Could reliable and cheap broadband internet be in the cards for Lathrop residents?

The City of Lathrop plans on having the work completed for its master plan of the city’s broadband infrastructure by the end of this week, and will then submit for grant consideration to cover the cost of the installation of dozens of miles of new broadband lines to help bridge the “digital divide” that exists in the community.

Last month the City of Lathrop awarded a bid to Magellan Broadband for $497,915 – the same amount that Lathrop received in a grant from California Public Utilities Commission for this exact undertaking – to design the master plan that will be used on the applications submitted for consideration of funding from the Local Agency Technical Assistance Grant Program funded by the State of California.

The program aims at connecting underserved areas to reliable high-speed internet – which is becoming a necessity in the modern world – at an affordable price.

And the need for options when it comes to reliable high-speed internet became apparent to the City of Lathrop last year when the Friday after Thanksgiving thieves targeted fiber network cables that cut off a large portion of the city from internet access for up to 36 hours while repairs were underway.

The outage meant that Target, one of the big destinations for Black Friday shoppers, was unable to process credit card payments on the busiest shopping day of the year. According to the staff report prepared for the council when it considered the Magellan proposal, the new master plan would provide the redundancies necessary to prevent those sorts of outages in the future.

As part of the project, the City of Lathrop has identified a focus of providing high-speed internet services to areas of the city that are currently unserved by commercial providers. By using a backbone loop design, the project would both connect crucial City facilities while allowing last-mile connections to businesses and residential customers.

According to a request for proposals that closes earlier this month, the city is currently seeking a private company that would agree to operating, managing, and selling retail internet service over the publicly-owned fiber backbone – allowing residents to receive reliable, high-speed internet at a price they wouldn’t otherwise be able to find on the open market. In exchange for providing customers, the City of Lathrop would receive lease payments, revenue sharing, matched contributions for grant applications, and possible new construction on the City’s network – or a combination of those things.

The network would be comprised of a combination of both aerial and underground fiber lines – including a new aerial section serving the northern portion of Lathrop’s city limits.

And the idea of municipal governments providing high-speed internet to residents is nothing new in California.

Palo Alto and Santa Clara – both of which lie in the heart of the Silicon Valley – provide fiber infrastructure, while Truckee-Donner provides the service for both residential customers and government buildings in the Sierra Nevada mountains. The service is also offered in a number of cities in Southern California, and a citywide system has been in development for Beverly Hills for some time.

The use of government-owned networks that provide internet connectivity to areas that are often not served by such amenities has been touted by experts as one of the ways to close the “digital divide” – the historical unequal access to digital technology and infrastructure.  

To contact Bulletin reporter Jason Campbell email jcampbell@mantecabulletin.com or call 209.249.3544.