Steve Mensing, Editor
♦ I’m drinking a cup of coffee this morning and reading an article in the city of Salisbury’s “newsletter”. The article is brimming with high gloss baloney about Fibrant one of the better known municipal broadband flops in the U.S.A. Fibrant loses millions every year and touts itself as a success and the product of “visionaries”.
Baloney Alert: The first piece of drivel I read in the article was a paraphrase from an early city budget: “Salisbury is geographically blessed, approximately halfway between Washington D.C. and Atlanta, Boston, and Miami and the I-85 corridor from Raleigh to Greenville, S.C.”
Reality Check: Open a current road atlas and pick most mid-sized cities or large cities and they can make the same meaningless claim about dwelling between other major cities, corridors, and rail and airway hubs. I haven’t looked, but I suspect Rosewell, N.M, the flying saucer capital of the world, could make the same claim. Are people piling out of buses to visit our sleepy little crime infested tank town?
Baloney Alert: It was alleged in the article that Salisbury is home to 4 colleges and an affiliated med school program. Then leaps to a conclusion that the Bury has the infrastructure to educate future “Knowledge employees”. What Hood Theological?
Reality Check: The colleges in Salisbury lack any substantive or notable tech programs–certainly none approaching the measure of the schools pipelining Silicon Valley. Stanford?
Baloney Alert: Calling Fibrant bold, smart, and visionary.
Reality Check: Fibrant was a bold idea–bold as in wreckless. It certainly was not smart when you consider that wall street analysts and the John Locke people warned a few Salisbury types about pulling the trigger on a municipal broadband misadventure. Visionary? Not hardly. Not even remotely.
Reality check: Fibrant was terribly expensive and it has sandbagged the city of Salisbury with some towering debt. It has never broken even or turned the corner and made a profit as several city council incumbents once claimed.
As you know Fibrant burned through its $33 million dollars in certificates of participation money from its “soft” rollout in November 2010 until the “well” mysteriously ran dry in June 2011.
A perusal of Fibrant’s and the city’s financial figures last Tuesday showed Fibrant to be a huge loser in its fifth year of operation. Its interest and loan payments are monsterous. It owes millions to the water and sewer funds. Accumulated losses stagger somewhere past 12 million dollars. Money–lots of it was siphoned from the general fund (the taxpayers suffer here). Those few Fibrant subscribers out there are being double-dipped. Not only are they paying for over-priced internet and in a few cases TV service–they are being backdoored by taxes and utility bills. Also I noted money wasn’t included from bad pole wiring (run n’ gun) costs owed to Duke. Our calculations are more dire than the ones the city put out on Tuesday. The city’s figures of $50 million is bad enough. In the next few days we’ll post some numbers. We don’t do “magic math”. Remember the RFP was the only news source reporting how Fibrant was not turning any corner or making a profit. It was eating this tank town alive.
It seems that Bailey is at least made a stab at some transparency not witnessed during previous “Magic Math” sessions with Sofley. Don’t get your hopes up. Teresa Harris was an assistant to “magic math” for many years.
Reality Check: It would be nice if Fibrant looked and acted like private sector companies–you know with boards of directors and managers heading up marketing, technology, customer care, and various administrative heads. It would be fantastic if Fibrant possessed the massive buying power of large broadband corporations or could afford research and development like the big boys have or their billions of dollars. But folks that isn’t happening. And those elements combined will always outcompete and out market insular municipal broadband networks. Especially those staggering under immense debt and in a towns where its working class tax base is melting away to safer environs. Salisbury is currently not a destination or a place where many folks would risk living.
Reality Check: Fibrant can not compete in price with TWC-MAXX, AT&T Gigapower, AT&T U-Verse, DirecTV, or DISH. More subscribers will be dropping out of Fibrant to join 2,800 who already left. Fibrant is WAY over its head. Many people will not set up businesses or come live in Salisbury because of the extreme crime, lack of a fully staffed police department, Salisbury’s reputation around the state for cronyism and corruption, the D and F public schools, the 27.2% poverty, and the lack of substantial attractions.
Reality Check: Salisbury is NOT the only 10 Gig city in the USA and hardly the first. (Most people don’t need 100 Mbps let a alone a gig) Salisbury’s being the first 10 gig myth is trampled by the fact that Minneapolis and Santa Monica went 10 Gig in fall of 2014, VTel serves Vermont with 10 Gig since June 2015. Detroit’s Rocket Fiber went 10 Gig in November. Chattanooga went 10 Gig around October. All of those mentioned, except Detroit, are vastly more livable places. By the way residential customers and small businesses are not asking for 10 gigs. Most of their devices and home or office networks can’t handle ten gigs. And no everyday consumer applications exist for 10 gigs.
Salisbury has no competitive advantage when compared to Huntersville, Cary, Chapel Hill, nicer sections of Charlotte, Raleigh, or Winston-Salem.
I agree in theory it would be good for Salisbury to palm Fibrant off on some unsuspecting mom n’ pop private broadband who wants to take an extreme gamble and is prepared to wear body armor to work.
Good luck. Five years of never turning the corner or remotely coming close would be cause enough for most well-grounded business persons to fold their tent and move on. The City of Salisbury needs to get out of Fibrant anyway they can.
