Multnomah County and Portland Take Steps Toward Public Internet Access

This person is happy because he's using publicly owned broadband to connect to the internet! GETTY IMAGES

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Internet access could someday be a public utility in Multnomah County, just like water, trash pickup, and electricity.

Portland City Council will vote Wednesday to enter into an agreement with Multnomah County to conduct a feasibility study on constructing a publicly owned fiber network, which would allow the county to provide a public internet service. Such a move would break down the monopoly on internet access currently enjoyed by private companies like Comcast and CenturyLink, and ensure that county residents wouldn’t have a barrier to entry for using the internet based on income level or geography.

In some parts of Multnomah County, only 40 percent of households have access to high-speed internet. A recent Harvard study found that public internet access tends to be less expensive for consumers than private options.

“The digital equity gap is real in our county,” said Bob Leek, who directs the county’s Department of County Assets, at a February county board meeting. “Access to connectivity should be like access to water and electricity.”

Multnomah County dedicated $150,000 to fund the study last year. The cities of Wood Village, Gresham, Troutdale, and Fairview will dedicate a combined $50,000, and the city of Portland will contribute $25,000, bringing the study’s total budget to $300,000. The study will look at Portland's existing fiber cables and other broadband infrastructure, and determine what would be necessary to provide a county-wide public internet utility service.

Hundreds of communities across the US already operate their own broadband networks—but as the Oregonian reported last year, a network that stretched across all of Multnomah County would be the country’s largest municipal broadband system.

Portland has been seen as a leader in fair internet access since the late 1990s, when city leaders fought against a potential AT&T monopoly on cable lines; more recently, Portland City Council adopted a broadband strategic plan in 2011, and in 2014 Google considered building a fiber network in town, which City Council lobbied aggressively for. Google ended up passing on Portland in favor of projects in other cities, but the dream of public broadband in Portland was kept alive by Municipal Broadband PDX, a campaign managed by nonprofit Municipal Broadband Coalition of America, which is now set to facilitate the county’s feasibility study. (For more on Portland's long will-they-or-won't-they relationship with public broadband, read the Mercury's deep-dive on the issue from last year.)

A feasibility study is just the first step in planning for a public broadband network, and it’s not yet known how much this might cost, or how it would be paid for. When Google was considering installing a fiber network in Portland, the estimated cost of the project was $300 million, and the cost of covering the entire county would likely be even steeper.

In addition to cost, the study will look at factors like infrastructure requirements, potential partnerships with other public or private agencies, and the public benefits and risks of public broadband. Multnomah County officials are spending the summer planning for the feasibility study, and will update the public on their plans in September.

“Given the size of our community and the complexity of our community,” Leek said at the February county board meeting, “it’s going to take a large coalition of people to pull this off successfully.”