/tren 7.8
6/28/22
COMCAST
Cleve Morris, City Manager
City of Placerville
3101 Center St.
Placerville, CA 95667
June 27, 2022
Re: Establishment of a Fiber Utility in Placerville
Dear Mr. Morris,
I am writing to you on behalf of Comcast in response to item 10.1 from the June 14, 2022 city council agenda adding Chapter 18 in Title 7 of the Placerville Municipal Code - Establishing a Fiber Utility in the City of Placerville. It is our understanding that the item will go to second reading at the June 28, 2022 city council meeting. I kindly request the second reading of the item be postponed to allow our two organizations to meet. It is our experience these endeavors face significant challenges and financial risk.
The ordinance, as we understand it, creates a mechanism enabling the city to finance a broadband pilot project in Placerville and potentially a city wide, city owned broadband network - effectively overbuilding Comcast's network in the city.
Comcast has built, operated and maintained a best-in-class fiber-based network serving Placerville and enabling innovative, scalable products and services. Comcast doubles its network capacity every 2½ years to stay well ahead of demand.
To maintain a network and continually keep up with increased consumer demand requires significant annual capital expenditures and is often overlooked when municipalities are considering building a broadband network. For example, 10G - Comcast is digitizing and virtualizing much of the physical device technology and moving many of those activities into the cloud, allowing innovation at the speed of software and to delivering multigigabit upload and download speeds.
Finally, I would also like the opportunity to share with you Comcast's contribution to closing the digital divide. In 2011, Comcast launched Internet Essentials - the nation's largest, most comprehensive, and most successful low-income broadband adoption initiative. In California, we are grateful to have served over 1 million students, parents, veterans, those with disabilities and seniors as part of the Internet Essentials program.
Comcast is continuously looking for opportunities to expand its network and partner with municipalities to help promote economic development. We believe we can forge a strong partnership as many of our goals are the same - ensuring the City of Placerville has the resources to drive growth, support vunerable populations and facilitate innovations .
We believe the best path forward is to sit down with you and members of the city council to explore ways that we can work together.
Sincerely,
Philip Arnat
Philip Arndt
Comcast Director of Government Affairs
Philip [email protected]