Click for the big picture.
Anza Electric Cooperative wants to expand its fiber-to-the-home system in southwestern Riverside County. After being awarded a $2.7 million FTTH infrastructure grant from the California Advanced Services Fund in 2015, Anza used its existing electric plant as the backbone for a fiber network aimed at reaching 3,800 homes in its service territory.
Now, it’s asking the California Public Utilities Commission for another $2.2 million, to reach 1,200 more homes and "several businesses", and provide free service to fire stations and the Ronald McDonald camp for kids with cancer According to the public version of its grant application summary…
Connect Anza will deploy a fiber optic cable on existing poles and rights of way and establish a network of sufficient capacity to establish high speed, quality internet service for Anza Electric Cooperatives (AEC’s) existing service territory covering over 500 square miles, located wholly within western Riverside County. The area encompasses the communities of Mountain Center, Pinyon Pines, and Garner Valley which totals approximately 200 square miles of our service territory…
Connect Anza, as an integral part of AEC, will provide reliable, affordable broadband high speed, Fiber-ToThe-Home (FTTH) internet service to its member-owners at the lowest possible cost. Connect Anza will offer speeds of 50Mb/s both down and up to residents at a price point of $49.00 per month with no cap or limits. AEC will also offer VoIP service including CASF e911 requirements at a monthly rate of $20.
There’s one big difference between this project and Anza’s previous one: the first time around, it was going head to head with Verizon, which paid virtually no attention to its own wireline telephone systems, let alone potential competitors.
Since then, Frontier Communications has taken over those systems, including the ones that don’t offer even 1990’s legacy DSL in most of Anza Electric’s territory. The relatively few areas where broadband service is offered, speeds don’t reach the CPUC’s minimum of 6 Mbps download and 1.5 Mbps upload speeds. In contrast to Verizon, Frontier aggressively, and increasingly beligerently, challenges CASF grant proposals that pose a competitive threat to its monopoly control of, at best, poorly served areas of rural California. It won’t be so pleasant this time around.