community broadband networks

Carroll County is a bedroom community, with a variety of economies all around it. Washington, D.C., Camp David, Baltimore, Harrisburg, Fort Detrick, and the Aberdeen Proving Ground are a few of the places surrounding Carroll County. There is very little major transportation infrastructure and no major waterways. Many of the county's 167,000 people commute daily to jobs outside of the bullseye.

Gary Davis, Chief Information Officer at the Carroll County Public Schools (CCPS) and Chairman of the Carroll County Public Network (CCPN) started at the school district in 2002 and immediately recognized that the telecommunications arrangement was insufficient.

Schools and other facilities were connected to the hub via 1.5 Mbps T1 connections and the whole wide-area-network was connected to the Internet via an expensive Frame Relay DS3 connection. The total cost ran as high as $600,000 per year.  

When CCPS approached Verizon about increasing bandwidth, Verizon’s proposal was extremely cost-prohibitive. Verizon wanted a long-term commitment that resulted in more than 10 times their current costs. Basically, Verizon would own the network but capital costs would be funded by CCPS and maintained with ridiculously high recurring fees. The return on investment for Verizon was just too low owing the the community demographics.

At that time, Davis met Robert Wack of the Westminster City Council and the two compared notes. Davis' vision for Carroll County Public Schools and Wack's ideas for Westminster and Carroll County were very similar. Both involved a high-speed network and Westminster is currently involved in its own municipal network project (to be covered in an upcoming post).

A 2003 feasibility study on telecommunications upgrades for the school and a second broader feasibility study for the entire county in 2005 resulted in a loose confederation between CCPS, Carroll County Government, Carroll Community College, and the Carroll County Public Library system. Davis is proud of the fact that the CCPN has broken through past silos. The public sector has worked together in Carroll County, preventing the rampant duplication of efforts that used to be the norm. 

Davis says the first focus was on improving educational opportunities with the network. The four entities were able to work together as the CCPN to secure better pricing by leveraging economies of scale. Carroll County applied $7.4 million from its capital project fund to get the project started, the original estimate in the 2005 feasibility study. CCPS also applied funds from its technology budget that had originally been earmarked for upgrades to phone switches.

Switching from the old telephone system to a VoIP system for the district's approximately 1,000 phone lines amounts to about 40% of today's savings at CCPS. Davis estimates annual savings to CCPS to be around $400,000, which also factors in costs associated with the network. Turning off old T1 connections and abandoning the pricey DS3 connection also contribute significantly to annual savings. Connections between district facilities now vary between 1 and 10 gigs.

Reducing spending is great, he says, but what really matters is the way the network improves the ability to educate. The old T1s and DS3 would not have been able to deliver the bandwidth for applications educators use today. For example, CCPS is experimenting by using the network to connect kids across the county who want to participate in Advanced Placement classes. These classes might not be offered otherwise because there may not be enough students at one location. In the pilot program, several students from schools across the county participate through video streaming, concentrating educator efforts and creating a more vibrant learning experience.

CCPS shares a 500 Mbps Internet connection with the local public library, ten times faster than the old DS3. The public library is also on a separate power grid, which makes it attractive as a secure back up data center for the school district, Carroll County Government, and Carroll Community College.

As the network has expanded, the CCPN has used a variety of funding. A state awarded BTOP grant, with matching funds from the county economic development fund, added to the original school district and county investment. Davis estimates that the county has invested about $12 million over the course of 10 years.

The network now consists of three rings with the fourth central ring in Westminster, the county seat. "Spokes" lead out to the southern end of the county, where community leaders hope to connect with Frederick or Baltimore County. Eight municipalities use the network's 110 miles of fiber over 450 square miles in Carroll County. There is one school in the northern part of the county that is not connected with fiber but uses high speed wireless supported by the fiber.

