Editorial: When Internet rivals compete, consumers win

You have to love competition, even when governments and voters – rather than market-chasing companies – are the instigators.

Look no farther than what’s been happening with high-speed Internet service.

Four years ago, the city of Longmont and its voters opted to move forward with a city-owned broadband offering They were intent on having the kind of world-class high-speed Internet only available in much larger, or much newer communities.

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Since then, Fort Collins, Boulder, Loveland and Estes Park have launched preliminary studies of similar initiatives, all with the same goal: to provide high-speed Internet to homes and businesses that haven’t been served by commercial carriers such as CenturyLink and Comcast.

Just one year into its deployment, Longmont’s NextLight has been dubbed one of the fastest Internet systems in the nation, and 45 percent of people approached to sign up do so.

Founding customers of the system get the service for an astonishing $50 a month, thanks to the city’s efforts.

None of the cities has gone into this without thoroughly considering whether the private sector could do it better, faster and cheaper. Their conclusion has been that the private sector cannot, in part because the returns don’t justify the investment.

But the landscape is changing rapidly. In the span of just a few days this month, CenturyLink and Comcast said they would begin offering high-speed Internet in places it hadn’t been available before, to homes and businesses.

Cities, as reported in our cover story by Joshua Lindenstein, aren’t backing down from their plans to explore and potentially ask voters for approval to build local, high-speed networks, in part because it’s not clear how much the commercial carriers plan to charge business owners and residents.

That detail is among the most important. If commercial carriers plan to offer high-speed services at prices that few can afford, it’s little different than offering no services at all.

Cities such as Fort Collins maintain that they won’t act imprudently, but they plan to continue their study efforts while they wait for details on actual pricing to come out.

Elsewhere city officials say they believe their government efforts are serving as important catalysts for the private sector to accelerate its own high-speed offerings. Although Comcast and CenturyLink didn’t comment on that point, it seems clear that these municipal efforts are playing an important role in stimulating a much broader rollout of high-speed services than anyone foresaw even 12 months ago.

As numerous studies have documented, high-speed Internet is critical to economic development, education and health care in each of our communities. So we’re happy to see cities being proactive about fostering such advanced infrastructure. And we agree with Tom Roiniotis, manager of Longmont Power and Communications, who said that regardless of how many players there are in this new marketplace, the consumer is going to win.