Covering the Conference
Some of our attendees are blogging the conference:
- David W: http://www.johotheblog.com
Photos from the conference are at:
- http://www.flickr.com/photos/akma/tags/f2c09/ (AKMA)
- http://www.flickr.com/photos/docsearls/sets/72157616205843715/ (Doc Searls)
We will be reviewing the speaker presentations and video streams to see if we can post that shortly.
Conference Notes from Philip M. Neches
From: Philip M Neches
Subject: F2C Conference, part 1
Municipal Fiber Panel
Tim Nulty, CEO East-Central Vermont Fiber:
- ~38 going full service municipal fiber utilities
- “wholesale only” business model doesn’t work, those doing it are in financial trouble
- ~45 million Americans in rural areas, conventional wisdom says will never have broadband
- cheaper to run fiber than copper was 80 years ago, inflation adjusted
- no fundamental reason that rural fiber broadband can’t work
- fiber is cheaper and more economic than wireless — if you intend to offer universal service
- wireless works economically if it is an add-on to fiber — but “sucks” if it’s done first
- his area: $70M for fiber; $35M for wireless first, but 1/4 the revenue and poor service; $10M for wireless as an add on to fiber and much better service (billing, back-haul, etc., already in place)
- financing with tax-exempt municipal debt is a key advantage — much cheaper than equity, cheapest debt
- Any attempt to get private equity into the picture loses advantage of tax exempt muni bonds
- (This is what Gil Williamson, former CEO of NCR, used to call a “one ton point”)
- non-profit corporation organized to develop and operate network, but municipalities finance and own network
- rural fiber can pay its own way — rural wireless can’t
- his example: 1,000 square miles, 16,000 miles of road; 200 wireless access points, 400 miles of fiber for wireless back-haul, 1,400 miles to bring fiber to all
Dick van der Woude, City of Amsterdam fiber project
- used municipal program to spur major incumbents to do open fiber
- in the blunt, confrontational way that is so very Dutch
- fiber needed as back-haul for wireless
- need access within building — to get to customer on top floor, need to get to all floors
Lev Gonick, CIO Case Western Reserve University
- 1M end users, 1,800 facilities, health care facilities, schools, libraries, museums, governments
- 501c(3) not-for-profit corp.
- 5,000 wireless access points
- layered solution: fiber as base layer, WiFi as overlay
- poor urban areas equivalent to rural areas in lack of broadband access
- governance entrepreneurial, not big company or government, light-weight organization
- partner with incumbents for last-mile service (but not residential)
Bill Schrier, CTO City of Seattle
- Municipal WiFi doesn’t work economically, fiber does (City commission report)
- $500 M, comparable to sports stadium, small compared to major highway project
- Electric utility is a key partner (they have the poles!)
- HDTV videoconferencing is the killer app! (not possible on wireless; also needs symmetrical bandwidth)
From: Philip M Neches
Subject: F2C Conference, part 2
Panel on Net Politics
Tim Karr, organizer, blogger
- critical juncture in media world: mainstream media -social media
- align: media reform, free culture, open government
- old media, particularly television, still the dominant experience for most people
Nathaniel Jones, Media and Democracy Outreach Foundation
- Politicians need same media to reach public, regardless of party
Ellen Miller, Sunlight Foundation
- Looking for connections between campaign contributions and earmarks
- Use the Internet for “scavenger hunts” for information
- 15M searches on USASpending.gov in 2 years
- rapid launch because OMB licensed Sunlight Foundation’s database
- “Outed”: Dennis Hastert, Ted Stevens, Charles Rangel
- Executive branch now responsive to openness; legislative branch lagging
- Real-time (e.g. daily) reporting of political contributions would be helpful
From: Philip M Neches
Subject: F2C Conference, part 3
Experiences from Burlington, VT, fiber network
Larry Keyes, IT guy for project described in talk
- tele-class for seniors who have had — or fear having — a fall
- 3X week for 15 weeks on-line Tai Chi Chuan class
- TV STB — living room — need large area for exercise
- use any broadband network: DSL, cable, muni fiber
- patients see instructor full screen; instructor sees up to 12 patients in windows
- controller manages bandwidth, audio, video
- problems:
- cable installers — sub-sub-sub-contractors don’t care if it works
- DSL — distance
- echo cancellation
- it works — trying to expand to group treatment for other conditions
Eva Sollberger, Seven Days, local weekly newspaper in Burlington VT
- does video journalism for Seven Days web site
- bring new audience from UTube postings
- 122 5-minute videos over 2 years; highly edited
- 20 – 30 hours of editing per 5 minute video
- many focused on non-profits, who embed video on their own sites
From: Philip M Neches
Subject: F2C Conference, part 4
Muni Network Failures Panel
Esme Vos, MuniWireless
- hot zones (big cities) and small towns looking for broadband (no incumbent)
- believes muni wireless private efforts failed because companies did not get city support — financial or anchor tenant
- 50% of devices are Apple OS — think mostly iPhones (Philadelphia experience)
- wireless meter reading
Sascha Meinrath, New America Foundation
- providers didn’t meet community needs
- who will control local connectivity?
