For example, do you think your children would receive an education comparable to suburban youths who have unlimited service? Would your in-home health care (tele-medicine) service options be limited? Would the local business economy thrive and grow in this environment and help generate high paying tele-worker jobs and in-home businesses?
These are just some of the questions many people consider when selecting a place to live, raise their family, retire or start a business. We also need to ask these questions when planning for our community's digital infrastructure needs.
You could surf the web fairly easily and enjoy it with a 58K modem not so many years ago. The content, that is the information you viewed on the web, was designed for slow dial-up modem users.
The Internet, its content, as well as the way we use the web and what we use it for has dramatically changed over the past few years. Imagine trying to read a robust news Web site such as The Union's, peruse the South Yuba River wild flower photo galley, and then watch some video clips with a 58K modem.
The experience would be excruciatingly slow and frustrating. Unfortunately, there are many people in our community where dial-up modem service is their only option, and they wish they could get a full 58K at that.
Broadband is defined as high-speed, always-on Internet service. However, the level of service varies greatly. Though dial-up service is available to every resident who has a phone line, broadband is not. Broadband requires newer technology than what your basic phone utilizes. Service speeds can range from 384Kbs to over 45Mbs.
Broadband providers typically run fiber optic cables out to neighborhoods and even into homes and businesses to supply service. This is very challenging and costly for them to do in our community due to our mountainous topography, low density and sparsely spaced neighborhoods.
These attributes make Nevada County a great place to live but extremely uneconomical for traditional service providers to build out the required fiber optic network infrastructure. Service expansion is based on an urban and suburban business and infrastructure model that does not work in a rural foothill community. As such, we need to take action locally to insure we're not bypassed by the broadband highway.
The Internet is rapidly evolving everyday. On-line content and services are expanding dramatically across many categories, not just teenager blogs and YouTube videos, but with tele-medicine, remote monitoring and alerting, video calling, distance learning, and HDTV services.
The way we use the Internet is evolving too. The Internet is more popular to Generation "Y"ers than is television. No longer is it a "broadcast" medium like television or a magazine in that we are just consumers of information. We now practice the three "C"s, creating, collaborating, and contributing Ð increasingly placing more information on-line for family, friends, and others to share. Yet broadband services are typically sold with 1/3 the upload speed compared with download, a trend you will see changing.
Even if you're happy with your current broadband service, you should care about this local issue.
The next generation Internet rolling out right now to Universities and Government Institutions (where the Internet was born) can download a high definition full length feature movie in about 5 seconds. That same download takes a few hours on most current broadband services.
As Internet content and services evolve, your current broadband service may functionally "feel" like a 58K modem. There will be incremental increases in our local providers' broadband service speeds as technology advances, but they are greatly limited on how much they can accomplish and where they can extend services due to the lack of an extensive fiber optic infrastructure in our community.
Providing every County resident broadband service only solves half the problem. The real challenge is having a sustainable broadband infrastructure that can continuously keep pace with the Internet's growing broadband requirements.
It is critical to have a broadband infrastructure that allows our community to compete effectively with other communities (less than 50 miles away which already have fiber to the home) for new families, jobs, businesses and to retain the ones that are here now. Broadband service has become a fundamental factor for any community's economic sustainability and quality of life. It is considered a core community infrastructure, similar to roads, water and sewer.
So how do we address this challenge? Governor Schwarzenegger's Broadband Task Force recently released "The State of Connectivity" report which lays out goals and objectives to provide broadband service to every resident. The report states "Broadband is a fundamental aspect of the infrastructure required to educate our youth, create jobs, promote public safety, improve our standard of living, and deliver essential services like healthcare." You can read the report at www.calink.ca.gov/taskforcereport.
We need to change our local broadband conversations so that everyone can discuss this issue as an important community topic. Change them in a manner so they are not just for the people who talk in acronyms and have pocket protectors (I can say that because I am one of them). As such, it requires our entire community to be engaged in the discussions and decisions as to how we build and sustain this critical infrastructure.
There is quite a bit of broadband activity taking place in Nevada County now. Gil Mathews of the Economic Resource Council (www.ncerc.org) continues to lead the way through ongoing support of the Nevada County Community Broadband Leadership Council.
The ERC created and has supported this working group for over seven years now. You can find a broadband coverage map and list of providers on the ERC's website. This group along with a larger four-county group is working on various regional broadband studies and projects to help promote more services in our area. There is hope in the new options such as wireless solutions now available for rural areas.
Other communities have successfully met this challenge, and we are far from alone in this endeavor. I am sure you will read more about these projects as they progress forward. If you're interested in participating, please go to the ERC's website and volunteer.
Just last week, a consortium that includes Sprint-Nextel, Clearwire, Google, Comcast, and Intel committed to a $14 billion investment to build a nationwide WiMax high speed wireless broadband network over the next two years. Sprint failed at this before and Google had similar wireless project set backs. However, this is great news, especially if they expand services to underserved markets like ours. They may initially focus on the lucrative urban mobile user market. This is how wired broadband was rolled out too, first urban, then suburban, finally limited rural areas Ð don't expect a quick fix to our challenges.
The exact wonderful outdoor features and community elements that make where we live so great contribute to our broadband coverage and service limitations. It is simply too costly for the major broadband providers to invest large amounts of capital into a small market like Nevada County where it costs more to build their infrastructure out to reach relatively few potential customers.
As a community, we need to proactively get involved in meeting our local digital infrastructure requirements.
Steve Monaghan is Nevada County's Chief Information Officer, chairs the ERC's Community Broadband Leadership Council and was a member of the economic development working group of the Governors Broadband Task Force. Diese E-Mail-Adresse ist vor Spambots geschützt! Zur Anzeige muss JavaScript eingeschaltet sein!
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Steve Monaghan
Quelle/Source: The Union of Grass Valley, 13.05.2008
