McLeod leads massive muni-FTTP effort in Iowa

Clark McLeod, the founder and former chairman and chief executive officer of Iowa competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC) McLeodUSA, is leading a grass-roots effort to establish government-owned, fiber-based telecom utilities in dozens of Iowa towns.

McLeod’s group, Opportunity Iowa, is encouraging Iowa cities to vote next November to create municipal government entities that could provide wholesale fiber-to-the-premises networks for use by private service providers. Under Iowa state law, municipal entities can only be created through a vote of each town’s residents.

This week the group announced 83 Iowa towns that support that goal, 38 of which already have municipal telecom utilities and 45 of which contain local support teams that will petition fellow residents to get the issue on local ballots for a November 2005 vote. If all are successful in creating telecom utilities, they could reach an estimated 25% of Iowa’s homes and businesses--around 290,000 premises, roughly 10% of which are businesses, said an Opportunity Iowa spokesman.

“The movement itself is not about building anything,” the spokesman said. “It’s a statewide movement to lend support, organization and education to individual cities. Every individual city will make their own choice as to whether they want to form a communications utility or not.”

For instance, more than 50 Iowa towns have already voted to create telecom utility entities, but about 20 of them are not providing service of any kind because residents have thus far chosen not to move forward with plans for a telecom utility. “We’re saying, ‘At least take that step so you have that alternative,’” the spokesman said.

Cities that vote to create telecom utilities can choose their own models, but Opportunity Iowa is recommending an open access model whereby the city owns the network and sells access to it on a wholesale basis to competing private service providers.

The demand for both more advanced networks and an open access model are driven by economic development imperatives, said the spokesman. “We’re losing people out of the state. We’re not attracting the high-tech jobs we’d like to attract. We in Opportunity Iowa recognize that infrastructure is critical to twenty-first century jobs. We believe there needs to be more local ownership and local control of that infrastructure.”

“Iowa tends to be underserved by some of the national LECs,” he added. “Our incumbent here is Qwest [Communications]. As you’d expect, they focus on Denver and Minneapolis and some other areas before they get to Iowa.”

The 83 towns already on board range in population from around 1,200 to around 60,000, including Waterloo and Dubuque.

A fourth-generation Iowan, McLeod sits on Opportunity Iowa’s advisory board along with former governors, attorneys general and David Lunemann, a fellow McLeodUSA alumnus. McLeod left the CLEC that bears his name in 2002.