Public Broadband in LA: A Policy Exploration

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Tamara Solis faced a choice when it came to her children’s education: Pay for rent and food or pay for internet access. Broadband came in second, so she takes her kids to a friend’s garage apartment in Watts for internet — where they do their schoolwork in close quarters amid the coronavirus pandemic.

“It’s a small place,” said Solis, noting that it was difficult to abide by recommended physical distancing guidelines. “We try to do the best — one on the table, one on the sofa, one on the bed ... but it’s not big enough to keep far away.”

- Los Angeles Times, April 22 2020

To survive in LA in the 21st Century, you need access to the internet. 

So many city services now offer apps to help residents navigate them -- including Metro, the library system, and LADWP. You can’t apply for a job without an internet connection, and participating in the gig economy — which is absorbing more and more of the city’s workforce — requires access to a smartphone.

If you are experiencing homelessness, you need wi-fi to find winter shelters and summer cooling centers. LA’s Homeless Services Agency now asks residents to use an internet portal to report an unhoused person who needs help. And just this week, the City opened a rent relief program for which you can only apply via a city website.

No matter where in Los Angeles you live or what you do, your life is moving online — a transformation that has been accelerated by the pandemic, and will only continue to pick up speed.

But as internet access has become an essential resource for managing daily life, inequality of access to the internet has become an urgent crisis in Los Angeles — one that will leave the city starkly unprepared for the coming decades if we don’t address it.

HOW MUCH OF LA IS CONNECTED?

The COVID-19 pandemic has fully exposed LA’s digital divide — the major gap between households with and without adequate internet access.

With children forced to take classes from home via videoconference-based “online learning,” we’re finding out just how many families in LA don’t have a broadband connection capable of streaming video — and how many don’t have access to the internet at all.

• In April, the nonprofit Partnership for Los Angeles Schools conducted a survey of 1,000 families in Watts, South LA and Boyle Heights. They found that 16% of families didn’t have internet access, and 20% of families didn’t own a computer or tablet. Children in those families have to schedule group learning sessions with other students, or are simply left out of schooling entirely.

• Even fewer families have access to the higher-speed broadband internet required for playing videos and conferencing — USC researchers recently found that 1 in 4 families with K-12 students in LA County don’t have access to both a computer and a fixed broadband connection.

• In East LA and Watts, the same USC report found that less than half of households with children in the LAUSD system "have the necessary technology resources for distance learning.”

• All studies have found that Black and Latinx families in LA are significantly less likely to have access to the internet at any speed, further underscoring deep racial inequalities in the city.

Here are some maps we created using American Community Survey data to show what percentage of households in different neighborhoods have broadband or a computer.

It’s not just kids who have been left out of LA’s internet age. As more and more Angelenos find themselves without housing, libraries are becoming de facto homelessness service centers, with public computers the only means of getting online for thousands of Angelenos. The closures of these facilities during the pandemic has left many people stranded. Undocumented people face more expensive hurdles to access — providers often require a pricey deposit for any subscriber without a social security number. 

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, more and more Angelenos without internet are suddenly finding that even the most basic and necessary aspects of their daily lives are now out-of-reach. Those who can’t afford broadband internet are left unable to work remotely — and can’t access virtual appointments with their doctor or other care providers.

The result is yet another engine of inequality in Los Angeles — access to higher-speed internet allows richer, whiter residents to get ahead in the city, while lower-income communities of color fall even farther behind.

WHAT IS LA DOING TO CLOSE THE DIGITAL DIVIDE?

Unfortunately, not very much. The city has put forward a few programs to set up public wi-fi hotspots, mainly in parks and tourism centers. But there isn’t an active city effort to connect underserved residents of LA to the internet right now. Instead, Angelenos are forced to rely on private providers — which hasn’t worked out very well.

About two-thirds of Angelenos only have one option when it comes to getting online. The reason why is simple: it takes time and costs money to put up new broadband infrastructure, and most telecom companies just don’t feel like the profits are sufficient or fast enough to be worth it – especially to enter a competitive market where they’d have to lower prices to earn customers.

That means, for the majority of us, we only have one company we can call if we want Internet access – and that company has no reason to improve service or provide faster options, because they’re the only game in town. If Angelenos are unhappy with their provider or don’t want to pay the price that the provider demands for internet, they’re probably out of luck. (Yes, this is called a monopoly, and it’s very bad for consumers).

Here’s a map showing the number of broadband providers in each LA County census district, put together by researchers at USC’s Annenberg School:

This map actually paints a rosier picture of LA’s broadband options than the reality: if a provider serves even just one house in a census district, they’re counted as serving that district on the map. The government has attempted to provide more accurate, detailed data in the past, but lobbyists for the providers have fought any changes to how this data is presented. 

