Asheville's Wireless Network

Good piece in GovTech about the City of Asheville's $20K wireless alternative to shelling out $450K/year for fiber.

An important side note: part of the reason Asheville's fiber bill got to be a big problem is because the structure of local franchising fees was tossed by the NC State Legislature via the Video Service Competition Act of 2006: Asheville, N.C., saved millions of dollars and also supported a local business last fall when the city’s IT department opted to build a city-owned wireless network to connect public safety buildings.

Asheville was using a fiber network as a condition of a cable franchise to connect 22 administrative buildings, fire stations and police substations, but the North Carolina Video Service Competition Act of 2006 gave the cable TV providers the power to negotiate statewide contacts, taking local government out of the plan. The new annual price for the city’s fiber service was $450,000.
This put the city in a tough spot, said Jonathan Feldman, Asheville’s IT services director. Asheville’s station alerting, which was previously connected by fiber, had resulted in a threefold improvement in cardiac emergency survival rates and a 20 percent improvement in structure fire response rates.
The city didn’t want to pay the new hefty fee for service, Feldman said, but the new system was saving lives and the city couldn’t give it up. That’s when the city found a $20,000 solution to a million dollar problem.

Battles of the Bands

I heard about this problem a couple months ago. Today's WaPo has a good summary. It seems that a wireless broadband network presently under development may cripple aviation GPS (and many consumer receivers as well):

Two of 21st-century America’s favorite gadgets — the smartphone and the GPS device — are on a collision course, according to a report delivered Friday to the Federal Aviation Administration.

The report says deployment of a massive new network of towers and satellites to expand wireless communication may effectively shut down Global Positioning System devices that are at the core of a multibillion-dollar plan to revolutionize aviation. They also may affect some GPS units used by drivers, bicyclists and boaters.

Whoops.

Overstatement

There have been a lot of complaints such as this one in the Boston Globe from the Governor Peter Shumlin of Vermont lately:

Shumlin offered himself as an example. Data from FairPoint Communications shows the governor's hometown of Putney as wired with high-speed Internet service. Shumlin said that's true in the village, but not out in the hills where he lives.

"That is news to me and my teenage daughters," Shumlin said about data showing his hohttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifuse has DSL, a type of high-speed Internet service. "We need the truth. We can't build out on bad data."

The complaint is well-founded. The federal mapping effort has had the benefit of gettin something down on paper. But in rural areas especially, the strategy taken by NTIA overstates availability. The reason for this is the basic geographic approach taken by the NTIA, an approach that aggregates availability to U.S. Census blocks. Among the problems with this approach is that blocks are not even in size. In urban areas blocks are, well, blocks defined by streets usually. Not so in rural areas where blocks can be quite large.

The bottom line with the basic strategy taken by NITA: aggregating availability data has pitfalls precisely where accuracy is most crucial. Namely, in sparser locations, U.S. Census blocks are large (indeed, those over a certain areal threshold were omitted from the initial map release one presumes for methodological reasons).

In dense areas, generalizing to a more or less arbitrary spatial units makes a certain amount of sense, especially if the units are compact, as blocks tend to be in densely settled areas. But in rural areas, this technique makes less sense because it tends to a) overstate avaialbility and b) deny the granular information needed for strategic decision-making. Aggregating data in this way was a gamibt and maybe a poor one, taken one suspects to avoid drawing a map of discrete actual service areas of individual providers, an approach that would no doubt lead to endless negotiation and litigation.

FCC Commissioner Cashes Out

Okay, okay, it's not as though I expect a former F.C.C. Commissioner to sell all her possessions and walk the Earth like Cain on Kung Fu, but this piece from the WaPo's Cecilia Kang is pretty blatant:

Federal Communications commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker announced Wednesday that she will resign from the FCC on June 3 and join Comcast-NBC Universal as its senior vice president of governmental affairs.

Other Infrastructures: Shuffling High-Speed Rail $$

The Obama administration hoped to commit $53 billion toward developing a high-speed rail network (a mere down payment on the $600 the U.S. High Speed Rail Association says are necessary to complete such a network).