- Post Office was 75% of federal employees — de Tocqueville
- history of telecom, told from the very far left
- connectivity should be a benefit from living in a civil society
Ken Biba, Novarum
- measuring wireless: WiMax, muni WiFi, 2G/3G cellular
- problems with “muni wireless 1.0″
- no free lunch
- indoor access not feasible
- free is not a sustainable business model
- EarthLink under-covered: about 40% of needed coverage
- 50 nodes/square mile needed
- what went right?
- video surveillance, public safety, parking meters, internal municipal communications: have good business cases
- hybrid fiber/WiFi networks outperform WiMax — 802.11n has 5:1 cap cost advantage over WiMax with more RF capacity
- Cell data performance doubled vs. 2 years ago
- best muni WiFi about 2-3x better than cellular; 802.11n better still
- Mobile 802.11n is a WiMax killer [my conclusion]
- 5 GHz 802.11n adds 500 MHz for 802.11bg with no new regulation
- Good that it doesn’t penetrate walls — outdoor and indoor networks unlicensed and don’t interfere with each other
- Applications with business cases drive deployments
- Why police going WiFi vs. 3G/4G?
- price $60/police car too much (for budgets)
- can’t do uplink video
- Unlicensed bands have bigger chunks of bandwidth than licensed — creates advantage for unlicensed
- all heading for 3 bits/hertz due to semiconductor technology
L. Aaron Kaplan, Vienna Community Mesh Network
- failure resistance should be better
- started with remains of failed commercial wireless ISP
Dewayne Hendricks, Tetherless Access
- “The tools make the rules”: technology is better now
- Remember MetroComm? $1B investment, 150 kb, gone and forgotten
- Radios on light poles — run into problems with local permits — happens every time!
- Bottom line: play the regulatory game better this time
- “Welcome back to the fight. This time, I know our side will win.”
- Shades of Paul Henreid in the AFI Silver Theater!
From: Philip M Neches
Subject: F2C Conference, part 5
Session on Regulation
Chris Savage, attorney
- Intelligent Regulation and the Death of the Chicago School
- market forces — like gravity, indisputably there, but not inherently good or bad
- revealed preference theory: actually wrong (behavioral economics shows)
- post-Chicago school: if competition (market) doesn’t always maximize benefit, what does?
- 6 – 18 month window of opportunity starting now
- Comment from audience: government should write the rules so that private enterprise makes the most money doing the right things.
- Regulators learn faster than courts
Derek Slater, Google
- broadband policy analyst, works in Mountain View with Google engineers
- how to sustain health, open, innovative Internet
- MLAB — Google operation to test Internet measurement tools
- Distributed servers to help researchers deploy tools widely enough to get useful data: MLAB
- 36 by end of April — want to recruit more to work with them.
- Why are you not getting the speed you expect?
- Infrastructure is special — we are reawakening to this notion
John Peha, CTO, FCC
- The Mythology of Rural Broadband
- Less demand? No, less availability, so less penetration
- 1/3 of rural households do not have access to terrestrial broadband at any price
- Broadband deployment has externalities: small business creation, job creation, property values
- not accounted for by a market-only approach
- Reverse-network effect: reducing the size of a network (dial-up) reduces the network benefit to remaining members
- as broadband becomes the norm, dial-up users are harmed
- also non-Internet services: newspapers, airline reservations, tax forms, etc.
