SPEAKER_08: This bonus episode is the second in a four-part series we're calling The Future of... We'll be exploring how changes to the way we live, learn, work, and play may shape our health and well-being in years to come. Thanks to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for supporting this episode. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is committed to improving health and health equity in the United States. Learn more about them at rwjf.org. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. When the pandemic hit, everything that could possibly be done online made the jump. Work, job hunting, school, doctor's visits. And the shift was hard for everyone. But many Americans didn't even have the fundamental thing needed to make that change.
SPEAKER_00: For online learning to work, students and teachers need a fast and reliable internet connection. But dozens of communities across the state don't have that option.
SPEAKER_10: Salas says her cousins don't have internet.
SPEAKER_05: There is no signal where they live.
SPEAKER_03: They were like, how am I supposed to turn in this assignment? I have to drive and sit outside of a McDonald's to be able to do my learning. That means we're actually doing that? Yes, students were doing that.
SPEAKER_08: People without internet access showed up at emergency rooms during a pandemic for non-emergencies because they just weren't able to do a video appointment. And when the time came, there was no refreshing their browser to find out where to get a vaccine. And the lack of access isn't just in rural areas, as is often assumed. About one in five people in New York City don't have any internet access at all, not even through the data plan on their cell phones. It's two decades into the 21st century, and when it comes to life online, large segments of America are still living in the 1900s. So to find out how we got here and what we can do about it, we're going to be talking to reporter and longtime front of the show, Katie Thornton, who's been looking into this for us. Hey, Roman.
SPEAKER_01: So, Katie, it's 2022.
SPEAKER_08: Why don't we have internet?
SPEAKER_01: Well, it's actually because AOL didn't deliver enough of those CD-ROMs back in like 1995. Yeah, I mean, that's definitely an old reference.
SPEAKER_08: I feel like you're too young to remember those.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you know, I have like the faintest memories of like teething on an AOL CD. But Roman, to actually answer your question about why there's this lack of access today in 2022, first we need a quick primer on how the internet actually works, like what the internet physically is, because it turns out Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska was kind of right.
SPEAKER_00: The internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes.
SPEAKER_04: Just so people understand, like, in a sense, if the internet really is tubes, it's these fibrotic cables that run under streets, along train tracks, and connect with these very large energy-sucking, enormous server farms.
SPEAKER_01: This is Greta Byram. She's been working on community internet projects for over 10 years. And perhaps fittingly for this story, we spoke over a really crappy internet connection. Your tubes were clogged.
SPEAKER_01: Yes, yes, exactly. But I think that this sort of tubiness is something that most people at this point do understand on a basic level. Like when you scroll Instagram, you're basically sending a request to a distant server farm to find a certain piece of data and to send it back to your device. The only wireless part of that transaction is from your device to the Wi-Fi router. But Greta says it's not the case that there is simply a single unobstructed connection going between a server farm and the modem in your home. Instead, the data actually goes through roughly three different layers of internet tubing, or what are sometimes called tiers.
SPEAKER_04: And tier one is like these big backbone lines that span the country or go under oceans, like these large companies that you've never heard of.
SPEAKER_01: So these are companies like Lumen Technologies, GTT, the Zayo Group.
SPEAKER_08: Greta is correct. I have never heard of these. Right.
SPEAKER_01: No, neither had I. But then there's also tier two, or what's called the middle mile, which often own like the cables connecting different cities within large regions.
SPEAKER_04: And layer two is sort of like transit, like kind of long stretches of towers. And they also don't sell to like individuals or households.
SPEAKER_08: So have I at least heard of these middle mile companies?
SPEAKER_01: Well, I don't know, Roman. Have you heard of Stealth Communications or Fiber Noir or my favorite, InterNAP? No, I think, yeah, heretofore been ignorant of Internet.
SPEAKER_08: Well, it's okay that you were snoozing on Internet, because for our purposes, you don't
SPEAKER_01: really need to know the names of these companies. All you need to know is that tier one and tier two connections, they're fast. And that's because tier one and two companies only need to connect a few big facilities.
