Community Broadband Bits Podcast

Aurora, Illinois, has been named one of the "Smart 21" most intelligent communities of 2015 according to the Intelligent Community Forum. We have been tracking Aurora for a few years and wrote about OnLight, its nonprofit ISP, that we wrote about earlier this year. With some 200,000 people, it is the second largest city in Illinois but it has one of the most interesting hybrids of municipal fiber and nonprofit partnerships we have come across.

For this week's Community Broadband Bits podcast, we are excited to have Bob Frankston back on the show. Frankston has spent a long time thinking about connectivity and we previously explored his thoughts on episode 14. In this episode, we talk a lot about how to think about what he terms "connectivity" rather than telecommunications. Telecommunications are a train track - the network owner determines when to move the trains and at what capacity. Our goal for networks is more akin to the roads, where we have more capacity to move around and pick our own routes on our own schedule. Frankston has persistently argued that community networks are reproducing the centralized model of the telephone and cable companies when they build networks.

This week, we helped to launch Next Century Cities, a collaborative effort of local governments that are making smart investments and partnerships to ensure their communities have fast, affordable, and reliable Internet access. Deb Socia is the Executive Director of Next Century Cities, coming to it from a nonprofit organization she developed in Boston called Tech Goes Home that works to increase digital inclusion. Via my capacity at ILSR, I am the policy director for NCC, so I have been working with Deb behind the scenes to launch Next Century Cities. This week, we spend a few minutes talking about this new organization. Next Century Cities is an exciting collection of 32 founding community partners with incredible diversity. From large cities to small, right-leaning to left-leaning. Some are municipal networks and some have partnered with private companies.

Lisa Gonzalez and I have been wading though all kinds of crazy talk since the cities of Wilson and Chattanooga filed petitions with the FCC to strike down state laws that prevent them from offering Internet access to their neighbors. In our first episode of Crazy Talk since way back in episode 72, we deal with claims that municipal networks often fail, whether the FCC has authority to restore local authority, and whether the state barriers in question are actually barriers at all. In this episode, I refer to this article in The Atlantic regarding law schools.

Earlier, this year, the Minnesota Legislature established a "Border to Border" Broadband fund to expand Internet access to the least connected in the state. Senator Matt Schmit and Representative Erik Simonson led the effort to establish the fund that is now administered by Danna Mackenzie. All three of them join us this week to discuss the program. We discuss the state of Internet access in Greater Minnesota and why these elected officials fought to create a fund to improve the situation. Then we move on to discuss the details of the fund with the Executive Director of the Minnesota Broadband Office, along with some lessons for other states that may be considering taking action.

While in Springfield, Massachusetts for the Broadband Communities Municipal Broadband and Economic Development event, I met several of the people that have been working on an initiative that aims to bring better Internet access to many in Connecticut. Two of them, Connecticut Consumer Counsel Elin Katz and Broadband Policy Coordinator Bill Vallee join me this week for episode 118 of the Community Broadband Bits podcast. Three cities have already issued an RFQ to begin the process of evaluating what options are available to them in improving Internet access for their residents and businesses. New Haven, Stamford, and West Hartford kicked the initiative off but others may soon join. We also discuss how Connecticut has greatly simplified the process of pole attachments to encourage investment from any interested provider.

Calls for "dig once" policies have resonated for years. The general idea is that we can more fiber and conduit in the ground at lower prices if we coordinate to include them in various projects that already disturb the ground. In the south Twin Cities metro in Minnesota, Dakota County has been tweaking its dig once approach for more than a decade. This week, Network Collaboration Engineer David Asp and .Net Systems Analyst Rosalee McCready join us to discuss their approach to maximizing all opportunities to get fiber and conduit in the ground.

This week, Lisa Gonzalez interviews me about my recent trip to the Internet Governance Forum in Istanbul, Turkey. The IGF is an opportunity for anyone concerned with Internet Governance on planet Earth to discuss the perceived problems and possible solutions. It uses a multi-stakeholder format, which means that governments, businesses, civil society, and academics are all able to come to the table... this means just about anyone who has the means to participate -- including by doing so remotely -- can do so.

By building a fiber line to allow some local businesses to get next-generation Internet access, Rockport became the first municipal fiber network in the state of Maine. Town Manager Richard Bates joins us for episode 115 of the Community Broadband Bits podcast. We discuss the financing behind the network and their partnership with local Internet Service Provider, GWI, to improve access to the Internet. Bates also explains how they had to ask voters for authorization to use a tax-increment financing approach to paying for the network to spur economic development. Nearby communities have been watching to see what happens.

Sallisaw is one of many small municipal FTTH networks that most people are not familiar with. For a decade, they have been quietly meeting their community's needs with DiamondNet. For this week's Community Broadband Bits, we learn more about it in a conversation with Assistant City Manager Keith Skelton and Network Communications Supervisor Danny Keith. Sallisaw built their network after incumbents failed to provide broadband in the early 2000's, becoming the first triple play municipal fiber network in the state. Nearly 2 out of 3 people take service from DiamondNet, which is operated by municipal electric utility.