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February 2006 Archive

WiMax - Slow Train Coming

In the United States, Orr says the technology is likely to take off in newly built developments and areas in which installing cable and DSL has proven difficult. The most talked-about use for WiMax, however, is in municipal networks, providing coverage across a metropolitan area.
Wired News: A Word to the Wise on WiMax

The "most talked-about use for WiMax" is metropolitan broadband? Ah Ha, there you have it in print. Indeed, the efficiencies of WiMax technology for moving large amounts of data at high speeds will inevitably provide a kick in the pants for metropolitan broadband.

I believe we will look back on these early years as the days of experimentation. We are still sorting through the business models and yet, there is a sense of inevitability that our cities will one day soon be covered in wireless clouds that will send data flying in every direction through the magic of radio. Soon, soon.


Posted on February 25, 2006 at 08:16 PM | Comments (0)

Oodles of Web 2.0 Links

I'm doing my best to stay on topic on this web log -- all about MetroNets -- really I am, but I just couldn't resist sharing this info with you all. SciFi writer Bruce Sterling has a blog on Wired Magazine, Beyond the Beyond, and on Feb 17, he wrote this short article titled "Web 2.0: Does it Exist, and Why on Earth Should You Care." I owe these great links to Bruce. What cool pages - bookmark these, they are great resources!

If you're not familiar with the term Web 2.0, don't worry - its still very new. This term is being used by those forward thinkers out there who are speculating on what the Web has become/will become. The idea is that websites are becoming more interactive and websites that include features like blogs, wikis and podcasts - tools for interactivity - are providing more utility than older websites, and those websites define what people mean when they use that term.

The on-line world is changing. It is really exciting! Web 2.0 is really a term you should become familiar with.

As the saying goes, sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, so forget about Googling the term or looking on Wikipedia - well, here that is if you really want to read about it first. Or, you could read Best (Or Most Interesting) Web 2.0 Definitions and Explanations. Reminds me of how Microsoft tried to describe Dot Net a few years ago - I still don't get that.

But if you want to skip reading about Web 2.0 and just go out and experience it, bookmark this page and check out the 162 links on it - what the site claims is the Complete List of Web 2.0 Products and Services.

If that's not enough, check out also The Best Web 2.0 Software of 2005.

After you've digested all this, please come back and tell me what you think Web 2.0 means to you - I already get this phenomenon better than I ever understood Dot Net. Let's just hope we don't live to see a Dot Net 2.0....

Posted on February 22, 2006 at 09:22 PM | Comments (0)

Harnessing the Latent Energy in a Community

seekers of the larger view

Seven Steps to Trilogy of Action
* discover unity
* draw together pieces of science and technology to create a system
* find the economic feasibility for a new technology by virtue of a wide grasp of the worlds of man and matter
* reach harmony through intuition, by meditating on the base of a wide and deep knowledge of the field so as to arrive at a new result
* build a model, a simplified representation of the problem at issue, subject to experimental and calculational analysis
* serve as a science-technologist generalist who, not once or twice his life, but many times in a year, and generally in the service of others, extracts the single, simple missing point out of a complicated situation
* make decisions or help others make decisions, by imaginative interaction with alternative scenarios calculated as consequent on those decisions

-- John Archibald Wheeler

I drew this quotation from a presentation entitled "Top Problems of the Internet
and How to Help Solve Them," by KC Claffy. I was browsing Martin Geddes' blog, Telepocalypse when I found this gem. I'm going to add Martin's blog to my list - great stuff on rethinking the whole communications paradigm. Who says we have to keep doing things like we always have, especialy with all the new tools we have? We have a crisis of imagination in our new industry.

So who is this Wheeler guy, and what does this quotation have to do with MetroNets?

According to Wikipedia, John Archibald Wheeler was a nuclear fission pioneer and a late collaborator of Einstein's. Very smart guy, and a lover of thinking and problem-solving. He divided his academic time between Princeton and UT Austin (how's that for serendipity!). History will show us if his pioneering work in physics compensates for his work with developing nuclear weapons. I believe he came to realize that progress with technology can be a double-edged sword (now there's an understatement). But leaving that aside for now, I'm grateful for this quotation.

When I read that quotation, I was struck with how well those thoughts aligned with the way I think about accelerating broadband penetration by way of metropolitan broadband networks. I'm searching for ways around the Municpal Broadband Policy Debate that divides us, keeps us apart, distracts us and slows us down.

After putting a fair amount of effort that way last year, I've chosen to mostly ignore that political route - luckily, many good people are holding down that fort already. Instead, I hope to do more good and be more effective by focusing my energies on two principal problems with the current approach to "Municipal Wireless."

1) We're not working together well to accomplish the changes we seek. We have tremendous potential to bring our efforts together in a more rational approach, both in individual metropolitan areas, and in how we grow this industry - it's time to start looking at how we can cooperate and collaborate.

2) Our underlying assumption about metropolitan broadband is not supported by our experience to date, but we keep doing the same thing. To wit, is the best way to move forward and create a ubiquitous broadband infrastructure really to have municipalites lead the process with RFPs?

Instead of making the RFP process work better, what if we could look at the process differently? What if we could find a way to put Private Sector leaders in the lead in this new space, to entice them in by lowering their risk, but still work with public sector partners in unity, playing to their strengths? My comments on Glenn Fleishman's blog yesterday highlight the merits of Glenn's analysis and the good approach of Chicago municipal leaders, suggesting that there's a new way to do this that may well be more effective than what we've been doing:

Glenn, you hit the nail on the head with this insight about the difference in a name. I think there is a significant difference in a "city" (an urban area), a "municipality" (an urban area under a single government - or, the government itself), and a "metropolitan area" (a larger contiguous urban area). That's why I call them MetroNets - no government, no city. But there's more to the lack of objections by the Heartland Institute and the CTIA.

When the municipal government forswears any capital or operating expense, they're removing much of the objection from arguments made by the Titches of the world. You have to wonder what would be left to object to - Chicago's CIO is prudently seeking to bring more value into his city by taking this initiative, thereby creating opportunity for the private sector at next to no risk for the taxpayers. Ironically, by taking "the pledge" to spend no money on the network, city planners can actually make it more attractive to a private sector partner to jump in. Reminds me of how TXU split the bill with Current Communications, leaving the network to Current, but granting them a long-term service contract to lower their risk. I hope we see more of this model. How about a "NextGen MetroNet?" Works for me.

My plans for Austin and Central Texas are to test that new paradigm, moving forward with a private sector initiative and inviting the municipality as well as the community to come along as partners to develop something new. I also plan to open up the concept of a metropolitan broadband network beyond providing Internet access and solving the business problems of municpalities, which, while having merit in their own right, only begin to scratch the surface of where this new technology will take us. I want to explore how these networks can transform our lives and the way we look at cities.

I love Austin and think its the right place to test this model. Austin is a creative city, home of start ups, digital media geniuses, the University of Texas, and an attitude that somehow we're different. Keep Austin Wierd is the slogan on local T-shirts. I'm convinced that a metropolitan broadband network offered up as a tool for community collaboration will take us in new directions that we would find hard to imagine in today's world. Consider what we will do here in Austin as a model to test a new approach to metropolitan broadband networks and how communities harness their latent energy and creativity.

Posted on February 18, 2006 at 01:06 PM | Comments (0)

What a Turnout, What a Start!

The Regional Wireless Roundtable breakfast event for Austin and Central Texas went off without a hitch this morning, marking what I hope will be the beginning of some ongoing regional collaboration on metropolitan broadband infrastructure in Central Texas. Clearly, things are starting to move here in Texas when it comes to metropolitan broadband. On Monday of this week, I wrote the attached letter on the status of community broadband in Texas, to Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, on behalf of the Community Broadband Coalition - click here to download the letter to get a snapshot of broadband in Texas. I told folks at the breakfast that I would post this, so here it is.

So, the big day arrived and I was intensely curious about turnout - what kind of showing would we have? Out of 39 registrants, how many would actually come? Well, we had 30 registrants show up, with one walk on. That's somewhere between 75% and 80%, by my math. I believe the number would have been somewhat higher if we had not had the event on the same day as the Austin City Council meeting, for instance. That was unfortunate timing, but it could not be helped.

I'm very pleased with the turnout, and the discussion. Hats off to Gary Bolles of MicroCast, moderator of the event; to Esme Vos, founder of MuniWireless, who shared some of her experiences with municpal rollouts around the world; to the Cisco team, who were available to answer questions before, during, and after the roundtable; and to the attendees themselves, who came and offered a good part of their morning for this discussion, as well as their thoughts and perspectives.

From Where Did They Come?