SPEAKER_08: So there's kind of like the interstate highway system or the airport hub and spoke system. There's not too many of them, and they only go between a few key spots.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, precisely. So it's always been relatively affordable for them to lay down these high capacity fiber lines. And fiber is like the really good stuff. It's basically bundles of flexible strands of glass, the width of human hair that can handle really large amounts of data. It's by far the fastest and most reliable type of connection. But there's one final leap that the data has to make to get to us, Roman, and that's called tier three. And tier three are your local retail Internet providers, your Spectrums and Verizons and such.
SPEAKER_08: Yes, finally, we're getting to names I know.
SPEAKER_01: Well, good, because it's actually here at tier three that our broadband access problems truly begin.
SPEAKER_08: Okay, so why is that?
SPEAKER_01: Well, it's because tier three companies like Verizon, they might own and operate their own tier one and tier two networks or purchase access from others. But either way, they're stuck with the task of figuring out what's called the last mile. And the last mile is all the millions of tiny connections that go down various streets and under or over people's driveways, etc, etc.
SPEAKER_04: And building the last mile like building the tier three piece is very physical. Like you're going up on the roofs and you're installing equipment and you're dealing with street furniture. And like that part is just incredibly difficult.
SPEAKER_08: Not to mention digging up roads and burying wires.
SPEAKER_01: Totally, totally. And tier three companies are the ones left to do this for entire cities and sometimes entire regions. So even though the last mile sounds way less sexy and high tech than country and ocean spanning fiber backbones, it's way more expensive. Yeah, you can totally see that.
SPEAKER_01: Right. So instead of fiber, most people's Internet is traveling that last mile over wires that were first laid for totally different purposes, which is why a telephone company like AT&T might also be your Internet provider because you're using the copper lines originally provided for your telephone connection or the coaxial lines normally used for cable TV.
SPEAKER_04: So Internet signals can travel over both copper and coaxial, but they're slower than fiber and less reliable. Like this is when like your Internet service provider says, oh, we have fast DSL. That just means like we're sending the signal over copper lines and watch out if it rains, your signal might get really fuzzy.
SPEAKER_01: So while something like dial up might be mostly a thing of the past, the truth is copper phone lines still connect a lot of people to the Internet over DSL. And even many people's coaxial cable connections aren't fast enough to meet the federal government's definition of broadband.
SPEAKER_08: And what is that definition?
SPEAKER_01: Right now it's 25 megabits per second download speed and three megabits upload.
SPEAKER_08: And to be clear, you're saying megabits here. That's only like one eighth of a megabyte. So the speeds that you mentioned particularly the three megabit upload speed, that's really slow. It's very useful to kids and between all of us, that would not even come close to being acceptable.
SPEAKER_01: No, definitely not. And this is why getting fiber into neglected areas is so important. But Greta says who gets fiber is determined by the market and the market is determined not by who wants fiber, but really just who can afford it.
SPEAKER_04: So if you're really lucky, you live in a neighborhood where companies see, oh, there's plenty of people who can afford $80 a month Internet. So we'll put a fiber line under the streets. But if you live in a neighborhood where they do their market analysis and it looks like folks can't afford that, you're going to still be on copper or coax.
SPEAKER_01: And so even though there are plenty of homes and businesses with fiber connections, for a lot of the country, that last mile remains a deep vexing problem. And so I wanted to take a look at two examples of cities that were decidedly not rich cities, where people in the last decade went about pursuing this last mile problem in two very different ways. OK, let's do it.
SPEAKER_08: Which is the first city?
SPEAKER_01: Up first is Detroit, Michigan. The statistics in Detroit at that time were abysmal.
SPEAKER_01: That's Monique Tate. She's a digital justice advocate and former auto worker who lives in Detroit. And the statistics she's citing are from 2014. And she says at that time, Detroit was ranked as the country's worst connected city. 60 percent of people did not have a connection that met the minimum definition of broadband. 60 percent.
SPEAKER_06: The number is astounding. That paralleled itself with 40 percent of the people lacking Internet connectivity at all.
SPEAKER_08: Wow. So 40 percent of people with no Internet, not even on their phones.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, not even on their phones. And you have to remember at this time in 2014, everything is moving online. So if you aren't online, you are out of luck.
SPEAKER_06: Education, economic development and opportunity, which I'm relating to jobs, you are stricken from that because if you go somewhere and say, I'm interested in a job, can I just fill out a piece of paper? No one has that for you to do anymore. They're going to say, if you can't submit your application, we can't even consider you.