The Washington Post reports today that some of those dollars are being reshuffled:

The Obama administration on Monday announced the reallocation of $2 billion in its signature transportation program to create a national high-speed rail network, including $795 million for upgrades that would permit speeds of 160 mph in parts of the Northeast Corridor.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood made the money available to other states this year when Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) opted not to accept funds that had been allocated to build high-speed rail between Tampa and Orlando.

Glad to hear that Florida's elected leaders maintain their ideological commitment to burning fossil fuels despite their particular vulnerability to rising seas....

Rep. John L. Mica (R-Fla.), chairman of the House transportation committee, has been outspoken in his opposition to the administration’s plan to spend $50 billion more for high-speed rail over the next five years.

Mica, who favors a privately funded rail system, was critical Monday of funding for several projects that would benefit Amtrak’s operations in the Northeast Corridor.

“We need a comprehensive, responsible plan for the Northeast Corridor,” he said in a statement, “and Amtrak — our nation’s Soviet-style passenger rail service — is incapable of carrying out a project of this scope and significance.”

Soviet-style. Nice rhetorical flourish. But since the private sector abandoned rail service decades ago, where's the investment going to come from? See any would-be railroad tycoons on the horizon (since they did such a smashing job the first time around!)? No. Okay. So if it's going to happen, it won't start through private investment any time soon.

As an aside: since I worry about the century-old span across the Susquehanna every time I cross it going to and coming from Philly, I'm glad to hear that the reshuffling tosses a dime or two toward replacing it.

NC Senate Votes to Limit Broadband Expansion

Okay, so that's an inflammatory title for this post. But that's precisely what the NC Senate has done in supporting the so-called “Level Playing Field/Local Government Competition”.

Among other restrictions on local government involvement in broadband, the bill limits the footprint of a public network service area to the official corporate limits of that entity as well as imposing operational limits.

This piece in the Davidson News demonstrates the stakes for a small town, attempting to collaborate with neighboring towns to build an inter-jurisdictional network:

The bill’s new rules would require cities and towns to get voter approval for any debt they issue to pay for communications networks. They also would have to hold public hearings on their plans. And since cities and towns are exempt from taxes, they would be required to make payments in lieu of taxes to themselves equal to what a private company would have to pay.

The community's experience with privately provided cable and, later, Internet service is typical of smaller communities across the nation. Davidson, nearby towns, and the surrounding unincorporated reaches of Mecklenburg and Iredell counties experienced the frustration of twenty years of de facto monopoly providers, takeovers, and service limited service, as a previous Davidson News piece explains.

But the NC Senate is not an institution that will allow simple pragmatics, a solid business plan, and the interest of communities stand in the way of an ideological commitment. Let's hope this bill is eventually stopped in its tracks.

The Vermont Senate has voted to speed up the permitting process for towers that will enable high-speed Internet access and cell phone service.

Vermont's challenges are manifold: sparse population, lots of hills and trees. So wireless may be a near term solution, but wifi networks are hard (and expensive) to build in these condition.

The legislation was not without its critics, suspicious of giving too much to the big telcos. As the Brattleboro Reformer reports:

If not, he said, Vermonters will be able to get "all the rock and roll tunes you’ve ever heard of," and be able to ship money out of state to pay for them but they’ll be much less able to upload and send out their own creative work product, MacDonald said.

"Economic development is based on uploading," he said. "This bill is woefully short on uploading technology."

He also said if private companies are getting public dollars to set up new fiber-optic backbones around the state, they should be required to welcome other users, even competitors, onto their networks.

Gauging Broadband's Economic Impacts

Let's hope that Kimberly Weisul is not responsible for writing her own headlines at bnet. Witness a piece from yesterday with the screaming headline: "Study: $7B Stimulus Funds Not Helping Economy".

First let's unpack the premise:

By rolling out broadband internet service, especially to isolated rural areas, the argument goes, we can combat the economic malaise that has plagued many of those areas. Instead, it seems that the benefits of widespread Internet use tend to be concentrated in areas that are already doing relatively well. It’s the techie’s version of “The rich get richer.”

Okay, for what it's worth, if the rich are getting richer, then, strictly speaking we can't claim that the broadband stimulus is having no impact. But that's a minor point.

