Expert Opinion
Christopher Mitchell: Electric Grid Disaster in Texas Leads to Broadband Open Access Soul Searching

The disaster in Texas resulting from an electric grid that was deliberately left exposed and likely to fail in rare cold weather events has received a lot of dramatic coverage, as well it should given the loss of life and damage to so many homes and businesses.
It also raised some questions in my mind regarding competition and designing markets that will be discussed below. Texas was a leader in allowing different electricity firms to compete in selling electricity over the same electric grid, an arrangement that has some similarities to open access broadband approaches.
In digging into that recent electricity history, I made another interesting and relevant finding that I discuss first as part of the background to understand the lessons from Texas. In 20 years of competing models between, on the one hand, municipal and cooperative structures to deliver electricity and, on the other hand, a largely deregulated and competitive market, the munis and co-ops delivered lower prices to ratepayers.
Electricity deregulation, Texas style
More than 20 years ago, Texas largely deregulated electricity markets. Residents still have a monopoly in charge of the physical wire delivering electricity to the home, but they could choose among various electricity providers that would effectively use the wire and charge different amounts, differentiating themselves via a variety of factors, including how the electricty was produced.
However, some areas continued to have monopoly electricity providers, including two of the largest public power providers in the nation, San Antonio’s CPS and Austin Energy, among others as well as several rural electric cooperatives.
For 20 years, Texas has conducted an informal test between unregulated market competition and local providers that are democratically accountable to their customers. The Wall Street Journal is the latest of many over the years to study the numbers and dispassionately annoint the munis and cooperatives the winners.
None of this was supposed to happen under deregulation. Backers of competition in the electricity-supply business promised it would lower prices for consumers who could shop around for the best deals, just as they do for cellphone service. The system would be an improvement over monopoly utilities, which have little incentive to innovate and provide better service to customers, supporters of deregulation said….
From 2004 through 2019, the annual rate for electricity from Texas’s traditional utilities was 8% lower, on average, than the nationwide average rate, while the rates of retail providers averaged 13% higher than the nationwide rate, according to the Journal’s analysis.
The findings are similar to a 2015 report from the Texas Coalition for Affordable Power, covered by the Texas Tribune:
But from 2002 to 2013, the average household in deregulated areas paid a total of about $4,800 more than residents of cities — like Austin and San Antonio — served by just one municipal utility, or those served by electric cooperatives, the analysis said.
Not just a question of price
This isn’t the first time we at ILSR’s Community Broadband Networks team have looked at electricity. Given that many of the arguments against municipal broadband are identical to arguments against public power more than 100 years ago, we like to look at the 100+ years of empirical evidence that local governments can handle these responsibilities.
Many studies looking at prices and reliability have found public power to be at least as good as the big investor-owned utilities, and often better. Back in 2011, I wrote about Connecticut Light and Power compared to Norwich, Connecticut after a storm demonstrated the benefits of community ownership.
Norwich had far fewer customers lose power, and they regained service more quickly than the investor-owned utility. It led to the New York Times digging into the two companies’ budgets to seek answers.
In contrast to Connecticut Light and Power, Norwich’s electric unit last year increased operations and maintenance spending by 11 percent, to $2.9 million. Put another way, in 2010 Norwich allocated about $132 a customer to this line item in its accounts. Connecticut Light and Power reported maintenance, unadjusted for deferred expenses, of $96.5 million, or around $78 per client.
We generally see networks that are directly accountable to their customers doing a much better job, not just in price but all-around value.
Lessons for designing markets competitively
The competitive market was supposed to deliver far lower prices to consumers. As several have stated, including ILSR’s very own energy expert, John Farrell, what it mostly did was allow electricity companies to introduce the tricky and opaque billing practices common among the national cable monopolies to what had been a fairly transparent market.
A 2019 Houston Chronicle article, “Analysis: The Murky and Confusing Texas Electricity Market” sheds some light:
But the shopping site became overwhelmed with offerings. Some companies offered more than 30 plans that were hard to distinguish from each other. Several retail electric providers began offering multi-tiered electricity plans with low teaser rates designed to catch the attention of shoppers, only to have those who signed up learn too late that using one kilowatt hour above a certain threshold would send the advertised price soaring by as much as 10 times.