Cities and Counties: 15
City of Austin - five
City of Bee Cave - one
City of Buda - one
City of Georgetown - two
City of Pflugerville - one
City of Round Rock - one
City of San Marcos - one
Travis County - two
Williamson County - one

Associated Regional Groups - 5
County Information Resources Agency - one
Capital Area Council of Governments - one
Texas State Senate Candidate - one
Lower Colorado River Authority - one
Austin Technology Incubator - one

Consultants and Community Activists - 10

Who were they? (Public Sector Official Titles only)

CIO
Executive Assistant to Council Member
CIO
Program Manager
Assistant City Administrator
Mayor
Energy Services Manager
IT Director
Police Lieutenant/IT Director
ITC Manager
Finance Director
CIO
County Judge
IT Director
Director
Director/Regional Planning and IS
Policy Director
President
CIO

We shared our aspirations and thoughts on the benefits and challenges of metropolitan networks. We brainstormed on applications that networks can enable. Public Safety was a strong leading indicator here. We discussed the importance of analyzing the business drivers for a network and applications and of identifying a business model to follow. We talked about RFPs, and about politics (we spent more time than I personally would have liked in the discussion of political hypotheticals, but there was clearly interest there, and a suggestion that ignorance of political constraints inhibits local decision-making and long-term planning). Knowledge of the political landscape is important. Finally, we discussed regional collaboration and the opportunities around public-private partnerships. I will follow up with suggestions for more regional collaboration, and track that effort on this site.

One challenge raised was that cities have long budget planning cycle horizons, which makes it almost impossible to build in plans into the budget to do a network. I suggested that this is an opportunity for the public sector network champion to seek a private sector partner to do a local pilot network that will not only capture the imagination of the citizens, but also educate the decision makers on the City Council. Metropolitan Broadband is a show-and-tell technology that is not fully grasped until it is experienced.

As I said, I'll continue the process by inviting those who attended to a smaller, more regular series of Regional Collaboration meetings in a relaxed setting so that we can continue the dialogue and hopefully move on to some shared activities to promote more bandwidth in our region.

This meeting ratified the assumptions we've had about working together. It works, and the future is promising. Thanks again to all who made this happen. What a Start!

Posted on February 16, 2006 at 04:01 PM | Comments (0)

Good for TV, But Bad for Internet? Oh, Please.

How could we all grow up with commercials on television - as much a part of our lives as the programs themselves, tolerate them, even in some ways admire them, but nevertheless live with them - and then, not more than ten years into the Internet era, be so loathesome of advertising on this new medium?

I have to admit, I get a little nostalgic when I see an old Alka Seltzer ad - "I can't believe I ate the whole thing," or - oh, why bother, I could go on and on with examples new and old that have become a part of our culture...but I won't. I just read the well written piece in Unstrung Insider, Hotspot Invaders - Wireless Networking News Analysis. and I'm struck by the attitude of so many of us who find ads on the Internet to be somehow objectionable. I'm sorry, but I find those comments naive. The world has not changed so much, and the broadband fairies just are not flying out there to deploy these networks while we sleep. Those costs have to be covered in some way, or we won't get the networks.

I'm old enough to remember when cable TV was launched in my neighborhood, and we wondered back then: "Well, since I'm paying for it, why do I have to watch commercials?" Well back then, at the outset of cable, we were paying for a clear signal primarily, so we moved seamlessly back into the old paradigm of interstiatial advertising (commercials inserted into programming) - it just seemed like natural behavior on that old medium...and....monopoly cable companies made more money that way, so we had no vote on it, so it happened, so we went along.

But along came this new medium, the Internet and the World Wide Web, which seemed to break all the rules and some of us thought that we should not have to be disrupted by ads anymore. Finally here was an escape from those irritating commercial "words from our sponsors."

And what's more, even though we were paying for access at home, we thought that we should get all of this access out in the public spaces for free - at least, if we could get away with it. As an Austin resident, I love all the free Hot Spots. But I always bought a cup of coffee to support my host. While I've never agreed with that attitude of entitlement - let's face it, there really are very few things in life that are actually free, and any network has fixed and variable costs that must be paid for in some way, I understand it. Even fresh air and clean water, we come to realize, are not even free anymore, but we still believe that they should be.

But those days have passed us by, and so that's called growing up. Somebody pays, somewhere, for all these comforts we enjoy. Fact is, most of what we consider to be free is actually just subsidized in some way or another. We're just unconscious of it or we willfully ignore it. Maturity is accepting the subsidized ad model as a positive, not a negative, and acknowledging the benefits that flow from ads.

While we recognize in our clearer moments that advertisers' payments to broadcasters help subsidize our TV programs, we still think of them as "free" if they're not officially called "Paid Programming." So, when in the past two weeks, I've had conversations with five different companies that either have or plan to offer advertising or location-based services on metropolitan broadband networks, I start to think that something is going on. Finally. Reality is taking hold.

Just last night, I got an email from Eric Daversa, VP of Business Development at NetLogix, including a press release regarding Adzilla and NetLogix and their new ad model. I respect Eric as an innovative and knowledgable consultant in this space, and consider him a friend. Regarding the potential of this new service, he's about as excited as a little kid with a new toy on Christmas - this model is really that innovative. I''m a little thick, but I'll take all this commotion as a trend. I don't need much more evidence. It's like this is coming up out of the woodwork.

"Free MuniWireless" has never had much resonance for me, because I always saw it as a flash in the pan, something that couldn't last because it was not sustainable. Nice thought, but come on. However, ad-subsidized metropolitan broadband access IS a sustainable model. I think that we will see some incredible creativity in this field, and in the coming months I plan to promote this approach to the degree I can in the networks underway in Central Texas over which I have some influence.

The beneifts of having access and infrastructure costs subsidized by advertisers, extending access where it would not otherwise be, far exceed the social costs of watching (or ignoring) advertising. The smart advertisers will find ways to make the ads entertaining and less painful, blending the fun elements of creative media with commercial advertising programming. It will happen, because its already happening - on TV and in print, we're seeing more and more content in advertising and more and more advertising in content. Have you been to the cinema lately and watched "The Twenty" - that's 20 minutes of ads masquerading as content - somehow I find it more appealing than a blank screen (just barely). But I don't begrudge the theater owner from showing them.

I think that ad sponsorship is a great way to launch these new networks quickly and cost-effectively, without tremendous (and unsupportable) risk - just look at TV and Radio and how those networks were launched - we found our way to commercially sponsored programming in those new media by way of the market - it just happened, because it needed to, and it worked.

If it makes sense - and it does - and there's room in the expanding metropolitan broadband world for this approach - and there is - I wouldn't bet against ad supported network access. Let's face it, we are less likely to get our governments to subsidize our networks in the US like they do in other countries, than we are to get our advertisers to do so. I think they will line up, given the poor value they get from money spent on TV ads in the age of the TiVo. So, unless we're all willing to dig into our wallets and pay directly for these networks as we go, let's not look this gift horse in the mouth.

Posted on February 15, 2006 at 10:39 PM | Comments (0)

Silicon Valley Metropolitan Network

Wi-Fi Networking News: Unwired Bay Area, Part 2: This Time with Details If you haven't seen this clip from Glenn Fleishmann's site, I recommend it to you. What these groups have done in the Bay Area, under wraps from us all for quite some time, is to put together a regional plan that makes sense. Take a look and see if you recognize any principles for regional collaboration. I hope these guys are successful. God Bless Silicon Valley and the Bay Area. They're awesome.

Posted on February 12, 2006 at 09:29 PM | Comments (0)

The Boston Model for Regional Collaboration - NOT

In December Bostonites were complaining that for a high-tech city, they certainly didn't feel like one when it came to wireless. Amid some political sniping this week, a task force was created that will explore the viability of citywide Wi-Fi. This week the Boston Foundation also released a report stating the city should partner with private companies like Earthlink to create a citywide network in the mold of those in Philadelphia and San Francisco. Broadband Reports

I started out to write a blog about a Boston cooperation-and-due-diligence model, based on what looked like a good deal at first glance. But wait, there's more to the story. Silly me. While that model may still emerge at some point, the water is murkier than it first appeared to be. Let's watch this as it takes shape and use it as a case study in regional collaboration. Who knows, maybe it'll end up as a negative model for us not to follow. This city has all the potential in the world, lots of resources, loaded with universities, tons of character, dense urban development, but they will have to find a way to work together politically. Ah, there's the rub, politics and working together. The juries still out on that one.

The article in the Boston Globe, Study Details WiFi Options, describes action that's brewing on metropolitan broadband after a lot of talk -- but not a lot of agreement, apparently.

The Boston Foundation and Boston's Museum of Science, at the request of a city councilman, John Tobin, put together a study entitled "Boston Unplugged: Mapping a Wireless Future." So far, so good. This link takes you to the study, but apparently it has not yet been released, because the site has a Coming Soon message. Oh well.