A tidbit of evidence cited in the piece, however, shows that only a minority of counties have experienced wage and employment growth in the wake of broadband expansion. But the data that substantiate this claim are from 1995-2000. So how on earth can that tentative and dated finding warrant the blithe conclusion that the broadband stimulus (which began almost a decade after the trend identified by a team of researchers) is so far without economic effects. Nonsense.

More importantly, if we pore over large-scale aggregated effects such as wage and employment numbers at the county level we fail to comprehend precisely the localized effects of connectivity. Only a starry-eyed economic development coordinator for a county might hold out hope that a fat pipe will lead directly to large-scale shifts in wage and employment patterns (especially in the long term). And, as the bnet piece suggests, a small and relatively fixed set of locations will benefit the most from connectivity. But that doesn't mean that increasing access and adoption in rural reaches of American isn't without consequence. For instance, perhaps broadband will staunch the steady flow of the best and brightest of rural Americans to the sub- and exurban enclaves to which they presently flock.

But just because a few conurbations stand to benefit the most doesn't in any way lead to the conclusion that broadband expansion is not helping the economy. That's a mischaracterization at best (and more likely ideologically-freighted spin with no toehold in reality).

Finally: Evidence of Planners Cluing In To Broadband!

Planning Commission sees opportunity in short-term broadband goals for comprehensive plan — Technically Philly

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Round One to the FCC

Good news for those in support of federal "Net Neutrality" rules. From the RoNew York Times:

A federal appeals court on Monday rejected as “premature” a lawsuit by Verizon and MetroPCS challenging the Federal Communications Commission’s pending rules aimed at keeping Internet service providers from blocking access to certain Web sites or applications.

While the decision, by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia circuit, is a first-round victory for the F.C.C. and its chairman, Julius Genachowski, the real battle over the agency’s attempt to regulate broadband providers has barely begun.

Broadband Availability By County Type

Patchwork Nation, an effort at characterizing the diversity of American communities by creating a general typology of counties, has turned its lens toward broadband availability, in collaboration with Connected Nation,: Leaving close scrutiny of the typology itself for another day (and the characterization of counties as "Minority Central," "Immigration Nation," and "Evangelical Epicenters"), the map provides a good first cut at assessing socio-demogaphic correlates of broadband availability. As Patchwork Nation's Dante Chinni describes:

So if you were to sit down with a mathematician and try to figure out a formula for connectivity - admittedly a very difficult challenge - it might look something like population density, plus education, plus income, plus civic engagement equals better access to broadband.

Well, having sat down with broadband data at many levels, yup, that predictive model is just about spot on. That said, as presented, I'm not quite sure what to make of the "community engagement" part of the equation. Since that is at the heart of my own work, I have some ideas of what might be meant by it, though.

The future of electrical power in Japan...and Chernobyl...

...oh wait, according to Bloomberg, a big chunk of the budget will be devoted to cleaning up the Fukushima Dai-Ichi reactors. The best guess right now is that it'll take way longer than Three Mile Islahttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifnd (probably on the order of 3 decades) and at least $12 billion: And then there's this little sidebar:

Ukraine is unable to fund alone the cost of a new sarcophagus to cover the burned out reactor at Chernobyl, due to be in place by 2014. The 110 meter-high arched containment structure has a 1.55 billion euro ($2.2 billion) total price tag and the London-based European Bank for Reconstruction and Development has so far raised about 65 percent of that.

Yikes. So much for investing in the next generation of electrical power....

Crowdsourcing Radiation

Tina Rosenberg has an interesting piece in the NYTimes refers to several sites that are crowdsourcing radiation levels in the wake of the tsunami/nuclear catastrophe in Japan.

Here's the view at JapanStatus.org, which posts reported radiation levels:

And here's the view from RDTN.org, which differentiates the colored markers by the entity providing the reading, not by the actual reported radiation level, which is a little confusing and less than informative graphically:

Toward a National Bandwidth Map

So the wires were ablaze yesterday with news of Broadband.com's new national bandwidth map.

Cool, a Google Maps mashup that promises to deliver a bandwidth map of the whole US. Slick.

