In a sprawling county the size of New Jersey, leaders in Riverside County, Calif., face a real challenge to get their residents hooked up to high-speed Internet. So they’ve come up with a collaborative plan they hope will appeal to a carrier to bring the next generation of broadband technology to the region.
The county, its 28 cities and one tribal government have agreed to a common set of rules to streamline permitting, siting and deployment of a gigabit fiber network across city lines from the Arizona border to the suburbs of Los Angeles.
“We want to streamline and speed it up, reduce the cost of the process and entice a carrier to come to Riverside today,” said Tom Mullen, chief data officer of the RIVCOconnect Broadband Initiative, led by Riverside County Information Technology. “We want to partner with them to reach the hardest to reach areas.”
Cities across the country have championed an array of broadband projects, such as Huntsville, Ala., which built its own fiber network and opened it up to competition, and Los Angeles, where telecommunication companies were offered faster permitting and city asset leases to expand high-speed Internet across the city.
If the Riverside plan succeeds, its $2 billion to $4 billion public-private partnership could be one the nation’s largest broadband networks.
“The difference between this and what you usually see is this is not a plan for a single jurisdiction, but a multi-jurisdictional approach,” said Joseph Van Eaton, a telecommunications attorney with the Washington, D.C., law firm Best Best and Krieger.
The vision for Riverside County is to create a gigabit fiber network that serves both existing and future residents, hospitals and school systems, and draws new businesses to the region — which is on pace to become California’s second most populous county by 2050, with an increasing number of Los Angeles transplants searching for more affordable housing.
In Riverside County, each local jurisdiction has agreed to streamline and expedite permitting and rights of way, make available local assets such as power poles and ensure land leases for the siting of telecommunications equipment — shortening construction delays and cutting administrative costs by a third and saving a carrier hundreds of millions of dollars, Mullen said.
They have also pledged to give the selected carrier a long-term contract for Internet service, a key financial incentive when you consider the government of Riverside County alone runs its business out of more than 500 buildings.
“It’s the pooling of our assets and the pooling of our purchasing power for a service we already need and will benefit our community,” Mullen said.
Among other ideas are “dig-once” policies so that fiber conduits would be installed whenever a roadway is opened for construction, and coordinating activities countywide through a single point of contact to achieve what Riverside County leaders envision as a five-year build-out.
Whether these incentives will secure a commitment from a carrier to deploy the next generation of broadband technology throughout the county — not just the accessible cities but across the mountains and the deserts to rural areas — remains to be seen. RIVCOconnect issued a request for proposals earlier this month. A spokesman for Charter Spectrum, the largest carrier in the county, declined to comment on the initiative, citing the bid process that closes in August.
In the meantime, RIVCOconnect intends to work with interested carriers and plans to hold a bidders’ conference later this month.
“We are trying to reach every home, every business across the county,” Mullen said. “We are looking to close the digital divide.”