LA’s lower-income communities of color are more likely to live under internet monopolies, and as a result often pay higher prices for even worse service.

With so many residents left with inferior options or without internet entirely, the city of LA has a clear obligation to fill the gap — connecting residents so they can access the many opportunities that only exist online, and helping all Angelenos prepare for technological advances in the coming decades.

But with a little ambition, LA can do more than just bridge the digital divide.

Other cities, both in the US and around the world, have prepared for a digital future by providing the internet as a basic human right — wiring every residence with high-speed broadband, and providing a competitive public option for internet access.

Not only could we get every Angeleno connected to the internet… we could also hyperboost the speed, benefiting residents at all income levels and businesses of all sizes.

Los Angeles has among the slowest internet speeds of any city in America. In a 2018 Speedtest ranking of fixed broadband speeds in the 100 largest US cities, Los Angeles came in 61st.

Our sluggish connectivity isn’t limited to the wired internet in residences — it also impacts our mobile networks. In a 2016 study by Rootmetrics of mobile network performance, LA ranked 99th out the 125 largest cities in the US — largely because of the underbuilt and out-of-date broadband infrastructure offered by private providers.

But cities that have invested in public broadband are able to offer a faster option. One hundred times faster. And with expanded digital infrastructure, they’re also able to offer free, public wi-fi across their entire surface area.

How can LA expand access, increase speeds, and become a public broadband city? Read on!

HOW DOES PUBLIC BROADBAND WORK?

For starters, let’s define the term “broadband.” Broadband just refers to any connection faster than dial-up internet, which uses phone lines. There are lots of different kinds of broadband connections.

Cities have explored a number of strategies for expanding broadband access among their residents. The easiest — and cheapest — involves setting up a network of wi-fi routers and booster antennas to blanket cities with public wi-fi access. But these services are notoriously unreliable and easy to hack.

The best option for broadband in the 21st Century is fiber-optic cable — just called “fiber” for our purposes. Fiber uses light to transfer data, and allows for the fastest upload and download speeds by far. As the internet demands more and more processing power, investing in fiber offers the most long-term advantage — in 2010, the FCC called it “the only last-mile technology capable of meeting ultra high-speed needs.”

When it comes to city-owned broadband networks, the gold standard is Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) — projects by local governments to get every single one of their residents connected to fiber. Yep, it’s possible, and it’s been done.

The greatest Fiber-to-the-Home success story in the US is Chattanooga, Tennessee. About a decade ago, Chattanooga managed to connect every resident to fiber within its city limits. As a result, residents can enjoy speeds of one gigabyte per second  — more than double the speed of a comparably-priced plan in LA.

Lower-income families in Chattanooga can get 100 megabytes per second at discount rates -- more than enough speed to Zoom conference and stream video -- while businesses and wealthier residents can pay a premium for 10 gigabytes per second — about fifty times faster than the fastest internet available to many Angelenos.

Chattanooga isn’t the only one — there are cities much closer to home that have been invested in public broadband. Santa Monica, LA’s next-door neighbor, has been building out a municipal fiber network for decades. 

Way back in 2000, Santa Monica started connecting city-owned buildings with fiber, creating a “ring network.” This network of powerful broadband connections now allows the city to offer free, public wifi within most of its borders. They’ve started connecting large multifamily buildings to the city fiber network as well — with an eye toward eventually getting every resident connected with gigabit-per-second speeds.

WHO OWNS THESE FIBER NETWORKS? 

Chattanooga, Santa Monica and other FTTH cities like Longmont, CO (whose municipal network boasts the nation’s fastest service) are unique in that their entire public broadband projects are owned and operated by the cities themselves.

But other cities have pursued an alternate model: the public-private partnership, where cities bring in large companies to build and operate fiber networks. Google Fiber is probably the best known company that provides this service, having partnered with cities like Louisville and Austin to connect residents to high-speed internet.

Cities tend to lean toward corporate partnerships like these, because they don’t require the city to put up any money or assume any risk. But the downside is that the private providers can usually charge consumers whatever they want… and end up assuming all the profits.

Deals with private providers have also led to mixed results, leaving cities with less than they bargained for. Google Fiber, for example, originally agreed to offer a cheaper, slower-speed option to residents of partner cities — but the company later removed that option, and because of the deal those cities made, there was nothing they could do about it. Last year, Google Fiber abruptly pulled out of Louisville entirely -- leaving the city with nothing but a mess of exposed wires, which Google paid them $4 million to clean up themselves.

