Gettin' Ta Know Austin - Howdy, Y'all

If I'm going to use Austin and Central Texas as models and as a case study for regional collaboration on the road to metropolitan broadband infrastructure, I better get you up to speed on the area. Here's some background.

Austin truly is a special place. While I travelled around the world for five years in my twenties, had a blast, and saw many wonderful places, I nevertheless returned home in 1985 and I haven't relocated since. I love the fact that Austin claims the title of "Music Capital of the World," was voted the #1 Most Wired City, aspires to be a leader in wireless, and that we originated the "Keep (city name here) Wierd" campaign here (we now have the ironic "Keep Austin Wired" t-shirts, from no less, the Austin Wireless City Project.

Austin probably has more grown-up but unreconstructed hippies than most towns. We live right on the Balcones fault line (a famous band in the 1970s was appropriately named, Balcones Fault). Living astride the fault has less to do with earthquakes than it does with geology and lifestyle. It means that the land to the southeast is flat farmland with rich dark soil, while the land to the northwest is what we call the Texas Hill Country, with cactus, rocks, and those mesas, ridges, and hills that used to characterize Western movies. The Colorado River cuts right through that fault line, like an arrow through Cupid's Heart, and LBJ dammed up the river to make the Highland Lakes in the 1930s and 1940s, which make the Hill Country that much more beautiful. I bought a ranch ten years ago in Dripping Springs, the gateway to the Hill Country, which is 45 minutes from my house. It's long on scenic views and short on practical purpose, so we mostly go out there to have campfires, drink margaritas and look at the stars, which may well be the most fun you can have with your clothes on.

But Austin is fragmented when it comes to strategy leadership. I'm guessing that all cities have these fragmentation issues, but Austin seems to be loaded to the brim with dynamic tension. We have the environmentalists v. the economic development types, the liberals v. conservatives, the city v. the state government, the city v. the university establishment, the East Side v. the West Side, the police v. the minority groups, and the core downtown v. the suburbs, the new economy v. the old, the Old Guard v. the Newcomers. We even have some who plan to build high rises downtown, while others wonder if our majestic state capitol will disappear behind the new urban canyons. It's no wonder it's hard to get people to sit down and talk about something as new and esoteric as wireless broadband infrastructure. "We have SBC and Time Warner (and recently, Grande Communciations) - what's to talk about?" But that said (that's my impatience talking) - It's not as if we've been idle, after all.

We brought technology here in the late 1960s with Texas Instruments and IBM, and the chip industry found a home here. Now we boast a large presence with Samsung, AMD, and Freescale. Starting in the 1980s a little startup grew into a global powerhouse - Dell sits just to our north in the suburb of Round Rock (which boasts a memorial to a gunfight no less - welcome to Texas). It's not all about technology - Whole Foods started from a hippie health food store I used to frequent in the 1980s. Austin has become synonymous, economically speaking, with creativity and innovation. We built on that base in the late 1990s with a rash of Internet startups, which have fared moderately well to poorly. Motive, Garden.com. I'm sure I'm leaving out some valid examples here. At any rate, there is a feeling here that we have come out of that malaise of the Dot Bust and wireless is part of that. But we're not focused.

We had a good start three years ago with Rich McKinnon and Jon Lebkowsky starting the Austin Wireless City Project, as a community grassroots organization to assure that there would be sufficient free alternatives to the Starbucks-type for-pay Hot Spots that began to spring up in 2003. We've got hundreds of those now, so I guess it worked. That same year, Randy Baker of Tuanis Technology got folks together to form the Austin Wireless Alliance, boasting nearly 100 member companies now. Wireless guru Ted Rappaport left Virginia Tech and came to UT to establish the Wireless Network Communications Group, and in January 2004 the IC2 Institute at UT hosted a Wireless Futures Conference. In 2004 we were voted the Most Wired City based on our number of broadband subscribers, Hot Spots, etc. and the Wi Fi Alliance located their global headquarters here. Last year, Mike Wolleben launched WiMax.com and located in the Austin Technolgy Incubator, which features a wireless section. We're the home of digital convergence, with a thriving music, film, and Internet scene. The South by South West Media Conference will bring international attention to Austin for 10 days in March, and in May, the World Congress on IT will feature 2000 VIPs from IT industry and government here for a little conversation on the future of our world. WCIT President Glyn Meeks, city CIO Pete Collins, Cisco's Billy Shoemaker and I have worked to make wireless a critical part of that event.

So what's my beef? Well, its just this. MetroNet broadband is a nascent Infrastructure technology. All of the activies cited above lack that broad-reaching infrastructure component, which suggests that we should look at it differenlty. To build infrastructure in isolation and without regional discussion leads to problems well documented at the start of the electric industry a century ago. It didn't work then, and I propose that it won't work well without regional planning this time either. We've been down this road before. It used to be that infrastructure required huge amounts of capital, so only a few players could do it, and the large capital projects were regulated, monitored, planned, and implemented with the intention of spending the money wisely and locating the infrastructure where it could do the most good. Not so with this new infrastructure, which is so affordable and unlicensed that independent entities can do as they wish.

So, enter MetroNetIQ.com and my local activities to get our community on the same page in Central Texas. Stay tuned, and I'll drill down on more details in the days ahead.

Posted on February 04, 2006 at 06:21 PM | Comments (0)

Change Starts at Home: Austin & Central Texas Get their Broadband Act Together

I've called Austin and Central Texas home for almost 36 years, and like anyone or anything you've known that long, I love it, but I can also get so irritated and impatient with it that my eyes could pop out. And that impatience applies in spades to our lack of cohesion and vision when it comes to broadband infrastructure and regional planning. Our fragmented political and social climate give us a diversity and energy that makes us the envy of many more stable but less exciting metropoitan areas. But that fragmentation has to date worked against us in forming a vision for regional broadband infrastructure. I started a campaign here two years ago to talk about new wireless technolgies and what they could do for our city, and you would not beleive the number of blank stares I received. It just was not on the agenda at that time.

It is now. I've launched this site, and in less than two months, we will have wireless Hot Zones in both Austin's downtown area AND in Round Rock, the suburb to our north and home to Dell Corporate Headquarters. I have a pivotal role in each project, and that's a huge victory. I'm also mobilizing a Regional Wireless Roundtable Breakfast, comprised of regional government stakeholders (35 attendees so far, representing 10 cities and counties), where we will have our first truly regional discussion on the impact and potential of broadband. The conference is sponsored by Cisco and organized by MicroCast with collaboration from MuniWireless.

I'll be blogging about these events in Central Texas with an eye towards creating a model for regional collaboration and organization. I'm not convinced that the present model of municpally led RFPs will survive as the way our nation gets broadband. While I applaud the initiaive and support the goals of muncipal RFPs, I believe that regional collaboration such as we have seen recently in Silicon Valley and as I am promoting in Austin and on this website is a more rational and practical approach, which in the long run may take more time, but will result in a more lasting and efficient regional impact.

Read On for some background on Austin, and stay tuned to this blog for the blow-by-blow of our activities in Central Texas.

Posted on February 04, 2006 at 09:09 AM | Comments (0)