Has Summit Broadband broken their contact with the City of Lakeland?

Summit Broadband, which partnered with the city of Lakeland to provide high-speed internet service to local homes and businesses, has shifted its residential roll-out plans away from individual homes in favor of contracts with homeowner groups.

A peeved Mayor Bill Mutz says he wants answers from the company.

Kevin Coyne, president of Orlando-based Summit, told Lakeland city commissioners in February that the company planned to make service available by June (this month) to roughly 5,000 residents of neighborhoods between downtown and Edgewood Drive.

Summit Broadband’s response:

“Summit Broadband has been working diligently to launch services in the city of Lakeland. While service to individual homes is not currently available, we are currently offering service to businesses and multi-family communities. In fact, we’re excited to already be serving more than a dozen local businesses in addition to becoming a provider of internet services for the Surf Lakeland project.”

Mayor Bill Mutz said he was not satisfied with that response.

“I am not satisfied with the speed with which Summit is rolling out service to consumers in Lakeland and concerned that they may have the de-emphasized that express concurrent desire of the commission,” he said via email.  “Whereas it has been our goal to provide commercial business with improved Internet service, the consumer emphasis was originally and consistently one of our highest expressed priorities and motivations.”

He continued: “I will request that the commission will receive an update from Summit specifically addressing a timing schedule for consumer rollout by area.  A designed delay otherwise is unacceptable from my perspective.”

Summit’s spokespeople will not talk about the change to multi-family communities.

Under the city’s agreement with Summit:

• The city will continue serving its existing nine dark fiber customers, including Lakeland Regional Health; the revenue stream brings in $543,000 a year, officials said.
• Summit will serve all new residential and business customers; that includes current city customers who expand to new facilities, such as Lakeland Regional’s upcoming behavioral health clinic.
• Summit will handle all installation, maintenance, billing, and customer service for its customers.
• The city will retain ownership of its fiber network and will continue to maintain the fiber it owns.
• The city will provide up to $100,000 over the life of the contract to “augment” fiber in locations where there are less than six strands that Summit can use.
• Fiber might need to be augmented in places where splices result in speeds slower than 0.30 decibel per kilometer (0.30db/km). Summit can offset those costs against the 10% revenue share but not against the $144,000 annual minimum.