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OneCommunity's Middle Way - Community Broadband Bits Podcast 135
OneCommunity is a nonprofit organization in northeastern Ohio that has connected thousands of community anchor institutions with high capacity connections. Created as OneCleveland before expanding, it has remained a rather unique approach to expanding high quality Internet access.
This week, CEO Lev Gonick joins us to talk about OneCommunity and its contributions to the region. As neither a private company nor a local government, Lev believes that OneCommunity offers a third way, something they often call a "community-driven" approach. We discuss how a big city like Cleveland needs to think about solving the problem of expanding Internet access broadly.
OneCommunity has just announced the recipients of its Big Gig Challenge and Lev shares some of the lessons they learned in evaluating proposals and working with the communities that competed for the prize. Lev and I will be on a panel together again with some other great folks in Austin for Broadband Communities in the middle of April. Great deal to attend here.
This show is 23 minutes long and can be played on this page or via Apple Podcasts or the tool of your choice using this feed.
Transcript below.
We want your feedback and suggestions for the show-please e-mail us or leave a comment below.
Listen to other episodes here or view all episodes in our index. See other podcasts from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance here.
Thanks to Persson for the music, licensed using Creative Commons. The song is "Blues walk."
An Increasing Call for Community Owned Networks
While Comcast focuses on increasing its market power rather than improving services in the communities it monopolizes, no one should be surprised that we are seeing a surge in interest for building community owned networks.
We've heard from many people who want to learn how they can start - more than we can always respond to, unfortunately. We are working on a resource to answer many of those questions, but it always boils down to 2 things: building a supportive network of people and getting informed. Get the word out - especially to local business leaders and anyone else who may be supportive.
There are many potential business models and financing opportunities, but some will work better than others in each community. That said, there are some basics that every community should be immediately considering.
The first is building a fiber network to connect anchor institutions such as schools, libraries, first responders, municipal facilities, and the like (see our Fact Sheet on savings from such networks). These networks should be constructed in such a way as to enable future expansions to local businesses, residents, and generally everything in the community or even beyond for rural areas. That means choosing the backbone routes carefully and ensuring that as much fiber is available as possible. Using conduit with channels and always leave at least one channel free to pull a future bundle (replacing a smaller count bundle that can then be removed to continue having a free channel).
Another smart move is to begin getting conduit and fiber in the ground as part of other capital projects, like street rebuilds, water main replacement, and the like. We will discuss how Santa Monica did this in an upcoming case study. In the meantime, there is no better resource than CTC Technology & Energy's recent report, Gigabit Cities: Technical Strategies for Facilitating Public or Private Broadband Construction in your Community.
We have additional resources organized in two places: on MuniNetworks.org and on ILSR.org.
Case Western Gig Network Releases Video of Case Connection Zone
Case Western Reserve University, one of the original partners in the OneCommunity Project, lit up a 1 Gbps network in a poorly served neighborhood near campus. This video explains some of the uses they have found thus far.
OneCommunity: An Important Model for America’s Broadband Revival
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The Baller Herbst Law Group filed an extensive report with the FCC detailing important information about OneCommunity - a fascinating nonprofit organization connecting many communities with fiber and wireless connectivity in Ohio. OneCommunity works with a variety of public and private sector partners to expand access to last mile and middle mile connectivity. Because they fall within our broad definition of putting public needs first, I wanted to highlight this report.
OneCommunity’s roots go back to 2001. At the time, Case Western Reserve University (Case) had a robust fiber-optic communications system and considerable networking expertise, but the rest of Cleveland lacked advanced communications capability. Case’s president, Edward Hundert, and its chief information officer, Lev Gonick, believed that broadband connections to the Internet promised to be a major factor in the local economy’s long-term health; that broadband could transform Northern Ohio from a manufacturing-based to an information-based economy; and that Case could play a profoundly beneficial role in enhancing Cleveland’s broadband future. As a result, Hundert and Gonick reached out to several of Cleveland’s leading government, educational, cultural, philanthropic, and other non-profit organizations and persuaded them to join Case in founding a new entity called “OneCleveland” that would provide gigabit connectivity to participating organizations and pave the way for widespread and free wireless service.
OneCleveland expanded far outside the City and changed its name to OneCommunity. It has already tallied an impressive list of achievements:
In the Northern Ohio region, OneCommunity facilitated public and private arrangements for the deployment of a gigabit-capacity fiber-optic community network, soon spanning 22 counties and now serving over 200 subscriber entities and 1,500 schools, hospitals, clinics, government, and public safety locations. Over one million citizens are affected by the organizations that OneCommunity serves through the network.
The network is open and carrier neutral, but so much more. Read the paper -- and appendixes -- for more information. PS : I should note that I disagree with the conclusion:
Charter to Cleveland, TN: You Are Not Sufficiently Profitable
Not too far away from Chattanooga, Tennessee, (home to the largest muni fiber network in the U.S.) lies Cleveland (Tennessee). Five prominent residents asked why they cannot get broadband:
The homeowners have discussed the problem with Charter Communications Director of Government Relations Nick Pavlis three times.
Pavlis said in a telephone interview it would cost the cable company $130,000 to run an underground cable 2 1/2 miles and “it’s just not a reasonable payback.”
He said the company spends $500 per house as a general rule, which gives them a 36-48 month return on investment.
Yet Charter has no problem lobbying the states to prohibit publicly owned networks. Tennessee probably has more fiber-to-the-home initiatives than any other state - perhaps it is time Cleveland looked into their own or cajoling a nearby network into expanding.
Short Shots
Some shorter news items from this weeks' news:
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Salisbury may be a great example of just how a community should build a network. They have opened many chains of communication with citizens to keep everyone involved in the process:
To get the message out about their fiber-to-the-home cable utility now under construction, Salisbury city officials already have conducted radio, newspaper and magazine interviews.
The city also hopes to provide daily "fiber" updates on its blog (www.salisburyftthblog.com) and have a continuing newspaper advertisement called "Straight Talk about Fiber" in the Post.
Any community considering the hard path of building one of these networks should take note of how Salisbury is ensuring citizens know what is happening and why this network is important to the city's future.
Clarksville Department of Electricity (CDE) Lightband creates local careers as they roll out the FTTH network that will deliver triple play services. They also have a spiffy video:
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Garn Anderson, of the Knight Center of Digital Excellence says "Smart Infrastructure starts with planning."
The success in and around Cleveland demonstrates not only the benefits of Smart Infrastructure, but also the reality that local communities are best equipped to implement today's fundamental need for infrastructure that empowers innovation.
He expands on those thoughts in a post on the Community Connections blog.