Santa Barbara is one of the world’s great sea coast towns. It’s also in a good position to be one of the world’s great Internet coast towns too.
Luckily, Santa Barbara is advantaged by its location not just on the ocean, but on some of the thickest Internet trunk lines (called “backbones”) in the world. These run through town beside the railroad and Highway 101. Some are owned by the state college and university system. Others are privately owned. In fact Level(3), now part of CenturyLink, has long had a tap on that trunk, and a large data center, in the heart of the Funk Zone. Here it is:
Last I checked, Level(3) was in the business of wholesaling access to its backbone. So was the UC system.
Yet Santa Barbara is still disadvantaged by depending on a single “high speed” Internet service provider: Cox Communications, which is also the town’s incumbent cable TV company. Like most cable companies, Cox is widely disliked by its customers. It has also recently imposed caps on data use.
Cox’s only competitor is Frontier Communications, which provides Internet access over old phone lines previously run by Verizon and GTE. Cable connections provide higher bandwidth than phone lines, but both are limited to fractions of the capacity provided by fiber optic cables. While it’s possible for cable companies to upgrade service to what’s called DOCSIS 3.1, there has been little in the history of Santa Barbara’s dealings with Cox to suggest that Cox will grace the city with its best possible service. (In fact Cox’s only hint toward fiber is in nearby Goleta, not in Santa Barbara.)
About a decade ago, when I was involved in a grass roots effort to get the city to start providing Internet service on its own over fiber optic connections, Cox told us that Santa Barbara was last in line for upgrading the company’s facilities. Other cities were bigger and more important to Cox, which is based in Atlanta.
Back then we lacked a champion for the Internet cause on the Santa Barbara City Council. The mayor liked the idea, and so did a couple of Council members, but the attitude was, “We’ll wait until Palo Alto does something like this and then copy that.” So the effort died.
But we have a champion now, running for City Council in the 6th District, which covers much of downtown: Jack Ucciferri. A story by Gwendolyn Wu in The Independent yesterday begins, “As District 6 City Council candidate Jack Ucciferri went door-to-door to campaign, he found that many Santa Barbara residents had one thing in common: a mutual disdain for the Cox Communications internet monopoly. ‘Every person I talk to agrees with me,’ Ucciferri said.” Specifically, 
“Ucciferri is dreaming of a fiber optic plan for Santa Barbara. Down south, the cities of Santa Monica and Oxnard already have or are preparing plans for fiber optic cable networks.”
One of the biggest issues for Santa Barbara is the decline of business downtown, especially along State Street, the city’s heart, where the most common sign on storefronts is “For Lease.” Jack’s district contains more of State Street than any other. I can think of nothing that will help State Street—and Santa Barbara—more than to have world-class Internet access and speeds, which would be a huge attraction for many businesses large and small.
So I urge readers in Jack’s district to give him the votes he needs to champion the cause of making Santa Barbara a leader in the digital world, rather than yet another cable backwater, which it will surely remain if he loses.
[Later…] Jack lost on Tuesday, but came in second of three candidates. The winner was the long-standing incumbent, Gregg Hart. (Here’s Noozhawk’s coverage.) I don’t see this as a loss for Jack or his cause. Conversations leading up to the election (including one with a candidate wh won in another district) have led me to believe the time is right to at least fiber up Santa Barbara’s troubled downtown, where The Retail Apocalypse is well underway.
Leave a Reply