SPEAKER_01: So Monique watched as job opportunities dried up for folks who couldn't easily apply online, or as the people who did have smartphones tried to format resumes on them. And folks were always trying to find places with decent Wi-Fi, particularly around Detroit's North End neighborhood.
SPEAKER_06: In the greater North End, there is, of course, McDonald's, and you could go someplace like that. But there was no local library in the greater North End. We were not even able to really look to the public provision of a library system.
SPEAKER_10: Now, in some of these cases, people weren't able to get online because there was not an
SPEAKER_01: affordable option. And at the time, there was also large sections of Detroit that literally had no internet connection. Like all the tier three stuff we talked about, the wires, the tunnels just did not exist in some neighborhoods.
SPEAKER_08: So I can see why they may not have fiber as an option for the reasons you laid out earlier. But to have no real internet infrastructure at all, no copper, no coaxial, how does that happen? I mean, that can't be random.
SPEAKER_01: No, it's not random. Greta says a number of years ago, a researcher named Bill Callahan started looking into these patterns, starting with the city of Cleveland.
SPEAKER_04: He got a hold of AT&T's maps of where they were investing in fiber infrastructure. And he lined it up with the old redlining maps from the 40s and found that it's the same, like it's the same streets that are the dividing lines between where the investment's happening and where it's not.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah, I have to say that this does not surprise me at all.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah. Sadly, me neither. This is a practice known as digital redlining. And AT&T has said, no, we don't redline. But people have found evidence of digital redlining in Dallas, Toledo, Dayton, Louisville, Milwaukee, and also Detroit.
SPEAKER_04: And so what was once explicitly racist policy is now just racist economic policy where companies can say, well, we will not recover the money that we put into these neighborhoods. So this is just an economic decision. Race has nothing to do with it. But the outcome is the same.
SPEAKER_01: But also, Roman, when Internet companies did offer service, they didn't always make their fastest speeds available to everyone. For example, back in the mid-2010s, when Monique was working with Detroit residents, one of the city's major carriers, Comcast Xfinity, offered a $9.95 a month deal to some low-income residents.
SPEAKER_06: They bragged about the fact that they were providing this program that low-income people could obtain. In that program, there was 10 megabits of download speed and one megabit of upload speed. Jesus, that is so slow.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, it is insultingly slow. It's not even close to the minimum requirement to be considered broadband. So you're already saying to this underserved and underrepresented group, we're going to
SPEAKER_06: provide a substandard product.
SPEAKER_08: So given that this was the state of things in Detroit, in the intervening years, like since 2014, what have people been doing to get more access? Because I can't believe it has stayed exactly like this this whole time.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so what I'm about to tell you is going to kind of sound like kindergarten logic. OK. But one of the solutions that was hit upon in some of these neighborhoods and that's still being used in some of them today started with the idea of sharing.
SPEAKER_09: It sounded like a good idea and it sounded really simple. It didn't require anything that seemed too illegal. So this is Patrick Crouch.
SPEAKER_01: Patrick is an urban farmer who back in 2010 lived in North Corktown, which was one of these historically redlined neighborhoods in Detroit with digital access issues. So we didn't really have any Internet and the house was such that it wasn't wired for
SPEAKER_09: telephone and it wasn't wired for cable. And I was taking an online class and it was at night. So that was after the libraries had closed. So I was like literally having to ride my bike two and a half miles to a friend who had Internet connection that was willing to let me sit and take this class.
SPEAKER_01: So Roman, most of Patrick's neighbors also couldn't get good Internet, either because Comcast didn't service their address or they didn't offer an affordable option. But down the block from Patrick was a software engineer named Ben Chodorov.
SPEAKER_09: He was a computer person. I don't know what he does. He's tried to tell me what he does and I still don't understand it.
SPEAKER_01: And you see, Ben had this very rare thing in the neighborhood, a cable Internet connection. And he was happy to share it with Patrick, but he couldn't just tell him his Wi-Fi password and call it a day. They lived way too far apart for that. So instead, Ben suggested an alternative approach.
SPEAKER_09: He started talking about this mesh network thing. For me, it was the obvious solution.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, it was a super fragile solution, definitely. But it was just like, yeah, we had to solve a problem.
