Westminster’s city council just voted unanimously to establish a partnership with Ting, reports the Carroll County Times. Known primarily as a mobile service provider, Ting wants to offer Internet services via the new municipal fiber optic network. Ting announced earlier this month that it would soon begin offering Internet service in Charlottesville, Virginia as well.
In their own announcement about the partnership, CTC Technology & Energy’s Joanne Hovis described the arrangement:
The City will fund, own, and maintain the fiber; Ting will lease the fiber and provide all equipment and services. Ting will pay the City to use the fiber—reducing the City’s risk while enabling Ting to offer Gigabit Internet in Westminster without having to build a fiber network from scratch.
CTC has worked with Westminster since the beginning to analyze the community’s situation, assets, and challenges.
We have watched Westminster’s idea blossom into a pilot project and then go full bloom to a planned 60-mile network when demand dictated nothing less. The project has been community driven and community minded. It comes to no surprise to us that a straight shooting, consumer minded provider such as Ting would be the partner Westminster would choose.
Dr. Robert Wack, city council member and local project leader told the Times:
“From the very beginning, it was obvious that they [Ting] understood what we were trying to do,” said Council President Robert Wack. “We got a lot of feedback from other responses that was questioning to flat-out skeptical.”
Ting considers the arrangement an organic step for them. From the press release:
It all feels like a really nice model for how this stuff should work. The city of Westminster builds a fiber network underneath the streets, driveways, hills and valleys they know best and ultimately owns their own future. We do pretty much exactly what we have been doing for our mobile customers for three years. Most importantly, the people of Westminster, Maryland will join the ranks of Seoul, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Chattanooga and, soon, Charlottesville, Virginia with blazing fast, video streaming, photo uploading, economy driving, job creating Internet to boast and enjoy.
For more on the project, listen to Chris’s interview with Dr. Wack in Episode #100 of the Community Broadband Bits podcast. We will feature Ting in an upcoming episode of Community Broadband Bits.
Update: Motherboard has a story with a great quote from Dr. Robert Wack:
“We want to blow this thing up, and we want disruptive services at disruptive pricing,” Robert Wack, Westminster’s city council president, told me. “We’ve got Comcast and its usual suite of services, Verizon DSL, with its patchy service areas, and dish and satellite services. Nobody is happy with any of it, and none of it has the capacity we need to take this city into the future.”
Error – we previously wrote North Carolina rather than Virginia. This is Charlottesville, Virginia.