I am very happy to hear that Senate Bill 6355, the clean energy bill, has passed. It wiIl establish the new Washington Electric Transmission Authority to plan, site, and arrange financing for electrical transmission infrastructure. It should help relieve grid congestion and enable clean energy distribution statewide.

However, as a broadband expert, I was disappointed to see that a Dig Once policy, including public fiber-optics, was not attached to it. Fiber-optic cable is essential for all telecommunications to work correctly, and it costs virtually nothing to install when compared to installing electrical infrastructure. Fiber is also the cleanest communications option for many reasons.

My guess is fiber was not included in the bill because of the stranglehold the telecoms have on our government in Washington. The situation is the result of many issues: Here in Bellingham, our politicians get money directly from the telecoms; some legislators simply don't understand how tech works; others believe that the telecoms are doing a good job, but nothing could be further from the truth. 

Below is a brief list of things you may misunderstand about fiber:

1. There are more fiber companies now and WA is doing well. The FACT is, Washingtonians still pay the highest prices in the developed world for broadband, and many in rural areas have no real access to it.

2. Washington has faster internet speeds than other states. The FACT is, our speeds are still well below other developed countries, and the testing methods used to verify speeds are stunningly inaccurate.

3. Satellite and wireless will solve the problem. The FACT is, Starlink admits they need fiber on the ground to make Starlink work well. And actually, wireless and satellite communications are extensions of wired fiber, and when compared to wired, satellite and wireless are unreliable. Also, Starlink remains unaffordable for the poor, especially Indigenous populations.

Finally, wireless and satellite are terrible for the environment. They require tremendous amounts of energy to send a data packet wirelessly when compared to fiber. The materials used to make wireless and satellite equipment are terrible for the environment, and satellites must be launched into low-earth orbit, only to burn up in our atmosphere in about three decades. There is no clean-up or recovery system.

Ultimately, they are all trying to sell you internet speed, but you need an accurate test. If you want to do a real test of your internet speed, a test professionals use to check their speeds, try a method called RRUL testing (Real-Time Response Under Load) to verify the actual connection speeds in Washington state. This free, open-source standard is defined here.

Our tests show that Ziply, Quantum, and other pretend-to-be-fiber providers perform, at best, a bit better than Comcast’s coaxial connections. None of it is real infrastructure. All these issues are problems that a Dig Once policy, paired with an energy bill like this, would directly address: installing public fiber-optics at the same time as electrical infrastructure.  

A Note On The State’s Unique Role In Backhaul Infrastructure:

One of the biggest problems we have in Washington state is a lack of affordable backhaul infrastructure. I have written extensively before about how poor our options for this are in Bellingham and Whatcom County and how it makes all of our services second rate. However, this entire time Washington state has had publicly owned fiber-optic infrastructure running up and down most major roads and interstates. That means that any of you who are close to I-5 could be on state fiber. However, like the COB they simply refuse to share it for the public good. I am hoping that their attitude toward this will change soon.

Risks: While this bill looks great there are major risks involved if the funds are poorly managed and important lessons to be learned from how other administrations handled other infrastructure funding, like broadband funding. Going all of the way back to the Obama era, funding could have been used to build extensive public infrastructure that both public and private entities could have used to benefit everyone. Instead, the money went to telecoms who virtually stole it by, among other things, over-quoting the cost of actual installation.

Washington’s own State Broadband Office said they would prioritize public infrastructure, and specifically public fiber, but ended up pissing most of their funding away on poorly-managed big telecom solutions instead. Our own PUD has a broadband manager now, and received millions from the State Broadband Office, but their pro-big-telecom general manger had a problem with doing the right thing, and our commissioners were too cowardly to stand up to him or replace him. So instead of operating a fiber network themselves, they gave the money to a local telecom instead. 

I hope there will be more oversight with how these infrastructure funds are spent this time around.