It’s difficult not to salivate when moving into a neighborhood with a community-owned fiber optic network. Every geek dreams of the lightning-fast Internet speeds of a network they can call their own—and of telling their current mega-ISP to shove it. But when the dream becomes a reality, one quickly realizes that not all community-owned networks are created equal. And they certainly aren't problem-free.

In summer 2007 I moved into the Issaquah Highlands neighborhood, a fledgling master-planned suburban community in the city of Issaquah, Washington, just east of Seattle. With its first homes built in 1998, Issaquah Highlands is a growing neighborhood of 3,000 households, and most subscribe to the community-owned Highlands Fiber Network (HFN). After learning about the network when I moved in, I immediately joined the HFN advisory board, a small administrative group with members representing three key players: the network ISP, the community builder, and Issaquah Highlands residents such as myself.

As both an HFN subscriber and board member, I gained a unique perspective on community-owned fiber over the three years I lived in the Highlands community. Things did not go as smoothly as I had hoped for when moving in, and I believe that learning from my experience may help others as they consider the benefits and downfalls of a community-owned network.

The buying experience



I didn’t move into Issaquah Highlands solely for its community-owned fiber network. In fact, I didn’t discover that the community had its own network until relatively late in the buying process. Once I learned about the network, I was shocked that it had not been mentioned in my home's listing or by the real estate agents selling fiber-equipped homes while remaining utterly unaware of fiber's benefits.

As a planned community, Issaquah Highlands homes are part of a community association. Except for some of the earliest homes, all owners are bound to a covenant agreement detailing the terms of living in the community and maintaining a home there. As part of the covenant agreement, everyone agrees to pay a monthly subscription fee for Internet service provided by HFN. This is probably the worst possible way someone can learn that their new home has access to a community-owned network: "Honey, we have another bill to pay!"

Requiring everyone to subscribe to HFN was a hot point of contention for some residents, though most of the time this was due to a lack of effective communication. Many residents simply transferred their existing cable Internet service when they moved in—then made the disappointing discovery months after moving in that they were still responsible for paying the HFN subscription fee in addition to the cable service they were already using.

Communities considering an investment in their own networks should consider the importance of not only educating existing residents but also future residents about the network, what it provides, and what it means for them. By failing to communicate with many new residents, Issaquah Highlands had far too many subscribers who didn’t even know they were subscribers.

Network implementation



The idea for a fiber optic network originated early in the development of Issaquah Highlands. According to HFN General Manager Robert Black, the network was implemented after encouragement from many of the initial residents.

The cost of implementing a community-owned network prevents most neighborhoods from building their own networks, and it's the main reason why all Issaquah Highlands residents are required to subscribe to the service. The cost of initial buildout was in the millions of dollars and was financed to be paid off over several decades. Once the network is paid off, ownership will be transferred from the builder, Port Blakely, to the community association. However, the community has a strong leadership position on the HFN board even while the builder owns the fiber.

Port Blakely at first contracted with a small Internet provider to build and operate the network, but this ISP quickly collapsed due to financial issues. Port Blakely then contracted with a Seattle-area ISP to operate the network and provide Internet service over the physical infrastructure. This step can be harder than one might expect; there aren’t many options left when it comes to standalone ISPs. Back in the days of dial-up, we had a thriving market in the US, but the proliferation of DSL and cable Internet service provided by whoever owns the wires means that most smaller ISPs have folded. While serving on the HFN board, I always knew that we would have problems replacing our local ISP if that became necessary.

With the tremendous speed potential of a fiber optic Internet connection, the real limiting factor is the ISP; consumer speeds depend both on the capabilities of the network routing hardware and the ISP’s connections to major Internet backbones. Surprisingly to those who assume community-owned networks are always faster, the early offerings from HFN were well below the comparable offerings from cable Internet service. I was relieved to learn when I moved in that HFN had increased speeds up to 20Mbps with prices comparable to cable service. Prior to my arrival, plans topped out much lower—around 1Mbps.

As major ISPs continued to improve their networks, HFN stayed competitive by increasing its own speed offerings. During my time in the community, we increased our Internet service to include plans with download speeds as fast as 55Mbps. Staying competitive was important to keep customers happy (though we never had to worry about losing customers; they were all bound by the covenant requirement). Most residents subscribed to the lower-priced basic service plans, so part of the motivation for creating new plans was finding speed and price points that would encourage customers to upgrade.

