In Cuyahoga County, OneCommunity is leading the effort of upgrade the County's networking ability. With a special focus on improving pubic safety, the project is estimated to save the county $10 million over the next 5 years. From the OneCommunity blog:

The project provides high-bandwidth connectivity and secure video conferencing to more than 60 county offices and public safety locations; will provide wireless high speed Internet to the Justice Center, Courthouse, and Administration Building; and will equip County employees with mobile wireless access.

In addition, the Cuyahoga Regional Information Services (CRIS) emergency system is now available in public safety vehicles, enabling law enforcement officers to pull up criminal records while out in the community.  Cuyahoga Community College benefits from this public safety broadband connection as emergency personnel can use CRIS to help coordinate response efforts.

In Mayfield Village, a new network is being installed by OneCommunity in a city-owned office and industrial area. Mayfield Village anticipates this new resource and its high capacity will bring new businesses to its facility on Beta Drive.

Mayfield Village Planning Development describes the service:

The Mayfield Village fiber optic network is a new facet of our Beta Drive commercial district. The network is intended by the Village to save our businesses substantial amounts of money on their internet and other IT costs. Mayfield Village not only partnered with regional dark fiber organization OneCommunity to install the fiber, but the Village and OneCommunity have teamed up to offer very competitive internet service prices to companies wishing to connect to the network.

We have already published a fact sheet on the critical role community broadband plays in job development. Now, ILSR presents a collection of how community owned broadband networks save money for local government, schools, and libraries while providing cutting edge services. The Public Savings Fact Sheet is now available.

Though schools, libraries, and other community anchors need access to faster, more reliable networks, the big cable and telephone companies have priced those services so high that they are breaking the budget. But when communities create their own connections, affordable high capacity connections are only one of the benefits. A community owned network offers the promise of self-determination -- of upgrades on the community's time table and increased reliability for emergency responders.

The Public Savings Fact Sheet is a great piece to share to mobilize other members of your community. Share it with decision makers and use it to start meaningful conversations. Distribute it widely and often.

We are always developing new resources. If you have an idea for a new fact sheet, we want to hear it.

Last summer, Medina County Schools announced a savings of almost $90,000 a year by switching from Time Warner Cable to the new Medina County Fiber Network. Scheduled for completion in late November, the network consists of a 151-mile loop and will provide bandwidth to government facilities and businesses. The project is mostly funded by the Medina County Port Authority, which will own the loop, and receives support from a stimulus broadband grant administered by the NE Ohio nonprofit, OneCommunity.

Loren Genson reported on local businesses' enthusiasm as the network makes its way to Brunswick, where fiber will pass through the Brunswick Industrial Park. Genson attended a meeting to update the community. From the article:

LeHotan, who owns All Construction Services on Industrial Parkway North, said improved fiber-optic broadband speeds will keep business in the industrial park and recruit new businesses to the area.

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Brunswick Economic Development Director Tim Smith said he promotes the fiber-optic network when talking to businesses interested moving their operations to Brunswick.

“I see leads that come in, and one of their requirements is high-speed broadband,” Smith said. “Our industrial park is right on the throughway. … Now we have this to offer as well.”

Clearly, current and potential Medina County employers recognize the value of the network. Dave LeHotan, owner of a local construction company, spoke at the gathering:

“It’s like a garden hose: You can only get so much water out of it, so much use at a time,” he said. “But this is like a fire hose, much more powerful.”

LeHotan said getting the upgraded infrastructure will help attract more businesses not only to Brunswick but all along the two loops that connect the entire county.

“This is really necessary even for small companies,” LeHotan said. “You can form a small company and all of a sudden the next thing you know you’re shipping 1 million products and only 15 percent of them are nearby.”

Once again, consumers must fight to preserve their landline telephone service. This time, the Ohio General Assembly is pondering legislation that can end traditional service for up to 1 million Ohio residents.

Our readers know about the efforts of ALEC and AT&T to drastically reduce their obligation to provide landlines across the country. Up to now, telephone companies were required to serve everyone, but those requirements are under attack, state by state. Bills have emerged in Mississippi, Kentucky, New Jersey and California.

The very real fear is that Ohio's Senate Bill 271 (SB271) will increase telephone prices, reduce service quality, and cause many to lose access to reliable 911 service. Many of those who still depend on landlines, include senior citizens. From an article on the Public New Service:

AARP Ohio State Director Bill Sundermeyer says, besides preserving social contact, land-line phones are needed to protect seniors' health and safety. For instance, some seniors use the phone line to transmit routine health information from equipment in their home to their doctor's office, he says.

"They can make an evaluation of a person's heart and how's it working, of their lungs, etc. That information would be very difficult to transmit over a cell phone."

(on a personal note, I can attest to this….my father routinely uses his landline telephone to send data to the clinic about his pacemaker to make sure it is functioning correctly)

The Office of the Ohio Consumers' Counsel (OCC) also expresses concern with the bill because it would allow telephone companies to stop providing local service in places labeled as "fully competitive." In the SB271 Fact Sheet (read the PDF, which offers a map of the qualifying areas), the OCC explains the problem with this definition:

The people of Warren County, Ohio, endured some rough weather in June as a 70 mph derecho whipped through this southwest county. A series of errors from CenturyLink kept 911 service inoperable for more than 15 hours. According to Stop the Cap!:

During the outage, callers initially heard nothing after dialing 911. Sometime later, someone at CenturyLink reprogrammed the equipment to forward calls from the Warren County 911 system in southwest Ohio to distant Geauga County’s 911 center in northeast Ohio near Cleveland, surprising operators.

