Running under Lawrence residents’ feet, alongside water, gas and electrical lines, is another service city leaders would like to see available to all: fiber internet.

Plans to bring super fast internet to Lawrence have been abuzz for years, but service to the wider public has never happened. When the City Commission plotted Lawrence’s future during its strategic planning process, fiber was one of eight priorities the commission wanted to accomplish in the next two years.

“Fiber has been a hot-button word that we’ve heard over the last several years,” Commissioner Mike Amyx said. “We need to be making sure that we’re constantly staying up to date. And let’s face it, residences, businesses and even governments need the highest speed that we can possibly get.”

Specifically, the initiative states that the commission will “identify barriers to having high-speed fiber throughout Lawrence and facilitate the development of the necessary infrastructure by the private sector.”

James Wisdom, director of information technology for the city, said while there is already fiber along many of the city’s main thoroughfares, the difficulty lies in getting the fiber connected to neighborhoods. He noted typically that means extending the fiber underground or aerially to connect to individual homes, but that there are some providers in other cities that have rolled out wireless connections.

“The backbones of the fiber go up and down all the major streets, but then to get it into the neighborhoods you have to extend it,” Wisdom said.

Wisdom said the city has installed approximately 50 miles of fiber along major streets, including 23rd Street, Sixth Street, Iowa Street, Wakarusa Drive and North Second Street. He listed about 10 companies that have at least some fiber installed, though many aren’t offering service.

“It’s not the fact there’s not enough fiber, it’s just a very competitive market to try to pay all the expenses and make a profit,” Wisdom said.

Currently, a handful of private companies offer fiber in small pockets around town, including the University of Kansas and some new neighborhoods in west Lawrence. Representatives for Midco, which provides cable, phone and internet service throughout Lawrence, have previously said the company is evaluating adding fiber service to its offerings.

RG Fiber, based in Baldwin City, also has plans in the works. RG Fiber CEO Mike Bosch said that they are finalizing design plans for a citywide fiber network, and hope to begin connecting neighborhoods phase by phase in the near future.

Bosch said they are hopeful that it will be a pretty smooth process, but the timeline depends on how difficult the rollout ends up being.

“It all really depends on the cost of construction and the ease of construction from the city standpoint,” Bosch said. “…It’s already been a significant challenge, so we’re trying to figure out what that’s going to look like and how that process will actually play out.”

RG Fiber already operates in Baldwin City and has plans to expand to Eudora as well as Lawrence. In general, Bosch said that there are three elements that companies have to contend with when they want to bring fiber service to a city: permits, regulations and the market.

Bosch said permitting for use of a city’s right-of-way and differing state and federal regulations for phone, video and internet service create challenges. In addition, he said there are economic barriers to building fiber networks in communities with smaller populations and pockets of existing fiber service.

“It’s going to cost us millions to build out, so then we have to look at the economics of it,” Bosch said. “We simply can’t get an investor, whether it’s a public investor or a private investor, to invest millions of dollars if they don’t see the economic payout.”

The city has begun doing some upfront investment. Wisdom said that when other street or infrastructure work is being done, the city has started laying down fiber conduit as other underground work is being done in the right-of-way.

“If the conduit is already there, the fiber installation is fairly simple,” Wisdom said.

The city also has an incentives program for fiber, though no company has yet used it. Since finalizing the strategic plan and priority initiatives in March, the commission has yet to discuss changes to how the city regulates and facilitates fiber.

Amyx said he’d like the initiative to put the issue at the forefront and start discussions to determine what the barriers are.

“We just need to have that kind of discussion, and be able to answer that question,” Amyx said. “Obviously, there’s all kinds of different things that we can look at — some may be realistic, some not.”