Each home in Issaquah Highlands supports the community network. In addition to fiber runs, every home features a network box containing the fiber portal hardware and patch panels for ethernet, cable, and phone jacks throughout the home. This configuration allows for phone and TV service to be connected to the fiber portal separately from the standard Internet service. By default, these extra services are connected to the local area providers (Qwest and Comcast, in our case).

The service tiers and prices offered to HFN customers are similar to those offered by the local cable Internet service, ranging from $41.90/month to $124.90/month. But one fee that residents might not expect was the $350 initial service fee paid as part of closing costs for each home (both new and resale). This additional fee didn't cause much friction with customers, but I suspect that was primarily due to the several thousands of dollars that make up the other closing costs. This fee is less than the actual cost for connecting each home to the main fiber lines running throughout the neighborhood, but fees collected through resale help cover the initial cost and eventually provide additional revenue for the network.

Paying a monthly service fee for Internet access is common, but our requirement to do so created some issues. For instance, homeowners had to pay once they bought a home but before they moved in, or after they moved out but before the home sold. Worst of all was when people weren’t aware of the required subscription until several months in and still had to pay for something they weren’t using and didn’t know they had.

Service quality



State of the art technology at HFN created a high expectation for the quality of service I would receive compared to my past experience with big ISPs like Comcast. However, I quickly became aware of some real benefits to having a major ISP provided after I stopped using one. Most notably, a lack of service outages and better customer support availability.

Overall, our network maintained a service level with over 99 percent uptime. That's good, but 99 percent can be a deceiving figure. With daily use of the Internet being the norm, any downtime becomes very frustrating. Excluding outages related to weather or other things outside the ISP’s control, there were several network failures during the time I lived in Issaquah Highlands.

In one case, the traffic shaper used to control each user’s bandwidth had failed—and then it failed to fall over to a backup traffic shaper. After this incident, I learned that the traffic shaping system was homegrown by the ISP and not standard hardware. Other incidents included a configuration issue with the primary network routers that caused consistent outages and had to be worked around with daily reboots until the configuration was fixed. The datacenter where our fiber connects to the ISP, a major regional facility, became an issue when its staff accidentally unplugged our fiber from the switchboard during a routine clean-out of dead connections.

My position on the advisory board gave me inside information on what caused most outages; perhaps for those in the dark, these outages were less of an issue because the cause was unknown. The outages bothered me because I knew in many cases they were preventable. Maybe I’ve been lucky, but I can’t recall ever experiencing network outages with a major ISP that weren’t attributed to severe weather conditions.

The customer service experience with HFN was also a big disappointment. Customer support was provided by our ISP and hours were limited to daytime and early evening. Any issues that came up after the support desk closed went to an answering service. Worse yet, the HFN support line was in a shared pool with the ISP's other support lines. This resulted in support hold times fluctuating due to issues unrelated to HFN. The average wait time was usually about five minutes, but could stretch out in excess of 10-20 minutes. Customers were not allowed to speak with the techs who could investigate network issues, so resolving advanced tickets always required a callback with a turnaround of one or more days.

In contrast, most major ISPs offer 24x7 customer service and in my experience an average hold time of less than a minute. More importantly, the service stability with major Internet providers left me with little need to contact their support departments.

During the occasions of frequent network outages, I was tempted to set up a subscription with a cable Internet provider as a backup to ensure I would have connectivity. This is when I realized that being locked into an ISP, even if it’s a glorious community-owned fiber network, isn't an ideal situation. Pricing, speed, and service quality were all major factors in choosing an ISP, yet if these failed with HFN, the ISP didn’t have to worry about losing customers.

I’m not saying that HFN exploited their customers, but it does seem clear that if there was more competition, many of the downfalls I experienced would have been better handled. HFN was constantly running a real risk; if its ISP ever failed as a business, our alternatives were quite limited. Even if another ISP could be found, any transition was bound to take a considerable amount of time; the local ISP not only provided Internet service but maintained all of our community data centers and owned much of the equipment.

But it wasn't all bad news.