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TGILDW - Thank God It's Labor Day Weekend

Pheww. While I have the EarthLink Withdrawl in perspective, I'm still concerned about the ripple effects on the industry. I've blogged a lot this week, trying to put events in perspective. So, I'm looking forward this late Friday afternoon to the start of Univ of Texas Longhorn football season tomorrow evening, and a nice Labor Day. TGILDW!

I thought I'd take one last stab at perspective before I quit blogging for the week though. Nearly two years ago, I cited these fundamentals in a PTI Seminar Keynote, when asked to answer the question "The Future of Community Broadband - Why? How?" (I posted links to these materials in my recent blog, Amid the Hype Crash, Hope Floats.)

Why? External Pressures Drive Change

Pressure from the Technology Environment
1. Broadband has become a new utility.
2. The maturing Internet is realigning our economy.
3. Technology and innovation have become relentless forces for change.
4. Mobile technology is a better match.
5. Government must go digital to keep up.
Pressure from the Competitive Environment
6. One global marketplace makes every region compete with every other.
7. Cities are committed, for the long haul.
8. Cities are under cost reduction pressures, networks offer business process improvement opportunities.
9. VOIP drives voice costs down, opens opportunity for dramatic cost savings for cities.
Disaster Preparation Requires an Alternative Communication Solution
10. Cities must have better, more open and flexible disaster recovery communication networks.

How? Transition to Wireless in Stages

Pioneer Stage - Cities Experiment with Municipal Networks
1. Small cities pioneer and large cities follow.
2. All networks are custom, pioneer models become differentiated.
3. Increasing awareness drives adoption.
4. Cities will adopt Public Private Partnership model as most effective.
5. A Killer App will drive adoption of networks – VOIP is most likely candidate.
Rapid Expansion Stage - Larger Organizations Adapt, Trend Explodes
6. Homeland Security will adopt guidelines for municipal networks.
7. Electric utilities will adopt municipal networks for improved outage recovery.
8. Homeland Security will require cities to have redundant municipal networks to be able to communicate in a disaster.
9. Incumbent Broadband Providers will adopt municipal networks to reach territory that is too expensive for them to serve.
Consolidation Stage - Nodes Transform into a National Network
10. Municipal Networks will be knit together into a national CitiGrid™ for National Defense.

Who knows if things will unfold this way, or what the timetable will be. The key point for including this is to provide a reference point that not all of us were pinning our hopes on the success of large city deployments, even two years ago. And look at these fundamental drivers in this list - none of those have changed because of the events of this week.

Clearly, I think the industry got things backward when it shifted its focus to big city deployments after EarthLink began to get all the attention, when city leaders expected to get their networks risk-free, and when most of the press connected "Free" and "Wi Fi" so consistently. This is a market correction, not a market failure. Market corrections are part of an experimental phase, after all. One might also argue that we are still in Step One of these Ten Steps.

In fact, I posted a comment on MuniWireless this afternoon, Muni Wi Fi: The Paths Forward, included below. This short comment pretty much captures my attitude about things this week.

I've been posting on these events on MetroNetIQ. The principal bottom line conclusion I can make after a long week is that considerable noise, press, and attention in this industry flowed to EarthLink after they announced they would build the Philadelphia network on their nickel. Since that date, cities lined up in the hopes of getting their "free pony ride," and that seemed to be all that the main stream press wanted to cover.

Collectively, those of us who sought to shift the conversation to other models, to multi-purpose networks, to models where cities paid, etc. could not get much attention, when all the buzz was about "free" Wi Fi and ever larger big city networks in SF, Houston, Chicago, etc.

While I feel for EarthLink and all their problems, I'm breathing a sigh of relief, because like a strong wind that blows away the sand to reveal what lies underneath, we can now hope to get some attention for more sound business models and other applications that were relatively ignored before.

Let's hope so, because underlying technological drivers have not changed. We still need more broadband, cheaper broadband, mobile broadband, disaster broadband, and rural broadband; incumbents will still be slow to provide it, and Wi Fi Mesh and WiMAX still have a role to play.

We need to move away from thinking only of citywide networks to think of Hot Zones, away from single purpose networks to think of multiple niche applications sharing a network, away from residential access revenues to think of industrial access revenues from AMR and other distributed infrastructure monitoring, sensor devices, and video surveillance support, to name just a few.

We need more creativity and imagination, and finally, a lot more patience. Our thinking to date has been too one dimensional.

Posted on August 31, 2007 at 04:05 PM

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