At the Digital City Expo in Phoenix, I am enjoying some great presentations about municipal telecom trends.

Galen Updike, of the Arizona Government Information Technology Agency, talked about their efforts to expand broadband access in rural areas of Arizona. Apparently Right of Way costs are quite high in AZ and this has been determined to be a real barrier to deployment. Galen did talk about the need to increase what we recognize as broadband from 200 kbps; unfortunately, his goal was a paltry 1 Mbps. Another issue for AZ is the lack of off-ramps from fiber networks to small towns. The state’s goal is to subsidize private sector providers to reduce their costs of deployments to increase providers’ ROI.

Tim Scott of Packetfront promoted open access FTTH networks. Open access is critical because no one service provider can do it all in developing and delivering network based systems. The key message is that FTTH is the next generation utility with four key factors: 1) Technology – fiber is it! 2) Services – no one can do it all in entertainment, services, heatlh care, etc. 3) Economy – there is a strong business case for FTTH, the city as an anchor tenant and 4) Ideology – that the network infrastructure should be share to encourage innovation and provide local services. Tim emphasized that community vision and leadership is required.

More later…