Other companies offered “free nights and weekends” plans that could cost consumers more because of much higher weekday rates. One company offered a $600 bill credit for a two-year plan that would ultimately cost customers twice as much as another plan offered by the same company.
It is worth nothing that Texas was not solely seeking lower prices, but also incentives to encourage customers to shift their electricity use away from peak times, especially in the summer. Some companies have achieved those goals, but reading the investigations suggests that the bulk of energy in the market has been expended trying to fool potential customers with opaque pricing.
What this means is that rather than technical or other useful progress, the main innovation was in the form of legalized fraud or trickiness. Companies often competed in how they could fool people into signing up, though they would pay more. This is one of the biggest complaints people have today about telecommunications bundles that are hard to understand and often change price without adequate warning.
Open access broadband networks
As more municipal networks explore and iterate on open access models, proponents need to consider some of the recent lessons learned from Texas. To date, most ISPs on open access networks are earnest, small local companies with a variety of reasons to enter the business, though maximizing wealth extraction has not been one of them.
To my knowledge, I don’t see these shenanigans on UTOPIA despite it passing 120,000 premises. But what happens when open access networks pass 2 million potential users? Or 10 million?
I hope this issue won’t even arise, in part because I would expect the local ownership of the network to produce more accountability than a state or federal agency. But it wouldn’t hurt to have some rules regarding transparency of pricing or some mechanism to ensure the competition on these networks doesn’t devolve to harmful games.
These cable pricing dynamics aren’t just annoying. They are particularly pernicious for the lowest-income households that don’t have the time, and sometimes the literacy, to spend hours digging into complex pricing. Returning to the case of electricity and the Houston Chronicle’s “Murky” story:
“Too many Texans are still overpaying for power,” said Fred Anders, founder of Texas Power Guide in Houston, a website that helps consumers find the lowest cost plans. “And very likely a disproportionate share of them are people who can least afford to overpay and have less time and awareness to navigate the minefield of gimmicks in the electricity market.”
That story also has the interesting nugget that very few people are actively switching providers, which is supposedly the best way to keep prices low. A fatigue seems to set in rather than the kind of enthusiasm that might be expected from the heartiest fans of markets.
This reality is an important reminder when it comes to internet access: I believe people generally want “competition” when they are frustrated with their provider. I don’t think a survey of the subscribers to EPB in Chattanooga or NextLight in Longmont or US Internet in Minneapolis or Sonic in California would reveal much desire for more local competition because users there are happy to pay a fair rate for reliable and straightforward service.
I don’t think people want to spend their time trying to save another $2/month on internet access by checking in on the deals each week to change providers. If that would be all that open access could offer, I will be disappointed. Of course, it may be that for communities that do not want to offer retail service, offering the possibility of choice will result in better outcomes than if they chose a contract with a single ISP, so there are many factors to consider.
People want something that works transparently at a reasonable price. My enthusiasm for open access is very much tied up with the possibility of specialized niche services. Services that we have trouble imagining today because nearly all Americans are locked behind networks owned by corporate monopolies that are not open to innovation. Ammon’s genius is not merely the financial model but the courage to open so much power to users and ISPs. Time will tell if they do anything special with it.
I believe that valuable innovation will come from open platforms, but think the Texas lessons offered a chance to explore why as well as some potential hazards along the way.
Editor’s Note: This piece was authored by Christopher Mitchell, director of the Institute for Local Self Reliance’s Community Broadband Network Initiative. His work focuses on helping communities ensure that the telecommunications networks upon which they depend are accountable to the community. He was honored as one of the 2012 Top 25 in Public Sector Technology by Government Technology, which honors the top “Doers, Drivers, and Dreamers” in the nation each year. Originally published on MuniNetworks.org, this piece is part of a collaborative reporting effort between Broadband Breakfast and the Community Broadband Networks program at ILSR.
Broadband Breakfast accepts commentary from informed observers of the broadband scene. Please send pieces to commentary@breakfast.media. The views expressed in Expert Opinion pieces do not necessarily reflect the views of Broadband Breakfast and Breakfast Media LLC.
Expert Opinion
David Strauss: How Will State Broadband Offices Score BEAD Applications?
Fiber, coax and fixed wireless network plans dependent on BEAD funding demand scrutiny.

