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Building the Gigabit City a Planning Guide Vol Building the Gigabit City A Planning Guide Vol. 2.0 Craig J Settles Compliments of Calix and Pulse Broadband Building the Gigabit City A Planning Guide, Vol. 2.0 Copyright © 2015 by Craig Settles Distributed by Smashwords All rights reserved. No part of this book Shelby used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in body in critical articles or reviews. Please do not participate in or encouraged the piracy copyrighted materials in violation of the authors rights. Ebook formatting by www.ebooklaunch.com This is dedicated to the doctors, nurses and rehab specialist of Alameda Hospital, Alta Bates Summit Medical Center and Rehab Without Walls. These folks are true miracle workers. Table of Contents Introduction 1. Unfair Competition? Nope. Community Broadband Is a Vital Asset 2. Success Breeds Success 3. The Business Case for Broadband 4. Broadband & Economic Development - Don’t Miss the Boat 5. Making the Case for Education and Healthcare 6. Create an Effective Project Team and Steering Committee 7. Getting To the Heart of the Matter - the Needs Assessment 8. The Mindset Driving Successful Broadband Fundraising 9. Show Me the (Hidden) Money for Broadband 10. The Many Communities Can Own Broadband Ways Infrastructure 11. Nonprofit and Co-op in operation 12. The Great Thing about Marketing Is… It Works! 13. Customer Service - Marketing By Another Name 14. Building Consensus Introduction: A stroke of insight about community broadband “What do you, I had a stroke?!” I’m a scale of 1 - 10, with 10 = death, I was hovering around 6 or 7 when they rolled me into the Emergency Room. Lucky for me the stroke I had at the end of January didn’t leave my brain deep-fried, just lightly scrambled. Eventually I was able to start to thinking about the revision of my book, Building the Gigabit City. One the things I struggle with is how to convey the seriousness need of community broadband. Well, let me tell you, a stroke is pretty dang serious. As I started revising my book while I worked through my recovery and rehab, a thought hit me. In many ways this process would have been limited - if not actually impossible - if I had been living in a small or rural or even in an urban low-income community without broadband. For someone suffering from a stroke, you have three hours to get them serious treatment or else the patient will not recover from the debilitating effects of the stroke. I was lucky, but for person living alone in a community with bad communications infrastructure, they can easily fall outside of the 3-hour window. There’s wireless and other technology that enable emergency responders to be able to treat the patient while still at their home and in route to the hospital. You need sufficient broadband to make this reality. Unknown to me at the time, Alameda [CA] Hospital has a righteous stroke center. The neurologist who runs the center has computers, monitors and a server at her home. When I hit the ER at 10:45 that night, she directed the entire team of five or six doctors and nurses from her home office, seeing everything they saw. A feat highly unlikely in broadband-deprived communities. After a debilitating event such as a stroke, the presence of family and friends is valuable to a patient’s recovery. Facebook, Twitter video clips and audio messages were just what the doctor ordered. All of these communication tools are facilitated by broadband. Being self-employed, I really didn’t have time to be ill. Though there were physical limitations to working, these were easier to deal with thanks to dictation software. Internet capability enabled me to “teach” it to conform to my business vocabulary. I was able to resume my Gigabit Nation radio show April, and the broadband capabilities that enabled the shows also allowed me to conduct interviews and research for the book. My rehab therapists at the hospital and at home were excellent, but they couldn’t be there all day. The thing about strokes, though, you have to use the affected muscles constantly in order to heal them. A company called Flint Rehabilitation Devices developed MusicGlove that incorporates sensors, software, the Internet and a Guitar Hero-type game that psyches out your hand into believing it’s actually moving. In a few weeks, the hand catches on and begins to move. Dr. Nizan Friedman, CEO and Co-Founder of Flint, believes broadband has particular value in small rural communities because it bridges the gap to knowledge, medical or otherwise. “People can access and use applications such as ours,” he says. “Patients can get tap into expertise being use by leading medical facilities in the country. Furthermore, with sites such as Twitter and Facebook, collaboration and motivation between patients is now possible. It all helps the healing” I don’t expect people to have a stroke before they have that “Aha moment” and realize