SPEAKER_01: This is Ben and the mesh network thing he was proposing would go way beyond sharing one lonely Wi-Fi signal with just one other person. Instead, it was a way to bring wireless Internet to a whole bunch of people all at once. He says he started thinking about it when he was going through some of his old gear.
SPEAKER_02: I had a pile of old little wireless radios that were given to somebody who gave them to somebody else who gave them to me. So I ended up with this box of pretty crappy wireless routers.
SPEAKER_01: So Ben began handing out some of these free wireless routers to those few neighbors who also had good Internet access and then asked if they could share their connections too.
SPEAKER_08: So he would just like knock on the door and hand them some weird old equipment and say, like, please touch us to your modem and give me your password. Yeah, that's pretty much exactly how it happened.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, like I already talked to all my neighbors.
SPEAKER_02: That made it easier to set up because people already trusted me somewhat.
SPEAKER_01: So the way that this whole thing works was that the person with Internet access would attach a so-called radio to their normal at-home router, and they'd put that up on their roof or on the side of their house. And that radio would basically extend the Wi-Fi signal so folks down the block could pick it up too. And throughout the neighborhood, there were also these little wireless nodes that extended the signals even further. And then Ben and his neighbors would climb up on the roof of whoever's house they were connecting and put up equipment to receive that signal. Then as a final step, they'd connect a wire from that receiver into a home Wi-Fi router and bang, they would be online.
SPEAKER_08: So in this kind of giant daisy chain of gear, what were the locations in the neighborhood where they installed some of these connections and nodes?
SPEAKER_01: Well, so as far as I can tell from talking with Ben, the answer appears to be pretty much anywhere they could.
SPEAKER_02: So like there is this hostel that donated their connection. The other node was in my upstairs neighbors' chicken coop. I think that was it. Did you talk to them? Oh yeah, wait. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, there was another node in an old Airstream trailer that was like a food truck.
SPEAKER_01: So between these few internet access points and those few nodes, those extenders, they made this web of wireless networks connecting a bunch of neighbors' houses and an apartment building and that hostel.
SPEAKER_08: So did the neighborhood need a password or was it just kind of open to anyone?
SPEAKER_01: No, you didn't really need a password. People who had routers on the network could put a password on their connection if they wanted to, but a lot of people just intentionally left theirs open so that other people could pick it up. Yeah, people would park right next to our house all the time.
SPEAKER_09: People would just roll up and sit there for an hour or two and do their thing. So it sounds like it worked.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, according to Patrick, it did.
SPEAKER_09: So this is what people that don't know about computers call magic. Yes, yes. I mean, it was essentially magic as far as I could tell.
SPEAKER_08: I get that this was definitely better than no internet at all, but was it fast enough to get the job done?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I was curious about this. It's true that because it involves sharing a limited number of broadband connections, Patrick said he would save heavy bandwidth things like downloading music for Saturday mornings. And sometimes that Airstream food truck would be out serving food to people. Right?
SPEAKER_08: And he'd be doing what it's supposed to do, like go feed people instead of being a node on a mesh network. Right, exactly, like doing a launch service.
SPEAKER_01: But all in all, Ben's mesh network did the job. Patrick says he never even bothered trying to get on Comcast for himself while he was on mesh.
SPEAKER_08: I mean, what's interesting about this is that this mesh network as an alternate solution to the last mile problem, it is not top down. It's not being solved by Comcast or some other tier three provider. It is really bottom up. The neighborhood is doing it for themselves.
SPEAKER_01: Exactly. But I want to be very clear about this. Ben and Patrick definitely weren't the only ones in Detroit using mesh to fix this last mile problem. It turned out that a lot of folks found themselves converging on this solution, including Monique Tate and Greta Byram.
SPEAKER_08: And those are the people, the experts that we talked to earlier.
SPEAKER_01: Right. In the early 2010s, Monique and Greta helped form a group promoting internet access in Detroit that would come to be known as the Equitable Internet Initiative. And EII basically approached this idea of a homespun mesh network and really kind of formalized it and scaled it up. They started a process of installing mesh in four different Detroit neighborhoods, and then they trained residents on how to build and fix the networks and paid them for their work. Wow. Right. But eventually they got so big that they ran into a bit of a problem.