The network has changed education in Carroll County and done so with significant savings. Davis acknowledges that the change came about through the work of the CCPN Administration, which he describes as an ideal model. "Each member organization contributes its leaders' expertise and what all members CAN do together, they DO do together," says Davis.

For CCPS, the results speak for themselves.

The nonprofit Merit Network, Inc., of Michigan, started in 1966 as a way to provide networking help to the state's research and educational facilities across the state. Over the years, the organization has kept up with the times and is now spearheading the Rural, Education, Anchor, Community and Healthcare - Michigan Middle Mile Collaborative (REACH-3MC II) project.

The project will bring connectivity to community anchor institutions and underserved rural communities in the Upper and Lower Peninsulas. The exentive fiber project is funded with two Broadband Technologies Opportunities Program (BTOP) grants totaling $103.2 million. When completed, Upper and Lower Michigan will house an additional 2,287 miles of fiber.

Matt Roush recently reported on the project, which is well underway in Monroe County in the southern part of the state. Roush brought news about installation of telecommunications huts, an early step in expanding the network into northern Michigican. From the article:

REACH-3MC will connect 105 community anchor institutions as the network is built and will pass 900 more over time. Led by Merit Network, REACH-3MC includes sub-recipients from the private sector to make broadband readily available to households and businesses that lack adequate service options in the 52 counties that make up the project service area.

For more details on the project, including a map of the proposed routes, follow this link to a PDF of the project overview.

As we feared, the compromise may have been compromised by the uncompromising power of AT&T lobbyists. Once again, we learn that they struck at the last hour and may have put local schools and libraries on the chopping block.

If WiscNet goes and stimulus funds are returned, local institutions will have to double and triple their telecom budgets just to continue receive adequate service. This is intolerable. Until we hear otherwise, we encourage people to continue contacting their elected officials [pdf] in Wisconsin to express their opinion on the matter.

Some more details here and here.

Update: The Assembly will now be meeting at 1:00 rather than this morning. Rumors abound that they are still discussing how to "compromise" on AT&T's attack on the schools and libraries.

Unfortunately, this afternoon, I'll be leaving for a short camping trip (AT&T is not going to ruin my trip) and I have some canned posts queued up, so I won't be able to cover what happens in Wisconsin immediately. For news on the stimulus grant impact, follow WI_Broadband and for news about WiscNet, follow ijohnpederson and his live blog.

2nd Update: To understand how AT&T has so much power in Wisconsin, check out who "donates" the most money.

Internet 2 President H. David Lambert offers some sober words [pdf] to Wisconsin's Governor Walker regarding an 11th hour provision inserted into legislation by AT&T and its telco allies that will kill WiscNet, an essential telecommunications network serving libraries and schools throughout the state. We wanted to note it because it goes beyond WiscNet alone and reminds us that companies like AT&T simply have the wrong incentives to be solely trusted with the future of something as important as ensuring everyone has affordable, reliable, and fast access to the Internet.

Dear Governor Walker,

Today we write to ask for your leadership in removing sections 23-26 of the University Omnibus legislation.

For the United States to be a leader in the global economy, it is critical that government policy does not stifle innovation. One way to inadvertently undermine state and national economic competitiveness goals is to bar those who have been successful in the past from continuing to innovate while creating bureaucratic rules to limit who is eligible to provide services to the marketplace. And, without question, the University of Wisconsin's initiatives and Wisconsin's not for profit Wiscnet have been resounding successes that have changed the lives of citizens in Wisconsin and throughout the world.

Draft language Bars Innovation and Reduces Market Choice

The University of Wisconsin has long been recognized as one of the critical contributors responsible for the creation of the Internet. It was the University's faculty leaders who championed the idea of interlinked networks over distance and who prototyped those ideas in real-world settings that evolved into the Internet. Even as telephone providers steadfastly argued that the concept of the Internet would fail, faculty leaders at the University of Wisconsin built the large-scale innovation prototypes that led to the development of the global Internet.

