Poor internet service on the Key Peninsula is legendary, and nearly everyone has a horror story— streaming video that stutters and balks, homework that takes an hour to download, new connections that can’t be had for love or money.
The coronavirus pandemic has made the situation worse, as
hundreds of students and teachers try to use the same creaking old copper-wire
system at the same time.
“It was impossible,” said Cindy Greetham, who was trying to
teach 20 fourth-graders by Zoom from her waterfront house near Home. “The
screen would freeze. I couldn’t hear them. They couldn’t hear me. Half the
time, I would get a band across the screen that said, ‘the internet is
unstable.’ “
Now, however, because of an unusual confluence of events —
including, ironically. the pandemic itself— the digital logjam on the Key
Peninsula may be about to break.
Pierce County is pondering a multi-million-dollar effort to
extend broadband in rural areas. Bills are coursing through the state
legislature. A pot of federal money is about to roll downhill from the CARES
and other acts. Satellite companies are getting into the act. Utilities in
neighboring counties are sizing up the possibilities.
Even the local electric co-op, Peninsula Light Co., is
taking a look —somewhat reluctantly— at getting involved.
“What we discovered during the pandemic is that broadband
has become an essential commodity,” said Mark Cockerill, a director of the Key
Peninsula Community Council and leader of its Broadband Project. “It ranks
right up there with electricity, food and shelter.”
Derek Young, the area’s member for the Pierce County
Council, calls broadband “the rural electrification for our generation.”
“I’ve got constituents who go the parking lot at Burger King
for wi-fi because they can’t get internet access at home,” he said. “We owe it
to this generation to make sure they can thrive and compete in today’s market.”
Young said Pierce County is looking to commit $20 million to
$30 million “immediately” to roll out broadband fiber optics “countywide as far
as we can get it.”
“We’ve had conversations with possible providers in the
past, but we’ve never had the wherewithall to make them real,” he said. “Now
we’ve got real cash to invest, and these conversations are going to get real.”
Lagging Speeds
The FCC considers 25 megabytes per second (Mbs) the minimum
for “good” internet service and recommends 100 Mbs for high-intensity uses like
two-video and video streaming. In big cities, “gigabit internet,” or speeds of
1 gigabyte per second (Gbs), are becoming common.
But a survey the Key Peninsula council took last year found
that 55 percent of KP residents who responded had internet speeds of less than
11 Mbs, and 36 percent had less than 6 Mbs. A few users reported speeds below 1
Mbs.
The problem is that most of the internet connections on the
Key Peninsula are made over painfully slow copper lines left over from the old
telephone system. The provider, Century Link, has made it clear it has no
interest in upgrading to faster fiber optic cables. It will not pay, the
company says, because it’s a rural area with too much distance between
customers.
“it’s the same problem they had in the 1930s with rural
electrification, said Bob Hunter, general manager of the neighboring Kitsap
PUD. “Because it doesn’t pay, private companies won’t do it.”
The copper-wire system, called Digital Subscriber Line, or
DSL, uses higher, inaudible frequencies to carry the bleeps and bloops of
digital information over the telephone lines, along with conversations. Once
cutting-edge technology, it’s now considered hopelessly obsolete. Speeds top
out at about 25 Mbs, but in practice seldom reach even that.
What’s more, DSL speed is dependent on the number of users
on the line. The analogy is not perfect, but it’s somewhat like sharing a water
line — when everyone’s faucet is open, the water pressure drops.
“The first house does fine, but by the time you get to the
end of the street, there’s nothing left at all,” said Cockerill.
Broadband Deserts
The Key Peninsula is 16 miles long and is home to about
16,000 people in communities like Wauna, Key Center, Vaughn, Home, Lakebay, and
Longbranch. Most are served by Centurylink, with a small area bordering Mason
County served by Comcast.
Two areas — one north and west of Vaughn, and the other near
Longbranch — have no internet service at all, and no one willing to bring it,
said Kris Hagel, executive director of digital learning at the Peninsula School
District.