the core value of broadband is the access it gives us to do things we could not do before, or do them more easily. This is why more of our communities must get off their hands and join in the broadband movement. Next Century Cities Executive Director Deb Socia said on one of my shows, “We’re not going to have these great creations and opportunities we’ve been promised unless we have the networks that helps support those creations.” So folks, time is a-wasting. "Rather than wait for incumbent ISPs to build the network your cities want and need, you can take control of your own broadband futures," Gigi Sohn (Counselor to FCC Chair Tom Wheeler) told a group of us conference attendees recently. "Rather than thinking of yourselves as taxers and regulators, think of yourselves as facilitators of the kind of services you’ve been begging the incumbents to provide for years.” Probably the most important question you should ask yourself is, If not us, who? If not now, when? 1. Unfair Competition? Nope. Community Broadband Is a Vital Asset Some critics say that municipal broadband is an unfair competition to the private sector. I say - bunk! Today consumers, business, educational institutions, medical facilities - they want fly. On space shuttles, figuratively speaking. Going at gigabit speeds. Chattanooga, TN, Santa Monica, CA Wilson, N.C., Lafayette, LA and several hundred cities and counties have fiber networks that fly. Does your community want to fly too? Let’s be clear here. Muni broadband is not “unfair competition” by local government. When Wilson’s 12-person IT department planned, built and managed a network that delivered speeds when they launched 20 times faster than the best Time Warner Cable offered, that’s competing with superior technology. When Comcast customers switch to Chattanooga’s gig network because EPB offers far better customer service, that’s competent competition. When tiny Reedsburg, Wis. refuses to compete against the large cable company on price, but beats competitors by offering greater value provided by local management, they compete based on local credibility. But is muni broadband even playing in the same game as incumbents? Fred Pilot, Principal of Pilot Healthcare Strategies, make the case that it is silly to even consider what communities are building is in some way compete with what telcos and cable companies are marketing. “It’s a fallacious argument because the incumbents and communities aren’t in the same business - a basic prerequisite for market competition. The incumbents are in the business of packaging and selling discrete bits of Internet bandwidth. They sell it by throughput speed with speed-tiered pricing for service and by volume. The faster the connection and the more bandwidth consumed, the higher the price. Naturally, the incumbents segment their service territories and product offerings to generate the highest possible profit for that bandwidth. After all, they owe it to their shareholders. “State and local governments on the other hand aren’t in the bandwidth business or selling it to generate maximum profit. They are in the infrastructure business - planning, constructing and financing it to support public objectives such as economic development and enhancing the delivery of public services. In the 20th century, they did that by building roads and highways. In the 21st, they do it by building FTTP infrastructure.” 21st Century infrastructure - and vital community asset The first step towards creating broadband as a community asset is to describe it as such. If all we want to do is create ways to pass around YouTube videos, Facebook kitties or Netflix flicks, much fewer city officials would give broadband on second thought. However, the reason communities coast to coast are spending millions dollars is soon creates valuable assets that benefit local government, economic development, education and healthcare. A rising number of city leaders are starting to wake up to the fact that we need to reframe the discussion about high speed Internet access. Conferences nationwide are bringing together folks who have success stories about using broadband as an asset together with those who were beginning their journey. It helped that President Obama this year has blessed broadband in Cedar Fall, IA and across America as 21st Century infrastructure. The second step towards creating valuable broadband asset is defining what success means. The network itself is not what changes communities. Whether your broadband infrastructure runs at 100 Meg (100 Mbsp) or at 10 gigabit is a secondary consideration. Whatever value your community derives from the infrastructure depends primarily on what you end up doing with the network. To those critics who say all muni broadband efforts are doomed to failure, we say success is about how much money did you make, how much a stockholder value did you generate and so forth.
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