It would be the height of irony if sections 23-26 of the University Omnibus legislation were passed, as those provisions would prohibit the University from being directly involved in proving out further developments of innovations in the Internet that it helped create. This would deny the University the ability to participate in the innovation cycle that created the market for commercial providers (including those who support the 11th hour insertion of sections 23-26) to provide their services in the first place. Commercial providers who many years ago argued that the Internet cannot succeed were wrong, and those commercial providers today who support the addition of sections 23-26 are equally wrong when they claim that proven innovation leaders like the University should be barred from participating in innovation, thereby ensuring that they cannot repeat their successes. Such an approach may benefit other countries (because the U.S. will continue to fall behind in comparison), and it may benefit profit-maximizing telecommunications entities that can then charge higher rates for services or for outdated technologies. But such restrictions surely do not benefit the citizens of Wisconsin or this country.

According to the well-known adage, "those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it." Here, where history provides a roadmap of what works and who made it work, those who refuse to learn from history are not only missing out on a golden opportunity, they are also jeopardizing the United State's leadership role in the global economy. Any such move that places the U.S. at risk should not be taken lightly, let alone this quickly. There simply is no need to rush to pass legislation to limit our options.

The citizens of Wisconsin know how the Internet has played a critical role in creating and growing the economy that now shapes our global business environment. The Internet creates opportunities for Wisconsin businesses to compete not just in state or regionally, but globally too. To stay competitive, Wisconsin needs the most innovative network technologies, and it needs innovative network providers like Wiscnet and the University of Wisconsin to continuously push the envelope of possibilities and assure that future innovations are possible in Wisconsin.

The Proposal would reduce the University to a Third-World Player in the Global Race for Research Leadership. The University of Wisconsin is also recognized globally as a major research institution with collaborations in science, technology and business reaching throughout the United States and globally. Big science is increasingly global, with the global high-energy physics collaboration now centered in Geneva and distributed through networks, with astronomers now reliant on networked observatories outside the US and with bioscience reliant on genome databases also networked throughout the world. Over $1B in annual research funding that flows in to the Wisconsin economy depends on the University's ability to connect globally to the critical and massive information sets available only through research and education networks, like those operated by the University, Wiscnet and Internet2.

Yet, just when other states in the country are scrambling to invest in network infrastructure to help their universities rise to meet the international research and education challenge, this legislation could essentially disconnect Wisconsin from the global research it now leads. The result would be devastating. As the only intensive research institution in the United States that would be barred from participating in its own networks, Wiscnet and Internet2, the University, with respect to the ability to participate in global research, would become an immediate equivalent of a third-world University.

With respect to the University of Wisconsin's Research programs, serviced by its own networks and Wiscnet in the state and by Internet2 at the national and global scale, the essential and global collaborative nature of the research work would be effectively ended if sections 23-26 were passed. Such sections are so sweeping and overly broad that they would render the University of Wisconsin the only research-intensive university in the country that was not permitted to participate in 21st century science, which relies on 21st century connectivity like that, provided by the University and Wiscnet.

Harm to Government Users of Services

Finally, to artificially limit competition for the provision of services to governmental entities, such as schools, libraries, community colleges and local government, will likely result in higher prices and lower quality services to such governmental entities. Forcing governmental entities to pay more for their services (while potentially receiving lower quality), is counterintuitive in this age of tremendous budget issues and emphasis on quality of education. The legislature should be looking for further ways to expand options in the marketplace for schools and libraries — not for ways to restrict such options.

We are hopeful that the last-minute language restricting Wisconsin's flexibility to innovate and compete on the global stage will be rethought by the committee and the legislature. Restricting the University from participating in innovation, restricting the private sector not-for-profit Wiscnet from competing with other private companies for the state's business and ignoring the University's role in creating the very Internet technology that these private companies now wish to profit from will not serve Wisconsin, or the nation, well.

We strongly urge the committee and legislature to reconsider and remove sections 23-26.