- Government solutions, especially one-size-fits-all, can have more cost than benefit
Thomas Friedman, New York Times
- Hot, Flat, and Crowded is about America, not energy, how we lost our groove and can get it back
- America is exploding with innovation from the ground up — experience from last 6 months of book tour
- There are too many “Americans” in the world today — we have to re-define that lifestyle for the rest of the world
- 2.5 “Americums” 300 million people living like America to ~9 today, and growing
- Petro-states: inverse relationship of oil prices and freedom
- Not global warming, but global “weirding”: extremes get more extreme
- don’t know the difference between an act of man and an act of God
- Energy poverty: 25% of world population do not have electricity
- will fall behind exponentially
- Loss of bio-diversity — Age of Noah, save/see last of species
- the word “later” will disappear from the dictionary
- Incredible opportunities masquerading as unsolvable problems
- Common solution: cheap clean electricity (energy)
- ET – next big industry – country that dominates ET will dominate world — has to be USA
- To name as issue is to own an issue: “green” is owned by the opponents, not the advocates
- green is geopolitical, patriotic, entrepreneurial, etc.
- green is the new red, white and blue
- Green is really a revolution when someone gets hurt.
- Change or die
- Make “green” disappear because it becomes the norm
- ecosystem for innovation
- need correct price signals
- IT was a greenfield, ET is not
- every innovation has to compete with cheaper, dirtier, established technology
- oil, coal — commodities: as demand goes up, price goes up
- solar, wind, etc: technologies: as demand goes up, price goes down
- e.g.: carbon pricing is a must
- Change your leaders, not your light bulbs
From: Philip M Neches
Subject: F2C Conference, part 6
Muni Fiber Session II
Geoff Daily, app-rising.com
- creating new organization: Rural Fiber Alliance
- fiber to every building; wireless everywhere
- we’re Americans – we can do it
James Salter, Atlantic Engineering
- Smart Grid and Fiber to the Home
- motivating reasons: environment, economics
- per-household electricity usage 3x in 50 years; more peaked 47% to 39%
- smart meters 2007: 6% of meters, 4% demand reduction, out of 902GW
- capital/customer: $12.5K/customer: 7.5K generation, 4K distribution
- telecom is about $2K/customer
- experiment: $0.30/kwh peak $0.03/kwh off-peak, results
- 30% peak reduction, 20% bill reduction, 5% total kwh reduction
- smart meter in every home — less than AIG bailout
- at $2500/home, includes fiber-to-the-home at $1000
- 10% peak reduction in demand would cut enough coal usage to make a significant impact on CO2 emissions
- obstacles: standards, policies, pricing, disjointed industry (3,200 different utilities)
Terry Hurval, LUS (Lafayette Utility System)
- City established electricity & water utility in 1896; first fiber for utility use 1998; started selling fiber bandwidth wholesale & government customers 2000; added fiber as a utility in 2004
- cable, telco tried to block; using negotiations and lawsuits; LUS spent $3.7M on lawyers and elections; prevailed; ratepayers saved that much or more since cable co. restrained rate increases; positive press for city
- Fiber runs parallel to electrical power lines, use substations for minihubs; 3 rings of 96 fibers each (Lucent-Alcatel passive optical system; in-home box at demark converts fiber to coax, POTS, ethernet, IPTV, etc.
- Bonds issued 7/2007; construction started 8/2007; first customers 2/2009; full deployment 2011
- Typical residential package video, Internet, phone $85/$137/$199/month depending on bandwidth (10/30/50 Mbps symmetrical), premium channels, phone features, etc.; all service includes 100Mbps peer-peer; business packages up to 100Mbps for $199/month
- 70% residential + 80% of businesses want service, per survey
- $110M tax exempt bonds
- businesses cite benefits to community: keep jobs, people in town
- Q: will you allow open access (e.g. just connectivity, w/o phone, cable, etc, services)? A: not until bonds are paid off.
- Q: where does LUS get backbone? A: AT&T and Qwest, $50/mbps
Tim Denton, Commissioner, Canadian Radio & Television Commission (CRTC)
- equivalent of US FCC:
- 3 legal regimes:
- Broadcast Act (licensed, regulated)
- Telecommunications Act(unlicensed, regulated)
- Commerce Act (unlicensed, unregulated)
- pushed through access to underlying infrastructure over objections of large carriers (different from US), carriers still contesting at cabinet level
- broadcasting over Internet: pushing through notion of exemption — claim jurisdiction but choose; not to use it
- issue is taxing Internet broadcasting to fund Canadian content
- business community against it — don’t interfere
- artistic community for it
- not a single comment on freedom of speech (unlike US)
- Net Neutrality next topic for CRTC
From: Philip M Neches
Subject: F2C Conference, part 7
Networks Here and There
Herman Wagter, CEO Citynet (Amsterdam)
- Schopenhauer: stages of truth
- Ridiculed
- Violently opposed
- Accepted as self-evident
- High connectivity, within Amsterdam, within Netherlands, 660Gbps recent switching peak
- Natural desire for connectivity can be obstructed by social convention, laws
- No poles, high density, wires underground (lots of mud): how to avoid digging again in less than 30 years?