SPEAKER_06: As it became more popular, people did start to ask questions because comments were made that I think this might not be legal.
SPEAKER_08: I was definitely beginning to wonder if it was legal.
SPEAKER_01: Well, technically not. Not exactly. But this sort of realization actually turned out to be a really good thing in the end because it spurred them to do something extra cool, which was to just go around Comcast entirely. Because in 2018, the Equitable Internet Initiative partnered with a tier two provider. And so that's the kind of company that buys internet access further up the chain, like
SPEAKER_08: closer to that big fiber internet backbone.
SPEAKER_01: Right. And that tier two provider called 123net now gives the Equitable Internet Initiative multiple free, super fast fiber internet access points that EII then distributes wirelessly by mesh. And that means the Equitable Internet Initiative no longer needs to purchase broadband from Comcast or any other tier three provider.
SPEAKER_08: Because they are the tier three provider.
SPEAKER_01: Precisely. They are tier three. And this has increased the connection speeds of their users in some really meaningful ways. For example, their service now includes symmetrical download and upload speeds.
SPEAKER_06: Because the key is to create not only just consumers, but create producers so that the upload of your content is just as important as the download of someone else's content. So if you decided that you wanted to have a podcast, you could.
SPEAKER_01: And the neighborhood network that Monique was the manager of now delivers free broadband to about 135 households. That's about 500 people. And that's just one of the three neighborhoods where the Equitable Internet Initiative has operational mesh networks. OK, so this brings me to my big question about mesh.
SPEAKER_08: These numbers that you're saying, like 125 households in one neighborhood, there's three neighborhoods. That is super admirable. And I'm so amazed and pleased. And it is a real success. But those are small numbers compared to the size of the problem facing the U.S. overall. So my question, I guess, at the end of this is, will this scale? And do we even want like an ad hoc mesh network to be something that scales? Like, is this a workaround to a problem that should be solved like head on?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, that is definitely something that I wondered, too. Because like you say, it doesn't feel like the solution. Some people are definitely trying to get mesh to scale. But it turns out not everyone who has worked on mesh is convinced that it's a viable way forward, including and I think this is pretty telling Ben Chodorov, who set up that really early mesh network back around 2010. I mean, I think I was naively hopeful in the early days, but that hopefulness definitely
SPEAKER_02: waned.
SPEAKER_01: The way Ben sees it, the network met an acute need for a while, and he is super proud of what he and his neighbors built together. But he thought of it as more of a conversation starter than anything.
SPEAKER_02: I saw that as a like a political message that could be sent by our mesh networks like man, look what we had to do. But then it's easy to massage that political message into saying like, we don't have to change the big systems because we can just build our own. And I think that's a way of ignoring the political organizing that has to happen to actually confront power and change it.
SPEAKER_08: I mean, this reminds me of like those like heartwarming GoFundMe campaigns for someone to get a kidney transplant when, you know, like it's great that people are generous and somebody can get their kidney. But the actual thing that you need is a health care system that provides free kidney transplants to everyone.
SPEAKER_01: Totally. Like that would be far more heartwarming. Yeah. I mean, I'll confess that I kind of felt the same way, which is actually what brings us to the other city I wanted to talk about, a place where things played out very differently. Because while Detroit was struggling with just getting people online, this other city was busy getting crisscrossed with fiber connections. And they did it by rethinking their entire approach to Internet access.
SPEAKER_08: We'll find out just what city Katie is talking about right after this. effort for this four part series exploring the future of health and well-being comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which is committed to improving health and health equity in the United States. Knowing that the healthy, equitable future we all deserve won't simply arrive, RWJF is exploring how new technologies, scientific discoveries, cultural shifts and unforeseen events like those in today's story may shape our lives in years to come. Through these explorations, they're learning what it will take to build a future that provides every individual with a fair and just opportunity to thrive, no matter who they are, where they live, or how much money they have. Learn more about their efforts at rwjf.org. If you like thinking about the future of things as we've been doing in this series, and you have a hunch about what it will take to build an equitable future, share it at shareyourhunch.org. I'm submitting my hunch, so I'm going to shareyourhunch.org and selecting the prompt, I'm noticing that. I'm noticing that more people in their 40s and 50s are having a midlife crisis in terms of their careers and thinking earnestly about career changes that do not prioritize income. That's my hunch. Those are from conversations I have with other parents. Check out other hunches and submit your own at shareyourhunch.org.
