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Content tagged with "incremental"
Santa Monica's Telecommunications Master Plan
In 1998, Santa Monica created a Telecommunications Master Plan that has guided it for the past fifteen years in building an impressive fiber network connecting all community anchor institutions and many business districts. We have just released a case study detailing this effort, entitled: Santa Monica City Net: An Incremental Approach to Building a Fiber Optic Network.
Below, you will find the original Master Plan and Exhibits. Santa Monica got it right - this document can still be a model today for communities across the United States. This document is particularly important for local governments that do not have a municipal electric department because it offers an alternative model run out of the IT department.
How Ammon, Idaho, Builds Digital Roads - Community Broadband Bits Episode 86
Ammon, a town of 14,000 in southeast Idaho, has been incrementally building an open access, fiber optic network that has connected community anchor institutions and is starting to become available to local businesses. Ammon Technology Director Bruce Patterson joins us to explain how the community has moved forward with its model for improving Internet access.
They first sought some stimulus support for the network but were not selected. But in the process, they had set aside the match funding and found that it would be less expensive to link municipal buildings across town with their own fiber rather than leasing from an existing firm.
It is worth emphasizing that Ammon has no municipal electric utility, but the water utility has been a key participant in the network. In fact, much of Ammon's success has to be attributed to the willingness of multiple departments to work together, supportive and thoughtful city council members, and a Technology Director willing to think outside the limits of how things had traditionally been done.
We've been covering Ammon for a few years, those stories are available here.
Read the transcript of our discussion here.
We want your feedback and suggestions for the show - please e-mail us or leave a comment below. Also, feel free to suggest other guests, topics, or questions you want us to address.
This show is 25 minutes long and can be played below on this page or via iTunes or via the tool of your choice using this feed.
Listen to previous episodes here. You can can download this Mp3 file directly from here.
Find more episodes in our podcast index.
Thanks to Fit and the Conniptions for the music, licensed using Creative Commons.
OnLight Aurora Partners with the City for Better Connectivity in Illinois
Nine years ago, Aurora officials decided it was time to reduce telecommunications costs and upgrade to a faster, more reliable network. The local government built a fiber network to service municipal government, but developed long-term ideas for the network to benefit the entire community.
Nonprofit OnLight Aurora now uses the City's fiber optic network to provide high-speed connectivity to educational institutions, businesses, healthcare facilities, social service entities, and major non-profits. The organization leases fibers from the City's fiber optic network and provides Internet access at affordable rates.
Aurora is the second most populous city in Illinois. The municipal government spans 52 buildings over 46 square miles. Before the city's fiber network, connections were a patchwork of varying speeds and capabilities. Employees in a building with a slow connection would need to travel to City Hall to access a high-speed connections to use the city's bandwidth intensive applications. The network was old, unreliable, and expensive. The Director of Onlight Aurora recently spoke with Drew Clark from Broadband Breakfast :
"In 2005-2006, we came to the conclusion that we were paying $500,000 a year [to telecommunications providers] for leased line expenses,” said Peter Lynch, Director and President of Onlight Aurora.
The 60-mile network, constructed from 2008 - 2011, cost approximately $7 million to deploy. At the beginning of the process, payback was estimated at 10 years. While the short-term goal was to cut municipal connectivity costs, community leaders intended to expand its use in other ways. The City now saves approximately $485,000 each year from having eliminated leased lines. From a Cisco case study on Aurora [PDF]:
Ponca City Fiber: Serving Businesses, Schools, and Offering Free Wi-Fi
Its extensive free Wi-Fi has brought Ponca City into the limelight but the mesh network did not appear overnight. The community effort began with miles of fiber network that provide connectivity and enable the mesh network financially and technically.
Ponca City, home to 25,000, is located on Oklahoma's north central border; Tulsa, Oklahoma City, and Wichita are all more than 90 miles away. The petroleum industry flourished in Ponca City until the oil bust in the 1990s and the population began to decline as workers moved away. Community leaders sought ways to salvage the local economy through economic development. They began to focus on the technology, manufacturing, and service industries.
The municipal electric department, Ponca City Energy, installed the first five miles of fiber in 1997 and five more in 1999 to connect outlying municipal buildings to City Hall. Line crews from the utility and the City Technology Services Department handled all installation to keep expenses down. The City continued to add to the network incrementally, exapanding it to over 350 miles. The network also serves the City's SCADA system.