Geauga County is located in the extreme northeast corner of Ohio, about as far away from Warren County as one can get without leaving the state. CenturyLink attributes the incident to a combination of inexperienced technicians, human error, and understaffing.

While accidents happen, the crux of this problem is in how CenturyLink responded to it.

Warren community leaders requested that CenturyLink meet with them to explain the fiasco, but CenturyLink was a no-show. Commissioner Dave Young, understandably upset, wants the county to turn over 911 services to another service provider.

“I want to switch sooner rather than later,” Young said. “The way this went down and the response we got from CenturyLink and now three weeks later we still don’t know the reason? We call our liaison and her solution to the 911 system being down is keep calling the 800 number. There’s something wrong there."

These massive carriers want to pretend they are the only ones capable of providing telecommunications services, but the reality is that many others do it better, including local governments and smaller, local private companies. The large carriers are a victim of their scale - no one knows what is going on.

Quite some time ago, we let you know about the plans and funding for the Medina County Fiber Network (MFCN). The network, owned by the Medina County Port Authority (MCPA) began construction in March, 2011, and is nearing completion. Jennifer Pignolet, reported in the Medina GazetteOnline, that the network just signed on their first customer, Highland Schools.

Apparently, the schools contract with its current provider, Time Warner Cable, is about to expire. While connecting Highland Schools now may be ahead of schedule, the county fiber committee can accommodate their needs. As an added bonus, the new relationship is more economical for the schools. From the article:

“Their situation needing to be addressed immediately certainly moved them to the front of the line,” [said Jim Gerspacher, chairman of the county’s fiber committee].

While the $14 million network is still months away from full completion, Gerspacher said there is enough infrastructure in place to get Highland online.

The school will have full Internet and phone service and will have all its buildings connected to one network.

Highland Technology Director Roger Saffle said the district will save close to $90,000 a year by switching from Time Warner to the Medina County network.

“It will maintain the access we already have with a cheaper cost,” Saffle said.

Highland Schools is moving from a $100,000 per year Time Warner Cable contract (or about $8,333 per month). The schools now will pay $1,500 each month to the MCPA and, according to Saffle, will be able to apply for federal grant funding to recover 40% of that monthly fee.

In 2008, OneCommunity and the MCPA began a partnership to plan and build the network. OneCommunity received a $44 million broadband stimulus grant in 2010 to extend fiber to 22 Ohio counties. MCPA received $1.6 million of that stimulus for their County network. The remainder of the $13.8 million project was covered by 20-year revenue development bonds issued by the MCPA.

This is a good news/bad news story. The good news is, cable companies are starting to challenge telco dominance in health care communications. According to Bloomberg, they are “ramping up sales staffs to sell broadband access and related services to regional hospitals and doctors’ offices, trying to squeeze more money out of a network they used to use mainly for carrying TV signals.”

The bad news, of course, is that as we transition to digitized medical records, our medical system will be increasingly dependent on the cable/phone duopoly. All companies cited in the article anticipate substantial revenue growth from the health care sector in coming years. Unfortunately, increased revenues to the telecommunications providers means any efficiencies are unlikely to translate into lower health care costs.

Compare this to OneCommunity’s HealthNet, which is driving down costs for health facilities across Northern Ohio by providing affordable access to their gigabit network.

OneCommunity is a non-profit entity that owns and operates its own fiber infrastructure and also promotes interconnection among public and private networks in the region. Its own network is carrier neutral, meaning any service provider can lease access. It connects more than 1,500 entities in 22 counties, including some 65 hospitals. As we've written here, OneCommunity has created enormous cost savings by allowing health care entities to communicate directly with one another, avoiding Internet transport fees.

The Port Authority of Medina County, Ohio, has successfully bonded $14.4 million to take advantage of a broadband stimulus award to build a fiber-optic network connecting community anchor institutions and businesses with better broadband.

Bethany Dentler, executive director of the Medina County Economic Development Corporation, said Dec. 17 that a bond consultant had just completed sale of the bonds at an average interest rate of 5.96 percent. Cash from the bond sale was expected to be in the hands of the Medina County Port Authority by the end of the year and a fiber lighting ceremony to kickoff the construction phase of the project is planned for March or April. Dentler said the port authority, which will own the network, plans to pay off the bonds over the next 20 years with fees charged to customers of the fiber network.

The nonprofit organization OneCommunity will build and presumably operate the network, which will be owned by the County. Being located in close enough proximity to work with OneCommunity appears to be a terrific advantage for communities who make investments in broadband infrastructure. The $1.4 million in stimulus funds aiding this project were a part of the larger award given to OneCommunity as part of their efforts to better wire 20 counties in Ohio.

The 2011 Smart21 ... highlights communities from 12 nations and includes 7 that appeared on last year’s list. Two communities, Issy-les-Moulineaux and Northeast Ohio, returned to the list after a 1-2 year absence. There were two Chinese, one Indian and one Australian communities on the list, as well as six from the USA, four from Canada and one each from the UK, France, Hungary and Brazil.