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| | 08/23/2004
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| | Scoop
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| | Briefly noted, by Ron May
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| | Briefly noted, by Ron May
* Even though I was truly exhausted, so much so that I fell asleep during a few of the sessions, I learned a great deal at the first Community Wireless Summit in Champaign/Urbana on Friday and Saturday.
I met people from all over the country who have a great deal of knowledge on the subject. There were about two hundred people in attendance and the sessions divided into three tracks: the first was the Washington/policy track; the second was the community organizational track, discussing strategies, models, and approaches for municipalities and local organizations; and the third track was the techie track, which I found most interesting, in many ways. The tech tracks dealt with the nitty gritty of what places like CTC Net are doing and the guys down at CUWiN (Champaign/Urbana Wireless Network) who have gotten a $200K grant from George Soros' foundation for the purpose of developing software to run a wireless mesh network that could provide a basis for extending wireless technology to places in Africa, and to Eastern Europe.
Actually, I spent two hours in the offices of CUWin with a whole bunch of folks on Friday night where they went over everything in great detail. By the way, my award for the most questions asked regardless of the session he was in --- and it crossed over from tech to organization to policy --- has to go to one of our own local guys, Stel Valavanis from OnShore who not only quite bright, but also very inquisitive. Don Samuelson gets my award for power networker for introducing me and others to many people. Don is a quiet guy, but still waters run deep. His Swedish Covenant background and his years in the Peace Corps along with the more traditional Dartmouth and University of Chicago Law School education (he was a contemporary of John Ashcroft in law school) made for a fascinating conversation in the car on the way down to Champaign.
People were literally there from all over the country: Boston, Austin, Portland, Seattle, New York City, Chicago, Detroit, Cinncinatti, and many other cities were represented, as were a number of key policy organizations in Washington, D.C. As Michael Maranda put it to me as we drove home Saturday night, this was a chance to put the face with the name. He explained that many of the people at the conference have been talking to each other through e-mail for years and now they meet face-to-face.
As far as local news is concerned, I believe that Lieutenant Governor Pat Quinn will be at an event in late September. One of his aides was at the conference. Also, the rewrite of the telecomm act in the state may be coming up and Bob Lieberman had some interesting things to say about that. Michael Maranda also has some thoughts on how funding may proceed for what we call the "digital divide." Remember that much of the money that is fueling initiatives today comes from the fund that was created with SBC money a few years back, but that money is now coming to an end. Much more to come on all of this.
Purely on an intellectual level, I found some of the things Greg Rose said about the anti-competitive aspects of FCC auctions with market signaling using jump and retaliatory bidding to be quite interesting. Or the comments of Harold Feld, Associate Director of the Media Access Project or Jim Snider, Senior Research fellow at the New America Foundation, who has put together an absolutely hilarious booklet entitled "The Cartoon Guide to Federal Spectrum Policy" which really brings the abstract issues home in an understandable, commonsensical way. And tying it all together were the thoughtful comments of the leading lawyer in the country in this field, according to Don Samuelson, one Jim Baller of the law firm Baller Herbst. Jim is a guy who will sum up a talk by someone else and tell you what may have been glossed over. I appreciated that on several occasions.
On a more practical level, one of the highlights of my weekend was the story told by Annie and Pete Collins. Annie has organized a citizens' or consumers' group in what has become known as the Tri-cities --- Geneva, Batavia, and St. Charles --- to provide municipal fiber optic broadband service to the home. It failed last year by a margin of 60:40 on the ballot, but is back again in force this year.
This story promises to be the biggest story in Chicago high tech for the year because it is a classic David vs. Goliath situation. There is real drama, real "Sturm und Drang" here, folks. On the night of November 2nd, I will be paying close attention to the election results.
(Storm and Stress, movement in German literature that flourished from c.1770 to c.1784. It takes its name from a play by F. M. von Klinger, Wirrwarr; oder, Sturm und Drang (1776). The ideas of Rousseau were a major stimulus of the movement, but it evolved more immediately from the influence of Herder, Lessing, and others. With Sturm und Drang, German authors became cultural leaders of Europe, writing literature that was revolutionary in its stress on subjectivity and on the unease of man in contemporary society. The movement was distinguished also by the intensity with which it developed the theme of youthful genius in rebellion against accepted standards, by its enthusiasm for nature, and by its rejection of the rules of 18th-century neoclassical style. The great figure of the movement was Goethe, who wrote its first major drama, Götz von Berlichingen (1773), and its most sensational and representative novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). Other writers of importance were Klopstock, J. M. R. Lenz, and Friedrich Müller. The last major figure was Schiller, whose Die Räuber and other early plays were also a prelude to romanticism.) Hey, we need to learn something every day that has nothing to do with technology in Chicago.
Do you realize how nasty and how underhanded SBC and Comcast got last year when they pulled out all the stops to defeat the proposal? The proposal has changed in significant ways since last year, including the method of financing, so it is no longer a tax, but last year, SBC and Comcast not only spent an estimated $2MM on advertising and direct mailings and a push/pull phone campaign that backfired because SBC and Comcast each did their own campaign independently at the same time, they had people going door to door to plead their case. It is rare for two incumbents that generally compete to be in bed together, but that is how threatened they feel by Annie's referendum. There are complexities here involving home rule and the fact that all three cities are not governed by the same rules. And today, Monday, August 23rd at 5pm is the deadline for any objections to be raised to the signatures that have been garnered for the November referendum.
