The nDanville network of rural southern Virginia has long been a favorite of ours (previous coverage is available here). The network has helped Danville go from being notable for having the highest unemployment rate in Virginia to being ranked as the third top digital city in the nation, according to a recent article.

Danville's City Manager was honored by the Southern Piedmont Technology Council for developing the nDanville network:

Danville City Manager Joe King received the Chairman's Award for his leadership in advancing the development of a modern telecommunications infrastructure in the region, a key factor in Danville's economic development renaissance.

King had been the director of the city-owned utility when it drew up plans for a fiber-optic network to be built incrementally until it could connect every home, business, and community anchor institution in Danville Utility's territory. At the time, Danville was suffering tremendously from the loss of tobacco and textile industries.

Today, the nDanville net-work connects hundreds of businesses, has sharply re-duced costs for local gov-ernment, health care provid-ers, and local schools, and has introduced more competition into the telecommunications marketplace.

Danville Utilities has 44,000 electric meters, half of which are located in Danville (44 sq miles). The others are scattered across over 450 sq miles surrounding the city. The Southern Piedmont Technology Council serves the technology industry in Danville as well as nearby counties and another city.

Even in 2004, many in Danville did not have broadband access to the Internet, as outlined in an early document explaining the network. Verizon barely offered DSL and Adelphia offered limited cable modem service.

Andrew Cohill, a consultant assisting the project, has offered more background in a recent article of Broadband Communities. In it, he notes that the network was a piece of a larger strategy of investment in the community to develop local expertise in technology.

Danville was the first municipality to deploy a fully automated, Layer 3 open-access network; nDanville, with more than 135 miles of fiber, passes more than 1,000 business locations, including every parcel in all five business parks. Current customers have access to 100 Mbps fiber connections capable of delivering a wide variety of services, and 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps connections are available upon request.

And as we noted back in August, the network is starting to connect residents in a pilot project starting with up to 500 homes.

The network is profitable, connects over 150 businesses, and is creating significant economic development.

An interesting resource that Andrew shares are the principles behind the network. Communities just starting to consider a community broadband network may want to adopt a similar statement of principles.

• Universal access: The long-term goal of the project is that every business and home should have the same level and quality of service. This commitment supports the open-access business model by aggregating the largest possible number of potential customers for service providers.
• Level playing field: Every service provider should be able to play by the same rules. nDanville has a single public price list available to all providers. There are no special deals or unpublished rates.
• Public-private partnerships: City investments in broadband infrastructure should create private sector business opportunities. The city sells no services to businesses or residents.
• Multiservice network: nDanville is an open-access network that supports multiple providers and a wide variety of services well beyond the traditional triple play to create true competition and lower prices.
• Symmetric bandwidth: The availability of services offering affordable symmetric bandwidth was viewed as critical to the economic revitalization of Danville. Any transport service requested by a provider can be configured with equal upstream and downstream data capacity to support business- class services and applications. This early decision is now becoming increasingly important with the rapid increase in the use of business videoconferencing, which requires symmetric bandwidth to perform adequately.
• Unlimited bandwidth: Another early design goal was that any home or business should have the capacity to use any service needed to compete in the global economy. nDanville’s active Ethernet fiber network offers 100 Mbps, 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps connections as standard, and DWDM lightpaths are available on request.

Some of the high profile economic development achievements include an Ikea plant and the expansion of CBN Technologies, which produces secure identification documents. While Ikea and CBN did not choose Danville solely for the publicly owned fiber-optic network, they rely upon it and almost certainly would not have picked Danville in its absence.

Riverside, California, an innovative city of 300,000 in the eastern part of Los Angeles has been a broadband pioneer even though it sits in the shadow of tech centers like nearby Santa Barbara.   Riverside’s accomplishment as a city catching up with the information age was evident when it was selected as one of the top 7 Intelligent Communities Award in 2011 by New York-based Intelligent Community Forum.  

“It’s an honor to be selected as one of the top 7 cities in the world.  It comes down to a couple factors, what communities are doing with broadband, but... includes digital inclusion, innovation, knowledge workforce (of folks within your community) and marketing advocacy... We rank very high in all those categories.” - City CIO Steve Reneker [Gigabit Nation Radio]

The cornerstone the city’s SmartRiverside initiative is a free public wireless network which covers 78% of the city’s 86 square miles.  Established in 2007 by AT&T (which also offers DSL services in Riverside), the maximum speed of the network is 768kbps, which at just under 1Mbps is decent enough to surf the web and check emails.  However the road to providing free Internet access and bridging the digital divide wasn’t so easy for Riverside.  