SPEAKER_08: We're back talking internet access with reporter Katie Thornton. So Katie, before the break, you were saying that there was another city you wanted to talk about where people had an easier time getting high quality broadband. Yeah, that's right. And this is a place that
SPEAKER_01: even during the very worst of COVID more or less managed to avoid all of the connectivity problems we described earlier. In fact, in this one city, pretty much anyone who wanted to get good internet access during the pandemic could get it. And contrary to what you might expect, it's not Westchester County or Grosse Pointe or Newport Beach or any of these uber wealthy suburbs. It's Chattanooga, Tennessee. Practically overnight, our schools shut down,
SPEAKER_07: many of our businesses moved to remote work. And being able to go home and immediately access services really enabled you to work at home, learn at home without missing a beat.
SPEAKER_08: So who is this and why does she have so much good news about Chattanooga? So this is Katie Espiceff. She works at EPB, which is Chattanooga's city run electric power utility.
SPEAKER_01: And the reason she has such good news is because Chattanooga is great, but also because back in the mid 2000s, Chattanooga was kind of like Detroit. Internet access options for most telecom customers were really limited. Chattanooga was in very much an underserved area. While we did have service
SPEAKER_07: from two large national incumbents, really there was no competition. And so there was no real driver to provide better services. But I do think we fell into a range of a lot of cities our size and that we were not getting the best technology. So they were kind of just in this motivational
SPEAKER_08: trough where these big providers had no incentive to provide anything beyond the slowest connection. Yeah, but then, and this is the good news part, the city made a really interesting move.
SPEAKER_01: They decided that starting in 2008, EPB, that public power utility that Katie works for, should enter the telecom market and become an internet provider. Huh. So EPB would compete with the existing providers to sell internet connections to
SPEAKER_08: businesses and households. Yeah, that's exactly right. They already sold electricity to customers and that's also not free.
SPEAKER_01: So why not sell internet access to? And where we landed was using a fiber optic network.
SPEAKER_07: EPB already had power lines that reached every home and business in town, meaning they could
SPEAKER_01: put these super fast internet lines right alongside them. And so EPB started laying down fiber all over the city. And they could afford to do fiber.
SPEAKER_08: Well, actually, yeah, they could, provided they got enough customers.
SPEAKER_01: Interestingly enough, as we were working through the business plan, we realized we needed about
SPEAKER_07: one in every three homes to make this profitable. So did you beat that? We did. We did beat that, no doubt. We secured a greater than a 33 or a 30% take rate from the first month we were in business. So how did those existing ISPs respond to that?
SPEAKER_08: Well, it turned into a classic speed war. First, EPB offered a connection that was 30
SPEAKER_01: megabits per second download speed and upload speed, which was a lot back then. But their competitors weren't going to let that phase then. As you can imagine, they were not ready to give up market share without a fight. So when
SPEAKER_07: we launched with the 30 meg product, our competitor came back and they upgraded theirs to a 30 meg product. So then EPB upgraded to 50 megs. And when their competitor matched that, they went to
SPEAKER_01: 100 and then 300. And in 2010, EPB began offering gigabit services, which was way ahead of the rest of the country at the time. In fact, when we rolled out a gig, we got so many questions over what would anyone do
SPEAKER_07: with the gig? This is just crazy. This is just marketing. But after a while, those gig connections turned out to be really useful for things like streaming
SPEAKER_01: high definition movies or uploading multimedia homework assignments. Or like zooming into every meeting during a pandemic.
SPEAKER_08: Right, exactly.
SPEAKER_01: And I think people have figured out what to do. I don't think there's any argument about
SPEAKER_07: what you do with the gig. And so in time, their competitors started offering gig speed services too. And Roman
SPEAKER_01: for EPB, this was a goal of theirs all along. The idea was that even if EPB didn't dominate the market, they would foster competition and force the private companies to provide better services. And that's what happened. That is amazing. But also like, did they ever dominate the market? Did they ever make it
SPEAKER_08: to number one? Eventually, yeah, they did.
