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Virginia Beach, Va., Next Up For High-Speed Internet Upgrades

Beyond faster internet for the masses, the region is also counting on the cables to attract data centers, cyber firms and online sites wanting to shave a nanosecond off the time it takes to make a transaction.

(TNS) -- VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. -- Beach shores were good enough for the first colonists who landed here before moseying up to Jamestown. Now the locale has proven a good fit for Microsoft, Facebook and telecom giant Telefonica, which are bringing super-high-speed cables from Europe and South America to Virginia.

How fast? Try 160 terabits per second, or enough speed to download 40 two-hour Netflix movies in two minutes, according to Pedro Wallace, the chief information officer in Virginia Beach.

“Not that we’re going to get that at home,” he cautioned.

For one, that’s not how undersea cables work. They go from point A to point B carrying gobs of calls, posts, photos and other digital data transmitted from one continent to another.

“So what, then?” you say, as you wait for the latest show to buffer, courtesy of internet service provided by one or two companies, Cox Communications and Verizon – depending on if there’s a choice where you live.

Wallace and others say future cables to span the Atlantic Ocean and land in Hampton Roads’ backyard could give residents and businesses more choices, and with it, the possibility of cheaper, faster internet. At least, that’s the hope.

Here’s how:

Much like power lines that stretch from central power plants, the cables can hook up with a data center, where the fibers inside branch off for different customers and users.

The first cable is owned by Facebook and Microsoft, and the companies want all the fibers to themselves. So, much like the first colonists, the cable will make a pit stop in Virginia Beach before traveling to its final destinations: Ashburn and Boydton, where the two tech companies have sprawling data centers, leaving little behind beyond some tax revenue and valuable marketing. Virginia Beach has already taken to calling itself a “digital port city.”

There’s at least one more cable coming to Virginia Beach, though, owned entirely by Telefonica.

City officials hope with this one, the company will want to attach some of that internet-ready fiber to the city’s relatively new high-speed broadband network that connects all of its city offices and schools (more on that later). From there, the company could bury its own fiber from the municipal network to homes and businesses, effectively building out the “last mile” to reach customers, costing the company less money than building a whole network and giving web surfers and Netflix watchers at home another option. Once the region’s five cities link up their municipal networks, all South Hampton Road could see something similar happen.

But, again, that’s what Virginia Beach, and other city technology leaders, hope happens.

“We have suffered the consequences of having one major service provider for too long,” said City Council member Ben Davenport, who campaigned on improving the area’s broadband and has so far led the city’s efforts.

Davenport said Cox has been “sitting on a monopoly and a gold mine” since securing franchise agreements years ago. He said the new cables and the city’s own broadband network represent an opportunity to change that – not just within the city but across Hampton Roads.

Cox, though, contends the marketplace is already competitive.

“Folks have options,” said Emma Inman, a Cox spokeswoman for Hampton Roads. “We feel we are a good value for the services we provide.”

She said the cable company had already invested $1.5 billion in its network and has promised to offer gig speeds to “all homes in all of our markets,” by the end of 2019.

Beyond faster internet for the masses, the region is also counting on the cables to attract data centers, cyber firms and online sites wanting to shave a nanosecond off the time it takes to make a transaction, making Hampton Roads as much of a tech hub as Northern Virginia.

So far, though, Telefonica isn’t in the business of selling internet service in the U.S., and the city has no signed agreements with the company or anyone else to offer an internet alternative. It’s all theoretical at this point, but city leaders say the cables’ arrival has garnered Virginia Beach enough industry attention to lead to serious discussions.

“On the surface, it seems very unlikely that Telefonica would itself serve as a broadband ISP in Virginia Beach,” said Tim Stronge, vice president of research for TeleGeography, which maps the world’s undersea cables and tracks telecom data. “What is possible, though, is that Virginia Beach has a municipal network with local fiber, and they are planning on Telefonica leasing some of the fibers to move traffic from their cable landing station to long-haul networks that would allow them to send their data to the rest of the USA.”

The Beach’s Davenport said Hampton Roads could be the testing ground for Telefonica to eventually offer internet access to the rest of the country:

“This wouldn’t be exclusive to Hampton Roads, this would be the entry point.”