We will be following this story with intense detail from today forward. Last year, SBC had retirees going door to door telling people that they would lose their jobs if the referendum passed. And the municipalities are at a huge disadvantage because once a referendum is on the ballot, the cities of Geneva, St. Charles, and Batavia cannot say anything in support of it. They can only take a middle of the road position, stating "Here it is" while at the same time SBC and Comcast can bash it with impunity. All three cities are contiguous and all three cities have their own electric utility which provides a powerful precedent for this proposal. In those cities, you pay your electric bill directly to the city, not to ComEd, and the bill is about 30% less than what residents in neighboring municipalities pay.
My information is that passage of the legislation could put a major crimp in the business of Comcast and SBC in the area, but it is not a given that this will happen, and the cost savings may only be in the neighborhood of 10% to 15%, based on what Annie Collins said in an interview I conducted with her before the she and Peter presented to the group.
One lesson Annie did say they learned from last year is that the marketing of this referendum should not be to the techie or geek community, even though there are many of them in an area that includes FermiLab. And remember that Denny's DuPage airport complex is part of this territory. Annie said that they have to sell this to the average citizen who just likes to watch cable TV or who just wants downloadable movies or internet access or video communication. That task is a lot harder than it may seem, she told the attendees of the conference.
Remember, this is not a proposal for wireless, but is rather for fiber optic broadband. There are a myriad of pros and cons when it comes to to the battle between fiber optic and wireless. Wireless is cheaper, but there are security issues with wireless protocols. There is also more degradation of the network with wireless and it can be subject to weather problems more easily than can fiber optic.
Remember that even if this passes, the municipality will still have to get internet access from somewhere, be it XO Communications (are they still in business?), SBC, Sprint, or someone else. The municipality has to create its own network to the internet and that access has to come from somewhere, but the municipality will be paying less than consumer price levels, more on the order of a wholesale price that the towns negotiate. The towns can collectively negotiate for a contract for a common carrier which would be cheaper than if everyone had to do it individually. The population of all three cities combined is 90,000.
I had a discussion this morning with a couple of fairly knowledgeable people (who have no special inside knowledge and are just observers of the scene, although one of them was involved in the SBC project to wire the schools) and the question was raised whether the government should be competing with the private sector. The former SBC contractor said that if it is the locality doing it with local control and it is kept close to the voter/consumer, it is probably more responsive than a big company like SBC which functions more like the government anyway. He also said that the municipality will probably contract out to the private sector for services such as security, etc., unless they are planning to have their own IT people do it. It can cost as much as $100K or more to hire a guy to do that work, so they will probably contract out maintenance contracts rather than have those types of salary on staff 24x7. The consumer will be offered an "ala carte" solution by the municipalities if this passes, according to the website of Tri-cities broadband. Consumers have the option of choosing a mixture of private and municipal services. No one will be forced to use the municipality services. Consumers will have a choice, but as my former SBC contractor said, SBC does not give such a choice to its DSL subscribers. To get SBC DSL you have to have an SBC phone line, but if a customer can get his or her internet provided by the municipality, then he or she is free to choose anyone for his or her local phone service, be it the municipality or another local carrier. (Such carriers include Comcast, MCI and others.) The cost savings that may come from end-running SBC could be significant, but that is not an automatic or a given. But my former SBC contractor did say that the speed of the service from the municipality will be much faster with FTTH (Fiber To The Home) at 100mbps vs. SBC which provides 3mbps vs. Comcast at 5 or 6mbps. "It's like comparing NASCAR to a drag racer," my SBC guy said. He also added that the proposal would not have been made if it had not taken SBC and Comcast so long to get their sh** together. "All they have done is raise prices, decrease services and confuse their customers," the website states (www.tricitybroadband.com) and even though the service has been lacking which is the reason for the referendum, SBC and Comcast are fighting it tooth and nail.
The estimated cost of laying down the fiber optic is $62MM for the three cities and it is projected to last thirty years with some upgrades being called for, of course.
There is much more to talk about including the methods of financing, but let me get this out for today. Small world story. Peter Collins went to high school with Robb Hendrickson of Jellifish and Robb's VP of Finance, Paul Bazan.
It just hit me last night as I was thinking about the weekend that there was a theme to the summit, if only an unarticulated one. This whole community wirelsss initiative is really more like a movement and a happening. It is being accomplished largely by people who are not technical professionals. They may have a techie background, but they generally did not spend five years getting their training at Accenture. They are a motley and self-made crew.
Annie Collins was a flight attendant for United Airlines for fourteen years. One of the speakers, who told the story of how eighteen Indian tribes adopted wireless technology (I believe his name is Matthew Rantanen), stated that "deadbeat alcoholics are now taking courses in Cisco routers" and "the tribal leaders who do not even know how to turn on a computer are asking how they can get two more meg of bandwidth for their tribes." That sums up rather poignantly how deep and how wide this movement is. It is not the province of a technological elite, but is truly grassroots and a force for liberation. One of the speakers hails from a small town in Indiana, population 6,000, and one can easily imagine that forty years ago, he would have been a farm hand or a nameless factory worker, but today, by virtue of this interest and knowledge of this subject, the mayor of that town has made him the "wireless czar," so to speak. He installs the equipment himself and is an expert on what he calls "vertical real estate." When one sees people like the guy from Indiana or the guy talking about the Native American tribes, one realizes that the community wireless movement has the potential to inspire social transformation. I found it quite moving.
Much more to come tomorrow. If you happen to be home at 8:30pm tonight, Monday night, August 23rd, tune into my interview with Bruce Montgomery on Technology Access TV on Channel 21 for those of you who get cable in the city. I don't think you will be put to sleep.
* Finally, what commercial real estate firm has a good reputation and would be able to handle about 45,000 square feet of back office space in an area outside of Chicago (but close by)? I have been asked if I know of a good firm. |
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