SPEAKER_07: In 2017, we hit a mark of 75,000 customers. 2018, it was 100,000 customers. Today, it's a little over 110,000 customers. And so do you have a sense of what your market share is right now? We sit at about 68% market share today. Wow. So those ISPs were right to be afraid.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, they were. And I think that what's amazing about EPB is that the other third of people in their footprint who aren't using EPB, they've already built out the fiber connections in front of those homes and businesses. So all you need to do is sign up and EPB will basically wire you up, hand you a modem and poof, you are online. Which kind of led me to what I thought might be a gotcha question, but it turned out to just be more good news. Did the uptake of the service vary depending on household income or depending on race?
SPEAKER_07: You know, interestingly enough, no. Our take rate is pretty standard across all income brackets as well as different geographic areas within our footprint.
SPEAKER_01: And part of that is because EPB has long provided an at-cost internet service for low-income families. And in the pandemic, they made it free. And all of this has had really real benefits. Economists predicted that citywide fiber would add 2,000 jobs over 10 years. But according to some studies, it's actually added about 10,000 jobs. And not long into the pandemic, the surrounding county's unemployment rate was 2% lower than the national average.
SPEAKER_08: You know, it's really interesting because to hear you talk about how EPB rolled out their fiber network and the benefits of it, I almost have to remind myself that you're not talking about electricity. Because like, it's really reminiscent of the way New Deal programs like the Tennessee Valley Authority transformed electricity from a private commodity into a regulated utility to a point where it would just seem wrong that someone couldn't afford electricity. And now EPB is doing the same thing but for internet access.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, that's spot on. And that's not just your read of it. In our interview, Katie directly connected EPB's mission here to the TVA, which served Chattanooga.
SPEAKER_07: You know, in the 1930s and really throughout the remainder of that century, the way to fulfill that mission was very obvious. It was all about bringing electrification to the valley. It meant jobs. It meant industry. It really meant survival. And actually, we think today that high-speed internet or access to broadband services does the very same thing.
SPEAKER_08: I find this all super inspiring. And this seems like the top-down solution that really is necessary. You know, like this is sort of like, we're from the government, we're here to help. And they really did help. Yeah, yeah, I feel the same way.
SPEAKER_08: So this might be a naive question, but like, if it works for Chattanooga, why can't it work for Detroit? Yeah, or everywhere.
SPEAKER_08: Like, exactly. I want it everywhere. I mean, it's definitely not a naive question.
SPEAKER_01: I wondered that too. Like surely Chattanooga is proof that all you need to get Americans online is the political will. And this was 10 years ago. So why aren't we seeing a ton more of it? So why haven't we?
SPEAKER_01: Well, it turns out, it's not that easy. There are some things that make Chattanooga a little bit of a unicorn. And one of the big ones is that remember, Chattanooga already has its own municipal electric system. Right. Right. So that meant that when EPB wanted to run fiber lines, they could just do it by laying fiber right alongside their existing electric infrastructure that already went into people's homes. And then that electricity actually powers the fiber, so they don't need to worry about that part either. Oh, interesting. Yeah. And most cities just don't have an existing department that's in a position to do that. And if you're a mayor and you want to set one up, it's going to cost you a ton of money up front. And there's no way you're going to see tangible results before your next election. So it's often a political nonstarter. But it just seems like the size and cost of
SPEAKER_08: these infrastructure buildouts could be overcome if people really wanted to have a public internet. Like it would be expensive, but it would be possible.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, totally. Like we should make that very clear. Like these things are possible to overcome. But Roman, in many parts of the U.S., there's one thing that makes it more or less impossible.
SPEAKER_07: There are laws that exist today in the country in specific states that prohibit municipal broadband.
SPEAKER_08: Of course there are. Of course they made it illegal.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I know. I wish that I was more surprised as well. But 18 states effectively have roadblocks that keep cities from offering internet. And another five states have laws that make it really difficult. And those laws have been pushed by for-profit internet companies and their very powerful lobbying arms for years. And so what are their bullsh** arguments against public broadband?
SPEAKER_08: Well, I reached out to folks at the two biggest telecom lobbies for this story.