The public-private partnership model for municipal broadband isn’t new: cities like San Francisco and Philadelphia tried various efforts to work with corporate internet service providers throughout the 2000s to get public wi-fi done. But all of those projects failed, either because the corporations were unable to justify the business model or the cities couldn’t agree to their terms.

In contrast, by acting as a fully public provider, Chattanooga is under less pressure to turn profits — allowing the city to continue to offer discount rates, spend revenue money on improving service, and prioritize access over shareholder returns.

City-owned broadband has another big advantage over private partnerships: since the deregulation of net neutrality by the Trump administration’s FCC in 2017, private providers are allowed to charge different rates for different websites, and block or throttle access for whatever site they choose. Cities can ensure that their public networks preserve a free and open Internet. 

WHAT DOES CHATTANOOGA HAVE TO DO WITH LA?

Good question. LA is obviously a much bigger place than Chattanooga, and it may seem like they don’t have much in common. And right now, LA doesn’t have much in the way of fiber infrastructure. Here’s a map we created using FCC data to show you the census blocks where fiber is currently available. (Once again, this map paints a better picture than the reality: if even one building in a census block is connected to fiber, that counts as a census block where fiber is available).

But LA and Chattanooga share a major hidden advantage when it comes to public fiber networks: they’re both served by a major city-owned utility company.

While cities like San Francisco and New York outsource their electric utilities to private companies, LA owns its Department of Water and Power — it’s the largest municipally-owned utility in the country. Owning its own utility was key to Chattanooga’s success in establishing a public fiber network — its Electric Power Board was already a powerful institution, saving the city costs and time that would come from setting up a new company from scratch.

It’s not a pipe dream: LA could harness its authority over LADWP to build fiber along our existing electric grid — following Chattanooga’s example and providing all residents with faster, cheaper internet, while modeling Santa Monica and using the new infrastructure to offer free public wi-fi within its borders.

One more perk: building a large-scale public internet project would create a lot of new jobs for LADWP workers – all with union protections and benefits. In an unemployment crisis, investing money in solid public jobs like these is a great way to shorten what could otherwise be a long, slow economic recovery.

WHY HAVEN’T WE TRIED THIS BEFORE?

We have — sort of. In 2013, some of LA’s elected officials started to get excited about building out a fiber network across the city. The only problem: they didn’t want the city to pay for it.

To avoid putting up the money themselves, the city opened a “request for proposals,” offering private companies the opportunity to move into LA to build and operate a high-speed fiber network at their own expense. The providers could use city infrastructure to build the network, charge whatever they wanted for the fastest speeds, and keep the profits for themselves — LA only asked that businesses be connected as well as residents, and that the lowest speed be provided for free.

But the project fizzled out. In 2017, Councilmember Bob Blumenfield, who championed the project, revealed that the city didn’t get even one viable proposal. Tech watchdogs were skeptical to begin with, guessing that the cost and timeframe of the project wouldn’t be worth it to corporations that wanted to maximize profit quickly. The skeptics turned out to be correct.

Since then, the idea of public broadband has been raised again periodically -- with no results. Two years ago, another Councilmember proposed a new city department to build out internet access. That, too, has gone nowhere.

Meanwhile, LA’s neighboring cities have been racing ahead of us in pursuit of high-speed public broadband.

In addition to Santa Monica, Burbank, Pasadena, Culver City, and Riverside have also developed municipal fiber networks in the last decade — some are available only to businesses that want to pay for high speeds, but Culver City is already working on connecting large residential buildings.

HOW MUCH WILL IT COST?

There’s no sugarcoating it — public broadband has a very high initial sticker price. When the City of LA first explored fiber-to-the-home in 2013, they concluded that getting every residence connected with fiber would cost between $3 billion and $5 billion. For comparison, the total annual LAPD budget is $3.1 billion, and the yearly discretionary budget of the entire city of LA is about $6 billion.

LA’s price estimate is probably accurate, too. San Francisco, a much smaller city in terms of population and surface area than LA, estimated the cost of a fiber-to-the-home buildout at $1.9 billion. Chattanooga’s storied fiber project cost $229 million — for a population only 5% as large as LA’s, with a third of the square mileage.

So fiber-to-the-home in LA would require a lot of money up front. But if we think of public broadband as an investment, the cities that have built it often end up recouping their costs – even turning significant profits within only a few years.

A study from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga found that the city’s fiber system in its first three years “saved $130.5 million in power outages, boosted business energy efficiency by $234.5 million and spurred $461 million in new business investment” in its first three years. These figures suggest that Chattanooga recouped more than three times its initial investment in a very short time. The city never had to raise taxes.