- passive fiber, star topology
- 10,000 home-run connections per POP
- much easier than with a Cu plant
- multiple technologies/protocols/services over same fiber plant
- ~$1,200 capex, fiber 10% labor 70% in cities: in suburbs more for fiber less for labor, result same
- regulatory regime: unbundled local fiber loop, central office access, back-haul access for competitors
- killer app: can I play cards with 4 friends? [e.g. HDTV video conferencing]
- people want bandwidth to achieve low latency
- Q: pay for like streets, not by usage? A: regulators not ready for that notion
Kevin Werbach, Obama FCC Transition Team - Quasi-hostile takeover of a $14T corporation (US government) with minimum staff in 77 days
- What are the issues, what are the challenges, what are the options going forward?
- Agency was run by Chairman Martin in a closed, politicized way, not trusting of staff, silo, hostile to new ideas, top-down management style
- Titanic change happening in industries of concern; agency was established in a previous era
- (so were most of the companies!)
- Get the FCC ahead of the curve:
- spectrum as a pool of capacity rather than as discrete small allocations
- was very creative under Chairman Powell, shut down under Chairman Martin, look at re-opening under new Chairman
- Embarrassment of riches in new administration: more care about technology issues vs. prior administration
- Q: direction with federal spectrum, NTIA? A: step 1 – inventory usage, federal, other; step 2 – develop plans, coordinate white-space database;
- Q: AT&T/Bush administration re-monopolized, re-verticalized industry, now what? A: change in last 2 years to more open access, not all the way, FCC can shine a light on the business dynamics & policy issues
- Q: should US have [cabinet-level] agency to roll up all spectrum issues from FCC, DoD, etc? A: could waste political capital w/o accomplishing much; use Internet for co-ordination with leadership from White House & agency heads
- Q: standards for smart grids? A: regulators need to think of themselves as standards bodies — push, delegate, advocate
- role for FCC as think tank, communications starter
Benoit Felton, Yankee Group
- perspective on fiber in Europe
- Sweden leading in fiber: 900k homes passed, 400k subscribers, 200 municipal utilities, 450 registered service providers (expect consolidation); also Norway, Finland
- Denmark: deployment driven by energy utility, not comm utility, low subscription rate, no coherent offering
- France: cable companies deploying fiber, poor uptake due to fight on in-home standards, history of poor service by cable providers
- Germany, UK, Ireland lagging
- Europe as a whole lagging US, Asia — but diverse results
- A couple of cases the operator voluntarily announced open access on passive and active fiber layers
- regulator reacts by negotiating, rather than imposing rules
- Need 40% penetration to get less than 10 year payback (assumes EUR 1000 capex 45% GM)
- best way to get take up is competition on services
- open access actually in incumbent operator’s best interest, because it drives faster adoption, which drives faster break-even and sooner decommissioning of copper network
- Forms of open access
- open ducts: second deployer only in very dense areas (Spain, France)
- open dark fiber:
- open lit fiber: US, Netherlands
- open services: Sweden — maybe net neutrality is adequate, maybe not
- Applicability of experience to US? Arguments that US is unique don’t hold up under examination.
- Conclusions:
- open access makes economic sense for private players everywhere in the world
- vertically integrated NGA deployment doesn’t make investment sense, can’t achieve 3-5 year payback
- profitable wholesale model crucial to NGA deployment
- net neutrality is first step to service competition
From: Philip M Neches
Subject: F2C Conference, part 8
Internet and Planet Earth
Jim Baller, attorney
- introduced next speaker as “father of municipal broadband”
- 15 years ago, talked about link between energy and communications
- most popular program on Glasgow KY municipal cable system: small claims court
Billy Ray, Glasgow, KY
- 14,000 people in south-central KY
- 1986 initiated city-owned cable system to support electrical grid
- treated infrastructure as part of the electrical grid, cable tv rented from electrical utility
- folksy history of utility moving into cable, phone, Internet, fiber, etc.
- cable company followed utility street-by-street lowering price
- publicity from this put city utility on the map!