SPEAKER_01: They didn't agree to interviews, but traditionally they've said municipal broadband interferes with free markets, that it's not the government's place, etc. But Greta says ISPs also argue, we've been doing this for decades, so we have the know-how. And so, you know, like if you're a local official and you have a big telecom company saying,
SPEAKER_05: hey, we've got that, we're going to take care of it for you, you know, that can sound kind of good to a local politician, right? Who's like, I don't understand how this stuff works. Like, just fix it for me. Right? And the result is that these lobbies have pretty successfully put the brakes on a lot of municipal
SPEAKER_01: broadband. And so in many states and cities and rural areas, private ISPs are the only ones allowed to provide these services. And so is that true for Detroit? Like, does Michigan have these laws that prevent publicly
SPEAKER_08: owned ISPs? It does. And although the situation in Detroit has improved somewhat in the last decade,
SPEAKER_01: even today, they're still ranked in the bottom 10 for American cities when it comes to internet access. The private ISP model hasn't yielded big changes, all of which has left some people, like Patrick Crouch, feeling almost kind of resigned to their fates. What did you do for internet when you moved?
SPEAKER_09: Get Comcast, like a normal human being. I mean, are you happy with your service?
SPEAKER_01: No, but, you know, it had just come to a point where we didn't really have a lot of options.
SPEAKER_09: And as I mentioned, Comcast is really the only game in town. Man, so if this is where things are still now, if mesh network won't scale, if municipal
SPEAKER_08: owned broadband is logistically and politically hard, where does that leave us? Like, what can be done or is being done from here on out to get everyone good internet that they need? Well, the short answer is no one is totally sure. The recent infrastructure bill looks
SPEAKER_01: like it's going to help with building out fiber in rural areas. And the people distributing a lot of the money to the states are asking explicitly about digital equity in cities. But in those states with bans on municipal broadband, that money is most likely going to keep going to ISPs. And if the past is any indication, those ISPs might just end up using it to offer further discounts on the same old outdated internet connection, rather than building anything new, at least in neighborhoods like Detroit's north end. Which is why, although Greta and Monique both think there's room for collaboration with ISPs, Monique stresses that any solution needs to lie in giving access to those who have long been on the margins of technology. Where do I see things going from here? I do look at the provision of internet as a potential
SPEAKER_06: opportunity to execute reparations. Yes, I do. Monique says that whatever happens in the long term, in the immediate future, it's
SPEAKER_01: time for big telecom companies to step up. They can't just follow the money and only lay down fiber in the richest neighborhoods anymore. They have to build out. Big telecom has the largest profit margins in the country. So why not give back?
SPEAKER_06: CEOs say that they are giving to communities in need. Well, give what we need. Give internet. Just give us the access and we'll go from there. So ultimately, it's going to be tricky. The goal of for-profit companies will always
SPEAKER_01: be to make money, which is why a lot of people still believe that quality of life is a priority. And that quality internet access for everyone means eventually treating broadband as a right, not just a commodity. And that requires intervention by people who are accountable to votes and not just dollars. But no matter what happens next, if we know one thing, it's that the days of treating broadband as a luxury are over.
SPEAKER_08: Well, this is fascinating stuff. Thank you so much, Katie. I appreciate it.
SPEAKER_01: 99% Invisible was produced this week by Katie Thornton, edited by Joe Rosenberg,
SPEAKER_08: mix and tech production by Amita Ganatra, music by our director of sound, Swan Rial. Delaney Hall is the executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Emmett Fitzgerald, Vivian Ley, Chris Berube, Christopher Johnson, Loshma Dawn, Jason De Leon, Sophia Klatsker, and me, Roman Mars. Special thanks to Tyler Cooper from the organization Broadband Now and finance professor Bento Lobo at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga, who we also spoke to for this episode, but whose voices we didn't get to include, and to Monique Tate and Greta Byram for the many, many follow-up interviews they graciously allowed us to conduct. You can find out more about Katie Thornton's writing and audio journalism on her website, itskatithorton.com and her Instagram, itskatithorton, where this week she'll be sharing more about broadband infrastructure, including the story of the Empire City subway. And no, it's not a train, but rather a weirdly important tunnel stuffed with wires. We are part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful Uptown, Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org. We're on Instagram and Reddit too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love as well as every past episode of 99pi at 99pi.org.
SPEAKER_08: Thanks again to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for their underwriting support of this special episode. Be sure to check out each episode in this four-part series, The Future of… And remember, if you have a hunch about what it will take to build an equitable future, share it at shareyourhunch.org.