Apparently Councilman Tobin worked hard on this wireless initiative and is ready to launch with a Request for Information. The RFI would look at:

- An examination of needed technical facilities for a WiFi network
- The creation of a "realistic" timeline for the project.
- A review of security and interference issues.
- A plan to build off of existing WiFi pilot projects.

OK, now its really looking good - progress. This is starting to sound like the Regional Collaboration I go on about on this website. But, STOP RIGHT THERE...

Enter the Mayor from Stage Right..."Step aside, Councilman, I'll take it from here ... I'm the MAYOR!"

In what must seem to the councilman as a No-Good-Deed-Goes-Unpunished move, the Mayor stepped in and took control, suggesting that what was needed was a Mayor's Task Force. According to the Boston Herald, this is if you will pardon the expression, politics as usual in Boston.

But, they did a lot of things right. And, it will probably still work out. An innovative leader in the city government did some consensus building, sought out allies, conducted preliminary research, and leveraged his position as an early adopter with motivated private sector partners. The missing link for now is political cohesion.

This is why I recommend smaller projects to get going - more action, less talk. See this link to learn more about how a metropolitan network on a less grand scale is being pursued at the university level in a smaller version of Boston, Cambridge, home of MIT.

Finally, to learn more about university / community collaboration, explore this report from the Boston Foundation, A New Era of Higher Education - Community Partnerships.

This is kind of fun to watch, when you think about it. Makes Austin look good.

Posted on February 11, 2006 at 06:16 PM | Comments (0)

FCC Shows Candor

NTCA: FCC Commissioner Calls for Sweeping Regulatory Reform Now, here's something to note: a federal official, FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, who speaks the truth (granted, he's a Democrat, but its a good start). Notably, Copps underscores two main points in his speech: We must provide many more incentives for Public Private Partnerships, and we lack a National Broadband Policy, and we truly, need a National Broadband Policy.

Posted on February 11, 2006 at 03:41 PM | Comments (0)

From Conversation to Collaboration

This morning, I realized that I've made the last phone call to invite city officials and senior staff to a regional wireless roundtable breakfast next week in Austin. Sponsored by Cisco and coordinated by MicroCast and MuniWireless, these regional breakfasts (also in Chicago and Atlanta) are meant to act as a catalyst and call to action for regional government leaders. It's time to have a conversation about metropolitan broadband. I targeted nearly 100 individuals and have almost 40 registrants, so I'll take that as a victory, so far.

How many of your new ventures have been sparked by a conversation? Interesting and new opportunities all begin when you meet somebody or something new, which sets off a chain of events inside your head and you start putting 2+2 together and you have a vision of some number greater than 4 - this is the act of creativity, the potential of progress. Something inside your mind becomes that spark that initiates you to take the first step - this is motivation. Maybe you find that missing puzzle piece that allows you to connect the dots and suddenly, you see the big picture, you see a new path through the forest. It's as if a guide taps you on the shoulder and points you in a new direction. Are you an open or closed individual?

Or, alternately, it doesn't start from within, but instead you are acted upon by some outside force, when you get that phone call or email from someone who poses a crazy idea - a what if. Or in my case, you have several people telling you similar things and you perceive a new opportunity just based on synchronicity. It's been a heck of a week for me in that way. That can be the catalyst that leads to new action. Either way, it takes an open mind and open ears to listen, ponder, and say," well, yeah, OK, I'll give it a shot." I've been the one making the phone calls this past month, and some officials have listened, and others have not. I'm hopeful that nearly half were motivated enough to register for this breakfast conversation.

In a sense, the purpose of this website is to be a voice that will spark conversations in your own groups and neighborhoods and cities about different ways of doing the same things, about new approaches to old problems, and new solutions to problems that we weren't even aware of, because we were so focused on our old problems. This is what I call progress. Using new communications technologies that will take cities in new directions, that's the proposition on the table on this website.

So in these phone calls to get people to register, I've been having conversations with friends, but mostly with strangers, over the proposition that we owe it to ourselves in this region to have a BIG CONVERSATION about what we are doing to work together in our region to bring in a new era based on ubiquitous broadband infrastructure. Will we be a region that acts with intention to put ourselves at the front of the line in the new century, or will we keep struggling with our problems of the last century, with our heads down, too busy to look up and gaze at the future for a single morning in February 2006? My sense is that most I talked to are of the open inquiring kind. Some simply have schedule conflicts that they can't avoid.

It's been as if I've been asking for a date, nearly every day for the past 40 days, as I make phone calls and encourage strangers and friends to come to a breakfast that will give us all an oportunity to learn more about something new, and to compare notes on what it means, and perhaps, if it makes sense, work together.

It makes me wonder, this morning as I pause to reflect, "Why is collaboration such a threat to some, so boring to others?" To me, working together makes the most sense in the world because these days, there is always too much on my plate for me to do on my own. It's the only way I get anywhere these days, working with others.

Next Thursday morning, we'll see how well the message took. Hopefully, we'll have a room full of civic leaders who are eager to have a conversation that will by the end of two short hours, point us all in the direction of collaboration. Working together a region can solve so many more problems than they can working separately.

And to have the chance to work on creating a regional communications infrastructure that will enable an unending and unlimited number of regional conversations, that will spark untold numbers of new ideas, that will lead to more collaborations of neighbors to solve new and old problems and create a better life for our children - now isn't that an exciting goal to get you up in the morning for a free breakfast? Stay tuned.

Posted on February 10, 2006 at 08:10 AM | Comments (0)

Wireless Disruption

Disruptive technologies are generally dismissed by the incumbents, but they attract a following among consumers who find a solution that better meets their needs for the right price point. In time, the disruptive technology that is successful moves out of the starting gate and becomes truly disruptive as a sustainable innovation. The classic business bestseller The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen makes a similar point. Something I read last night is a great topical reminder of this business phenomenon, applied to current telecom and metropolitan broadband issues.

This concept reared its head last night, got me thinking and kept me awake, as I plowed through the compelling and well written whitepaper, The One Hundred Year Storm: Wireless Disruption in Telecommuncations, by global consulting firm Deloitte & Touche.

I'm now getting the e-newsletter Digital Communities, which is also is a content-rich, professional website that should be bookmarked by those interested in metropolitan broadband. Produced by Government Technology and sponsored by Intel, this site has several useful links to good content, such as the Wireless Mesh link, where I found that whitepaper. The arguments put forth in the paper provide good theoretical backing for why we pay attention to metropolitan broadband - because it disrupts the traditional approach to telecommunciations.

Posted on February 08, 2006 at 06:52 AM | Comments (0)

A Great Example of Regional Collaboration

Yesterday I met Dr. Alex Cavalli, founding board member of the Digital Convergence Initiative (DCI), a project of the Greater Austin-San Antonio Corridor Council. This was one of those moments of serendipity that Luc de Brabandere talks about in his book from last summer,
The Forgotten Half of Change : Achieving Greater Creativity through Changes in Perception. Because my eyes and ears are open for signals of change, I know that DCI will be an ally for me as I work with regional leaders to promote change at the regional infrastructure level. I like the concept of serendipity any way, but after reading de Brabandere's fascinating book on change, I am on my guard for serendipity as an indicator of coming changes.

A partner in the Boston Consulting Group and a leading author on business innovation in Europe, Luc de Brabandere makes the argument in The Other Half of Change that change comes in two parts: the actual, physical change, which requires a following change in perception (a change in the way we see things), in order for the actual change to become permanent. To be aware of the potential for change, de Brabandere suggests that we be on the lookout for five leading indicators of change, early warning signs if you will. He highlights these five "weak signals that indicate a mismatch between our assumptions and the real world." Watch for these five signals.

1) Minor defects that signal disruptions to the status quo; 2) Dissonance, a warning of failure ahead; 3) Serendipity, when things seem to happen as if they were magic, as if they were planned ahead by some unseeing force; 4) Paradox - my favorite paradox to emphasize the change we're in is the rapid replacement of the hundreds-year old instituion Encyclopedia Britannica, the Icon of the Age of Reason, by Microsoft's Encarta, symbolizing the maturity of the Digital Era, only to be supplanted by Wikipedia a few years later - hello, Internet, World Wide Web, and the Network Era; and finally, 5) Boredom, where a new concept becomes commonplace (remember all the fuss about eCommerce just a few years ago, back when Business 2.0 was 300 pages long?).

So when Alex and I had a conversation yesterday about our shared impressions and struggles to move the Central Texas regional along, it was compelling enough for me to take note. I knew then that MetroNetIQ and DCI were bound to be working together in the near term, given the close alignment of our goals and the strong signals for collaboration.