Drill in a little closer and that map of bubbles comes into clears and more useful focus. The default map, for example, shows only the point locations of DSL central offices, a helpful start. One can select the estimated broadband availability footprint of those locations (green below). And one can look at the footprints of Ethernet over Copper (EoC), as shown in orange in the Metro DC region below. And, as Stacey Higginbotham gushes at GigaOm, this sort of effort has the potential to provide enormous insight into where, at what speed, and at what cost broadband is available.

As an example, the map shows that 7 out of the 10 cities with the most expensive rates per migabit of bandwidth are in North Carolina. As the NC legislature contemplates the "level playing field" bill that would effectively exclude municipal and other public networks, learning that industry is putatively failing tilts the rhetorical scales toward the munis.

But what is the method behind these claims? You'll look in vain for an explanation of how the map works, whence the data come, etc? According to Higginbotham:

The map borrows from the National Broadband Map – launched last month by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration — in the form of an API call that takes some of the data shown on the federally funded map, but it also adds true crowdsourcing and machine learning to deliver a greater variety of information.

Cool! Crowdsourcing! Hive mind! Awesome. But, uh, how? Saying we're tapping the hivemind is one thing. Explaining the method by which that is rendered as an estimate of broadband availability, cost, and speed is another. I'll hold off calling Broadband.com's map the greatest thing since sliced bread until I see more about their data and their methods. Until then it is an enlightening collage.

A sidenote: as I've said many times before, bandwidth is an important issue. But it's not the only concern in the world of broadband policy. For starters, often claims and maps about bandwidth have a huge error term. Any number of discrepancies exist between the benchmark one gets at a terminal and what is actually "available". Nonetheless, bandwidth is among the things that must be considered in a coherent national broadband strategy.

BBand Planning 101

So how do you leverage all that federal broadband data?

Let's say you're in a small to mid-size county not conveniently strapped on to the side of a large metropolitan area. The big fat broadband pipe is not heading your way anytime soon. That means that the core population centers of your county might have access to, say, 7 mbps downstream. And large swaths of the county might have access to wireless. And some have no access at all.

Let's say, you live, for example, in place like Buncombe County, North Carolina. So there's a substantial population (~210 thousand), the preponderance of which lives in or around the county seat.

What do you do?

Well, for starters, consider broadband availability relative to densities of population. Are there any obvious low-hanging fruit that providers have missed?

Not so lucky, usually. In many cases, the low-hanging fruit is long gone. That means that the areas left behind are recalcitrantly lagging.

Now it's time to take a close look at the broadband mapping data from NTIA. A first question: the NTIA collects information on community anchor institutions (CAIs) since these are integral to both sustainable adoption and public computing center aspects of the BTOP program.

So how well connected are those anchor institutions?

Well, in the case of Buncombe County, most are in the Asheville ambit. So most CAIs have access to the broadband. But not all:

The place to start is triaging those institutions (while not accepting the NTIA determination of what is and isn't an anchor institution; update the NTIA list and make sure it is comprehensive). Which are connected? Which of the disconnected should be connected? Which of those could be easily connected? Making these determinations is the first step toward an actionable plan.

A couple glaring deficiencies exist in the NTIA data, of course. Most important, the data are aggregated to US Census blockgroups. That means that, especially in rural areas where this information is most relevant, the footprint of broadband is overstated. Making a location-based strategy is difficult when the location of the broadband footprint is uncertain.

But this is a good first step for framing the game plan.

Where are the muni networks?

Interesting map at Community Broadband Networks, labeling the nation's 130 or so municipal networks.Pretty surprising distribution, with the largest occurrence of networks in Iowa, Georgia and Tennessee (REA and TVA, anyone?).

Broadband hogwash in the NC legislature

Good piece on the challenges of rural broadband in the News and Observer.

I didn't realize that NC beat the Roosevelt administration to the punch, passing a state rural electrification bill a month before the REA came into being. That proud legacy notwithstanding, the state legislature is now weighing a bill that would place all kinds of obstacles in the path of public broadband networks (and presumably public-private ventures by default).

Technology, Plans, Toys

Kaid Benfield is right.

Yes, Gizmo Green seems to be the composite vision of green advertising. Quite true, no new technological product will redeem a sustainable future. And, indeed, rampant consumerism may in fact be a large component of our present unsustainable course.

