I had the chance last week to make a presentation to the Humphrey Institute’s Telecommunications and Information Society Policy Forum (TISP) on the subject of Open Networks. Thanks to the remarkable Milda Hedblom, the forum’s creator and long time facilitator, TISP has long provided the Twin Cities’ telecommunications policy community a safe and thoughtful forum for discussing stubborn challenges and new ideas.

Steve Kelley, former State Senator and long time proponent of technology, especially telecommunications technology in the Minnesota was the moderator. Also in attendance was Gary Fields (pictured above) who is part of the Blandin Broadband Team.

With the second big snowstorm of the season about to fly, I had expected to see a lot of empty chairs in the room, but it turned out that plenty of folks were willing to risk facing a messy drive home to hear me out. Though I’ve been working hard to learn all I could about Open Networks, I was still plenty nervous to be speaking publicly for the first time about this new area of focus for the Blandin Foundation’s Broadband Initiative, especially at my alma mater, and with Dean Brian Atwood in the room.

With a nod of appreciation to my Humphrey training, I had titled my presentation “Open Networks: Better Broadband for the Common Good.” Lacking a deep knowledge of the many technical issues at play, I thought the most value I could add was to talk from the Foundation’s perspective about why Open Networks can be “better broadband,” how their unique attributes help promote the “common good,” and why they therefore appear to be a good option for promoting the Broadband Initiative’s vision of helping Minnesota become a world class leader in the universal deployment and use of ultra high-speed next generation broadband. I told the audience that, from a donor’s perspective, it was particularly persuasive to read a recent World Bank report’s recommendation that “encouraging and financing pilots and scalability projects may reap substantial economic and social benefit.”

While still rare in the United States, Open Networks are emerging in Europe, Asia and Africa as an innovative public-private partnership approach to ensuring that the benefit and value of broadband internet access are passed on to end users to a far greater extent than under more traditional (closed incumbent operated) systems.

Open Networks’ most distinguishing feature is that the infrastructure is owned and controlled independently of any service or content which runs over it (think of FedEx and the US Postal Service sharing the public roads with delivery trucks and other private motorists). This enables anyone connected to the network to take or provide content or service from or to anyone else on the network, thus stimulating innovation and entrepreneurship and enhancing the competitiveness of local business.

After talking some about other benefits of Open Networks, I made a point of noting some of the challenges and concerns they raise.

For all of their potential social and economic benefits, Open Networks clearly is a very disruptive concept. Because some of their core and access technologies (Internet Protocols) challenge traditional business models that have underpinned telecommunication service delivery to date, most incumbent providers have opposed the emergence of local open access network initiatives. Although incumbent providers in the room didn’t speak up on this occasion, future success in promoting the Open Network concept clearly will depend in some measure on the degree to which they can be engaged in dialog around the question: “What would make Open Networks an attractive option for you?”

Sometimes talk DOES lead to action. The day after my presentation I got a call from Mike Reardon from St. Paul’s Office of Telecommunications to follow up. At the forum, Mike had noted that St. Paul’s Broadband Advisory Board had come back to the city council with a recommendation that the city consider not only at wireless options for internet connectivity, but open access fiber optic networks as well.

As a result of his call, Mike and I are working on scheduling a series of meetings for interested St. Paul city council members, members of the St. Paul Broadband Advisory Board, and interested parties from the city of Eagan, with Matt Wenger, Vice President of the Americas for PacketFront. PacketFront describes itself as a “global telecom solutions company specializing in the design, deployment, and operations of open-access community networks.” Blandin Foundation is inviting Matt to Minnesota later this month to speak about Open Networks to our Board of Trustees, participants in the proposed Iron Range Community Fiber Network project (an open network). We’ll see if more talking leads to more action…