I offer you then this document as an example of a vision document for regional collaboration. It's important to put down a shared vision in writing if you intend to work together with a group on a common goal. As Stephen Covey says in Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change, (Habit No. 2) - "Begin with the End in Mind". - in other words, "know where you're going before you start out on your journey." A collaborative effort requires a shared vision, or there will be problems down the road when individual paths diverge. Click this link to download Digital Convergence Initiative: Creating Sustainable Competitive Advantage in Texas (You will need to register first)

Posted on February 07, 2006 at 06:59 AM | Comments (0)

On the Road to Regional Collaboration

The road to one's goal is not always a straight line, and in my experience, it's almost never paved either. It's a winding path up to the top of the mountain and, as with other journeys to a goal, sometimes one has to go sideways for a while in order to proceed again up the mountain. I'm hoping that recent events indicate that my journey to regional collaboration has turned a corner and we're heading back up the mountain, once again.

Two years ago, I proposed that Austin would make a great place to launch a metropolitan wireless broadband network, and I pursued that goal with passion, but as I've said before, it didn't seem to take at the time. People would look at me as if I had proposed that we relocate London Bridge from Lake Havasuu, Arizona, to Austin to replace the Pennybacker Bridge, an Austin icon (ironically, both bridges are on the "Colorado River," but there is a Colorado River in Arizona that actually comes from Colorado, and another one in Texas that's mistakenly named - but boy, do I digress).

Back to a city-wide wireless network for Austin. Two years ago, Hot Spots were something to talk about, and the time for a city-wide network was just not right. I'll have to dig up that proposal I wrote and share it with you all in another blog.

Fast forward a year. I wrote this white paper, entitled Regional Broadband Authorities: A Collaborative Approach to Universal High Speed Internet Access, at the start of last year, finishing the final draft on January 25, 2005. Well, it seems the time was still not right for the idea, because it never went anywhere. Perhaps I just lacked the forum to get it out in front of the right people a year ago, or the energy to push that string uphill. At the time, I was engaged in a research project at the city-owned electric utility, so I kept on plugging away.

OK, so fast forward one more year, and now it looks like the time may be right - we may just be ready to go after this goal as a community. I'm looking forward to our Regional Wireless Roundtable breakfast a week from Thursday. As it turns out, I brought my white paper up in conversation today with Dr. Alex Cavalli, founding board member of the Digital Convergence Initiative (DCI), a project of the Greater Austin-San Antonio Corridor Council. That project started a few years back at the IC2 Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, as "part of that Institute's continuing effort to create wealth through expanded uses of capitalism for the purpose of maintaining a stable and civil society."

I'll have to write more about the DCI in another blog, because it looks like our paths may end up winding together. In this blog, I wanted to tell you about the Regional Broadband Authority idea. Based on other regional infrastructure planning (i.e., Regional Transportation Planning Authorities), the idea was for the government to promote rational, regional collaboration on broadband infrastructure by creating a planning authority. After reading it again tonight, I'm glad to see that the reasoning is still sound. But the means have changed.

Last year, I thought the path to regional collaboration ran through Washington, suggesting that the federal government would be a preferred forum, given the poor state of affairs with state legislatures at the time, which seemed to be moving in lock-step to ban municipally owned networks.

What a difference a year makes. Today, I've concluded that the road to regional collaboration is a local road, with collaboration of private and public sector, of city and county governments, of regional organizations like the Digital Convergence Initiative, the Corridor Council and the Councils of Government. Today, I've come to realize that the solution will be both emergent, arising from our local communities, and convergent, with ideas and groups coming together to make something new. The days of the sheriff as hero riding to our rescue are long gone. No, we will solve this problem ourselves, and I believe some version of the Regional Broadband Authority will get us where we need to go.

Posted on February 06, 2006 at 08:25 PM | Comments (0)

From Hot Spots to Hot Zones

Gabriel Brown, chief analyst for Unstrung Insider, reckons The Cloud will use wireless mesh -- a networking technique that uses cheap peer nodes to supply backhaul to other nodes -- on a case-by-case basis when it can't get cheap wired backhaul or good line-of-sight to fluff up its hotspots into hotzones. "The decision is really driven by the particular application, throughput requirements, and the availability of low cost backhaul, in the neighborhood where they're building out the access network," he says. "But certainly, the whole of London won't be covered by a mesh, and they're going to use a lot of DSL, some WiMax, and whatever else they can get, to connect the outdoor access points."
Unstrung, 2/6/2006

The Cloud Drifts Into Hotzones So many good points made by this little article...1) Hot Zones can be used to extend Hot Spots; 2) Wi Fi Mesh is flexbile technology that can be used when other forms of backhaul are not available; 3) Networking technologies such as fiber, DSL, WiMax, and Wi Fi Mesh are complementary technologies that will be combined to make custom metropolitan broadaband systems; 4) Large cities are more likely to see Hot Zones dotting the metro landscape than they are to see huge, continguous, city-wide clouds.

This article highlights the difference between city networks in the US and in Europe, where campus deployments are more likely than city-wide networks. The article also trumpets the alignment of regional Hot Spot player The Cloud and Wi Fi mesh pioneer and market leader Tropos Networks, and envisions the synergies and expanded service capabilities that will come their way through such an alignment.

The partnership with Tropos will also allow the operator to offer new services like mobile Internet access, wireless VOIP, remote wireless video monitoring, automated meter reading, and public safety applications.

Posted on February 06, 2006 at 05:37 PM | Comments (0)

The Wisdom of Crowds, the Safety of Numbers

The more open you can make your planning process, the better. The more involvement you can get from your community, the more support your network will have. By being open and getting all segments of your local community involved from the get-go, you will find that the process goes smoother, any bumps in the road are overcome more easily, and when it comes around to signing up subscribers, you will have more support and a quicker road to solvency.

There are several means to generate community involvement, but one of the first I would recommend is to create a community blog (see the definition of blog I added to the Glossary). There are over 4 million of these websites out on the web, since the first was launched about five years ago. I added a book review to the Books section on Orientation - a recent book by Hugh Hewitt, Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation that's Changing Your World. I strongly recommend you buy and read this book - it's well written, full of useful information, and an enjoyable experience. I read it cover to cover on a three-hour plane ride.

Perhaps my experience with my two blogs - UnwireMyCity.com and now, MetroNetIQ.com - will offer you some encouragement. It's been nearly nine months since I began blogging, and I started from scratch. Follow these steps to get started on your own blog.

Creating a Community Blog in Eight Easy Steps

1. Start with a URL. That's the web address, www.metronetiq.com for this website. I recommend GoDaddy.com, as having the best value for URL purchase. You can get a website URL for under $10. Something catchy helps in branding, but I don't think it's all that important - better to get started than to spend considerable time picking a URL.

2. Get some web logging software. I chose the most popular software for blogging, Movable Type by Six Apart. I paid $99 for a software license.

3. Make arrangements for website hosting. Websites are really just files on a web server, a specialized computer hooked up to the Internet. So you need to either have your own server, or pay some other company to do that for you. Typically, hosting companies charge a small fee and then move up the fees if there is considerable traffic on your site. I took the easy route and chose hosting by AQHost, one of the recommended hosting sites on the Six Apart website. I can no longer recommend AQHost, however, due to poor customer service. In launching MetroNetIQ.com, I switched to LivingDot, which will cost me about $150/year - including the cost for software - a small price to pay for a company that specializes in hosting Movable Type blog sites.

4. Start posting content. the rule for a successful blog is to write, write some, and then, write some more again. Like the shampoo bottle instructions, let's add a final step: Repeat. Short and punchy is best. As Hewitt stresses in his book, blog sites are about relevant content, an easy writing style, and current information. The key is to keep it simple to start, and get into the habit of posting regularly. It's OK to be candid, in fact, that's the expected tone in the blogosphere. It's important to be accurate, but even more important to be timely. Because the medium is so current, small errors and/or omissions can be corrected as soon as you catch them, but gross errors run the risk of being picked up and spread widely, so caution and prudence are in order. Good to follow the Dale Carnegie guidelines and stick to positive statements in your comments (say nice things about people, or remain mostly silent).

5. Learn to use the software. Early on, I went to the bookstore and bought a helpful book, Movable Type 3.0 Bible Desktop Edition) to help me with the basics. I was able to get quite far in understanding the tools and functionality of the software with this aide. But, I wanted to go further, so I went to the next step ...

6. Hire a professional. I took an additional step and hired a web design expert to dress up the site and add more functionality. Steve Zilko at Zilko Web Solutions has been very helpful to me in adding functionality and giving the site a more professional look. I recommend you drop Steve a line, or hire somebody local, or work within your own staff to dress up the site and add further functionality.

7. Start interacting with your community. By using a blog to focus debate and update your community, you are helping to generate trust in advance of this next step, bringing broadband access to your town. The great thing about the blog and blog software is that you are able to reach your constiuents cheaply and effectively, gather input, and incorporate sound suggestions that will make your final project better reflect the wants and needs of the community.