So, sure, it's pretty easy to deconstruct Gizmo Green as a failed guarantor of sustainability. But to conflate technology with technological products would be a mistake, as is suggested at the end of Benfield's piece.

Perhaps it's fair to say that planners understand the future of technology just as well as technologists understand the future of cities, places, and spaces.

Yet, isn't that the whole reason why planners should insinuate themselves more forcefully into imagining, designing, and building policies toward the technologized future? I.e., if Gizmo City is one potential "imaginary," then shouldn't we all make sure that the we move toward a different one?

Gigabit in Hong Kong

The New York Times piece points out the obvious in describing gigabit broadband for $26/month in Hong Kong:

In the United States, we don’t have anything close to that. But we could. And we should.

Indeed. And we'll only get there with fiber. And the places that have fiber will be on equal footing with world leaders. And those that don't, won't. It's simple as that.

S Korea Goal: 1gbps to the house

South Korea sets 1 Gbps residential broadband access goal - FierceTelecom

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Digital Divide, Minnesota...

» Nearly 30% of Minnesotans lack broadband

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NTIA Data (So Far...)

So I've spent the weekend sinking my teeth into the National Broadband Map. More to the point, I've been figuring out what the data contain, what's not there, and what can be said about the findings. Bottom line: there's a lot to sift through. One big lacuna: there is one (big) .txt file that list that contains all of the identified Community Anchor Institutions (CAIs) in the country. And the lat/long fields are pretty much useless. So step one for mapping the CAIs is geocoding them . But I've got a couple pics of Philly worth a second look, such as the above bandwidth map (which displays the maximum download speed aggregated to the census block level). Note: providers report that just about all of Philly has 50-100 mbps available.

High-speed Woes in China

NYTimes: China Rail Chief’s Firing Hints at Trouble

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Policy Innovation

So the Obama FCC is certainly working diligently to find room for expanding spectrum at the margins:

The core of the plan would ask, though not require, local TV stations to give up a chunk of the broadcast spectrum assigned to them by the Federal Communications Commission. The chunks would then be auctioned off to wireless companies with the donating broadcaster getting a piece of the of proceeds. In effect, it’s an effort to get the most out of our broadband spectrum, which is a limited quantity.

The big questions remain unanswered. How many local broadcasters will play along? Will the $30 billion that auctions of available spectrum are projected to generate over the next decade actually materialize? Regardless, the administration is rolling out an impressive national strategy for broadband development based on leveraging existing policies and institutions (viz., the rejiggered Universal Service Fund) and exploring tweaks such as this latest announcement.

With next week's release of the National Broadband Map, it's heady days in the broadband world.

National Infrastructure Bank....hmmmmm

Interesting idea coming from Geithner, given that funding is always prone to the vicissitudes of partisan brinkmanship:

The Obama administration's budget proposal due out next week will call for creation of a national infrastructure bank that selects major projects for federal backing, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Wednesday.

Geithner said it would support projects that produce significant returns on our investment, allow Americans more choices in their modes of transportation, and better connect existing transportation networks.

FCC Poised to Restructure Universal Service Fund

This is big:

The federal government spends more than $4 billion a year, collected from phone bills, to subsidize phone service in rural and poor areas. Now, it's considering ways to give those places more for the money: high-speed Internet connections instead of old-fashioned phone lines.

The Federal Communications Commission is set to vote Tuesday to begin work on a blueprint for transforming a subsidy program called the Universal Service Fund to pay for broadband.

This is a big deal and an important shift in emphasis. Right now, of course, we still need to invest in rural telephony. But it seems likely that the continued structure of the USF may in fact provide disincentives to expanding broadband service. Providers receive federal subsidy to (re)invest in conventional wireline service. But the FCC has proclaimed that broadband will be the telecommunications platform of the future; restructuring the USF is a step toward realizing that vision.

Legislative Wrangling

So ATT is working with its friends in the state legislature to scuttle a BTOP funded middle mile project in SC:

“They have been invited to the table and offered a piece of the pie,” [Oconee County administrator] Moulder said. “They’ve chosen to see us as competitors, when we had hoped they would see us as partners.”

A familiar pattern.