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.