Given the vital ways in which access to broadband enables America, adequate Internet for all is a necessary and overdue undertaking. To help close the digital divide, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act includes $42.5 billion in Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment funding for the last mile. Add to this the estimated level of subgrantee matching funds and the total last mile figure rises to $64 billon, according to the BEAD Funding Allocation and Project Award Framework from ACA Connects and Cartesian.
The federal funds will be disbursed by the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration to the State Broadband Offices who will then award subgrants to service providers. On June 30, each state will find out their allocation amount. By 2024, the states will establish a competitive subgrantee process to start selecting applicants and distributing funds.
A critical element of the selection process is the methodology for scoring the technical merits of each subgrantee and their proposal. Specific assessment criteria to be used by each state are not yet set. However, the subgrantee’s network must be built to meet these key performance and technical requirements:
- Speeds of at least 100 Megabits per second (Mbps) download and 20 Mbps upload
- Latency low enough for “reasonably foreseeable, real-time interactive applications”
- No more than 48 hours of outage a year
- Regular conduit access points for fiber projects
- Begin providing service within four years of subgrant date
What level of scrutiny will each state apply in evaluating the technical merits of the applicants and their plans?
Based on our conversations with a number of state broadband leaders, the answers could be as varied as the number of states. For example, some states intend to rigorously judge each applicant’s technical capability, network design and project readiness. In contrast, another state believes that a deep upfront assessment is not needed because the service provider will not receive funds until certain operational milestones are met. Upon completion, an audit of the network’s performance could be implemented.
We, at Broadband Success Partners, are a bit biased about the level of technical scrutiny we think the states should apply. Having assessed over 50 operating and planned networks for private sector clients, we appreciate the importance of a thorough technical assessment. Our network analyses, management interviews and physical inspections have yielded a valuable number of dos and don’ts. By category, below are some of the critical issues we’ve identified.
Network Planning & Design
- Inadequate architecture, lacking needed redundancy
- Insufficient network as-built diagrams and documentation
- Limited available fiber with many segments lacking spares
Network Construction
- Unprotected, single leased circuit connecting cities to network backbone
- Limited daisy-chained bandwidth paths on backhaul network
- Lack of aerial slack storage, increasing repair time and complexity
Network Management & Performance
- Significant optical ground wire plant, increasing potential maintenance cost
- Internet circuit nearing capacity
- Insufficient IPv4 address inventory for planned growth
Equipment
- Obsolete passive optical network equipment
- Risky use of indoor optical network terminals in outdoor enclosures
- Sloppy, untraceable wiring
Technical Service / Network Operations Center
- Technical staff too lean
- High labor rate for fiber placement
- Insufficient NOC functionality
While the problems we uncover do not always raise to the level of a red flag, it happens often enough to justify this exercise. Our clients who invest their own capital in these networks certainly think so. The same should hold true for networks funded with taxpayer money. Fiber, coax and fixed wireless network plans dependent on BEAD funding demand serious scrutiny.
David Strauss is a Principal and Co-founder of Broadband Success Partners, the leading broadband consulting firm focused exclusively on network evaluation and technical due diligence. This piece is exclusive to Broadband Breakfast.
Broadband Breakfast accepts commentary from informed observers of the broadband scene. Please send pieces to commentary@breakfast.media. The views reflected in Expert Opinion pieces do not necessarily reflect the views of Broadband Breakfast and Breakfast Media LLC.
Expert Opinion
Raul Katz: Can Investments in Robust Broadband Help States Limit the Downside of Recession?
If managed effectively, the BEAD program could play a key role in allowing our economy to weather the storms ahead.

The United States economy is still undergoing persistent inflation rates, high interest rates, and stock market volatility. According to a Wall Street Journal survey conducted in January, economists put the probability of a recession at 61 percent.
Simultaneously, we are also on the eve of the largest federal broadband funding distribution in American history. All 50 U.S. states have begun formulating plans to help connect their communities through the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment Program, and its funds are expected to be distributed within months. That, coupled with the Affordable Connectivity Program and other initiatives designed to subsidize broadband access, will play a critical role in connecting every American to the internet. This once-in-a-generation investment in building more robust and resilient broadband networks can help states weather the coming economic storm. To learn how, we simply need to look back to March 2020.