- load shape determined by thermostats: control the thermostats =control demand
- key element that needs to be created: software to reflect generating profile to distributed thermostats
- less capital to build broadband to every customer than new generating capacity
- Q: what could make more towns do this? A: carbon tax would induce innovation
Andrew Revkin, New York Times
- moderated panel
- implementation of cap/trade: could be just trade and not have much climate impact
Bill St. Arnaud, Canarie
- reducing carbon is a business opportunity
- carbon tax: difficult political sell
- cap and trade: hidden tax on supply side only
- carbon neutrality: by mandate, in
- another approach: carbon rewards rather than carbon taxes — akin to loyalty programs
- virtualization: replace physical product, transportation, with networking
- US is the leader in virtualization: Hollywood, Silicon Valley applications, university innovation, culture of early adoption/Internet
- consumers responsible for 60% of CO2 emissions, 40% direct, 20% indirect
- examples:
- free WiFi on busses
- free broadband in home, bundled with energy (gas, electricity)
- network operator gets revenue based on energy reduction
- more efficient energy =increased consumption
PMN Note: nobody talked about using cold storage to time shift electrical demand for air conditioning to off hours. Also, nobody talked (much) about distributed generation. I think these are big deals.
From: Philip M Neches
Subject: F2C Conference, part 9
Spending on Infrastructure: American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (a.k.a. stimulus bill)
Sharon Gillett, State of MA, Commissioner, Telecom & Cable
- MIT researcher, economic impact of broadband
- recruited to commission in 2006 by new governor’s administration
- 351 towns, 32 with no commercial broadband, ~50 more with partial service (MA map)
- RFI for public/private broadband initiatives — just before economic meltdown
- stimulus bill: $4.7B through Dept. of Commerce – NTIA, $2.5B through Agriculture (Rural Utility Service – RUS) — $3.9B for infrastructure — $10M for IG to insure rules follow, no waste/fraud — obligate 1/2 of money by September
- BTOP: broadband technology opportunity program, comments due 4/13, then issue rules, then solicit first proposals; NTIA retains all decision making
- Q: where did map come from? A: survey of town administrators
- other issues: business (fat pipe) services, back-haul (middle mile)
Thomas Cohen, Attorney, Fiber-to-the-home Council
- firm filed proposed rules to BTOP and RUS on behalf of clients, including FTTH Council
- Agencies under tremendous pressure — first oversight hearings this week
- driving forces: get people to work, create infrastructure, do it quickly
- first $ out the door in the fall?
- looking for projects that meet purposes of the act, are pre-packaged, will work, applicants have experience
- Rural Utility Service: 100X their regular budget; 75% rural with insufficient access to high-speed broadband
- BTOP: bring access to unserved areas, under-served areas, public awareness, public service, training/education
- Q: were filings technology neutral? A: yes
- think of application as a full blown business plan, packaged from beginning, make the granting agency look good, show that the project can really be accomplished
- success will encourage Congress to fund more programs in the future
- look at what CA has funded already for examples
Jim Baller, Attorney, Broadband Coalition
- discuss funding opportunities in other parts of stimulus bill
- $48B transportation funds, $4B for smart grids, $8B public safety, etc.
- bill intended to be first inning in a 9 inning game
- bill requires FCC to develop a national broadband plan by Feb 2010
- puts many things in play years before it might happen otherwise, encourages cooperation among groups
- dialog stimulated on longer term broadband policy, stimulus bill does not set policy, more work in years to come
- mood in the country is challenging, but it encourages innovation: very optimistic
Harold Feld, Attorney, Public Knowledge
- blogger Tales from the Sausage Factory
- shift in how people are thinking about the role of government
- reaffirmed values from original Communications Act: universal access, community institutions (libraries, etc,), data driven policies (vs. ideologically driven)
- parts of government working with each other: NTIA, RUS, FCC, etc.
- broadband ecology: value it for what it does for people’s lives
- message to carriers: it’s not all about you!
- private entities can apply, but must show that grant is in public interest
- network neutrality, value of competition, interconnection
- new way of doing business in Washington: conventional wisdom didn’t work (against the bill)
- enormous opportunity, don’t get complacent
Joanne Hovis, CTC Communications
- broadband must serve local concerns
- areas of concern: rural vs. metro debate — a fight along these lines would not serve either rural or urban interests, but would help entrench incumbents
- central government involvement (in broadband): US now getting involved, Europe/Asia have done this for years, reason why they got ahead of US; stimulus bill implementation sets example
- definition of broadband: 50 to 100 Mbps scaling to 1 to 10 Gbps — incumbents talking in terms of 1 – 5 Mbps — need to keep pressure on keeping definition aspirational and forward looking, not backward looking (result in falling further behind world)
- role of states: concern for conflict-of-interest as advisor to communities and potentially competitive applicant for funds; potential for private interest influence (15 states bar localities from broadband service)
