[1st-mile-nm] FCC Gigabit Workshop: Fiber Deployments Pay Off for Municipalities

[Richard Lowenberg]

FCC Gigabit Workshop: Fiber Deployments Pay Off for Municipalities

3/28/13 at 9:27 AM by Joan Engebretson

www.telecompetitor.com/fcc-gigabit-workshop-fiber-deployments-pay-off-for-municipalities/

There are numerous things municipalities can do to help bring 
high-speed broadband networks to their communities, said participants at 
an FCC workshop on gigabit communities yesterday. The workshop was held 
as a follow-up to FCC Chairman Genachowski’s announcement earlier this 
year that set a goal of having at least one gigabit community in every 
state by 2015.

“The cost of throwing fiber in the ground is really low compared with 
[the cost of] tearing up roads,” commented Christopher Mitchell, 
director of the Telecommunications as Commons Initiative at the 
Institute for Local Self-Reliance. Municipalities that have acknowledged 
that reality have been able to do a range of things to increase the odds 
of their communities gaining high-speed broadband networks, said 
Mitchell, who took part in a panel discussion focused on “Leveraging 
Local Tools” that was part of the gigabit workshop.

Mitchell cited the examples of Santa Monica, Calif. and Seattle, where 
the local governments installed fiber whenever and wherever the streets 
were torn up. By using that approach, a city can amass substantial fiber 
resources in just a few years.

In Santa Monica’s case, the city eventually had enough fiber to support 
a municipal network. In Seattle’s case, an extensive fiber footprint 
helped attract a high-speed network project that resulted from the 
Gigabit Squared initiative, Mitchell said. As Telecompetitor has 
previously reported, Gigabit Squared aims to bring high-speed broadband 
to several communities nationwide.

The benefits of installing fiber when a street is already torn up 
apparently aren’t lost on the state of Minnesota. As Heather Gold, 
president of the Fiber-to-the-Home Council Americas noted, that state is 
considering legislation that would require the department of 
transportation to advise network operators in advance about construction 
plans.

Careful coordination among various departments of a municipality is 
another good practice, said Mitchell. He noted, for example that one 
Florida municipality was able to maximize the benefits of a fiber 
network it was constructing through coordination with the department of 
transportation, which uses the fiber for traffic signals.

Google also has seen benefits from big-picture planning for the gigabit 
network the company is constructing in Kansas City, Kan. and Kansas 
City, Mo.

“We can aggregate demand,” said Milo Medin, Google vice president of 
access services. Google has been building out the network on a 
neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis — and when the company begins hooking 
up individual customers in a neighborhood, it does all of the other 
customers in that neighborhood who have signed up at the same time. In 
addition to minimizing the per-customer installation cost, this also 
enables the company to give customers appointments for a specific time 
rather than simply saying they will arrive some time during a four-hour 
or six-hour time window.

How the FCC can help
Panel participants also offered several suggestions for how the FCC 
could help spur the creation of more gigabit networks.

Medin argued that service providers will need to offer a video service 
in order to make a business case for deploying high-speed broadband 
networks. But high programming costs make it challenging to put together 
a video offering. He pointed specifically to the cost of local sports as 
a “non-trivial issue.”

Gold said the FCC could help by preventing content providers from 
requiring service providers to take a package of channels in order to 
get just one or two popular channels that customers really want. In 
addition she said local broadcasters should be prohibited from 
negotiating jointly with service providers about re-transmission costs.

(See the web site for links in the article)

RL

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Richard Lowenberg, Executive Dir.
1st-Mile Institute, 505-603-5200
P.O.Box 8001, Santa Fe, NM 87504
www.1st-mile.org  rl at 1st-mile.org
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