“It’s a big problem for us, especially when children have to
learn from home,” Hagel said.
At the height of this school closure last winter, the
parking lots at Vaughn and Evergreen elementary schools were full of cars in
the dark of the night, as parents and students with laptops used the school
wi-fi to access their lessons.
In the Greetham home, things were pretty desperate. Both
Cindy Greetham and her husband, Jim, teach in the Peninsula School District,
and their daughter, Ann, 20, was home from college, so there was a lively
competition among laptops. When all three needed to use the internet at once,
it simply swooned away.
Several times a week, Cindy need to upload a 10-minute video
for her students. But the DSL service is asymmetric — it’s designed to be
faster down than up.
“It would take me seven hours to upload a 10-minute video,”
she recalled. “Sometimes I would let my Mac run overnight, and it would still
be working in the morning.”
Eventually, the Greethams got a wi-fi hotspot from the
school district, one of more than 500 Kris Hagel and his team scattered around
the peninsula. Some 50 of the district’s school buses were also equipped with
hot spots, which pluck their internet signal from cellphone towers.
Peninsula Light Is Wary
Pierce County commissioned a study, unveiled last month,
that examined satellite, over-the-air wi-fi and several other technologies, and
concluded that fiber-optic cable — known as “fiber to the premises” — is the
most practical solution. Fiber-optic cable is actually cheaper to string than
copper — it costs between $8,500 and $10,000 a mile. But who will string it?
The county’s consultants, CTC Technology and Energy,
reported that both Century Link and Comcast demanded heavy subsidies to bring
fiber-optic cable to the Key Peninsula. Century Link wanted a 65 to 75 percent
subsidy; Comcast offered to serve 525 more homes in the northern part of the
peninsula, but said it would require a $2 million subsidy to do so.
Inevitably, in nearly every conversation among experts, the
name of the Peninsula Light Co. comes up The Gig Harbor-based electrical
cooperative owns nearly 6,000 poles and 130 miles of overhead wires on the Key
Peninsula.
“It would obviously be the best solution,” Cockerill said,
and others agree.
“In terms of stringing fiber, having a partner like PenLight
would be ideal” said Young.
But the co-op is skittish about getting outside its area of
expertise.
“We’re an electric and water utility, and that’s what we
do,” said Ryan Redmond, PenLight’s chief resources officer. “Right now, we’re
listening. We are interested in what we can do to help, but that doesn’t mean
we’re going into the broadband business.”
Utility insiders are painfully aware of what happened to
Tacoma Public Utilities, which used excess capacity on its meter-reading fiber
network to start the cable provider Click!. Although Click! was popular with
customers — and forced its commercial competitor to improve service and lower prices
— it never made money, and was eventually forced to privatize.
Two Nearby Models
But just over the county line are two similar public
utilities that have made the leap into broadband successfully, using a
public-private model that sidesteps the Click! conundrum
Both Mason County PUD and Kitsap County PUD offer their
members high-speed broadband over fiber-optic cable. The utilities own the
cable, but lease capacity on it to private internet service providers who
compete among themselves for customers.
It was at first a case of strange bedfellows.
“We were strictly a water and sewer utility,” explained Bob
Hunter, the Kitsap PUD general manager, “We got into telecom back in 2000 to
solve a telephone problem — there were three different phone companies, and it
was long-distance to call from Poulsbo to Port Orchard, or from Port Orchard to
Kingston.”
The PUD build a fiber-optic network to connect “anchor
institutions,” like the courthouse, the school district and its own
substations,.
“By 2016, people who worked in these places were asking us,
‘Hey, why can’t we have this at home?’“ Hunter said. “They told us, ‘We’ll pay
for it if you build it.’”
Gigabyte Internet
To finance the build-out, Kitsap PUD sought loans from
investors that could be amortized over 20 years. Homeowners who sign up can pay
off the cost — up to $10,000 a home — through a yearly assessment by the
county, averaging about $150 a month. In addition, they pay their chosen ISP
$75 a month for internet service.
