Community leaders in the city of Biloxi want to expand massive water and sewer infrastructure improvements to include broadband infrastructure. The City Attorney Gerald Blessey recently addressed members from the Leadership Gulf Coast group and during the speech he shared the idea to spread fiber throughout Biloxi.
Mayor FoFo Gilich has already spoken with the Governor who, reports WXXV 25, is interested in the idea. Streets in town are being excavated for the water and sewer project and Gilich wants to use this opportunity to install conduit and fiber.
Biloxi recently settled a lawsuit for just under $5 million with British Petrolium (BP) for economic losses arising from the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010. Community leaders consider fiber a strong investment to help the area recover.
“And not only is it going to be economic development, but it’s going to be quality of life. Our school system needs this. The medical system needs this. The casino industry needs this,” said [Vincent Creel, city of Biloxi Public Affairs Manager].
The Biloxi plan may be happening in coordination with a larger initiative to bring fiber to the coastal area. The Mississippi Gulf Coast Fiber Ring would link 12 cities along the southern coast; each community would determine their own level of service.
The Sun Herald reports that Governor Phil Bryant has offered an additional $15 million in BP state settlement funds to deploy fiber. While any network is still in the idea stage, the plan will likely involve establishing a nonprofit organization to own and operate the fiber ring.
The Coast counties need the economic development a fiber network could bring. According to the Sun Herald:
Since Hurricane Katrina, the recession and oil spill, the three Coast counties are down 2,700 jobs compared to the pre-recession numbers of 2008, and down 5,600 jobs compared to pre-Hurricane Katrina in 2005, [Blessey] said.
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The technology will draw talented new people and high-tech business to the Coast, he said. He sees the technology supporting research at colleges in South Mississippi and providing medical teleconference capabilities that would allow a patient on the Coast to confer with a specialist anywhere in the country. The circle would let movie, television and video game producers work from South Mississippi instead of going to other cities that have the technology, and he said it would help monitor pollution in the Gulf and the health of the fisheries and forestry.
“The infrastructure is just first step,” he said.
The state might look at what Virginia did with some of the tobacco settlement money in establishing the Mid-Atlantic Broadband Cooperative, now the Mid-Atlantic Broadband Communities Corporation. The effort has aided Danville and Martinsville muni fiber approaches by providing a connection to the outside world and creating a connection for peering exchange.
MBC began in 2004 when the state used funds from the Virginia Tobacco Commission and $6 million in matching funds from the U.S. Department of Commerce Economic Development Administration to commence a fiber backbone deployment. The first $12 million paid for approximately 350 miles of fiber to industrial parks in southern Virginia. Since then, additional grants have aided in extending the network to over 1,800 miles. In 2012, MBC transitioned from a cooperative, that paid excess revenues to members, into a nonprofit corporation which made revenue and grant management less complicated. Under the new model, excess revenues can be reinvested into the network.
The nonprofit operates an open access middle mile network throughout southern Virginia. It provides wholesale transport in more than 20 counties for 45 providers of varying levels from large international companies to small local ISPs. MBC is credited with injecting a healthy dose of economic activity into southern Virgina.
From MBC’s History page:
The broadband capacity it has brought to Southern Virginia has attracted numerous companies to the region and has helped to bring more than 900 jobs and $1.3 billion of private sector investment to the region. Most notably, MBC was a critical component in securing the Microsoft data center project for Southern Virginia, which has already announced over $1.3 billion in private sector investment and 180 high-paying jobs.
We talked to Tad Deriso from MBC in Episode #146 of the Community Broadband Bits podcast. Have a listen.
WXXV 25’s report:
This article is apart of MuniNetworks. The original piece can be found here
