I’ve been mentioned here by a couple of the broadband bloggers so it’s time for me to come out of the e-closet and blog something myself.
Bernadine Joselyn blogged her presentation on Open Access Networks earlier this month and mentioned at the end of that post that she was “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.”
Today, that meeting happened and I attended. (Click photos to enlarge.)
Left photo: Matt was introduced by Bill Coleman, Community Technology Advisors, who’s been Blandin’s lead on the Get Broadband project… and as of this month, another contributor to this blog.
I don’t think it would be helpful for me to provide a summary of Matt’s presentation. He’s a very informative and entertaining speaker so give the audio a listen.
Click play to listen (1 hour, 41 minutes) or download the MP3.
Here are just a few of the many items that I found particularly interesting from Matt’s presentation:
- Matt spent a good chunk of his presentation talking about the myriad of new applications that have been created in the fiber-connected MalarNetCity in Sweden.
- Unlike most current broadband services, the ultra highspeed broadband capabilities of fiber allows for fast uploading which is increasingly important in the new world of everyone, citizens included, as content producers, not just content consumers. (In the book, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams, the authors refer to people in this changed world as ‘prosumers.’ See my recent post on the book here.)
- Minnesota’s statute on cooperatives is particularly advantageous for establishing a governance structure that allows all sectors/institutions in a community to participate in creating an open access network – even individuals investors (known as LRDs: Local Rich Dudes). The usual response is for one sector to pay for/bond for a fiber network. Matt thinks it’s important for all sectors to have skin in the game and the coop model is particularly suited for this.
- The incumbent phone companies who have a responsibility to be the “Provider of Last Resort” in a local area (usually rural) are trying to sell off their rural services because they’re expensive and don’t provide a growth opportunity. Matt thinks that in some areas, they might be interested in contributing their assets to the community fiber coop if the community had one in place.
- Telecom guru Milda Hedblom was in the audience and said that the Minnesota city of Monticello is moving towards a municipal fiber network. (See the Monticello Fiber Project site for more.) I chatted with her afterwords and she has concerns about the economies of scale for an open access network in smaller population areas.
Bernadine mentioned this report in her blog post but I think it’s worth repeating: the World Bank’s Study on Local Open Access Networks for Communities and Municipalities.
Great summary, Griff. I had the opportunity to hang out with Matt Wenger plus listen to a couple presentations. A very interesting couple of days.
I was struck by two things. First was the need for communities to maintain forward momentum on their community technology projects. According to Matt, conducting a study to review the previous study is not good for momentum and I agree. Doing things creates and maintains momentum.
Secondly, is that creating and operating a community network is not one decision; it will be an ongoing series of decisions about technology, business strategies, partnerships, financing, pricing and management. Governance of the network is the consideration as the network is forming. If you work hard and smart at that, your chances for success increase greatly.
Communities that invest in open services networks are creating digital road systems. For nearly a century, communities have built and maintained roads for the benefit of the community–for the common good. In the same way, we will see more and more communities building digital roadways, to create new economic development opportunities.
Just like traditional roads, government will manage the roads but will not own the businesses that use those roads to deliver goods and services. Government’s role will be limited to providing a well-maintained, high performance road system that is used by a wide variety of service providers. Each service provider will pay to use the road system to deliver their goods and services, and will do so happily because they will be able to reach more customers at much less cost.
Cities like Palo Alto, California and Danville, Virginia have already selected this model.
I think part of the problem with getting people to see the benefits of an open access network is that the metaphor of highways and airports doesn’t quite work when thinking about the current model.
The internet can be thought of as a public highway that’s been developed and maintained by the gov’t and regulatory bodies. Content/applications/development have flourished on it.
And since we’ve had a multiplicity of ways to GET TO the internet via the private sector ISPs, it doesn’t seem to be a problem to most folks. Companies are competing to be the onramps (ISPs). Matt’s metaphor of UPS employees developing and delivering all content doesn’t make sense to me.
It’s only now, when faced with the expense of deploying fiber to the premises, that the previous way of providing on-ramps (public or private) to the public internet poses a problem.
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