Craig Settles sits down, across the country, to interview Maryland's Lori Sherwood, the Program Director for One Maryland. One Maryland is a stimulus-funded project bringing fiber-optic broadband to every county in the state. We have written about several counties using these connections to start building muni fiber networks (see our stories tagged with Maryland). One of the partners is the Maryland Broadband Cooperative, which focuses on middle mile connections also.
This project is expected to start saving the state some $30 million a year while greeting increasing the capacity to essential community institutions. Many of these institutions will undoubtedly be moving away from incumbent T1 and similar connections that have been gouging the taxpayers for years by grossly overcharging for what they provide. However, we do have the same concerns about this project as we recently noted in North Carolina's MCNC project, namely that statewide networks connecting libraries and schools take potential anchor tenants off networks that could be built by communities to serve everyone. Without these anchor tenants, it will be more difficult to finance a network available universally.
Santa Monica's approach to building community owned broadband that puts the community first has been wildly successful. They have not focused on providing residential connections, and likely will not in the future, focusing instead on meeting their municipal needs and businesses to spur economic development.
They can deliver up to 10Gbps to businesses that need it and they have connectivity throughout the City for whatever projects they choose to pursue. This includes free Wi-Fi in parks, controlling traffic signaling (prioritizing mass transit, for instance), and smart parking applications. On top of all that, their investments have saved more than a million dollars that would have been wasted on slower, less reliable connections provided by leased lines.
Arizona Avenue, the Mid-City area and the city's office district will all be getting makeovers if the City Council approves two contracts that will connect 40 signalized intersections to City Hall's centralized traffic control system.
The work represents the fourth phase in a five-phase effort to connect all of Santa Monica's intersections using fiber optic cables. Some signals will need to be fully replaced, while others can get by on smaller upgrades, according to the staff report.
Don't miss this hour long interview between Craig Settles and Jory Wolf, the brains behind Santa Monica's success.
Around 45 minutes into the interview, Jory Wolf talks about the ways the free Wi-Fi network promotes local businesses in partnership with a Buy Local campaign. I was thrilled to hear this as a colleague of mine at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance is a great friend of buy local campaigns because they are proven to help the small, independent businesses that contribute so much to communities.
If you want to learn more, particularly about how Santa Monica's approach has created many new jobs (that's right, smart public investments in broadband create jobs!) check out .
-Though the city provides Internet access directly, it also makes the network available to third-party providers on an open-access basis. “The incumbents have chosen not to use our assets,” Wolf says, explaining that larger providers are often reluctant to operate over networks where they cannot control the user experience and that their marketing and support organizations are not geared to using other companies’ networks.
However, other ISPs have shown interest in the network now that it is becoming successful. Currently, two ISPs offer services generally over the network, and other ISPs serve the Santa Monica offices of businesses that they deal with in other locations. Wolf says, “We have the opportunity to handle the business any way they prefer. … We’re not an obstacle; we’re an enabler. We don’t see ourselves as competitors, but as filling a void.”
City Net’s revenue from current business customers totals about $300,000 per year, enough to fund network operations and maintenance and to support an extensive system of free Wi-Fi hot spots throughout the city. Wi-Fi is now available at parks, beaches, libraries, public buildings and other open-space areas. On any given day, about 2,000 of Santa Monica’s 87,000 residents use the 27 Wi-Fi hot spots.
The city also has $190,000 of its capital funds remaining, which it uses as a revolving capital improvement project account. This account funds construction for network expansion, which is repaid by customers as the network is extended to their premises.
An indirect benefit of City Net is that it has forced competing networks to lower their prices. Wolf’s office estimates that nonparticipating providers have lowered their bandwidth prices by 20 percent or more, making bandwidth generally more affordable throughout the city. “If that’s all we had accomplished, we’d feel that we’d done what we intended,” Wolf says.
Finally, check out a recent segment of Santa Monica Update that discusses Santa Monica City Net (fast forward to 9:20 in the video to skip right to it).
Franklin County formed a partnership with a local wireless Internet service provider (WISP) to expand the County's local government wide-area network and provide broadband options for the citizens. The project leveraged County structures such as towers and water tanks for WISP transmitters and receivers. We were in the process of upgrading the public safety radio system at the same time, so the two efforts worked together to identify possible new tower locations that would improve radio coverage and meet broadband demand.
The partnership provided the WISP with a fast-path to business growth through additional funding and access to existing infrastructure. The County provided space on towers, tanks and poles in exchange for Internet service at County offices. This arrangement lowered deployment costs for the WISP, expediting business growth.
The partnership expanded the WISP customer base in Franklin County from 98 customers in early 2005 to approximately 1000 in early 2008. In addition, 15 fire and rescue stations were added to the County’s wide-area-network (WAN) in addition to five other County offices. There are many advantages to moving remote offices onto the WAN, including reduced costs and improved communications and data sharing across County Administration. The wireless mesh network supports data and voice and the WISP is currently segmenting the County's voice traffic on their network to ensure quality of service (QoS).
At the 10th annual Commonwealth of Virginia Innovative Technology Symposium in 2008, Governor Timothy M. Kaine awarded Franklin County with one of the Technology Awards for Excellence for the County’s innovative approach to the use of technology in improving government services and efficiency. Receiving the award on behalf of Franklin County, Terry said, “This award demonstrates Franklin County’s leadership in the state in addressing the challenges facing local governments with innovative solutions.”
