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What a Turnout, What a Start!

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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

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