When the COVID-19 pandemic initially cratered the economy, states that had a higher rate of fixed broadband penetration were more insulated from its disruptive effects. Simply put, better-connected states had more resilient economies according to a study I authored for Network:On. In a separate study, by using an economic growth model that accounts for the role fixed broadband plays in mitigating the societal losses resulting from the pandemic, I also found that more connected societies exhibit higher economic resiliency during a pandemic-induced disruption.
In the study conducted for Network:On, we documented that U.S. states with higher broadband adoption rates were able to counteract a larger portion of the economic losses caused by the pandemic than states with lower broadband adoption rates. The states most adversely affected by the pandemic, such as Arkansas and Mississippi, were those exhibiting lower broadband penetration rates. Conversely, states with higher broadband penetration, such as Delaware and New Jersey, were able to mitigate a large portion of losses, as connectivity levels allowed for important parts of the economy to continue functioning during lockdowns.
Nationally, if the entire U.S. had penetration figures equal to those of the more connected states during the pandemic, the GDP would have contracted only one percent— a much softer recession than the actual 2.2 percent. These findings show that investments in closing the digital divide and ensuring everyone can access a high-speed Internet connection are critical to building economic resilience.
Today, wide penetration rate disparities exist between states — such as Delaware’s rate of 91.4 percent compared to Arkansas’ rate of 39.7 percent. Because of this, public authorities should focus on creating policy frameworks that allow operators to spur infrastructure deployments and find the optimal technological mixes to deliver the highest performance to users.
Broadband access matters. It doesn’t exist in a vacuum and is crucial to an area’s economic health. As state broadband offices around the country prepare to deploy BEAD funding, they must remember that broadband access and adoption are imperative to building economic resiliency.
Beyond my own study, a review of the research examining the economic impact of digital technologies over the past two decades confirms that telecommunications and broadband positively impact economic growth, employment, and productivity. This reinforces how consequential these government investments in broadband infrastructure and adoption are to protecting America’s economic health.
The BEAD program still has its challenges, but if managed effectively, it could play a key role in allowing our economy to weather the storms ahead.
Dr. Raul Katz is the president at Telecom Advisory Services LLC and author of the study: The Role of Robust Broadband Infrastructure in Building Economic Resiliency During the COVID-19 Pandemic. This piece is exclusive to Broadband Breakfast.
Broadband Breakfast accepts commentary from informed observers of the broadband scene. Please send pieces to commentary@breakfast.media. The views reflected in Expert Opinion pieces do not necessarily reflect the views of Broadband Breakfast and Breakfast Media LLC.
Expert Opinion
Kate Forscey: For the FTC to Rein in Big Tech, Slow and Steady Wins the Race
Going after Big Tech with marquee cases may make headlines, but those failures make big headlines too.

Recognizing the outsize power Big Tech has in the tech marketplace and throughout our daily lives, the Biden Federal Trade Commission, helmed by Chair Lina Khan, has made big headlines for pursuing cases and regulatory changes in an attempt to restore competitive balance to the tech ecosystem.
Khan started off with a bang. She, along with the Department of Justice’s Antitrust division, sought to modernize the merger guidelines that would provide better guidance for courts and scholars to challenge Big Tech’s rampant consolidation of the tech sector. Moreover, she has initiated a proceeding that will evaluate the anticompetitive effects of overly broad non-competes; some of which have the effect of entrapping valued coders and engineers into these large tech firms indefinitely, preventing smaller competitors from availing themselves to their expertise.
But rather than complete these efforts in an incremental, potentially bipartisan manner, the agency has continued to set its sights higher and higher. Let’s just say the FTC has had a tough go at implementing this strategy.
For example, as part of Facebook’s pivot to the metaverse, it planned to merge with Within Unlimited—a virtual reality fitness start-up. Fearing a loss of “potential future competition,” the FTC just expended an enormous amount of its resources to enjoin the merger, not only going to court but starting a concurrent proceeding with one of the agency’s administrative judges. The result? A federal district court outright denied the requested injunction, and now the FTC has abandoned its administrative case too.