8. Incorporate the blog into your new network website. By starting early on, you are also creating an archive that will reflect the steps you took to create your network, which will be helpful to you and to others whom you may want to coach after you have your network.

Posted on February 05, 2006 at 12:52 PM | Comments (0)

Planning and Engagement: A MetroNet in Ten Easy Steps

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In contrast to the "one-winner-takes-all" municipal RFPs that are the norm today, I believe it's important that cities slow things down and involve more third-parties, their neighbors and private sector partners, specfically. In planning a metropolitan broadband network, it's best to keep things simple and develop a plan that manages risk as you go. So I recommend that you proceed step-by-step according to the list below, and contact MetroNetIQ Consulting for more advice on any of these steps. Our team of consulting associates is prepared to help you at any or all of the steps below.

Prudent Progress Project Plan Outline
Ten Easy Steps, with Two to Grow On

1. Get informed on metropolitan broadband technology options. Looking beyond some of the misinformation still circulating these days, we see that technological progress is further along than we might think. Being on MetroNetIQ.com is just the right place for Step One. For a good start, the resources on this website have considerable information on the metropolitan broadband industry and the changing picture for municipal and regional leaders. Share this information with other community leaders. Start with the Orientation categories on the left and work your way through the resources to get up to speed quickly.

2. Evaluate your community needs regarding broadband services. Before getting going, you need to evaluate your options, and this is the point where it makes sense to spend a little money for a custom initial evaluation. Contact MetroNetIQ Consulting today to learn more about a custom initial evaluation. You may also browse the Vendor Directory on the right side of this website for other resources. At this early stage, be sure not to spend too much, or take too much time - the key at this point is to set a direction and get moving.

3. Produce and file a preliminary plan to make government policymakers aware of your actions and intentions. In some states, such notice is required and delay could have consequences. In any case, filing a short preliminary plan has minimal downside and may result in help being offered your way. You can file the preliminary plan with your state's Public Utility Commission and copy your state legislators and US Congressman and Senator (use these links to locate your state's regulatory and legislative contact info). As you move along, help out long-term public policy by filing a more detailed plan with your state's Public Utility Commission and copy your state and federal legislative representatives. Be sure to state the benefits you expect to accrue and why you are proceeding in the manner you have selected.

4. Get on the same page with other community leaders with a Regional Collaboration Event. Take time out to listen - it may change your perspective for the better. Listen to an expert as recommended above, listen to your peers, listen to the neighboring city leaders in your region, and solicit the views of the entire community (see below). All this listening will pay off in the long run. Use the Regional Collaboration guidelines on this website, and contact MetroNetIQ Consulting for help and advice on regional collaboration, our strong suit.

5. Launch a Pilot Program. At some point, all the studying, talking, and listening will make you ready to dip your toe in the water. By installing a pilot network, ideally in partnership with a private sector partner, you will demonstrate to your community the real aspects of a MetroNet. For those less-informed than you active network planners, a Pilot is necessary to generate the awareness and understanding that will be necessary to continue, benefiting both the insider community and the greater community at large. Stay tuned to the blogs on this website, which will describe my work on the Pilot networks in Austin and Round Rock.

6. Broaden your community base of support. Having informed your planning team on the subject at hand, and evaluated your need and solution options, and the regional perspective, it's time to seek community input and determine a plan of attack. By making sure that you have as many community leaders on board for any plan you undertake, you will face less opposition than you might otherwise, and your network will meet more of the needs of your community. I recommend you review this short How To article on settng up a community blog as a great way of interacting with your community as you go through the planning process.

7. Determine your business model. First and foremost, I recommend you check in with your local electric utility for partnering possiblities. See the example of Go Moorhead. Align with technology partners, or better yet, with a system integrator, to ensure project success (See the Vendor Directory). Factors that will drive your decision include the risk profile of your city management, available funds, existing network assets, difficulty of potential network installation, in-house assets and skills for ongoing maintenance and operations, and partnering options with electric utilities and private sector providers.

8. Prioritize the implementation of broadband applications that will become available from your new MetroNet. Initiate those services that accelerate your return on investment (ROI) first. See the Application Vendors in the Vendor Directory for ideas and to stimulate dialogue.

9. Determine a funding strategy. While there will be a capital expense associated with the deployment, it is likely that a Wireless Internet Service Provider (WISP) or Network Operator is willing to share the burden or bear all of the burden, in exchange for having an anchor client and customer for municipal services. Assess your capital budget possibilities. What is the temperature in your community for this network? See the Funding Options in the Vendor Directory.

10. Spread the word in your community. Begin to educate interest groups within your community on the coming changes and future service availability. Discuss the impact with your community and answer questions. Reference www.MetroNetIQ.com and other websites to spread the word and raise the level of awareness in your community.

11. Launch your plan, use someone else's network, build your network. It's time to go, finally. Whether you take advantage of a motivated private provider who has already built a network, or you initiate network construction in partnership with a private provider (acting as an anchor tenant with a long-term services contract), join with other cities for a regional network, or build your own network, you've engaged in a prudent decision-making process and you can relax knowing that you've done the best a city leader can do.

12. Enjoy the benefits and brag on your success. Controlling your own destiny and taking advantage of the new network becomes a virtuous circle. Establish a standing committee to take input from the community on new and innovative ways of providing city services. Broad, intentional community planning will enable greater value to be reaped from this new network sooner. This is a great time to further leverage your communiity blog, as well as the MetroNetIQ on-line community. As more cities and towns implement MetroNets, the cost of equipment will be driven down, the technology will advance more rapidly, and new applications will be developed; all of these factors will increase the value of your new network.

Posted on February 05, 2006 at 11:02 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

First, You Have a Conversation With Your Neighbors

I've been working on a Regional Wireless Roundtable Breakfast Event for the past two months. It's been a journey of lessons learned, and as I told you that I would share with this blog, here goes. I'll try to break it into digestible bits.

Part One. Getting Started. Back in November, I got an email from Mike Perchowski at MicroCast, asking me if I would help him put together a hand-selected group of regional government officials to attend a breakfast in February, to talk about metropolitan broadband and the new wireless options now out there. I knew MicroCast by reputation as an events company, having watched them do good things working with Esme Vos at MuniWireless, helping her to put on conferences on municipal broadband. It seems that Cisco, the networking equipment giant that entered this metropolitan broadband market in late October, had done some work with MicroCast and contacted them and MuniWireless to help put on at least three regional breakfasts like this one in Austin (They're also doing events in Atlanta and Chicago).

I was enthusiastic to work with this crew, because I had been leaning towards this regional approach, because this is a first-class bunch, and because I was excited to gather together a conversation in Austin, finally. At last, we would get the who's who from the region together for a conversation on broadband infrastructure - what would it be like? After all, if you want to get something started, kicking it off with a conversation is one of the best ways to surface issues, identify leaders, educate everyone at once, and generate interest in new ideas. What a great idea!

Well, that's the theory at least. We'll see how it works in practice, on February 16. But, based on all the conversations I've had over the past month, I'm enthusiastic. Getting this list together has been a bigger task than I anticipated. While I have a Rolidex that I'm proud of, and being from this area, I do know a lot of people in a lot of different fields. But knowing folks, and getting a specific group of them to come to a breakfast at 8:00 am on a Thursday morning for a discussion on wireless broadband (on the same day that the Austin City Council meets, as I was to learn) is a bigger task than you'd think, Bigger say, than hosting a wine tasting on a Friday night. I want to do that one next. But, I digress.

I started with a survey of the region and a list of cities. I then put together a spreadsheet of the folks I knew with some relationship to government or chambers of commerce in each city. Using that short list, I started making phone calls and developed my pitch. I then spread the net a little wider as I thought of other allies, moving beyond city officials, city adminstrators, and IT/telecom senior staff. I had lunch with our County Judge early on, and made a trip to the Council of Governments. COGs are a little known form of semi-government here in Texas, our Capital Area COG is comprised of ten counties, and they pool resources to make purchasing more efficient, and they study regional issues like emergency services, disaster planning, public safety, health care, and .... as it turns out, metropolitan broadband, although that has not been at the top of their list yet.

I also ended up in discussions with the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA), the regional electric utility headquartered in Austin; with the Department of Information Resources, part of state government here in Austin; with the County Information Resources Agency - are you starting to see a trend - good to be in the state capital! Well, as it turns out, there is a lot of interest in this subject. Soon the word got out and I received a call from local community activists, who have been promoting wireless for the last several years. And, some Cisco system integrators contacted me. With 12 days to go, we have around 35 RSVPs, and I expect at least 15 more - it would be nice to have 50-60, and end up with 40 or so at the breakfast - that's my goal. Much bigger than that and its hard to have a discussion in the two hours we have allotted.