Right next door, Santa Monica’s initial $530,000 investment in public fiber was found to have immediately brought back more than $700,000 in annual savings. While it sometimes takes a while for public fiber networks to onboard enough customers to turn a profit, there are plenty of examples of projects that recouped their costs in combined savings and revenue in only a few years.

Not all of the money has to be invested at once, either – there are a lot of creative options to pay for a long-term fiber project. LA could use bond financing to start connecting some neighborhoods to fiber now, focusing on neighborhoods that currently lack access, then use the savings or profits from the initial investments to continue building out the network.

So up-front cost isn’t necessarily the obstacle it might seem to be when it comes to public broadband. In fact, pursuing a city-owned fiber network might be a more fiscally responsible choice than allowing LA’s technology and connectivity to fall farther behind.

SO WHAT’S THE DOWNSIDE?

High-speed public broadband might seem like a solution without a catch. But cities that have built out their fiber networks have actually seen some powerful negative consequences — and without rigorous planning, public broadband can actually hurt communities more than it helps.

Remember what we said earlier about public fiber projects generating revenue from increased business? That sometimes comes with harmful side effects. Specifically, high-speed municipal broadband projects can light a fire of gentrification.

Developing faster internet is often used as a tool for cities to create a tech sector, attracting high-paying jobs and wealthy “creative class” residents. Chattanooga is no exception: prior to launching their public high-speed network in 2010, Chattanooga was a typical post-industrial American city, having suffered severe job loss and blight in low-income neighborhoods. Investing in public broadband was seen as a means to lift the city’s local economy.

But by 2012, Chattanooga’s downtown zip code saw the fastest rate of gentrification in the entire country. A 2019 report by a group called Chattanooga Organized for Action found that almost 3,000 Black residents had been displaced since the year 2000. The city had experienced a “tech renaissance,” but with starkly unequal outcomes.

Other “smart cities” that have made tech investments have used these tools to increase police surveillance and criminalization of Black residents. Columbus, Ohio, winner of the US Department of Transportation’s 2016 “Smart Cities Challenge,” used its new broadband program to improve connectivity between police stations and neighborhood surveillance devices — a perilous development in a city that has recently seen among the highest rates of police killings of Black residents of any major US city.

Millions of people are precariously housed in LA. If the city sincerely wants public broadband to be a tool for equity, we’d have to take active measures to prevent its use for criminalization, while simultaneously implementing transformative policies to lower rents, keep people housed, and prioritize deeply affordable construction. That’s the only way to avoid the tragedies of displacement these other cities have seen. 

WHAT ABOUT SECURITY?

When it comes to implementing public broadband, there are also some steps that need to be taken to protect user data -- and prevent hacks.

As Californians, we have an explicit, constitutional right to privacy. There are court decisions at both the State and Federal level which further defend and clarify that right -- including protection from data collection, even when using public services.

Luckily, it’s relatively simple to provide both security and privacy on public fiber broadband systems. This 2018 report from the ACLU includes many helpful suggestions, such as regulatory options like establishing an independent auditing program, and a technology called “wave division multiplexing,” which is already used in Santa Monica.

It also saves time and potential legal issues in the long run to bake in privacy and security from the beginning. New York City, for instance, had to strengthen its privacy policy for its public internet kiosks after receiving a warning letter from the New York Civil Liberties Union.  

Aside from having both the legal imperative to do so and the available technology to provide it, ensuring privacy for Angelenos on public broadband services is just the common sense approach.

SO IS PUBLIC BROADBAND IN LA WORTH IT?

The question of building out a city-owned high-speed fiber network is a fraught one. It comes with gentrification risk and security hazards, but could provide tremendous advantages across income levels in the city — and if we don’t invest in expanding access, we’ll leave residents and businesses to fall even further behind in the Digital Age. 

The internet has become an essential resource for survival in LA, especially now that we’ve learned that LAUSD campuses won’t reopen for the foreseeable future, and students will continue to be asked to go to school online. That’s why internet access should be a basic human right — one provided by the city to all residents. A municipally-owned fiber network is the best way to accomplish that goal.

The potential for gentrification isn’t a reason not to invest in it at all — it’s a reason to simultaneously implement policies that will keep people housed and stop displacement, while minimizing security risk for users. If we aren’t protecting residents from possible negative outcomes, then it’s not worth doing at all.

But if we take precautions and do it correctly, investing in public broadband could serve as an extremely powerful tool to lift up low-income neighborhoods, boost local businesses, and create a healthier, more just LA — a city that finally welcomes all of its residents into the 21st century.