I went to the TISP meeting last night on High Speed Minnesota: Gigabit Broadband Goals. Rick King (of Thomson), Tom Garrison (of City of Eagan), and Representative Masin presented on how and why the Broadband Bill (HF2107) is a good idea.

Rick and Tom were kind enough to let me post the presentation online. It was interesting; there were  similarities between the presentation and the presentation given to the Telecommunications Regulation Committee meeting a couple of weeks ago. So I didn’t bother to take very detailed notes on the prepared presentation and I focused on the questions instead.

I did the best I could with getting everyone’s name, but if anyone catches an error or wants to add something – please do!

Question from Jefferson (missed last name) from Lakedale Communications: Why should we mandate something (1Gbit speed) that should be dictated by market demand?

The answer hinges on whether or not you think that current demand is being met. One the one hand, Eagan surveyed their population and 24 percent were unhappy with current broadband speeds. On the other, Windom has Fiber to the Home but the take rate in the community is well under 100 percent.

Another item to consider is the fact that we need to build for the future and compete with International communities. We need to set up goals for the future.

Lastly the Gbit speed is a goal not a mandate.

Question/Comment from Jodi Miller from Northern Dakota County. The statewide policy is a step forward but a feeral policy would be good too. There are lots of gaps in service just outside of St Paul, especially in commercial areas. Private/public partnerships is a good feature.

Question from Chris Gackle. Originally cable was built out in residential areas, not business areas. Surveys that measure satisfaction rates can be misleading because so much depends on who self selects into the sample group.

Churn is a big issue with the major providers and one way that they measure satisfaction and they (AT&T and Verizon) are combating churn with added services and applications and fiber deployment is one opportunity.

Question from Mark Ashe. Telecoms have taken a lot of government money over the years to upgrade their infrastructure but there has been little to no accountability. Where is the accountability?

Accountability is not in the bill – but is definitely something that the committee could consider.

Supply and demand of broadband varies in/by communities but a statewide goal would help standard supply.

Comcast is working on a 100 megabit cable modem – but that traffic is asynchronous.

Question by Cora Wilson. Current providers give people what they ask for but people don’t necessarily know what they need. And we (adults) cannot venture to guess what kids will need tomorrow. The highway was built before the prevalence of cars – but look at the difference it made.

Question by Craig Wilson. How do you get people to be open to open networks? Cora mentioned roads but roads were publicly owned. Right now networks are owned by numerous fiefdoms.

Current and future providers will have to assess whether their strength is in infrastructure or application/content management. They need to figure out where is your value add?

Follow-up question by Craig. One issue is that the providers want to control everything (infrastructure through application) and lock in user with the triple play (video, audio, digital).

Providing the triple play is fine but you can’t think that you are going to be able to lock in users.

Also there is a great advantage to sticking with open standards; Apple had a better computer but IBM went with open standards and PCs overwhelmingly won the market.

Can legacy work with new open networks? Why can’t proprietary providers work with cities such as Eagan?

Question from Gary Fields. Has Pawlenty taken a view on the bill?

Nope.

Question from Mike O’Connor. Has GigaGroup thought about suggestions to change current regulatory issues?

Not yet. They would be interested in getting involved once they know more. One thing that Eagan has done was to look at Best Practices and how regulation can support the stride towards Best Practices.

Question from Burnsville/Egan telecommunications. Currently broadband/ISP/Cable ads highlight lower cost? How can we get them to feature higher broadband speeds as a feature worthy of focus?

This may become a bigger issue when there is a greater differential between the various providers. Right now the differences in broadband speeds are not that significant.

Question from David Asp. How can we get better public/private partnerships?

Private providers should look at this as an opportunity. Private providers look towards 1-5 years for a return on investment but the government is comfortable with a much longer rate of return.

Eagan has decided that a government-owned network with the path of last resort for them.

Comment from Ruthe Batalulis. Eagan needs to bring in broadband for their small businesses. The very big guys can afford what they need; the smaller guys can’t. And Eagan is home to 1800 home-based businesses, who recognize daily the impact of inadequate broadband.

Question: MMUA had a bill that would allow public/private partnerships but it didn’t go far as the telcos were against it.

We need to make adjustments to how we do things to compete.

Question from Chris Hertel. If Eagan prefers a commercial provider, how do you not lose all control to that commercial provider? Would an open network work?

Perhaps collaboration would work such as we have with the airport. Many providers benefit when there are improvements to the airport and the control is shared.

Question/Comment from Gary Fields. We need to look at international communities for ideas for partnerships. There seem to be 3 options:

1. Government mandates partnership
2. Greater cooperation
3. New businesses break the log jam to offer services that break the incumbent stronghold.

Question from John Schultz. I want to build an open infrastructure by provide companies but no one wants to pay for it.

The advantage of an Open Network is that one entity can control the Open Network but lots of people can provide services over it.

Money isn’t the only issue; you’ll also need to get authority from local governments to do an Open Network.

This question is not addressed in the bill – but it is a question to consider in the future.

Ann’s Notes:

The meeting was a little like old home week. It was fun to see people I hadn’t seen in a while – some in years! Lots of these people are pretty darned smart; that’s always a good start. What was also nice was that while the room was heavy with vendors it wasn’t all vendors. There were industries (such as the presenters), someone from AARP, folks from the Department of Commerce. These guys weren’t in the room 10 years ago. Also there were guys who were involved with the very earlier efforts to get Minnesota connected to the Internet – so I think we can learn something from what they did right and what they might do differently this time around.

I liked so much of what Rick & Tom said about their process in Eagan. They assessed their current situation (where was the connectivity, who was connected, and were they happy); they got a lot of smart people in a room (CTOs of Thomson, NWA, BCBS, others); they scanned the environment (best practices from around the world); they set some common goals. I used to teach a class on technology planning for nonprofits (for librarians not for techies) and this parallels the process we used to promote. In fact the NPower had a tech planning tool (TechAtlas) and if I remember correctly the steps were: envision, assess, prioritize, act, evaluate and revise. It sounds like what they’ve been doing in
Eagan.

And it seems to me as if this is a process that the new broadband bill is promoting – so I’m all for it. The devil is in the details, but as I think was stated clearly last night – a step in the right direction would be envisioning a shared goal. And we need to start moving in some direction soon or the rest of the world is going to pass us by; in fact that’s already happening.