Just 40 miles north of the heart of Silicon Valley, the City of Oakland has its sights set on implementing an ambitious Broadband Master Plan.
Dubbed the OaklandConnect project – unanimously approved on May 20 by the Oakland City Council – the plan calls for the construction of a city-owned open access fiber network to expand affordable broadband connectivity to over 33,000 households that city surveys indicate are languishing without home Internet service.
While Oakland is served by Comcast and AT&T mostly (with a smattering of Sonic and T-Mobile hotspots), the service in many areas is substandard, expensive, or both – in a city where surveys indicate affordability as the primary reason so many do not have home Internet service.
Once the East Bay city of 436,000 completes network construction, it would be one of the largest publicly-owned open access networks serving a major metro area in the nation – and may serve as inspiration for other large cities to follow suit with a model that’s been proven to bring affordable local Internet choice in monopoly-dominated markets.
While UTOPIA Fiber is the largest publicly-owned open access network in the nation, currently serving 21 Utah cities, none of those cities are the size of Oakland, the eighth-largest city in California.
The only other major city building a publicly-owned open access fiber network is Colorado Springs, which began network construction in September 2022.
The Colorado Springs project is not expected to be complete until the end of 2028, though portions of the city have already been lit up for service.
Master Plan for Major Metro Open Access Network
In Oakland, the city’s plan was buoyed by a $14 million grant from the Last Mile Federal Funding Account (FFA) approved last summer by the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) – one of 45 CPUC grants awarded to community broadband projects since June of 2024. (The CPUC has also approved eight other grant awards for Tribal providers).
With the City of Oakland chipping in up to $2 million from general obligation bond proceeds (not general fund dollars), it paves the way for the deployment of nearly 13 miles of new middle mile 144-count fiber, upgrading almost 12 miles of existing city-owned fiber, and the addition of nine miles of new last mile connections for 27 affordable housing developments across the city. Backhaul for the network will come from the state’s massive open access middle mile network now under construction.
The FFA grants, and the state’s middle mile network build, are part of California’s larger Broadband For All initiative, a $6 billion effort aimed at seeding competition and expanding broadband access across the Golden State, courtesy largely of federal dollars from the American Rescue Plan Act.
As detailed in the recently approved Master Plan, the vision is to:
“[L]aunch an MBN (Municipal Broadband Network) in Oakland…pursuing a ‘hybrid’ model where the City constructs a fiber network designed to deliver residential broadband service, and then enter into public-private partnerships with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to: 1) deliver low-cost, high-speed service to residents; and 2) fund the maintenance of the network through fees and revenues.”
Oakland’s CIO and IT director Tony Batalla tells ILSR that the project will leverage the CPUC grant funds and include “up to $2 million from city general obligation bond proceeds. The project will be built entirely within this budget. The current timeline stipulates the project be completed by the end of 2026.”
The 100 page Master Plan provides a high-level implementation plan and roadmap to design, construct, and launch the OaklandConnect project, initially targeting 2,500 households managed by the Oakland Housing Authority in West Oakland, Downtown Oakland, the Fruitvale District, and neighborhoods deeper into East Oakland.
“OHA and other nonprofit housing providers will be connected directly to the fiber network with in-unit fiber. The plan right now is to provide all affordable housing units in the Project with free, dedicated fiber Internet service in each unit,” Batalla said.
Building on that, the plan calls for network expansion into other parts of the city, as well as the adoption of an array of policies aimed at eliminating Oakland’s digital divide while cutting construction costs, which includes implementing rooftop access and dig-once policies; restoring and expanding public Wi-Fi; and other efforts to sustain the city’s “Digital Equity ecosystem.”
“We are developing an open access policy that can be executed by ISPs or other partners in the future. The plan intends to interconnect with the California State Middle Mile network in a way that makes both open access networks complementary,” Batalla added.
The Master Plan, he said, “identifies several routes already in progress that can be interconnected with the new fiber broadband network with little cost.”
Dismantling Digital Discrimination
Putting the entire project in perspective, the Master Plan notes Oakland’s “rich history of activism, civic leadership, and social progress.”
