Communities & Communications

Common Roots

Having something in common is the basis for all friendship; the connections we form with others are the basis of the society we create. From those connections we gain the experience we need to establish trust. From trust, we get the courage to accomplish things by working together, to share risks and reap greater rewards. Our joint actions involve bringing things together.

All those things we really enjoy in life, those things that make it all worthwhile, come from connecting with others and finding a way to live and work together.

Having something in common is where it all begins. With that, we are a part of a greater whole, a part of a community. And as a group of individuals with a common bond, we must communicate.

We communicate with more variety now than we used to; our need to communicate has in no way diminished, and we have more tools at our disposal. It's far easier now to pick up the phone and make a call, in fact, long distance is even beginning to fade away as a communications term. And then there's email. While we may send fewer letters, we actually end up writing much more often by using these new electronic media. An essential element for all this communication is "always on" broadband infrastructure.

Broadband technology makes it ever easier to communicate and stay in touch, to form, build and keep communities. In a world where events and activities seem to conspire to pull us apart, broadband has become one of our most potent and vital tools. We'll never stop talking, never stop connecting. Our need to stay connected will not diminish. Broadband is but one more step in an evolutionary path to find easier, better, and cheaper means of staying in touch with our many communities.

Local Community Support

Communities must communicate internally and with the outside world and they rely on the dominant telecommunication providers (cable and telecom) to provide the broadband access service they need. In the absence of such traditional connectivity, communities must find a 'Plan B."

But as corporate entities, the dominant ISPs believe that broadband is a corporate service that they choose to provide to markets for a profit. They believe that broadband should resemble their traditional service models,
where access-is bundled with-content.

It is anathema to traditional ISPs for broadband communication to look like other access services delivered over local distribution networks that society has installed over the years (electricity, water, gas), regardless of any logical argument or community rationale.

But there's no good reason broadband access projects should not be free to dip from both wells. They can use both approaches as models for services as well as infrastructure deployment. Broadband can be part of a service bundle (like from a cable or DSL provider), or it can be yet one more access service provided more like a utility (like electricity). And to ensure coverage to all markets in a timely fashion, communities are likely to employ such a utility approach in some areas to gain broadband access, and when they do, the effort will require local community support.

Building the trunk line, the core of any network, is not like building the local distribution networks out at the edges: the trunk lines serve everyone, so there's less risk of cost recovery when everyone pays in to the pot - there's a vested interest for all in seeing that these core networks get built. So at first, the core gets more attention.

But when it comes to local distribution networks, nobody outside the local community cares that much, at least not nearly as much as the local population does. Locals have incentives - they experience infrastructure problems daily, while visitors suffer only a temporary inconvenience and then leave the area - and their problems - behind.

Beyond the primetime NFL cities - in other words, "all the rest of us", building citywide networks out at the edge requires two critical elements: 1) local initiative and community support; and 2) some form of firm market security (often, a monopoly grant or long-term contract) to ensure both a broad base of revenue and the promise of long-term capital recovery.

Without those two critical elements, towns are stuck with the status quo - the networks they currently have in place - or their new local distribution networks will only get built out in spots where cost recovery can be assured. That's why build-out of local Last Mile Broadband has been so slow - it depends on local community support, and lacking any cohesive national strategy to give that process direction, local politics remains a slow, stop-start business.

Distribution Networks

It has ever been the case with distribution networks. Build-outs of other networks have shown two predominate paths:
1. access only, local public initiative - electricity, streets/roads, water /wastewater, natural gas; and
2. bundled access and content, investor-owned (private) initiative (with or without government-regulated monopolies) - cable TV, electricity, telephone, cellular telephone.

In contrast to these established services, broadband service is still very new, only a little more than ten years old. Largely, it is supplied over existing cable and telecom networks, and it has indeed proven to be a high-value service where it's been offered. The cable and telecom networks have taken us a long way in this first phase, adapting their existing networks to provide faster and faster access service, bundled with content or other services in most cases. Of course, current providers would continue under this model - to them, it ain't broke, so why fix it? And broadband service has proven very lucrative so far.

But the problem for smaller towns and price conscious consumers is that this model has not yet led to a rapid, widespread build-out of local high speed fiber or wireless broadband networks. The pace of construction where such infrastructure is underway has not kept up with demand. Either the task is too great even for these huge companies, their incentives too small, or both.

One thing, however, is certain. Given ten years of experience with broadband, we can now conclude that more creativity and local coordination will be needed if local broadband distribution networks are ever to be built out over large areas, or if they're ever to be built out anytime soon.

Communities Take Control

Despite recent set-backs with initial business models, today's digital transition initiatives merely follow in the footsteps of history, as local communities take the imitative to bring in a vital utility service. As broadband grows in importance, more local communities will grow impatient with existing telecom and cable providers and step up to exert more local control and create a sense of urgency. But it's a slow process. Wi Fi Mesh and WiMAX, the latest iterations of wireless broadband innovation, are so new that unanswered questions remain. Fiber networks have more proven value, but they're very expensive.

Ultimately, local broadband network projects move forward with local community initiative and support from local governments, businesses and community leaders. Such leaders have two choices: 1) strike a political and economic accommodation with existing telecom and cable incumbents, cellular carriers, and/or successful new service providers; or 2) strike out on their own.

Digital transition initiatives with broadband applications and wireless broadband networks provide a quick technology fix, but where they manage to take hold, expect at some point for the wireless phase to be followed and complemented with a fiber network phase for long-term sustainability. But regardless of the technology at the edge, it's still the politics that drive the solution in the end.

The Promise of Public Private Partnerships

When it comes to local distribution networks, the public and the private sector need each other. The most efficient solutions marry the respective advantages of public and private sector players and help offset disadvantages.

All previous types of distribution networks offer lessons on where community digital transition and broadband network projects can go, if there is political will at the local level. And as leaders on both sides come to grips with this economic and political reality and gain some flexibility, we'll begin to see the pace of last mile digital transitions and broadband projects increase.

While history gives us valuable lessons about economic and political constraints, the Internet has taught us a lot recently about emergence and bottom-up solutions.

Either existing leaders will begin to catch on, try new approaches and get busy, or new solutions and new leaders will emerge to go around them - when it comes to broadband infrastructure, we must insist: "Lead, follow, or get out of the way!"

ATTRIBUTION REQUIREMENT - The reader is encouraged to link to this post and to share this material, with the understanding that they provide an attribution to MetroNetIQ and share any alterations with MetroNetIQ.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.