And it looks like the FTC is going for a repeat with its challenge to Microsoft’s merger with Activision, the maker of World of Warcraft and Candy Crush. Strangely enough, the fear here is creation of future potential competition, specifically Microsoft and Xbox gaining a foothold against its larger gaming competitors like Sony and Tencent, a Chinese multinational conglomerate.
Even more bizarrely, the agency appears to ignore that the merger would open up more competition in the mobile gaming market—largely controlled by the Apple and Google app stores—by bringing Activision titles, like Call of Duty, to every mobile device. In short, it’s looking like the FTC will be 0-for-2 by the end of the year.
Agency should take incremental steps, not tackle unwinnable battles
Look, reining in Big Tech is a laudable goal. However, it may be time for Khan to turn to tried-and-true ways to accomplish that goal with incremental, ideally bipartisan steps, instead of focusing the agency’s limited resources on unwinnable epic battles.
The first thing Khan should do is finish what’s already on the agency’s plate.
For one, Khan should complete modernizing the merger guidelines. The current guidelines were written before Big Tech was even a thing and without an understanding of today’s technology and modern markets. New guidelines would provide a stable framework for courts, academia, and the antitrust agencies to analyze anticompetitive practices in a more productive manner as cases crop up going forward.
For another, the FTC should conclude its privacy investigation of prominent social media and video streaming companies. More than two years ago, the Commission launched an investigation into the privacy practices of nine social media and video streaming companies — including TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Amazon. And we have yet to see any results, even though all the tech companies mandated submissions are presumably in.
For yet another, the FTC should reexamine pending proceedings to take a more targeted approach that has a better shot of passing legal muster. Take the FTC’s proceeding to ban non-compete clauses. Whatever the general merits, it’s politically divisive, and legally questionable, to think the FTC could really ban even executives being held to a non-compete clause.
In contrast, a really bright idea would be to address Big Tech dominance by going after noncompete clauses for mid-level engineers and workers. It used to be that a talented mid-level engineer could go cut her teeth working a few years at a place like Google, getting experience there and then moving on to a start-up to help them build their company up.
This allows smaller companies to potentially compete with the big guys and ultimately create a more competitive marketplace in a given space, whether that’s search or social or whatever. But the goliath groupers don’t like that idea – Big Tech likes its dominance – so nowadays they lock employees into noncompete clauses that prevent them from any sort of outward mobility. The FTC could change that with a targeted and incremental rule—one that could be bipartisan and legally sustainable.
Going after Big Tech with marquee cases may make headlines, but those failures make big headlines too. To do this and do this right – in a way that doesn’t create legal conundrums down the road – the Commission might want to recognize that incremental, bipartisan victories have the greatest staying power. If you want to have a lasting impact, take it from Aesop: slow and steady wins the race.
Kate Forscey is a contributing fellow for the Digital Progress Institute and principal and founder of KRF Strategies LLC. She has served as senior technology policy advisor for Congresswoman Anna G. Eshoo and policy counsel at Public Knowledge. This piece is exclusive to Broadband Breakfast.
Broadband Breakfast accepts commentary from informed observers of the broadband scene. Please send pieces to commentary@breakfast.media. The views reflected in Expert Opinion pieces do not necessarily reflect the views of Broadband Breakfast and Breakfast Media LLC.
-
Fiber3 weeks ago
‘Not a Great Product’: AT&T Not Looking to Invest Heavily in Fixed Wireless
-
Broadband Roundup2 weeks ago
AT&T Floats BEAD in USF Areas, Counties Concerned About FCC Map, Alabama’s $25M for Broadband
-
Big Tech3 weeks ago
House Innovation, Data, and Commerce Chairman Gus Bilirakis to Keynote Big Tech & Speech Summit
-
Big Tech2 weeks ago
Watch the Webinar of Big Tech & Speech Summit for $9 and Receive Our Breakfast Club Report
-
Big Tech2 weeks ago
Preview the Start of Broadband Breakfast’s Big Tech & Speech Summit
-
#broadbandlive2 weeks ago
Broadband Breakfast on March 8: A Status Update on Tribal Broadband
-
#broadbandlive1 week ago
Broadband Breakfast on March 22, 2023 – Robocalls, STIR/SHAKEN and the Future of Voice Telephony
-
Broadband Mapping & Data4 weeks ago
Tribal Ready Wants Better Broadband Data to Benefit Indian Country