Next, I'll tell you about recruitment. It's an art to pull something like this off, but its definitely a replicable process.

Posted on February 04, 2006 at 09:05 PM | Comments (0)

Gettin' Ta Know Austin - Howdy, Y'all

If I'm going to use Austin and Central Texas as models and as a case study for regional collaboration on the road to metropolitan broadband infrastructure, I better get you up to speed on the area. Here's some background.

Austin truly is a special place. While I travelled around the world for five years in my twenties, had a blast, and saw many wonderful places, I nevertheless returned home in 1985 and I haven't relocated since. I love the fact that Austin claims the title of "Music Capital of the World," was voted the #1 Most Wired City, aspires to be a leader in wireless, and that we originated the "Keep (city name here) Wierd" campaign here (we now have the ironic "Keep Austin Wired" t-shirts, from no less, the Austin Wireless City Project.

Austin probably has more grown-up but unreconstructed hippies than most towns. We live right on the Balcones fault line (a famous band in the 1970s was appropriately named, Balcones Fault). Living astride the fault has less to do with earthquakes than it does with geology and lifestyle. It means that the land to the southeast is flat farmland with rich dark soil, while the land to the northwest is what we call the Texas Hill Country, with cactus, rocks, and those mesas, ridges, and hills that used to characterize Western movies. The Colorado River cuts right through that fault line, like an arrow through Cupid's Heart, and LBJ dammed up the river to make the Highland Lakes in the 1930s and 1940s, which make the Hill Country that much more beautiful. I bought a ranch ten years ago in Dripping Springs, the gateway to the Hill Country, which is 45 minutes from my house. It's long on scenic views and short on practical purpose, so we mostly go out there to have campfires, drink margaritas and look at the stars, which may well be the most fun you can have with your clothes on.

But Austin is fragmented when it comes to strategy leadership. I'm guessing that all cities have these fragmentation issues, but Austin seems to be loaded to the brim with dynamic tension. We have the environmentalists v. the economic development types, the liberals v. conservatives, the city v. the state government, the city v. the university establishment, the East Side v. the West Side, the police v. the minority groups, and the core downtown v. the suburbs, the new economy v. the old, the Old Guard v. the Newcomers. We even have some who plan to build high rises downtown, while others wonder if our majestic state capitol will disappear behind the new urban canyons. It's no wonder it's hard to get people to sit down and talk about something as new and esoteric as wireless broadband infrastructure. "We have SBC and Time Warner (and recently, Grande Communciations) - what's to talk about?" But that said (that's my impatience talking) - It's not as if we've been idle, after all.

We brought technology here in the late 1960s with Texas Instruments and IBM, and the chip industry found a home here. Now we boast a large presence with Samsung, AMD, and Freescale. Starting in the 1980s a little startup grew into a global powerhouse - Dell sits just to our north in the suburb of Round Rock (which boasts a memorial to a gunfight no less - welcome to Texas). It's not all about technology - Whole Foods started from a hippie health food store I used to frequent in the 1980s. Austin has become synonymous, economically speaking, with creativity and innovation. We built on that base in the late 1990s with a rash of Internet startups, which have fared moderately well to poorly. Motive, Garden.com. I'm sure I'm leaving out some valid examples here. At any rate, there is a feeling here that we have come out of that malaise of the Dot Bust and wireless is part of that. But we're not focused.

We had a good start three years ago with Rich McKinnon and Jon Lebkowsky starting the Austin Wireless City Project, as a community grassroots organization to assure that there would be sufficient free alternatives to the Starbucks-type for-pay Hot Spots that began to spring up in 2003. We've got hundreds of those now, so I guess it worked. That same year, Randy Baker of Tuanis Technology got folks together to form the Austin Wireless Alliance, boasting nearly 100 member companies now. Wireless guru Ted Rappaport left Virginia Tech and came to UT to establish the Wireless Network Communications Group, and in January 2004 the IC2 Institute at UT hosted a Wireless Futures Conference. In 2004 we were voted the Most Wired City based on our number of broadband subscribers, Hot Spots, etc. and the Wi Fi Alliance located their global headquarters here. Last year, Mike Wolleben launched WiMax.com and located in the Austin Technolgy Incubator, which features a wireless section. We're the home of digital convergence, with a thriving music, film, and Internet scene. The South by South West Media Conference will bring international attention to Austin for 10 days in March, and in May, the World Congress on IT will feature 2000 VIPs from IT industry and government here for a little conversation on the future of our world. WCIT President Glyn Meeks, city CIO Pete Collins, Cisco's Billy Shoemaker and I have worked to make wireless a critical part of that event.

So what's my beef? Well, its just this. MetroNet broadband is a nascent Infrastructure technology. All of the activies cited above lack that broad-reaching infrastructure component, which suggests that we should look at it differenlty. To build infrastructure in isolation and without regional discussion leads to problems well documented at the start of the electric industry a century ago. It didn't work then, and I propose that it won't work well without regional planning this time either. We've been down this road before. It used to be that infrastructure required huge amounts of capital, so only a few players could do it, and the large capital projects were regulated, monitored, planned, and implemented with the intention of spending the money wisely and locating the infrastructure where it could do the most good. Not so with this new infrastructure, which is so affordable and unlicensed that independent entities can do as they wish.

So, enter MetroNetIQ.com and my local activities to get our community on the same page in Central Texas. Stay tuned, and I'll drill down on more details in the days ahead.

Posted on February 04, 2006 at 06:21 PM | Comments (0)

Change Starts at Home: Austin & Central Texas Get their Broadband Act Together

I've called Austin and Central Texas home for almost 36 years, and like anyone or anything you've known that long, I love it, but I can also get so irritated and impatient with it that my eyes could pop out. And that impatience applies in spades to our lack of cohesion and vision when it comes to broadband infrastructure and regional planning. Our fragmented political and social climate give us a diversity and energy that makes us the envy of many more stable but less exciting metropoitan areas. But that fragmentation has to date worked against us in forming a vision for regional broadband infrastructure. I started a campaign here two years ago to talk about new wireless technolgies and what they could do for our city, and you would not beleive the number of blank stares I received. It just was not on the agenda at that time.

It is now. I've launched this site, and in less than two months, we will have wireless Hot Zones in both Austin's downtown area AND in Round Rock, the suburb to our north and home to Dell Corporate Headquarters. I have a pivotal role in each project, and that's a huge victory. I'm also mobilizing a Regional Wireless Roundtable Breakfast, comprised of regional government stakeholders (35 attendees so far, representing 10 cities and counties), where we will have our first truly regional discussion on the impact and potential of broadband. The conference is sponsored by Cisco and organized by MicroCast with collaboration from MuniWireless.

I'll be blogging about these events in Central Texas with an eye towards creating a model for regional collaboration and organization. I'm not convinced that the present model of municpally led RFPs will survive as the way our nation gets broadband. While I applaud the initiaive and support the goals of muncipal RFPs, I believe that regional collaboration such as we have seen recently in Silicon Valley and as I am promoting in Austin and on this website is a more rational and practical approach, which in the long run may take more time, but will result in a more lasting and efficient regional impact.

Read On for some background on Austin, and stay tuned to this blog for the blow-by-blow of our activities in Central Texas.

Posted on February 04, 2006 at 09:09 AM | Comments (0)

Let's Get This Party Started! It's Time to Begin Regional Collaboration

To My Readers,

I just told a fellow consultant in an email this morning:

it's rare that business comes to find me, I usually have to go out and get it! It's time to get going!

So my opening message to you, my readers, in my first blog, on my new website, is just this:

I'm a metropolitan broadband consultant, I know what I'm doing, and I'm action-oriented. I'm ready to go make things happen. I've laid out my perspectives and views on this site, and I believe that this is the right way to go. I'm available today (although my calendar is getting busier by the day, I'll find the time to help cities get going.) Contact me and let's make plans to get going in your region.

Here's the gist of my email to my friend. I like this analogy of you all reading over my shoulder.

"This week, I've been focused on finishing the website, I landed one significant contract, and I'll get two more contracts today for networks in Austin and Round Rock, just to our north. It's been an exciting week. I could launch the website today, for sure by Monday. That will be a reference point that you can refer your people to.

I've been thinking a lot about regional collaboration and how to capture the market interest in Metropolitan Broadband. Let's get busy and do some work together. Let's go help put Texas on the map. No need to sit around and wait to hear back from city officials as they exchange phone messages - yechhh. Let's find those who are ready to go. Why don't you jump on this and set up some meetings?

Message points for regional leaders

1. Metropolitan broadband is available now, there are many options, and they're increasingly affordable. It's not as risky as it looks at first glance.
2. Metropolitan broadband is on city leaders' minds, but there are a lot of questions to answer, and it's a long learning curve.
3. Education is the first step, and given the long learning curve, it's better to start now than to wait. This is not new anymore, so there is no good reason to wait other than procrastination, fear, and ignorance. Education addresses the ignorance, which in turn reduces the fear, which attacks the procrastination and gets things going. While action is not for everyone, education will help cities to decide whether the time is right for them.
4. Regional collaboration makes the whole process less risky, quicker, and more affordable. It's the most sensible approach to enter into this new area. Here's the 1-2-3 approach for interested regional leaders.
5. Step One for your friends is to visit www.metronetiq.com and get their feet wet with the Orientation section (left side) and the old blogs in the archive from last year.
6. Step Two is for them to talk to their neighbors and find out what's going on in their region.
7. Step Three is for them to help to organize a regional breakfast where we can make a joint presentation and initiate a regional discussion on broadband infrastructure.
8. The goal for your regional leader friends is to bring their colleagues in cities in their region up to speed, create a common level of awareness, and stimulate discussion, which leads to action and the benefits of moving forward.
9. The action can range from any number of options, following the shared discussion. Any or all of these can be outcomes of an initial regional discusion.
a. more group study and discussion, with regular meetings scheduled to keep each other informed.
b. formation of a committee of delegates to focus on this issue and develop a greater understanding.
c. regional planning, with more formal mechanisms for working together.
d. coordinated pilot projects: cities each agree to study one aspect or one particular technology
e. cities share lessons learned from the pilots with their regional colleagues.
f. alignment with industry representatives, from equipment vendors to WiSPs to financial allies
g. facilitated implementations where some cities are ready to go now
h. case studies of implementations that are shared with other cities, to speed up the learning process

With this set of regional collaboration options, MetroNetIQ Consulting proposes to engage with regions to become their trusted advisors, and more immediately, to identify from the larger regions those few towns that are ready to move on this now and to help them through consulting engagements.

With sufficient interest, I see two ways to proceed immediately.

I. Individual city consulting. MetroNetIQ will meet with local city officials and assess their situation and offer an opinion on how to proceed. This is a quick hit approach to save those who are ready to go now the time of weeks/months spent wading through the learning process. Price ranges from $5,000 to $9,995 for an intense two-day session - under the $10,000 threshold of most cities' procurement guidelines. For those cities that really want to do this, and are ready to get started, this will be money well spent.

II. Regional collaboration consulting - vendor independent. Regional meetings, starting with an initial breakfast collaboration meeting - interested participants can pool their money to pay for an initial event, at app. $10,000/session plus travel, based on individual scoping. With 10 regional city participants, that would be $1,000/ea plus 1/10 of travel, and we would come to them - convenient. Follwing initial orientation and facilitated discussion, we would chart a course of action, answer questions, and preferably, identify and launch a series of pilot projects that would let neighboring cities come to see first hand what the technology does and how it works. In other words, this is a way to begin to get active, to move quickly but prudently out of the studying mode and into the doing mode.

While I'll be busy here in Austin with my new contracts, with my website, and with my efforts to promote Metropolitan Broadband globally, getting out into commnities is my bread and butter. That's what energizes me. I would love to advise you, support you, and when you have it lined up, travel out into the field to deliver this consulting. By working together, we can help each other - no more talk, let's get busy!

As always, let me know how it goes, and what you think.

Best Regards,

John Cooper
512-771-0507
john.cooper@metronetiq.com"

Well, cities, the ball is in your court. What I said to my friend applies to you as well. I urge you to be deliberate, but not to a fault. Often, the real learning only begins when you take action. Sometimes you just have to go out and get it, because if you wait, it won't come to you quickly, if ever. There's safety in numbers. The journey of a thousand miles starts with one step. The hardest thing about exercising is lacing up your shoes and getting out there. OK, I'll stop.

Posted on February 04, 2006 at 06:46 AM | Comments (0)

Glossary of Metropolitan Broadband Terms: A New Vocabulary

Wikipedia Image.jpg

This glossary of metropolitan broadband terms is drawn from a number of resources, all cited in the Orientation Resources sections of this website. Learning these terms is like learning a new language, so I urge you to jump in and start using them in conversation. Get familiar with them - try to use them in whole sentences, as in "I can't decide whether we need a WLAN or a WMAN for our town, but one things for sure, if we don't do something soon, we'll be stuck in a Hot Spot!"

Use this glossary as a reference: when you are stumped, be sure to refer back to the on-line reference sites as well. www.Wikipedia.org and www.whatis.com are two great resources. Most definitions can click through to their Wikipedia definition.

PLEASE EMAIL ME NEW TERMS THAT YOU LOOK FOR, BUT DON'T FIND IN THIS GLOSSARY.

Posted on February 03, 2006 at 11:50 PM | Comments (0)

Glossary of Metropolitan Broadband Terms: A-E

Wikipedia Image.jpg

This glossary of metropolitan broadband terms is drawn from a number of resources, all cited in the Orientation Resources sections of this website. Learning these terms is like learning a new language, so I urge you to jump in and start using them in conversation. Get familiar with them - try to use them in whole sentences, as in "I can't decide whether we need a WLAN or a WMAN for our town, but one things for sure, if we don't do something soon, we'll be stuck in a Hot Spot!"

Use this glossary as a reference: when you are stumped, be sure to refer back to the on-line reference sites as well. www.Wikipedia.org and www.whatis.com are two great resources. Most definitions can click through to their Wikipedia definition.

PLEASE EMAIL ME NEW TERMS THAT YOU LOOK FOR, BUT DON'T FIND IN THIS GLOSSARY.

Access Point - Also known as an AP, an access point is a wireless hub or "base station" that transmits and receives Wi-Fi wireless data traffic in a typical range of 100 to 500 feet. An external antenna can extend that range. An access point is usually attached to a wired LAN which is connected through a router back to the Internet. Access points are easy to set up and range in price from under $100 to over $1,000. They are available from companies such as Linksys, Proxim, Tropos, D-Link, Netgear, Cisco and many others.

Anchor Tenant - One definition of anchor tenant is an influential organization in a network that owns the resources and "leases" network access to tenants. In the case of local government, tenants would be other city departments and organizations, not-for-profits, community groups, businesses, educational institutions, and others. Another definition is a primary tenant on a long-term contract that covers a fixed amount of the costs of the network, thereby reducing the risk of the capital investment by assuring recovery of a portion of the investment. With one or more anchor tenants, a network provider can be more flexible in pricing of services to retail clients and theoretically, gain more market share.

ASP - ASP is an acronym for Application Service Provider, a company that provides remote access to applications, typically over the Internet, as an alternative to purchasing software licenses and running them on your own servers or computers. ASPs are used when an organization finds it more cost effective to have someone else host its applications than to host them itself. The applications served up can be as simple as access to a remote fileserver, or as complex as running an order entry system through your browser. The ASP provides the servers, network access, and applications to be used, typically for a monthly or yearly subscription fee.

Backhaul - Short for Internet backhaul, this term refers to the transportation of data from the field back to the Internet. Every wireless local area network provides local area bandwidth, but also requires connection to the mother of all networks, the Internet - that's what backhaul is about. The amount of backhaul capacity ("size of the pipe") will impact how well the wireless network performs, and how many subscribers the LAN will support. While my search on Wikipedia did not turn up this term in the Internet context, it did talk about TV broadcast usages, and I suspect that truckers also refer to something like Internet backhaul when they seek out a load to carry in their empty trucks on their way back to their original starting point. The size of the truck will determine how much load can be "hauled back."

Bit - This is where the education on digital computing begins. Information is coded as a series of 0s and 1s in digital binary language, the language of compuiers and other digital devices. These discrete 0s and 1s are known as "bits."

Byte - A Byte is the (almost) most basic standard measurement of data storage in use. Essentially, a "byte" is a packet of 8-bits of information. See this excellent Wikipedia link for a full detailed description of "bits and bytes."

Blog - A weblog (usually shortened to blog, but occasionally spelled web log) is a website of periodic articles (normally in reverse chronological order), often a diary of personal perspectives. Blogs range in scope from individual diaries to arms of political campaigns, media programs, and corporations. They range in scale from the writings of one occasional author, to the collaboration of a large community of writers. Many blogs enable visitors to leave public comments, which can lead to a community of readers centered around the blog; others are non-interactive. The totality of weblogs or blog-related websites is often called the blogosphere. When a large amount of activity, information and opinion erupts around a particular subject or controversy in the blogosphere, it is sometimes called a blogstorm or blog swarm. Unwiremycity.com is a blog, which uses Movable Type blog software. See also Blog, Understanding the Information Revolution by Hugh Hewitt in the Books section.

BPL - BPL is an acronym for Broadband over Power Lines, and is a form of PLC, or Power Line Carrier, a technology that uses existing electric utility lines to bring a wired information signal to the end user. In the case of BPL, the wired signal is broadband, running at speeds that typically range between 1.5 and 4 Mbps per subscriber. The technology is not wireless or mobile. On installing BPL end point modems, each electrical socket in the facility becomes an access point.

Broadband Internet access - Broadband Internet access, often shortened to "broadband Internet" or just "broadband" is a high data-transmission rate internet connection. DSL and cable modem, both popular consumer broadband technologies, are typically capable of transmitting 512 kilobits per second (kbit/s) or more, approximately nine times the speed of a modem using a standard digital telephone line. Broadband Internet access became a rapidly developing market in many areas in the early 2000s; one study found that broadband Internet usage in the United States grew from 6% in June 2000 to over 30% in 2003.[1] Modern consumer broadband implementations, up to 20 Mbit/s, are several hundred times faster than those available at the time of the birth of the internet (such as ISDN and 56 bit/s) while costing less than ISDN and sometimes no more than 56 kbit/s; though performance and costs vary widely between countries. See this blog for more discussion about the definition of broadband, a potentially volatile political topic.

Carrier - A wireless network operator is often referred to as a carrier. Carrier is also a technical radio term for the radio wave that carries voice or data.

CDMA - CDMA is an acronym for Code Division Multiple Access, a method pioneered by Qualcomm for transmitting signals over wireless networks. In CDMA, many radios transmit and receive on the network at the same time, making it very efficient. In the US, Sprint and Verizon use CDMA technology.

Council of Governments - Also known as "COGs," these regional organizations are peculiar to the USA, serve an area of several counties, addressing issues such as regional and municipal planning, economic and community development, cartography and GIS, hazard mitigation and emergency planning, aging services, water use, pollution control, transit administration, and transportation planning. Representatives from local governments serve on the boards of COGs, and funding comes from a combination of state grants and local contributions.

Digital Divide - The population can be divided into two parts: those with and those without digital devices and broadband Internet access. This "digital divide" has ever greater implications, because such modern information technologies as the telephone, television, computers and the Internet play an ever more dominant role in our daily lives. The digital divide exists not only between those in cities and those in rural areas, but also between haves and have nots inside cities. A digital divide could also be said to exist between the educated and the uneducated, between economic classes, and globally, between the industrially developed nations and the Third World.

Digital Transition -The term "Digital Transition" describes the process all organizations must go through in the 21st Century, as they leverage new technologies that provide new options for Applications, Equipment, Processes, and Networks that make them more effective. In contrast, the term "Municipal Wireless" is limiting. It puts the network technology ahead of the application and process changes that drive the business case.

A good way to understand this issue is to consider analog v. digital. Analog technology was revolutionary in the 20th century, when radio and television changed the landscape through exploitation of better understanding of how radio frequencies behaved. But with the advent of the transistor and the integrated circuit, a digital alternative was born and it matured in the second half of the twentieth century. As this digital progress was employed with the internet at the turn of the century, the potential of the transformation became apparent, and private sector companies began to leverage the new tools to be more competitive. Public sector organizations are lagging now, and have much ground to make up to be more effective.

Thus, the "analog" approach reflects a 20th century mindset that still relies upon paper-based data, labor inputs, and manual processes. A "digital" approach demonstrates a 21st century perspective that takes advantage of low-cost, high-power digital computers and storage devices, VOIP communication devices and broadband networks to transform the potential of organizations. Undergoing a digital transformation is a complex task that starts with a paradigm shift regarding the nature of the job, and a rewriting of the processes used to accomplish business objectives. Because digital technology evolves rapidly, a digital transformation is more of an ongoing process than it is an event with a beginning and an end.

DSL - DSL is an acronym for Digital Subscriber Line, a broadband data communications technology that transmits information over the copper wires that make up the local loop of the public switched telephone network. DSL bypasses the circuit-switched lines that make up that network and yields much faster data transmission rates than analog modem technologies. Further, a customer’s DSL line is a dedicated line that runs from their residence or business to the telephone network's Central Office, in contrast with Cable broadband, which does not require proximity to the Central Office, but as a shared network resource, it is prone to slower speeds when many users are on-line.

E911 - From the FCC website: "The wireless Enhanced 911 (E911) rules seek to improve the effectiveness and reliability of wireless 911 service by providing 911 dispatchers with additional information on wireless 911 calls.

The wireless E911 program is divided into two parts - Phase I and Phase II. Phase I requires carriers, upon appropriate request by a local Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP), to report the telephone number of a wireless 911 caller and the location of the antenna that received the call. Phase II requires wireless carriers to provide far more precise location information, within 50 to 300 meters in most cases.

The deployment of E911 requires the development of new technologies and upgrades to local 911 PSAPs, as well as coordination among public safety agencies, wireless carriers, technology vendors, equipment manufacturers, and local wireline carriers. The FCC established a four-year rollout schedule for Phase II, beginning October 1, 2001 and to be completed by December 31, 2005."

E911 at the FCC is an attempt to work around the problem created by consumers switching from fixed telephone lines to mobile lines, and to the coming issue of Wi Fi based VoIP for 911 numbers. In a switched network, each terminal point has a unique identifier, which can be used to locate the caller in an emergency 9-1-1 telephone call. But with wireless and Wi Fi VOIP, the telephone call may not provide the necessary location information, leading to the concern over the impact such changes will have on such public safety systems.

E-Community - An E-Community is a community with a vision of the future that involves the application of information and communication technologies and broadband infrastructures in a new and innovative way to empower its residents, institutions and regions as a whole. As such, they make the most of the opportunities that new applications afford and broadband-based services can deliver and help improve the community in question. Importantly, an E-Community is not primarily focused on technology. It is about using broadband technology to enhance education, export, elderly care, experience, effectiveness, efficiency, emotions, entertainment and more.

Exabyte - An exabyte is a "buttload of data" as we would say down here in Texas. Check out this good Wikipedia link to see a useful table that describes the growing list of terms for data. From Kilobyte (1,000 bytes) to Megabyte (1,000,000) to Gigabyte (1,000,000,000) - see a pattern here? - to Terabyte (1,000,000,000,000) to Petabyte (1,000,000,000,000,000) to Exabyte (1,000,000,000,000,000,000), the list goes on and on. Oh, there's two more categories - "Zettabyte" and "Yottabyte," but let's not go there for now. To get a better idea of Orders of Magnitude, and how they all fit together, with some pertinent real-world examples, see this link.

ExaFlood - From Wikipedia: the word exabyte is the basis for the term "exaflood", a neologism created by Bret Swanson of the Discovery Institute in a January 2007 Wall Street Journal editorial.[12] Exaflood refers to the rapidly increasing torrent of data transmitted over the Internet. The amount of information people upload, download and share on the Internet is growing (due in large part to video, audio and photo applications), at an exponential rate while the capacity of the Internet, its bandwidth, is limited and susceptible to a "flood" of data.

Ethernet - Ethernet is a frame-based computer networking technology for local area networks (LANs). It defines wiring and signaling for the physical layer, and frame formats and protocols for the media access control (MAC)/ data link layer of the OSI model. Ethernet is mostly standardized as IEEE 802. It has become the most widespread LAN technology in use since networking became widespread in the 1990s, and has largely replaced all other LAN standards.

Posted on February 03, 2006 at 11:40 PM | Comments (0)

Glossary of Metropolitan Broadband Terms: F-J

Wikipedia Image.jpg

This glossary of metropolitan broadband terms is drawn from a number of resources, all cited in the Orientation Resources sections of this website. Learning these terms is like learning a new language, so I urge you to jump in and start using them in conversation. Get familiar with them - try to use them in whole sentences, as in "I can't decide whether we need a WLAN or a WMAN for our town, but one things for sure, if we don't do something soon, we'll be stuck in a Hot Spot!"

Use this glossary as a reference: when you are stumped, be sure to refer back to the on-line reference sites as well. www.Wikipedia.org and www.whatis.com are two great resources. Most definitions can click through to their Wikipedia definition.

PLEASE EMAIL ME NEW TERMS THAT YOU LOOK FOR, BUT DON'T FIND IN THIS GLOSSARY.

Hot Spot - A Hot Spot is a location where wireless access points make high-speed Wi-Fi Internet access available on a free or fee basis. Hot Spots are mostly found in public spaces, such as hotels, airports, convention centers, libraries, coffee shops, pubs and restaurants. A Hot Spot is the name given for a public area that provides Wi Fi Internet access.

From the www.whatis.com website: "For users of portable computers equipped for wireless, a hot spot (or hotspot) is a wireless local area network node that provides Internet connection and virtual private network (VPN) access from a given location. For example, a business traveler with a laptop equipped for Wi Fi can look up a local hot spot, contact it, and get connected through its network to reach the Internet and their own company remotely with a secure connectio