In 2003, Ponca City Energy connected the local schools, and the Ponca City Medical Center to the network. The network also began providing Internet to the University Learning Center of Northern Oklahoma, now named the University Center at Ponca City. The Center collaborates with thirteen higher education institutions to provide distance learning in 48 online degree programs.
Ponca City eventually began offering Internet access via the fiber to commercial customers. According to Craige Baird, Technology Services Director, most businesses in the community purchase Internet access from the City. Revenue from commercial Internet customers, approximately $36,000 per month, pays for the wireless mesh network.
Fact Sheet on Financing Municipal Networks
We are adding a new fact sheet to our growing collection with the new, Financing Municipal Networks Fact Sheet. Many have assumed that municipal networks are funded with taxpayer dollars, but this is not true in the overwhelming number of cases.
When a community decides it needs to establish its own publicly owned network infrastructure, one of the biggest challenges is financing the investment. Each community is unique but three main methods of financing are most popular. This fact sheet offers a quick look at these common approaches and provides real-world examples.
Download the Fact Sheet [pdf]
Seattle, Gigabit Squared, the Challenge of Private Sector Cable Competition
This the second in a series of posts exploring lessons learned from the Seattle Gigabit Squared project, which now appears unlikely to be built. The first post is available here and focuses on the benefits massive cable companies already have as well as the limits of conduit and fiber in spurring new competition.
This post focuses on business challenges an entity like Gigabit Squared would face in building the network it envisioned. I am not representing that this is what Gigabit Squared faced but these issues arise with any new provider in that circumstance. I aim to explain why the private sector has not and generally will not provide competition to companies Comcast and Time Warner Cable.
Gigabit Squared planned to deliver voice, television, and Internet access to subscribers. Voice can be a bit of hassle due to the many regulatory requirements and Internet access is comparatively simple. But television, that is a headache. I've been told by some munis that 90% of the problems and difficulties they experience is with television services.
Before you can deliver ESPN, the Family Channel, or Comedy Central, you have to come to agreement with big channel owners like Disney, Viacom, and others. Even massive companies like Comcast have to pay the channel owners more each year despite its over 10 million subscribers, so you can imagine how difficult it can be for a small firm to negotiate these contracts. Some channel owners may only negotiate with a provider after it has a few thousand subscribers - but getting a few thousand subscribers without good content is a challenge.
Many small firms (including most munis) join a buyer cooperative called the National Cable Television Cooperative (NCTC) that has many of the contracts available. But even with that substantial help, building a channel lineup is incredibly difficult and the new competitor will almost certainly be paying more for the same channels as a competitor like Comcast or Time Warner Cable.
Big City Community Networks: Lessons from Seattle and Gigabit Squared
A few weeks ago, a Geekwire interview with outgoing Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn announced that the Gigabit Squared project there was in jeopardy. Gigabit Squared has had difficulty raising all the necessary capital for its project, building Fiber-to-the-Home to several neighborhoods in part by using City owned fiber to reduce the cost of building its trunk lines.
There are a number of important lessons, none of them new, that we should take away from this disappointing news. This is the first of a series of posts on the subject.
But first, some facts. Gigabit Squared is continuing to work on projects in Chicago and Gainsville, Florida. There has been a shake-up at the company among founders and it is not clear what it will do next. Gigabit Squared was not the only vendor responding to Seattle's RFP, just the highest profile one.
Gigabit Squared hoped to raise some $20 million for its Seattle project (for which the website is still live). The original announcement suggested twelve neighborhoods with at least 50,000 households and businesses would be connected. The project is not officially dead, but few have high hopes for it given the change in mayor and many challenges thus far.
The first lesson to draw from this is what we say repeatedly: the broadband market is seriously broken and there is no panacea to fix it. The big cable firms, while beating up on DSL, refuse to compete with each other. They are protected by a moat made up of advantages over potential competitors that includes vast economies of scale allowing them to pay less for advertising, content, and equipment; large existing networks already amortized; vast capacity for predatory pricing by cross-subsidizing from non-competitive areas; and much more.
