Craig Settles kicks off this event with a 45 minute presentation discussing what community networks should do to succeed financially and how they can go beyond simply making broadband access available to more people.
Bryan Sivak, Chief Technology Officer of the District of Columbia; Joanne Hovis, President-Elect of NATOA and President of Columbia Telecommunications Corporation; and Gary Carter, Analyst at City of Santa Monica Information Systems Department responded Craig Settles' presentation.
One of the key points is something we harp on here: if community broadband networks run in the black according to standard private sector accounting procedures, that is great. But it is a poor measure of how successful a community network is. Community networks create a variety of positive benefits that are not included in that metric and those benefits must be considered when evaluating such a network.
Is subscription sales the only way our municipality is going to see a return on our $500,000 [city-owned wireless network]? Not really. We see other benefits. Police on the street longer because they can do their reports from the cars rather than the squad room. More information to our firefighters before they make scene on a possible structure fire. AMR project. Tourist access to city wide internet. These are all hard dollar and soft dollar returns that are real.
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Community Broadband Networks
Community broadband networks are merely a tool. Until we realize this fact and address the real issue with respect to communities, we will be wasting an inordinate amount of resources. History is just repeating itself; but instead of the steam engine, we now have the Internet. How successful a community network is can be measured by the success of the community in utilizing its own resources, and may be succinctly stated as "What Happen$ in the Community $tay$ in the Community".
So, the real issue is community empowerment as well as individual empowerment. Networks are really no different from vehicles, which evolved from the steam engine, in this respect.
My background is over thirty years in data communications and the more involved I've become in community networks the more I realize that it is all about the methodology, as the technology exists, the applications exist, and the business case can be readily made. As you point out there are significant benefits which can only be realized when you take a more encompassing community view. Having also worked with Native Americans and Canada's First Nations it became apparent that their empowerment was tribal and could easily be modeled through a community cooperative having control of local enterprises of significant ecomonic interest to the community. Consequently, I've become an advocate of community development cooperatives as the methodology to establish not just community broadband networks but other community needs, like a business incubator. The methodology initially seems a confrontation to more monopolistic endeavors, which for example, might be made up ILECs and those enterprises advocating cloud computing. In reality though, if these enterprises were to embrace the inevitable community empowerment opportunities just as those enterprises are currently embracing individual empowerment opportunities such as smart phones, e-books, etc. we would all be winners.
Hopefully, this makes as much sense to you as it does me. If not, I'd be happy to explain in more detail.
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