Before the end of this year my hometown of Highland, Illinois will begin activating service for its new municipal fiber to the home project. I’ve followed the project passively over the last two years as it evolved from idea to certainty, and it is one that I have favored since the idea was early in its conception. Spending this summer in Highland I have had the pleasure of seeing wire being strung around town for the first phase of the project and the sprouting of small utility cabinets unobtrusively tucked away.
Highland has a history of strong municipal utilities providing water and electricity to the city, and the new communications utility is positioned to serve Highland’s needs in ways that have been met by incumbent providers with often disappointing results. In the past it has been an infrequent but unfortunate reality that when the single cable providing Highland’s roughly 10,000 is damaged that phone service to the community has been interrupted for the several hours necessary for the cable to be repaired. After each of these incidents the city’s desire for a more robust connection to the national network the the redundancy to maintain connectivity in the event of damage to this single line has fallen of the indifferent ears of incumbents. In light of Frontier’s recent acquisition of Verizon’s telephone lines in Highland concern would not be unjustified considering Frontier’s history with smaller municipalities on the edges of metropolitan areas. The incumbent cable television provider has downsides as well.
The growing phenomenon of municipal broadband providers has attracted some attention in media including coverage of specific projects. Though Highland’s project hasn’t attracted much attention outside the local area, the city is on the leading edge of a growing movement to improve the quality of and access to internet services.