE networks, Hopi Telecommunications, various CBRS deployments on tribal land.

Community mesh networks. Detroit Community Technology Project's Equitable Internet Initiative. Red Hook Initiative in Brooklyn (which famously kept the neighborhood connected after Hurricane Sandy took out commercial service). NYC Mesh.

The evidence here is pretty consistent, and it falls out of basic structural differences.

Capital cost. Municipal utilities can borrow at lower rates than private corporations (general obligation or revenue bonds at a few percent). That's a massive advantage in capital-intensive infrastructure.

Return requirements. A publicly owned utility or a cooperative doesn't have to generate returns for outside shareholders. Surplus can go into rate reductions, network upgrades, or community programs.

Time horizon. A city thinks in thirty-year infrastructure horizons. A publicly traded telecom thinks in quarterly earnings horizons. Fiber networks pay back over decades, not quarters.

Customer service. A municipal utility's customers are also its voters. A cooperative's customers are its members. Complaint resolution tends to be structurally different when the customer has a direct governance stake.

Economic leakage. When you pay Comcast, most of that money leaves the community. When you pay a local cooperative or municipal utility, most of it stays local — salaries, local contractors, local supplies. Researchers at ILSR have documented this multiplier effect repeatedly.

The counter-arguments that incumbents make — that municipal networks fail, that taxpayers bear the risk, that government can't run businesses — are worth taking seriously because some municipal networks have in fact struggled financially. Burlington Telecom had serious problems for years before recovering. A few networks have gone bankrupt. The failure rate is not zero.

But the honest comparison is to the performance of the alternative: monopoly cable and telecom service in the same communities. By that comparison, municipal networks have performed well. And the failure cases have been studied — they tend to cluster around specific mistakes (underfunded buildout, over-optimistic take-rate assumptions, weak management) that are addressable, not fundamental.

Roughly 17 states have laws that restrict or prohibit municipal broadband. Some bans are near-total. Others require absurd procedural hurdles — public referendums, limits on service areas, requirements to charge higher rates than the incumbent so as not to "compete unfairly."

These laws didn't write themselves. They're a well-documented product of telecom industry lobbying, often drafted by model legislation organizations like ALEC. Susan Crawford's Captive Audience (2013) is the classic account. Subsequent work by Christopher Mitchell, Harold Feld at Public Knowledge, and others has tracked the ongoing fight.

The strategic logic is clear. The incumbents don't need to beat community networks on service. They just need to prevent them from being tried, because every successful example threatens the narrative that the current model is the only possible one.

Some of these state bans have been repealed or weakened in recent years. Arkansas, Washington state, and a few others have opened up more space for municipal and cooperative networks. The political coalition behind that has been interesting — rural Republicans, urban Democrats, libertarian local-control advocates — because the cause of community self-determination cuts across the usual lines.

The story on tribal lands is its own chapter. For most of the 20th and early 21st century, private telecoms simply wouldn't serve many reservations. The population density is low, the incomes are low, and the federal Universal Service subsidies that in theory should make rural service viable were not calibrated for reservations.

FCC data has long shown tribal lands with connectivity gaps of 30%+ below national averages, with some reservations at under 50% broadband adoption.

The 2.5 GHz spectrum rural tribal priority window (finalized under the FCC in 2019-2020) was a turning point. It allowed federally recognized tribes to apply for spectrum over their lands at no cost, to build their own networks. MuralNet, a nonprofit, helped tribes navigate the application and deployment process. Native American Telecommunications Coalition and other groups advocated and organized.

By the mid-2020s, dozens of tribal nations had acquired spectrum and were in various stages of building networks. Some are partnering with cooperatives or universities. Some are going fully sovereign — tribal government-owned, tribal-staffed. The Mescalero Apache, the Nez Perce, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, and many others have built or are building networks.

This is digital self-determination. It matters far beyond internet access. It's a claim about who decides what infrastructure a sovereign people builds on their own land.

Diana Nucera (Mama Sax) and the Detroit Community Technology Project took a different path. In parts of Detroit where Comcast had effectively written off service, DCTP trained residents — "Digital Stewards" — to build and maintain wireless mesh networks. A single backhaul connection feeds a network of rooftop antennas, which share the signal across blocks.

The technology is imperfect compared to fiber. That's not the interesting part. The interesting part is the model. The Digital Stewards program trains community members in networking, not as a jobs pipeline to a corporate IT career (though that happens too), but as a civic practice. The network is owned by the community. When it breaks, someone local fixes it. The knowledge stays in the neighborhood.