With an eye to the future, Franklin County is now working with the Appalachia Colleges Community Economic Development Partnership (ACCEDP) to further expand the service through a community outreach to bring high speed Internet to underserved, high demand areas.
Craig Settles has announced a new weekly audio show, Gigabit Nation, that will streamed across the Internet as well as available for on-demand listening. The first show is on Wednesday, July 27, at 14:00 EDT featuring Chattanooga's EPBFi FTTH community network.
The schedule for upcoming guests is quite heavy on community networks and private companies that are partnering with communities to build networks that respond to their needs.
Gigabit Nation’s mission is threefold: 1) inform listeners how to get meaningful broadband into communities everywhere, 2) help communities increase broadband adoption and 3) provide a vehicle for people to work together – and with organizations – to get broadband done.
Craig started by asking how the network is used by local businesses:
There’s a printing operation here with their corporate headquarters in Los Angeles. They have to be able to send artwork all the time to headquarters. There’s a guy who works developing catalogue books that are published by an outfit in Canada. Before the network it would take him six hours to upload materials and now it’s done in minutes. One company has their offices on the north side of community and the manufacturing plant on the south side. They’re always sending large data files back and forth.
Hospitals here can upload and download files such as x-rays, MRIs, and CT scans immediately between other hospitals and doctors 75 miles away in Nashville. Patients don’t have to be transferred there, and they don’t have paper records that have to be carried by hand to specialists like they did in the old days. All of this saves lives and it saves money.
When Craig asked what the Obama Administration can do to expand broadband to "improve local economies," Speers asked for an end to state-created barriers to community networks and mentioned a Tennessee bill that would allow muni utility networks to offer services to communities outside their historic electric territories:
From a Tennessee perspective, first put us on a level playing field with the telcos. Allow municipalities to get into the business with none of the restrictions we have. We wanted to be able to wholesale our network services. Take Lawrenceberg, for example. They have no broadband and the telcos flat out refuse to build it there. We can expand our network over to them and they’d save $3 Million. But with the law the state legislature passed, we can’t serve them because they’re out of our area. If we shared head-in facilities, this would go a long way for economic development there.
Craig offers some more details, including some of the planning:
The planning team went a step further. Broadband feasibility studies typical include asking constituents about their level of interest in Internet services. Powell’s team secured firm commitments from institutions such as schools and hospitals that would not only subscribe to the network but entice their customers to subscribe, too. They contacted businesses about moving or expanding operations to Powell.
With agreements and letters of intent in hand, Powell was able to give Tri-County Telecom (TCT) more credible revenue predictions. “We presented our data and potential institutional subscribers,” states Bray. “TCT then adjusted for what their real costs were and described how the buildout was going to look, what the real breakeven was (and based on what assumptions), when certain goals had to be met and how long it will take to reach certain milestones over 20 years.” Bray calls all of the TCT forecasts, “conservative.”
He also notes that Powellink broke even at the end of 2010, an impressively short period of time.
I just noticed that Progressive States Network has published the audio from a phone call we did on March 31 about community broadband networks. I was one of the four guest speakers -- we each spoke for 5-10 minutes and then answered questions from the audience. Progressive States Network has long advocated in the states to recognize and preserve local authority to decide whether to build a community broadband network.
Other guests included:
Washington State Representative John McCoy
Ben Lennett, Senior Policy Analyst, New America Foundation
Craig Settles, Founder and President, Successful.com
It was supposed to be two perspectives on the National Broadband Plan, but at times it turned into Blair Levin interrogating Craig Settles, unfortunately minimizing the roles of Stacey Higginbotham (Giga Om) and Amy Schatz (Wall Street Journal). It would have been interesting to see an event where Craig could continuously interrogate Blair, or where Stacey and Amy had more control (Stacey, in particular, is a gifted reporter unafraid to ask tough questions).
Readers of this site may be interested in an upcoming debate between Craig Settles and Blair Levin, the architect and chief defender of the National Broadband Plan. On Monday, Feburary 7, New America will host and webcast the event. Tune in at 10:00 EST to hear these two discuss the plan, with moderators Amy Schatz (Wall Street Journal), Stacey Higginbotham (GigaOm), and Cecilia Kang (Washington Post).
Craig is a champion for local, community owned networks, whereas Blair Levin justified the National Broadband Plan's turning a blind eye to the lack of competition in broadband by saying it would have been unpopular with the massive carriers to challenge their dominance.
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.
When it comes to broadband, I’m a socialist. Why? Because broadband service in the United States is currently provided by a cableco/telcoduopoly, and, as such, is slower and more expensive than in most of the developed world, studies show. Because I don't believe the FCC can fix that lack of competition within the current regulatory framework, despite the ambitious goals set forth in its National Broadband Plan. Because a reasonably-priced alternative to cable or telco broadband might be just the thing to bring competition to the industry and spur U.S. broadband cost and quality to world-class levels. Because our connectedness increasingly dictates our our economic standing in the world: Broadband is as important to us as the interstate highway system--a public works project--was to Eisenhower-era America.