Virginia Beach, so far, holds the regional cards when it comes to the cables. They’re landing in the city, as will a potential 1.4 million-square-foot adjacent data center to be managed by Finland-based NxtVn if it secures rights to the land. The city and school district have already spent $40.1 million since 2002, with help from state and federal grants, laying hundreds of miles of its own fiber cable connecting all of its municipal buildings and schools to a faster network. That means it no longer has to pay Cox to get online, saving it $1 million a year for the next few decades, according to officials.

But the city says it doesn’t want to stop its network there, a sentiment likely to encourage observers who fear the region’s normally fragmented way of doing things city by city with little cooperation.

Still, some are skeptical that without a concrete plan in place, the cables may come and go without any benefit to the area.

“Hope is not a plan,” said Gary Jones with Klett Consulting, a Virginia Beach-based systems engineering contractor who worries the companies bringing the cables to the shore aren’t going to wait for the region’s many elected leaders to come up with one. “They’ve been talking now for two years.”

He described broadband as an interstate – and, like any interstate, it doesn’t (or at least shouldn’t) end at the border of a city or county, and access shouldn’t be a luxury anymore: It’s a necessity.

“This...is...infrastructure. And it’s critical,” he said, comparing it to water and electricity.

Virginia’s Secretary of Technology Karen Jackson has been pushing “smart city” initiatives that aim to boost an area’s tech capabilities by building it into the foundation, literally and figuratively, such as sensors in roads that could help driverless cars. In Northern Virginia, the $500 million proposed Gramercy District in Ashburn is getting “smart” by integrating technology into a planned office tower, apartments and retail.

“That’s all powered by broadband,” she said.

And those broadband cables landing on the shore of Virginia Beach?

“That’s a real differentiation that the rest of the state doesn’t have. There’s no reason a development like that couldn’t happen here,” she said of Hampton Roads.

So far, Virginia Beach, Norfolk, Chesapeake, Portsmouth and Suffolk plan to pitch a proposal to the new GO Virginia funding board to connect and expand their broadband networks. The cities have all shared maps showing where hundreds of miles of fiber crisscrosses Hampton Roads. And Virginia Beach is charting future routes and points where it can all be connected, linking the five cities at first, as well as the area’s colleges and universities, on the same high-speed network.

Norfolk is spending $4.1 million this year to replace 36 miles of high-speed internet fiber it mainly leases from Cox with its own fiber by the end of the year that will allow up to 10 gigabyte download speeds.

“We are building an infrastructure for the city that will do us well for the next 20 years,” said Steven DeBerry, the city’s chief information officer.

Portsmouth leases all of its active fiber from Cox but is working on a strategic plan going forward to include connecting into a regional network.

“This will be a game-changer for the region,” said Daniel Jones, the city’s chief information officer, of the cables. “We’re talking about internet and broadband speeds that are unprecedented for the area.”

Davenport acknowledges that coming up with a framework to make the region work together – for example, who’s going to negotiate with potential internet providers? How much does each city invest? – will lead to “a lot of hard questions that need to be answered.”

Mark Klett, also of Klett Consulting, has been pushing for a governing broadband authority, likening the moment to the dawn of electricity or the automobile that eventually required oversight and management much like utility regulators.

“We can’t rely on the telecom industry to take care of this,” he said. The industry should have a seat at the table, but “shouldn’t own the table or pick the number of chairs at the table.”

While Davenport likes the idea of a broadband authority to govern the network, he said he’s given up on forming one, knowing the well-funded political resistance it would face, namely from the telecom industry.

Whatever happens, Klett is convinced a region needs to at least offer 10 gigabytes per second at a reasonable rate to be a player in attracting the tech companies of the future.

Why does it matter? A modem DSL offers up to 12 megabytes. Cable DSL offers up to 50 megabytes.

Chattanooga offers a gigabyte for $94.98 a month, not much more than a basic internet-only plan from Cox Communications in Hampton Roads. In the 23510 zip code, $83.46 a month will get a Hampton Roads Cox customer 50 megabyte download speeds. In some new housing developments in Chesapeake, Virginia Beach and Norfolk, including the Watermark apartments in Wards Corner, Cox offers its Gigablast service, Inman said. It costs $99.99 a month with a two-year agreement and maxes out at one gigabyte per second download speeds.

On the Eastern Shore, it costs a little more than that, $135, for a gigabyte. The price is expected to drop to $105.

“You want an organization that isn’t just there to make money,” said Robert Bridgham, executive director of the nonprofit Eastern Shore Broadband Authority. “Our motivation is not just to pinch pennies and line people’s pockets.”

©2017 The Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk, Va.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.