Newark exploring city-sponsored Internet

Newark residents and businesses someday may turn to the city for Internet access like they do for water and electric utilities.

City officials are exploring when to hold a workshop for gathering input about a municipally sponsored Internet service. They want to gauge support for the concept before the City Council decides whether to allocate more than $10,000 to explore the feasibility in a study next year, city spokesman Ricky Nietubicz.

The city’s interest was prompted by residents who spoke at City Council meetings. City Information Technology manager Josh Brechbuehl said the attention ramped up last year after the city installed smart water and electric meters, which relay usage information over a new wireless Internet network, called a Wi-Fi mesh.

Plans for a $1.3 billion data center and power plant on the Science, Technology & Advanced Research Campus at the University of Delaware also drew residents’ attention to high-speed Internet infrastructure in the city, Brechbuehl said.

Options for the new system include leasing a fiber-optic network from a private company or boosting the WiFi mesh in place.

Brechbuehl said the biggest hurdle would be keeping costs in line with competitors. Newark has 16 broadband providers. Beyond leasing cable and bandwidth, there also is the expense of connecting the Internet into the homes, he said.

Augmenting the city’s smart meter Wi-Fi setup also would be costly because the system isn’t designed to deliver browsing bandwidth for thousands of people simultaneously, doesn’t cover the entire city and isn’t strong enough to permeate into buildings, Brechbuehl said.

“If you put cost aside for a moment ... there are interesting things that can be done. We may be able to do it cheaper. We don’t know it yet,” Brechbuehl said.

Brechbuehl said he’s looking to other communities that have developed similar systems.

“We have not found a lot of success. We see a lot of cities researching it and starting the process, but not many that have completed it as a big success,” Brechbuehl said.

More than 450 governments across the country offer Internet service, said Christopher Mitchell, director of Community Broadband Networks for the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit group that advises communities on planning.

At first, the main motivation behind setting municipal-funded services was improving access to the Internet for residents, he said. With the prevalence of broadband today, cities are now motivated to break local “monopolies” held by companies like Comcast and Verizon in order to offer a higher quality and less expensive service, Mitchell said.

Systems range from fiber-optic lines exclusively serving business districts to about 100 municipal systems that connect to every residence and business, Mitchell said. Municipalities sometimes set up a publicly-owned Internet service provider and build an infrastructure or lease privately-owned infrastructure.

“You have the service from the cities that is typically higher quality and lower cost,” Mitchell said. “That will cause the existing providers also to lower the cost. In many cases, everyone will benefit even if they don’t accept the municipal service.”

Mitchell said some municipally-sponsored systems have been able to offer a one gigabyte-per-second internet around $75 monthly. A gigabyte is 1,000 megabytes. This week, Comcast was advertising a 550 megabyte-per-second Internet in Newark for $400 monthly.

Brechbuehl said the feasibility study would also look at providing WiFi to parks or on the Main Street business corridor.

“To start, we just really want to hear from the public,” Brechbuehl said.

Contact Xerxes Wilson at (302) 324-2787 or xwilson@delawareonline.com. Follow @Ber_Xerxes on Twitter.