Though it also candidly laments the “legacy of racist federal, state, and local policies – including the exclusion of Black families from home ownership opportunities through redlining and the construction of an interstate freeway system that destroyed vibrant Black neighborhoods in West Oakland – still evident today and can be observed in all facets of life, including how online and digital services are provided and accessed.”
“These patterns of digital exclusion mirror demographic patterns of disparate access documented throughout the State.”
Bold words – backed up with cold hard facts.
The plan cites an investigation of 38 cities across the nation conducted by The Markup and the Associated Press that found AT&T, Verizon, EarthLink, and CenturyLink disproportionately offered lower-income and mostly Black and Brown neighborhoods slow Internet service for the same price as faster service offered in mostly White neighborhoods.
That is followed with an analysis of what has been found in Oakland:
“Preliminary research from Oakland, comparing advertised prices from East and North Oakland addresses, indicates similar patterns of pricing disparities. The advertised price of this East Oakland address…offers one Internet plan option, ‘AT&T Internet Air’ at $60 per month for speeds of 90-300 Mbps (Megabits per second) download speeds.”
“However, at the North Oakland address, customers are offered a choice of three plans, all with promotional pricing. AT&T offers customers at this address a similarly priced plan, but with significantly higher speeds at 996.5 Mbps and lower latency at 12 milliseconds.”
That is buttressed by research done by #OaklandUndivided, which found that Internet service in Oakland’s highest income zip code – with the largest population of White residents – were nearly 10 times faster than in the poorest parts of the city – where Oakland’s largest population of racially-minoritized residents live.
The City’s ‘Greatest Asset’ Is …
While the official adoption of a multi-part plan to bring affordable Internet access to long underserved and poorly served parts of the city marks a significant milestone, the grunt work and community organizing that precipitated the plan was the key driver.
A coalition of city leaders, nonprofits, and digital equity advocates coalesced in the wake of the 2020 pandemic and have since been working to document and analyze the digital landscape in Oakland, identify ways the city could ensure its most resource-deprived citizens could participate in a digital economy, and advocate for state support.
These efforts sprang up in most cities, but few have followed through the way Oakland has.
Much of that effort was led by #OaklandUndivided, a partnership between the City of Oakland, Oakland Unified School District, Oakland Public Education Fund, TechExchange, and Oakland Promise.
The Oakland-based coalition is itself embedded in a larger statewide coalition led by the California Alliance for Digital Equity (CADE), which has been heavily involved in advocating for legislation, broadband infrastructure investments, and other initiatives, most visibly in and around LA County.
In Oakland, #OaklandUndivided was a vocal advocate for state middle mile investments that could help reduce the cost of deploying last mile infrastructure. They also did the work of compiling the granular data that helped make the case for the CPUC grant the city was awarded.
When ILSR spoke to #OaklandUndivided Director Patrick Messac about the council vote to adopt the Broadband Master Plan, Messac said that expanding Internet access “hinged on access to affordable backhaul, specifically in the communities that needed it most.”
“This is where the city stepped up, as the crucial link between disconnected residents and the partners best situated to deliver last mile connectivity.”
Still, he said, Oakland’s greatest asset isn’t fiber. “It’s city leadership that takes seriously its role in ensuring all residents, regardless of income, have access to reliable, affordable, high-speed Internet.”
“Without the unwavering support of our city officials and elected leadership, we’d still be stuck with band-aid solutions that fail to address the underlying cause of this structural inequality – the private market placing profits over people.”
Listen to #OaklandUndivided Director Patrick Messac speak about the work and tactics the coalition used to document Oakland’s connectivity challenges when he gave the keynote at our Building for Digital Equity livestream in December 2023.
*Full disclosure: ILSR’s Community Broadband Networks initiative has been an active member providing research and technical assistance to CADE since it was founded
Header image of lineman working inside aerial fiber splice case courtesy of City of Oakland
Inline image of two Oakland women holding signs advocating for digital equity courtesy of #OaklandUndivided
Inline image of little girl on laptop courtesy of #OaklandUndivided