Community members in Princeton, Massachusetts, voted on May 14th to proceed with planning for a next-generation fiber network. The picturesque New England community voted to spend $10,000 on a system design and to establish an entity to operate the network in the future, if the community decides to proceed with the investment.

According to News Telegram story, the question passed by more than the required two-thirds majority at 274-61.

Earlier this year, the Princeton Broadband Committee distributed a survey to residents. Results showed the people of Princeton desperately want something better than existing DSL, satellite, wireless or dial-up. School's must now connect with expensive T1 connections and property values suffer due to the lack of broadband. Telecommuting is not an option in Princeton.

The design should be completed this summer, opening the way for the next step in the process. Voters will need to approve by a two-thirds majority a request to borrow funds and the establishment of the town broadband entity.

CapeCodToday, recently ran two interviews relating to OpenCape, the publicly owned network nearing completion in Massachusetts. The interviews follow a belated March press release from Comcast, announcing its new service contract with Cape Cod Community College (CCCC). Like some others familiar with the project, we were surprised to see the college choosing Comcast for connectivity instead of OpenCape.

As we previously noted, CCCC and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute were two OpenCape founding members in 2006. The nonprofit OpenCape received $32 million in a Broadband Technology Opportunity Program (stimulus) award and gathered an additional $8 million in funds from the state, the county, and CapeNet, the company building and operating the network.

Regarding the delay in publicity, the College was not willing to comment on the connection, including statements to Comcast itself, until we had actively used it for a couple of months.

When the contract was negotiated, CCCC needed fiber service and OpenCape was not ready to serve them. Cox stated that the college needs to stay competitive and referred to a Bridgewater University satellite campus that will soon open in the community. Community colleges rely heavily on reliable connectivity as students look for distance learning opportunities.

Cox said Comcast was the only provider with resources in place and offered a three-year contract at five-year pricing. The rate is $95 less per month than OpenCape's pre-completion estimate. Cox emphasized the fact that the college did not have many choices and said:

In the near future, I am hopeful that CapeNet will be fully operational and competitive, reducing our future costs and increasing our capabilities. As we depend increasingly more upon the internet and “the cloud” for services, there will be even more demand by the College community for fast, reliable, competitively-priced broadband.

Friends in the area tell us CapeCodToday occasionally prints biased stories about the OpenCape project, leading us to wonder if the timing of Comcast's press release so close to the launch of CapeNet is to promote the misconception that the project has not been successful.

In a later interview with Alan Davis, CEO of CapeNet, Brooks asked rather slanted questions but Davis took the opportunity to correct misinformation. For example:

Cape Cod Today: The OpenCape network cost $40 million in Federal and State funds. Is this just another spectacular waste of tax dollars, as some of our readers have suggested?

Mr. Davis: The government can find lots of creative ways to waste tax dollars, but often they get it right. Thanks to federal and state funding, we’re creating a superior fiber optic infrastructure that will compete with Verizon and Comcast and produce more broadband choices for the region. When buyers have more choices, buyers win.

Right now, Comcast and Verizon have a virtual stranglehold on our region. Did you know they even have a federally-blessed agreement to market each other’s services?

And:

Cape Cod Today: Comcast made a rather comprehensive Service Level Agreement with CCCC. What is CapeNet’s SLA and how does it compare to Comcast’s?

Mr. Davis: Actually Comcast’s SLA is very standard. SLAs are always long and complex since they’re written by lawyers who get paid by the word.

The point of an SLA is to guarantee performance and compensate a customer for loss of service. Our SLA reflects our confidence in the new network and goes beyond the expected.

We’ll stack and aggregate reimbursements for outages and sub-par performance, up to 100% of a customer’s bill. Buyers would love to see Comcast match that and we hope they do.

Like Cox, Davis expresses optimism that CCCC will be ready to sign on with OpenCape and CapeNet in three years. Also from the interview:

Here’s the important thing and you heard it loud and clear: the college stated they would never have gotten those prices from Comcast in previous years. That’s the result of meaningful competition. With more choices and more leverage, the buyer wins. I’m confident you’ll hear more from the college and CapeNet.

