The 27,000-person town of Opelika, Alabama will be voting this week on whether or not to get into the broadband business. The town hopes to build a $33 million fiber network funded with revenue bonds, using a core fiber ring from the local power utility as its heart. Broadband operator Knology is providing some of the core services over the network. As we’ve seen time and time again, local incumbent Charter Communications is fighting the plan and a local group has sprung up called “Concerned Citizens of Opelika” who are trying to get the plan shelved before it takes off. Says the group:”This referendum represents everything going wrong with our nation today, and it is an opportunity for us to stop, here at home, something that is so fundamentally opposed to the principles this country was founded on.”Of course it’s not clear that the country was founded on protectionist, anti-competitive principles either, and the town wouldn’t be proposing the idea if they were entirely happy with their service from local providers, who frequently aren’t driven to improve service due to a lack of competition. Charter meanwhile is taking the interesting tactic of trying to tell locals that their coaxial network will be more reliable than the fiber network, because fiber cuts take time to repair:”This delivery system keeps the cost down for residential customers while supplying direct fiber optic connections to businesses requiring the maximum bandwidth available nationally,” James said. “If a coaxial cable is damaged by traffic accidents or excavation procedures, it can be repaired rather quickly, whereas a damaged fiber optic cable will take hours or days to repair, depending on the scenario.”Obviously fiber cuts can happen with cable networks too, and this kind of argument is an about face for cable operators, who are usually busy trying to convince people that fiber and cable are largely indistinguishable.
According to this Q&A with Opelika Mayor Gary Fuller and Opelika Light and Power Director Derek Lee, the city hopes to have the network up and running by 2012. Though like other projects of this kind, Charter will do everything in its power to ensure this doesn’t happen, and they’ve already convinced lawmakers to pass a state-level law intended to either slow or derail these kinds of projects.