Google lights up muni broadband model in Huntsville

Three takeaways from Google Fiber’s announcement that it’s now an active tenant on the Huntsville, Alabama municipal fiber network:

  • The customer owns the marketing buzz. Huntsville put up the capital, Google buys access to end users and gets the headlines.
  • Google continues to pull back from the capital intensive business of owning and operating infrastructure.
  • Competition matters.

Google Fiber’s blog post belongs to the happy, happy, joy, joy school of public relations, but also makes it clear that it’s no longer interested in sinking its own capital into broadband infrastructure…

As an enterprising city, Huntsville explored new ways to connect residents and small businesses and is building a municipal fiber network through Huntsville Utilities. Google Fiber is the city’s first tenant and will lease part of the network with a non-exclusive arrangement, which allows other providers to lease fiber from the city as well…

Leasing the infrastructure in Huntsville rather than building from scratch allows us to bring Google Fiber to even more people, and even faster.

The kicker, though, is that Comcast isn’t even pretending to be above the fray. According to a story by Lee Roop on Al.com, Comcast is responding to the competitive threat…

Google Fiber is causing competition. Comcast issued a statement Monday about its own service in Huntsville. “Comcast offers the fastest speeds to the most homes and businesses in Huntsville,” the company said. “Our 10-gigabit fiber network supports Huntsville’s growing business community, and our recently announced 1-gigabit service provides the fastest residential speeds in the marketplace. We’re proud to be a long-time community partner in Huntsville and in all of the markets we serve across Alabama.”

The big question is whether the lease payments from Google will, over time, be enough to keep the Huntsville broadband enterprise in the black. As a muni electric utility, it has a tremendous amount of sunk infrastructure costs it can lean on. But as Provo, Utah and Alameda, California – to name two other muni electric utility examples – winning broadband subscribers and repaying even just the marginal investment isn’t a sure thing.

Competition matters.