Seattle Rejects Creating a Municipal Broadband Network to Compete with Comcast, Activists Say They'll Keep Fighting

After studying the issue seven times over ten years, the City of Seattle is turning away from the idea of creating a municipal broadband network.

After studying the issue seven times over 10 years, the City of Seattle is turning away from the idea of creating a municipal broadband network. Robert Ullman

Back in January, I wrote an article in this very same space called “It’s Time for Seattle to Become a Gigabit City.” Mayor Ed Murray had just commissioned another study—the seventh in 10 years—to assess how the City of Seattle could break the local duopoly of Comcast and CenturyLink over internet service. After all, surveys show that there is widespread dissatisfaction with the two telecommunications conglomerates over soaring prices, middling speeds, lame reliability, and uneven, inequitable levels of service throughout the city. That month, President Obama announced that he would issue a new set of grants to cities around the country to develop high-speed internet networks. The future looked bright.

And this spring, as if to emphasize the need for a municipal alternative to Comcast, thousands of its customers were twice left with no service for hours at a time during sudden, large-scale outages. Meanwhile, CenturyLink, which began offering gigabit service last year in some neighborhoods, apologized to a customer on Beacon Hill for misleading him after he complained online. It turned out that a fiber-to-home connection wasn’t available at his address, something he learned after 40 minutes of infuriating back-and-forth with a customer service representative…