San Marcos Comes Down to the Wire

Q. Lots of bad press out there about municipal wireless these days - how does that impact the San Marcos project?

A. Believe me, I know about the press, I've been reading it myself and it gets tiresome. I guess there are three things to explain what's been happening.

First, one company's travails drove a lot of what happened this year. EarthLink was heavily involved in this little industry, and when their CEO died and they got a new one, he took a different strategic approach, and pulled his company back from heavy involvement in the municipal wireless industry.

Second, a lot of the press coverage had to do with large city projects. They like to cover the big cities like Philadelphia, Houston, Chicago, San Francisco. When those projects hit bumps, they get press. And that's where EarthLink was focused.

Finally, the best explanation of what we've been through is to refer to the Gartner Hype Cycle, which occurs when any new technology is introduced, in this case, Wi Fi Mesh and Municipal Wireless. There's lots of initial excitement about the potential, which leads to overhyped expectations. Inevitably, reality fails to live up to those high expectations and there's a tremendous backlash in the press - what we're going through right now - call it one over-reaction leads to another. That results in what Gartner calls the "Trough of Disillusionment," where we are now - Yuck, not a happy place, who wants to be there. But as they say, "it's always darkest before the dawn." Leading out of that low point is a gentle upward curve, where reality sets in, real applications that produce real benefits begin to be implemented, and the technology leads to what is called a Plateau of Productivity. Happy times again, but very unlike the original expectations. Here's the graph below.

Q. So, how is San Marcos different from the big cities?
A. The technology actually is a better fit for smaller cities than for larger ones. We have about 25 square miles to cover, really about 10-15 of any density. That's a doable project for the stage of this technology. There are lots of cities out there of this size that have successful projects, it's small enough to cover effectively, but large enough to have lots of uses for the network.

Q. There are lots of trees (and foilage) and hills in San Marcos - will that affect how the technology works?
A. The ideal conditions for this radio technology are flat terrain, little to no foliage, and straight streets in a grid. Think South Padre Island. But the network design is ample to cover the territory in San Marcos. We've come a long way in three years in learning how to make this technology work.

Q. Texas State University has a Wi Fi network of its own. Wouldn't it have been ideal - made more sense to just extend that network to cover the entire city?
A. Well, there's ideal and then there's reality. Texas State has its own purposes for its network, and the city has its own purposes. The important thing is that we have received assurances of cooperation, so that the two networks will cooperate with each other and not interfere.

Q. When this network was originally planned at the City Council meeting in October 2006, weren't the original plans for the city to not spend money on the network?
A. Yes, that was a different time. Back in October last year, we were looking at recent history, at spring and summer of 2006, when the prevailing model was for a private company to build, own and operate a network and the city would receive benefits as a cooperative host. Private companies are no longer willing to take on all the risk, so they are asking cities to play a greater role, in what is referred to as an Anchor Tenant model, where the city commits to purchase services on the network. What is interesting is that we've discovered a new trend, where the city can gain further benefits by turning that Public Private Partnership model around and being the host of the network, bringing in other anchor tenants, including service providers and the incumbents. Cities are starting to look at these projects less as service purchases and more as infrastructure projects, like streets and roads, which is a natural fit for cities. When they do that, it changes the dynamic.

Q. I've heard that some are even looking at this as a new utility?
A. Indeed, there is talk of broadband as a "4th Utility," although I'm not sure exactly what the other three are. In that view, the city has a role in providing a commodity like electricity. But that's different from looking at these projects as infrastructure, where we use the term "Open Access Network." In a utility scenario, the city can be in a position of providing a commodity service in competition with the incumbents, or of bringing in a new competitor to do so. But in an infrastructure scenario, the city is building more streets and roads to accommodate more traffic. In this case, the traffic is information flow. And that new infrastructure is available to multiple parties, including the city itself, the school district, the new service providers, and existing service providers. Cities that put in this infrastructure are preparing for a more high-traffic mobile broadband future.

The bottom line for cities like San Marcos is that infrastructure has a big impact on their future and how their growth can be managed. In a world that is increasingly digitized and mobile, broadband has become a critical infrastructure. By stepping in to stimulate creation of new infrastructure in their city, leaders are preparing their cities with better options to manage growth. Rather than add labor-based services, they can lean more on technology, keeping a lid on labor costs as the city grows. Rather than continuing to buy outside services, which are subject to inflation, they can provide more services to themselves, and lean on technology, where prices tend to decline over time. By managing their own city business with a general purpose infrastructure that can also provide benefits to the other stakeholders in the city, from schools to businesses to residents, the city leaders are moving in a direction that has been labeled as The Intelligent Community. We feel that this is a smart way to move into the future. We'll know more about where we stand in a month or so, I guess.