So if you are an investor with $20 million in cash lying around, why would you ever want to bet against Comcast - especially by investing in an unknown entity that cannot withstand a multi-year price war? You wouldn't and they generally don't.
Auburn Essential Services; A Workhorse in Northeast Indiana Saves Jobs, Serves Public
In 1985, Auburn Electric became one of the first communities in the midwest to deploy fiber. At the time, the purpose was to improve electric and voice systems substation communications within the municipal utility. That investment laid the foundation for a municipal network that now encourages economic development and saves public dollars while enhancing services.
Auburn expanded its fiber network beyond electric systems in 1998. The utility began using the network to serve city and county government operations. It is not well known, but Auburn offered gigabit service to its public sector customers way back in 1998.
The benefits from the deployment prompted community leaders to develop an Information Technology Master Plan in 1998 that would answer the question of what other ways the fiber could serve the community? As part of the Master Plan, Auburn leaders collected information from other communities that were capitalizing on their own local fiber. While Auburn made no immediate plans, they kept an open mind, waiting until the time was right.
In 2004, Cooper Tire and Rubber (now Cooper Standard) was about to be sold from its parent company. The $1.6 billion auto component manufacturer needed a data center but bandwidth was insufficient and inconsistent in Auburn. Cooper considered leaving because the incumbents, Mediacom and AT&T, could not or would not provide the broadband capacity the company needed. If Cooper left town, an estimated $7 million in wages and benefits from 75 high-paying tech jobs would also leave. At the time, Auburn was home to 12,500 people.
According to Schweitzer, the City tried to persuade the telephone company to find a solution with Cooper but the two could not reach an agreement. Rather than lose Cooper, the City of Auburn stepped in to fill the connectivity gap in 2005.
In a 2007 interview with Public Power magazine, Schweitzer noted advantages in Auburn that facilitated the project:
In Indiana, Auburn Built Fiber Network Incrementally - Community Broadband Bits Episode 77
When a major employer in Auburn, a town of 13,000 in northeast Indiana, told the local government that it would have to move jobs to a different location unless it had improved Internet access, the local government first encouraged it to work with the telephone company. But when that telephone company, headquartered far from Auburn, refused to meet local needs, the town formed Auburn Essential Utilities and extended city fiber to the business.
Chris Schweitzer, Director of Auburn Essential Services, joins us for episode 77 of the Community Broadband Bits podcast. We discuss how Auburn was prepared for that moment and how it expanded the network in future years to now offer services on a citywide basis.
Listen to the show to learn more about Auburn, including how they have structured the project financially. See all of our coverage of AES here.
Read the transcript from this show here.
We want your feedback and suggestions for the show - please e-mail us or leave a comment below. Also, feel free to suggest other guests, topics, or questions you want us to address.
This show is 20 minutes long and can be played below on this page or via iTunes or via the tool of your choice using this feed.
Listen to previous episodes here. You can can download this Mp3 file directly from here.
Find more episodes in our podcast index.
Thanks to Haggard Beat for the music, licensed using Creative Commons.
ECFiber: Significant Expansion in the Vermont Crowd-Funded Network
The East Central Vermont Community Fiber Network (ECFiber) continues to grow, tripling in size in just the past year. We reported last summer that the community owned network had raised the funding for an expansion. Fundraising and reach surpassed the original expansion plan and the network now boasts 180 miles.
The Valley News recently reported that:
Next year, ECFiber plans to focus on connecting customers in unserved parts of Royalton, Strafford, Norwich, Tunbridge and Sharon.
ECFiber is seeking additional investment during this quarter to finance the work next year, and has set a goal of having more than 1,000 customers connected by the end of 2014.
ECFiber seeks funding by selling tax-exempt promissory notes to local investors. There are 23 member towns in the ECFiber consortium, including Montpelier. For detailed maps of service area and planned expansions, check out the ECFiber's Where Are We Working page.
The article goes on to note that Tim Nulty is planning to retire from his position as CEO of ValleyNet, the nonprofit behind ECFiber. Nulty will take on the role of board Chairman. Leslie Nulty will also shift from project coordinator and will continue as a ValleyNet board member.
Leslie visited with Chris in the Broadband Bits podcast episode #9. She shared ECFiber's history and the two discussed the community owned network model that is ECFiber.