Harrison Diamond is the new business relations officer for the City of Huntsville. (File photo)

By Harrison Diamond, Business Relations Officer for the City of Huntsville. He served on the Mayor's GIG City Initiative Team.

A recent opinion piece on AL.com presented a skewed and inaccurate portrayal of the City of Huntsville's GIG City announcement. Before delving into the inaccuracies of the piece in question. I'd like to point out the two points upon which we agree: the system will cost around $60 million and government Internet is not the path to success.

It's about infrastructure

The piece incorrectly implies that the fiber system being designed is for one company - Google Fiber. This ignores a process that has been years in the making. The City of Huntsville has been laying fiber for nearly two decades. Huntsville Utilities has also been working toward building out a fiber network. Why? Quite simply, fiber ensures a more resilient and robust electrical grid. Fiber will allow critical infrastructure the ability to communicate with one another. When there is an outage, instead of wasting time guessing where the problem is, crews can immediately respond and restore power.

A resilient grid requires fiber. It impacts everything from emergency responders to public safety communication to a smart traffic control system, which ensures steady traffic flow for shorter commutes. The fiber system will cost Huntsville about $60 million and it was going to happen regardless of the ability to lease excess fiber to private broadband companies.

But here is where the win-win proposition enters. Huntsville Utilities will now be able to share the cost of constructing the network with private companies through multiple lease arrangements. This saves taxpayer dollars. Leases are open to any company wishing to connect and provide service. Google Fiber is just the first. We think the Huntsville model is something other communities will want to replicate, as indicated by one of many articles on the topic: Read "Backchannel" on Dark Fiber.

Becoming a GIG City

When Mayor Tommy Battle announced his intention to make Huntsville a GIG City in 2014, we issued a request for information (RFI) to private companies for ideas on models to help us achieve our goal. We explored the Chattanooga and Opelika models with interest, but decided we didn't want our government to be a content provider. We believe the private sector knows best how to provide broadband service more efficiently.

What is the government good at doing? Building infrastructure. Fiber today is no less an infrastructure need than roads, water, sewer and electricity. As mentioned, Huntsville has been placing fiber for nearly 20 years. It only makes sense to help recoup costs by offering excess capacity to private companies in the business of delivering broadband service and content to citizens. While we welcome Google Fiber, our network will be open to incumbent providers and new companies. In the end, we believe this dark fiber model will encourage more providers to enter our market. More providers mean more competition and that means better prices and better services for customers.

Where we go from here

Getting the GIG is not the achievement. Using the GIG is the true excitement. The digital world and the physical world are more interconnected than ever before and this is just the beginning.

Gartner estimates that there are roughly 6.4 billion connected devices in the world today and that number is expected to increase by the billions by 2020. All those devices require connection to high speed broadband.

Broadband will enable communities to break the digital divide and enable true digital self-sufficiency. It will help entrepreneurs create the next great company from home, where many successful businesses first start out.

Huntsville is charting a new path, but that is nothing new for us. Huntsville led the technological innovations that gave us rockets to take humans to the moon. Now we are developing the GIG City model to provide rocket speed broadband to more people and businesses. Connectivity is new infrastructure, and you have to have it if you want to compete.