In return, customers get “Gigabyte internet” — speeds of 1
GBs, both up and down. They can choose from among five internet providers, and
switch among them at any time.
Hunter is first to admit the solution is not cheap. “People
have called it ‘Internet for the rich,’” he said. “I call it ‘Internet for
those who can afford it.’“ Still, he said, it’s a first step.
Mason PUD, to the south, uses a variation on the same
system. Begun as an electrical utility in the 1930s, Mason PUD got into fiber
to connect its own substations.
“Then people began asking us to serve them, too,” said Lynn
Eaton, the utility’s communications manager, “Well, that’s the whole reason
PUDs exist in the first place, going back to rural electrification. So we feel
it is our duty to fill that need.”
Mason PUD has built out wherever it can find a critical mass
of demand, in what it calls “fiberhoods.”
“We set up a model that has a 12-year payback time. There’s
a $25-a-month construction add-on, in addition to the ISP cost. We don’t build
until 75% of the residents of an area say they want it, and they only pay if
they take the service.”
As in Kitsap, Mason PUD customers have their choice of
several private service providers, and can switch among them at will.
“It’s been really successful for us, but it’s a long road,”
Eaton said.
Federal Money, With a Hitch
Federal funding can help smooth out the inequalities in
broadband access, and there are literally billions of dollars ready to pour
forth for that purpose from the CARES act and President Joe Biden’s big
infrastructure bill.
Under Biden’s American Rescue Plan, the Department of
Commerce, for instance, would be given $3 billion in additional for funding for
public works and infrastructure; the Treasury Capital Projects fund, $10
billion; the FCC’s Emergency Connectivity Fund, $10 billion; rural community
development block grants, $45 billion, and so forth.
But there’s a catch: most of the money is intended for
“retail” providers, and Washington State has a law — championed by Comcast —
that prohibits PUDs from providing retail service — that is, selling directly
to consumers.
“PUDS are not really interested in retail,” said Mason PUD’s
Hunter. “We think the open access system we are using, with private partners,
works just fine. But without what’s called ‘retail authority,’ we can’t access
the billions of dollars that’s going to be available in federal funding.”
A bill giving PUDs that authority — HB 1336, sponsored by
Rep. Drew Hanson of Bainbridge Island — was approved on Sunday by the state
Legislature.
Hugh Taylor, the principal policy analyst for Pierce County,
said the county has basically identified the technical issues and the key
players — including PenLight — and is now concentrating on “getting them to
talk to each other.”
County May Take Charge
Derek Young, the county council member, told The Gateway on
Monday that Pierce County has asked its technical consultant to explore whether
the county itself should take charge of wiring under-served areas for
broadband.
“If that’s the case, we’re going to push forward on that,”
he said. “If not, we’re going to look to partners like PenLight or others.”
It’s not just a Key Peninsula problem, Young noted.
“We have areas all over the county which are either not
served at all, or where people are paying a lot of money for very poor
service.”
An example, he said, is Frederickson, which is the county’s
manufacturing and industrial center.
“We lose customers daily, because they find out they can’t
get broadband internet,” Young said. “This are big industrial users who need to
upload terrabytes of data. They’re not going to be satisfied with DSL on copper
wires.”
Help from Kitsap?
Hunter of Kitsap PUD, who says he started out strictly a
“water and sewer guy,” is now an enthusiastic evangelist for broadband.
“I understand utilities that don’t want to get into this
business,” he said, “But at the end of the day, we work for the public. People
started petitioning us to do this, and I can tell you, there’s nothing more
powerful than hearing from the people you serve.”
The Hanson bill just passed in the Legislature includes
language that would allow PUDs from other counties to serve Pierce County
customers, and Hunter says his utility might be interested.
If the financing could be put together, Hunter said, Kitsap
PUD would be willing to undertake the job of installing a fiber-optic backbone
for the Key Peninsula and run it for a few years, providing he could turn it
over to a local utility once it were up and running.
“The first thing I would want to do,” he said, “Is have a
meeting with PenLight.”
