Sifi Pitches Council on Privately Funded, $500 Million Project to Install Fiber Optic Cable Across Cleveland

Bill Frenton, director of design at Always Underground, detailed at Council’s meeting Tuesday how fiber optic cabling could connect the 65 percent of Cleveland streets without it. Credit: TV20

City Council continued its evaluation of how to bring internet access across Cleveland, one of the most digitally redlined and deprived areas in the country, on Tuesday as the Utilities Committee heard from Sifi Networks on its plan to invest $500 million in laying fiber optic cables in the city.

The telecommunications company, based in New Jersey, pitched the committee’s seven members on its unique business model, one that could lay miles of high-speed fiber optic cable to the more than two-thirds of Cleveland’s residents previous without such.

And do it all on its own dime.

“The goal is to create a fair playing field,” Scott Bradshaw, Sifi’s president, told Committee Chair Brian Kazy. “This is a 100 percent private investment. No tax dollars. No subsidies. No stimulus from the federal government. It’s a 100-percent private risk.”

Sifi’s lengthy pitch to Council comes about a year after the Bibb administration released a request for proposal in hopes of closing Cleveland’s longstanding digital divide, which has left some 30 percent of Clevelanders without internet access.

City Hall has pushed to allocate some $20 million in ARPA dollars to DigitalC to expand low-cost ($18 mont), moderately speedy internet. City Council, earlier this year, “held” those discussions until later this year after some members raised doubts about DigitalC’s ability to do the job.

Sifi, which has helped set up fiber networks in 11 states but which has yet to complete more than one individual project in its FiberCity intiative and which has faced lawsuits, nevertheless sold council on its plan for a street-by-street installation of a network that would then be used by Spectrum or other ISPs.

President Scott Bradshaw explained the approach is best seen through a highway metaphor.

“Fiber is a multi-lane highway,” he told Council. “Private ISPs pay a fee to ride that highway—there’s no rocket science behind it.”

If Council does buy into Bradshaw’s pitch in September, it could take anywhere from four to six years to complete the project. A year-long input phase would help Sifi determine which parts of Cleveland to prioritize, likely steered by the FCC’s connectivity map. (East Side, mostly.)

Such a build, which would require trenching near city sidewalks, could add hundreds of union jobs “for a sustained amount of time,” said Bill Fenton, director of design at Always Underground. Most of them would tap electricians from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, and last years at a time.

Fiber, of course, is costly, and residents would have to pay to use it. Bradshaw predicts those speeds of 10-plus gigabits going for at least $65, which could be halved with federal subsidies, he said. Or FiberCity Aid, Sifi’s own subsidy program.

Other than the hours-long talk about gigabits and ISPs, Bradshaw’s pitch seemed both to worry some Council members and confuse others. After all, for Kazy, such a too-good-to-be-true pitch for a city-wide contract that could, in theory, last until 2103.

“Twenty years ago, our exact committee got into another long-term contract,” Kazy told Bradshaw, probably referring to the detrimental electricity agreement with American Municipal Power in 2007. “You’re gonna have to part the Red Sea to convince me that 80 years is right.”

Although Cleveland could be Sifi’s 41st customer, the company ran into some deep growing pains starting in 2019, with its first clients.

In the city of Fullerton, Calif., residents complained en masse about, as the Fullerton Observer reported, how Sifi “tore up our already beleaguered streets.” Moreover, as Bradshaw admitted, Sifi has only fully completed one city’s installation: Placencia, Calif.

“I don’t want that to happen in Cleveland,” Kazy said, referring to Fullerton’s build out. “It’s the city’s neck on the line; it’s the Council’s neck on the line.”

Council will entertain Sifi’s pitch again in September.

Austin Davis, Bibb’s broadband “czar,” noted that it’s not a question of one or the other between Sifi and DigitalC, as a low-cost option coupled with a moderate one would give residents options.

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