In a May 2nd OpEd published in CapeCodToday, Davis provided more detail about how competition from CapeNet improves broadband for everyone:

The bottom line is that when we have more choices for broadband services, we have more leverage against huge companies that have gone unchallenged. We’ll have more power to demand better service and better prices. This changes everything.

Certainly CCCC must supply students and staff with the connectivity they need to learn, teach, and conduct research. OpenCape and CapeNet will soon be in a position to offer the services CCCC needs at a reasonable price. Comcast usually enjoys an environment with little or no competition and takes advantage of their position whenever possible. 

This interview offers some insight for those who may grant interviews to reporters that have an agenda. Slanted media institutions are growing even as more neutral journalistic enterprises are laying off reporters. Communities are smart to be prepared for either ignoring inquiries from obviously-biased sources or practicing responses to misleading charges, some outrageously so.

The city of San Leandro has formed a partnership with a local company now named Lit San Leandro to expand business access to the Internet. We talk with San Leandro's Chief Innovation Officer Deborah Acosta and Judi Clark, a consultant with Lit San Leandro, to learn more about their approach.

San Leandro already had conduit assets and Lit San Leandro is pulling fiber through it for the deployment. In return, the City is getting both attention for its 10Gbps service availability and many strands for its own use.

Rather than simply making dark fiber available, which is most helpful to technically savvy firms, Lit San Leandro is working with ISPs that can take advantage of the dark fiber to deliver services to other customers that don't have the capacity to take advantage of dark fiber directly.

We also discuss policies around conduit placement and how to build a healthy tech and innovation system.

We want your feedback and suggestions for the show - please e-mail us or leave a comment below. Also, feel free to suggest other guests, topics, or questions you want us to address.

This show is 23 minutes long and can be played below on this page or subscribe via iTunes or via the tool of your choice using this feed. Search for us in iTunes and leave a positive comment!

Listen to previous episodes here. You can can download this Mp3 file directly from here.

Thanks to Eat at Joe's for the music, licensed using Creative Commons.

Community Broadband Bits Episode 47 - Deborah Acosta and Judi Clark on Lit San Leandro

Longmont, Colorado, will move ahead with plans to offer fiber connectivity to the entire community. After presenting this business plan to the City Council, members voted unanimously on May 14th to support the measure. Scott Rochat from the Times-Call attended the meeting.

Residents stepped forward to express their opinions and all but one urged the council to "get it done."

From the Rochat article:

The plan projects a four-tier price structure. For residential rates, that's proposed to range from $39.95 a month for 10 megabit-per-second upload and download, to $99.95 for 100 mbps.

The study estimates that 35 percent of homes would choose to get their Internet service from the city, still leaving plenty of the field for the existing providers.

"Competition is good," Councilman Alex Sammoury said. "Just because we're a government entity doesn't mean the free market doesn't apply to us. If someone can do it better, more power to them."

The plan proposes to have the city provide Internet directly and work with a private partner for phone service.

Video service would not be provided, Roiniotis and the Uptown consultants said, because Internet video has eroded the market for traditional television.

Vince Jordan, LPC Manager, began the presentation and stressed economic development, education, and lifestyle.

Representatives from Uptown Services reviewed recommendations and the business plan. They answered about 3 hours of questions from council members, including skeptical members who want to avoid becoming the next Provo, Utah. Neil Shaw and Dave Stockton from Uptown Services provided some perspective between the two communities. They pointed out the large number of successful networks in states across the country.

Longmont had been prepared to incrementally expand the network using the cash on hand from the many years of dark fiber leasing. Such an expansion could be done without borrowing but would take a long time (more than ten years, likely) to get to everyone. This is the approach Danville, Virginia, has been using.

Instead, Longmont is now developing a plan to finance the rollout of the network to everyone over a few years, estimated to cost $41 million. A future discussion will examine whatever financing strategy is recommended and approve it before it can move forward.

