Last week I attended the Community Fiber Networks conference near Chicago hosted by Broadband Communities. There was a great contingency from Minnesota at the conference and it was fun to hear about successes in Minnesota and other communities.

The best thing I heard while I was there? Blair Levin said that the US Broadband goal is to be world leaders. I haven’t heard anyone talking about being leaders in a while. So energizing. He also suggested that we quit aiming at speeds – because those are snapshots in time that are generally stale once you’ve said them out loud.

I decided not to share linear notes on the conference but maybe to simply pull out some tips and trends that caught my attention. I’ve tried to organize my thoughts a little!

Business Case is Key

• Broadband Communities Magazine hosts a FTTP Financial Analysis tools – you can access them for free if you subscribe to the magazine, which is also free. They look good to me although I am not qualified to really speak to the quality of such tools.
• Not every community needs to build a fiber network – but to survive they need to do something to encourage better broadband. Creating fiber/broadband-friendly policies is a first step.
• The City Investment in Kansas City (Google Network) $3M; the ROI in Kansas City was $265M!
• Sometimes it’s necessary to look at reduced and eliminated costs from a community budget when factoring ROI and creating a business case to build/encourage a fiber network.
• Balancing Sustainability with Community Benefit can be tricky. The shorter ROI is reached when you serve Anchors, Enterprises, Larger Business and Wholesale. The longer ROI comes with reaching unserved, undeserved, residential and small business.
• When looking at building better broadband, Chicago knew money would be tight so they looked at their assets (rights of way, towers…) and used them to negotiate.
• The National Public Safety Network will be funded with $7B from the spectrum auction. There must be a way to tie into it – perhaps through the hook of rural health.
• There is real potential in the library white spaces pilot project. The idea is to use the old TV White Spaces to connect remote libraries. Now those white spaces are not accessible in the same way WiFi is – so you can’t get connected with your smartphone – but use the white spaces almost like a WAN to reach the remote libraries and set up WiFi at the libraries. It’s a nice mesh network to serve a wider audience. Also while the E-Rate has traditionally been library-school only networks, there’s a push to open them up to wider uses.
• The onus is going to fall to the Cities to get the work done. (I might broaden that in rural areas to be County. Wthout County – or Regional – support the spaces between the Cities remains off grid!)

Innovation is ROI

• Building a Gig community is 10 percent technology and 90 percent sociology.
• A coworking center is a necessity for a Gig community to succeed. (Really interesting snippets of what a coworking site can be like.)
• The killer app for building broadband? Money! KC’s ROI (3 to 265) helps prove the business case but you still need money to get started.
• Local governments (well – all governments) need to go digital to push citizens to use technology and recognize cost savings. (One big note here: on the drive home Bernadine Joselyn read loud a story about putting unemployment application online only. I am an advocate for moving transactions like that online – but I think starting with a demographic that is least likely to have the access, device or skills to complete the transition is setting the process up to fail. Or setting up the users to fail.
• The network needs to be accessible (affordable) to emerging businesses not just established businesses!
• Innovation is easy. Execution is hard. And the execution will happen at State not Federal level.

I also have Bernadine’s presentation from the conference: