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

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,