To view the discussion, zoom ahead to about 14 minutes in to the video below.

Video: 

The bottom line is that the FIT program and its predecessors (despite facing significant threats) have jumpstarted renewable energy development in Ontario: the province would rank #4 and #11 for solar and wind deployment, respectively, if it were a U.S. state. It has created 31,000 jobs. It has also enabled widespread participation in renewable energy generation: 1 in 7 Ontario farmers is participating, earning a return on their investment.  Finally, it has enabled the province to shut down all of its coal-fired power plants by the end of 2014.

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Huge Interest

The biggest challenge for the FIT program is the overwhelming demand. Already, signed contracts for nearly 5,000 megawatts of new renewable energy capacity will allow the province to meet most of its 2030 renewable energy target, 12 years early. Actual deployment has kept pace with many U.S. states, but poor preparation has meant that less than 10% of energy under contract (thus far) is actually producing electricity.

Success with Small

The MicroFIT program (mostly 10 kilowatt and smaller solar) has been a huge success. More than half of the 230 megawatts of solar added to the grid under the FIT program has been from the MicroFIT program, serving almost 15,000 individuals and small businesses.

Unexpected Challenges

The Ontario Power Authority has faced several additional challenges that may explain its difficulty in keeping up with demand:

• The world economy collapsed in late 2008, with a slow recovery.
• The ruling Liberal Party nearly lost its majority in the fall of 2011, jeopardizing support for the FIT program.
• The largest provincial utility, Hydro One, limited renewable energy to no more than 7% of peak demand on its distribution feeders and missed deadlines for interconnection, slowing energy deployment.
• In May 2013, Canada lost an appeal to a World Trade Organization suit challenging the program’s buy local provisions from Japan, the European Union, and the United States.

A Mixed Review on Jobs

The Energy Ministry says that 31,000 direct and indirect jobs have been created thus far by the Green Energy Act, far more than would be expected with less than 10 percent of the renewable energy deployed and despite the world economic slowdown.

Manufacturing has come to the province to serve the “buy local” provision. About half of surveyed manufacturers intending to locate in Ontario have established a presence locally.

Doubling Down on Local

Ontario energy officials haven’t abandoned the ‘buy local’ policy, but rather have reinforced it with new program rules that prioritize local ownership of FIT projects. The success of the MicroFIT program and community-based projects led to a points scoring system for new FIT projects that rewards greater local support and local ownership. A quarter of the program capacity opened in early 2013 was set aside for locally owned projects. The new rules will hopefully lead to more smaller-scale projects with support from the local community.

Conclusion: Improvements Needed

While renewable energy development has been a modest success and job creation more so, the FIT program needs to improve. The Ontario Power Authority needs to streamline the development process for projects with existing contracts and push utilities to use evidence-based procedures for determining grid capacity. It should consider whether utility-scale, multi-megawatt projects make sense, given the difficulty in getting such projects to market. It should consider requiring local ownership for the remaining program capacity, knowing that it will minimize public opposition and maximize the economic returns. With these changes, the FIT program may still live up to much of its early promise.

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We look forward to the next issue of Broadband Communities magazine, due on June 15th. This upcoming edition is titled "Fiber Nation: Are We At The Tipping Point?" and focuses completely on local communities that created their own networks.

Broadband Communities puts on the annual Broadband Communities Summit, which we just attended in Dallas in April. The magazine is free and features a lot of information useful to those thinking about building networks.

According to the announcement, you can subscribe now and have the issue delivered to your door and/or your inbox. The issue will include:

• Annual Census and Analysis of Muni Networks
• FTTH Deployments with Case Studies
• Best Practices for Broadband Adoption
• Deployment of Advanced Broadband on University Campus
• Financial Modeling for Rural FTTH Builds
• Economic Development and Broadband
• Gigabit Communities - The Fast Few

Joanne Hovis, President of CTC Technology and Energy, recently published a must-read article in Broadband Properties Magazine. Whether you are a community leader investigating the possibility of a publicly owned network or an engaged citizen looking for pros and cons, this piece explains practical benefits succinctly. In her article, The Business Case For Government Fiber Networks [PDF], Hovis looks at life beyond stimulus funding. She points out how we should evaluate municipal networks in an environment where shareholder profit is not the first consideration.