DCTP's Teaching Community Technology Handbook (free, and worth reading) lays out the pedagogy: popular education methods, community consent practices, a conception of technology as something communities make together rather than something done to them.

The Equitable Internet Initiative scaled this work across several Detroit neighborhoods. Similar models — Red Hook Wi-Fi in Brooklyn, People's Open Network in Oakland, various community wireless projects in Mexico and other countries — share the same DNA.

If you're thinking about community broadband in your own community, here's a rough framework.

Layer 1: Understand your local regulatory environment. Is your state one of the ~17 with restrictions? What specifically is allowed? Some states allow cooperative broadband but not municipal. Some allow municipal electric utilities to offer broadband but not other cities. The details matter.

Layer 2: Map existing assets. Is there a municipal electric utility? A rural electric coop? A university with dark fiber? A hospital system with a private network? A mid-mile backbone nearby? Community broadband often starts by stitching together infrastructure that already exists.

Layer 3: Identify the gap. Where is service worst? Most expensive? Most unreliable? Who is being left out? This is where political will gets built.

Layer 4: Choose a model. Municipal, cooperative, nonprofit, public-private partnership, community mesh. Each has different capital, governance, and operational requirements. The right choice depends on local conditions.

Layer 5: Build the political coalition. This is usually the hardest part. It requires rural and urban, left and right, business and labor, churches and schools. Community broadband succeeds when it's not partisan. Incumbents try hard to make it partisan. Don't let them.

Layer 6: Secure capital. Federal programs (BEAD, ReConnect, Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program) can be significant. Revenue bonds. Philanthropic grants. Patient capital from mission-aligned investors.

Layer 7: Build with an eye to governance. Technology is the easy part. Governance — who makes decisions, how conflicts resolve, how service priorities get set — is where most networks live or die.

Exercise 1: Check your monopoly status. Use the FCC broadband map. Look up your address. How many providers actually offer 100/20 Mbps or better? Often the answer is one. Note your prices.

Exercise 2: Find your nearest community network. ILSR maintains maps. Visit one if you can. Talk to the staff. Ask about their operations and their governance.

Exercise 3: Find your state's preemption law. Read it. Note who sponsored it. Note when it passed. Note what industries testified in favor.

Exercise 4: Attend a digital equity meeting. Almost every city now has some kind of digital equity coalition. Show up. Listen. Figure out what's actually missing locally.

Exercise 5: Read the Teaching Community Technology Handbook. It's available free from the Detroit Community Technology Project. Even if you don't build a mesh network, the pedagogy — the idea that technology is a community practice, not a product — changes how you see everything.

We Are Human. In the 21st century, that law runs through the wires. It runs through the question of who owns the infrastructure that carries the voice of a grandmother to her grandson, the homework of a seventh grader, the telemedicine appointment of a diabetic in a rural county, the job application of a person trying to leave poverty.

If those wires are owned by a corporation that answers to shareholders in another state, service decisions are made on a logic that does not include solidarity as a variable. If those wires are owned by the community they serve, solidarity can be a variable. It still has to be fought for. It's not automatic. But it's possible in a way it simply isn't under pure shareholder logic.

The premise under all of this is simple. If every community that wanted to could build its own network, the digital divide would shrink dramatically within a decade. The technology is there. The money is there, more than it has ever been, through federal programs and cooperative lending. What's missing is permission and organized will.

Both are buildable. They start with people deciding that the wires running through their town should belong to the town. That's a small claim. It's also the foundation of every other digital freedom that will matter in the next fifty years.

Look up who owns your internet. Look up who is trying to make sure you can't change that. Then look up the communities that have changed it anyway. The map is bigger than you think, and it's growing.

- Mitchell, C. and colleagues at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. Community Broadband Networks (ongoing project, muninetworks.org). - Crawford, S. Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age (Yale, 2013). - Crawford, S. Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution — and Why America Might Miss It (Yale, 2018). - Lobo, B. "The Economic Impact of EPB Fiber Optics Infrastructure and Smart Grid Investments" (UT Chattanooga, multiple reports). - Detroit Community Technology Project. Teaching Community Technology Handbook (free online). - Nucera, D. and colleagues. Writings and talks on digital stewardship and community technology. - MuralNet reports on tribal spectrum deployment. - FCC Broadband Deployment Report (annual, with tribal connectivity data). - Public Knowledge reports by Harold Feld and colleagues on broadband policy. - Benton Institute for Broadband & Society (ongoing research and commentary). - Community Networks Podcast (ILSR, Christopher Mitchell) — long-running oral history of the movement.