The City issued a RFP in 2006 for a provider to deploy a citywide Wi-Fi network, with the goal of making the Internet accessible to users who can’t afford higher cost plans.  The City met with respondents and a speed of 512kbps or about half a megabit was initially quoted as an entry-level speed that would complement existing services rather than compete against them.  The contract was awarded to AT&T who hired MetroFi to build the network and charge the city a service cost of about $500,000 a year.  MetroFi went bankrupt after completing only 25 square miles and Nokia Siemens took over but only completed up to the present level of coverage. 

In 2007, the wifi network launched and began bridging the digital divide. Through the City’s digital inclusion efforts, not only were modest-income families able to obtain low cost or free PCs but also have means to use them with an Internet connection.  

After AT&T acquired a competitor and created AT&T Wireless Systems (AWS), it informed the city in 2009 that it was going to off-load the network, transferring it back to Riverside at no cost.  AT&T wanted out because it “didn’t sign up enough customers who would pay for premium service.” [Riverside takes over Wi-Fi network] Given that the contract stipulated the network could not be sold or leased to a private owner until after five years of operation, the City of Riverside’s only options were to find a new “sponsor,” pay for it, or shut it down.   MuniWireless followed the events closely and revealed the community’s split between a quality public service they depend on and the willingness to pay for it:

The city council will vote on 16 March 2010 to maintain the network, find a sponsor, or shut it down. Some people in Riverside do not want the city to spend money on the network given the city’s precarious financial state, but others who have been enjoying the free Wi-Fi service, don’t want it taken away from them (see my article about St. Cloud, Florida whose city council ran into stiff opposition from residents over the termination of free Wi-Fi service). People who have been financially crushed and are trying to save money by using the free Wi-Fi service (and canceling their DSL/cable subscriptions) are urging Riverside to keep it up and running. This is exactly the same situation that the St. Cloud city council faces today. [Residents Oppose Closing of St. Cloud's CyberSpot Wi-Fi Network]

The Riverside City Council voted to end the AT&T contract and now owns the equipment.  Time Warner is now the service provider and Minnetonka-based US Internet was selected to service and maintain the network.  The new 5 year contract has the city paying $5.48 million, or a little over a million a year to US Internet. [US Internet takes over Riverside citywide Wi-Fi network] [Press Release]

In the future, Riverside hopes to build out the network to near full 100% coverage.  It was rejected in both rounds of NTIA stimulus funds.  In the first round, the city was not rural and did not lack resources to implement broadband.  In the second round, it’s $8 milllion request for a middle mile intranet connection was rejected.  However Riverside will benefit from indirect programs that did receive funds such as the California Emerging Technology Funds [CETF NTIA page] which does digital literacy.  This bolsters the city’s existing digital inclusion and PC refurb programs for low-income families. 

Craig Settles has been pumping out some in-depth interviews with community networks on his new Gigabit Nation audio show. This show discusses a wireless network built using a public-private partnership in Franklin County, Virginia.

The approach is outlined in this case study [pdf] and excerpted here:

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).

A case study from Motorola [pdf] notes that Franklin County has received awards for its approach:

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.

We have frequently encouraged communities to learn more about Santa Monica's approach to incrementally building a publicly owned fiber-optic broadband network, which has just received another award. The Ash Center at Harvard's Kennedy School selected Santa Monica as one of their top 25 Innovations in Government.

The program was selected for this award in the economic development category for the network's effectiveness in attracting technology companies to the city and supporting existing Santa Monica businesses with a leading edge broadband infrastructure, city officials said.

Santa Monica City Net's model is being replicated by the cities of Burbank and Long Beach, and is in review by Chicago and Calgary.

As we explained in Breaking the Broadband Monopoly, Santa Monica started with an I-Net on which they could not run commercial traffic and slowly built their own network that had no conditions on how it was used. In the past, this network has received the "Significant Achievement Award" from the Public Technology Institute (PTI).

This press release recaps some details from their network:

The City created a telecommunications master plan and built a fiber optic network that connected 59 buildings used by the City, Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, and Santa Monica College. Savings realized by this project enabled the City to construct its own municipal fiber optic network, Santa Monica City Net, to support traffic cameras, security cameras, real-time parking advisory systems, a traffic signal synchronization system, and real-time mass transit signs. The City also leases dark fiber and lit services to local businesses for affordable broadband.

The results of Santa Monica's advanced broadband initiative are a reduction in construction costs of new broadband service, an increase in purchasing power of connected local businesses, and a broadband market expansion for global Internet Service Providers that now offer service to small, medium and large commercial buildings. The program also supports an environment for local businesses to compete in the global economy with cutting edge network solutions.

The PTI is a national non-profit technology research and development organization based in Washington, DC, representing local governments. The PTI Technology Solutions Awards is a national program recognizing local governments that use technology to increase revenues, improve service to their community, save tax dollars, or improve management.