Hovis gives a brief history of how local communities reached this point of need. As many of our readers know, local communities used to be able to negotiate with cable providers for franchise opportunities and rights-of-way. Often cable providers would construct broadband infrastructure in exchange for a franchise to operate in a given community, creating I-Nets for local government, schools and libraries. Once states inserted themselves into the process with state-wide franchising, local negotiating power evaporated. Many of those franchise agreements are ending and local leaders are considering municipal fiber optic networks.

Hovis stresses that municipalities do not function in the same environment as the private sector. While they still have a fiscal responsibility to their shareholders (the taxpayers) the main function is providing public safety, encouraging economic development, offering education, and using tax dollars to better the quality of life. Hovis describes how redefining return on investment (ROI) needs to go beyond the balance sheet bottom line. 

These benefits have nothing to do 
with traditional financial measures. Rather, they represent the return 
to the community in terms of such largely intangible societal benefits 
as enhancing health care quality, narrowing the digital divide, providing enhanced educational opportunities to school children, delivering job search and placement opportunities at public computer centers and helping isolated senior citizens make virtual social connections.

Even without the intangible benefits, Hovis argues the financial benefits to local communities cannot be ignored:

First, a government network can help avoid existing and future costs by replacing services for which the government previously paid third parties. Second, a network can bring revenues to a community, especially given new E-Rate regulations that make government networks eligible for subsidy if they serve schools and libraries. Together, these cost savings and revenue streams can add up to significant dollars – potentially to amounts that justify financing the necessary construction.

Hovis explains the economics of government need to lease circuits, an extremely lucrative practice for phone companies or providers. In addition to being expensive, Hovis notes they are often low-bandwidth. Hovis takes it one step further:

Build the network and you will shave this amount from your accounts payable.

In fact, because a government network can deliver far higher-capacity connectivity than the jurisdiction
 had previously leased, its value is even greater than simple cost avoidance. 
A government that owns a network 
can use inexpensive, off-the-shelf equipment to connect its facilities to one another at no cost for bandwidth (because the traffic is “on network”
 and not going out to the Internet). It can also deliver Internet connections to these facilities at a per-unit cost much lower than that of leased connections because it can aggregate the needs of all departments and purchase commodity bandwidth. This is particularly true for a jurisdiction that can develop a mutually beneficial partnership with a provider of wholesale bandwidth.

Considering the fact that capacity needs continue to grow, savings with a publicly owned next-generation network increase exponentially. Eliminating the need to lease now eliminates the need to lease more later.

Hovis also examines in detail the different ways municipal networks can provide revenue. She examines:

• Dark or lit fiber to community anchor institutes (CAIs): We have documented hundreds of communities that lease dark fiber to CAIs and also to commercial customers. That list continues to grow.
• Middle Mile Capacity: Providing infrastructure to private ISPs is more speculative, but encourages economic growth and provides connectivity to businesses and individuals who would not otherwise have it.
• E-Rate Subsidies: As of September 2010, nonprofit and public networks are eligible for E-rate subsidies for providing broadband to schools and libraries. This potential source can contribute toward network self-sustainability.

The article also stresses one of the factors we find most compelling when considering investment in publicly owned networks - keeping local money in the local economy:

Circuits leased from a large national provider require the delivery of a big monthly check to a potentially far- away corporate entity, but monthly fees paid to a government-owned network stay in the community to be spent on other government services and to be multiplied when network employees go out to eat or spend money at other local businesses.

The concept of planning, financing, and building a municipal network is daunting to many communities; it should be a unique local decision. Few people have experience like Hovis, who does an excellent job of laying out critical considerations.