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Note: nice piece - the last mile for most rural communities will never see the light of day on a telco or cableco business plan - it will be the cities and municipalities that serve their residents.

from: The New Dominion

A last mile in their shoes: Rural communities struggle to get even broadband footing

Story by Chris Graham
newdominion@ntelos.net

networkcablesweb.gifIt doesn’t take a mathematician to figure out why Nelson County lacks even adequate broadband infrastructure.

The county’s 15,000 residents are spread out over 471 square miles - and without a true population center, it is essentially cost-prohibitive for broadband carriers to be able to lay down the fiber that would be needed to accommodate high-speed Internet-access needs.
That’s not their problem, of course - though the fact that this issue is not the problem of broadband carriers doesn’t make Maureen Corum’s job any easier.

“People are tired of us saying it’s coming, it’s coming - they want results,” said Corum, the director of economic development and tourism in Nelson, on whose lap the responsibility for coming up with a solution to the county’s broadband problem has fallen.

County leaders estimate that it would cost $1 million for the local government - read: local taxpayers - to foot the bill for putting in the necessary broadband infrastructure on its own.

Other Rural Virginia localities have ended up going that route - but Nelson County doesn’t want to have to do that unless it decides that doing so makes the most sense.

And so it is that Nelson is in the midst of a two-phase study and planning process through which it hopes to be able to figure out which of several routes would be best to take with regard to the buildup of broadband infrastructure.

Over the Blue Ridge in Rockbridge, Rockbridge County and the cities of Buena Vista and Lexington are getting a similar effort under way.

“We’re in phase one right now - and what that means for us is that we’re going to be doing some studies, one of what potential exists here for fiber, could we make a solid business case for fiber-optic cable to be installed throughout the cities and other options for the more rural areas in the county,” said Tim Reamer, the director of economic development in Buena Vista, who is heading up the work on the development of the Rockbridge Area Telecommunications Plan.

“Ultimately, what we hope to do is figure out what the network would look like and how it would operate,” Reamer said.

***

It’s not just an issue in Rural Virginia. Joe May, the chair of the Science and Technology Committee in the Virginia House of Delegates, lives just outside Leesburg in densely-populated Northern Virginia - “and until recently, I had 12K dialup,” May said.

“From a purely practical standpoint, lack of availability of broadband in the underserved areas is a major problem,” said May, who sponsored legislation passed by the General Assembly and signed into law this year that allows local governments to apply lower personal-property tax rates for property owned by wireless broadband service providers and another piece of legislation that specifies that the state can enter into public-private partnerships to provide the technology and infrastructure necessary to deploy wireless broadband services to schools, businesses and residential areas.

The political effort comes on top of several years of hard work in the trenches in Richmond and across the Commonwealth.

“This has been an evolutionary process,” said Karen Jackson, the director of the Virginia Office of Telework Promotion and Broadband Assistance, which Gov. Tim Kaine created in 2006.

It was during the administration of former governor Jim Gilmore that the state began focusing its attention on broadband issues. The effort ramped up during the term of former governor Mark Warner, who shifted the emphasis from the business sector to the nuts and bolts of infrastructure.

With the creation of the Office of Telework Promotion and Broadband Assistance, and the appointment by Kaine of a Broadband Roundtable that is being chaired by Warner, the current administration is trying to bring the visions of its two predecessors into reality.

“We’ve been working the last year, year and a half, to get broadband up the backbone of the Eastern Shore and across over on the eastern side of the Middle Peninsula. At this point, we’re well along with that - it just takes time to get the funding mechanisms together between public and private and also to work with the respective groups that have to study and analyze,” said Glen Sink, the executive director of the Center for Rural Virginia, which has been participating in the joint effort.
“There’s work being done to run additional backbone over in the mountain region in the Valley - and an initiative being done up in the upper section of Southwest, around Bland and Bluefield and through there, there’s work there to get backbone,” Sink said.

“The state is pretty well serviced with the basic backbone infrastructure - but there are some areas as we’re going forward where that backbone is real important to redundancy and to the increasing level of service that the world is looking to for Internet activities,” Sink said.

The issue that is pressing right now isn’t so much the availability of broadband infrastructure as what is called the “last mile of broadband” - from the cable to the business or home. Service providers are turning their attention away from the last mile in rural areas to deploying next-generation technologies in metro areas where the presumption of profitability is greater.

That is the dilemma that counties like Nelson and Rockbridge are facing right now - trying to work almost against market forces to achieve a solution to their own development needs without having to break the backs of their taxpayers to do it.

“What we’re doing is basically coming up with a strategic plan for future implementation,” said Maureen Corum in Nelson County. “You have to build a business case that says what’s currently here - and that’s one of the projects in phase one of this study. What technology is currently available - and at what price. So we’re talking to the ISPs - and that’s hard, because they don’t want to give you their tower locations and price points and things like that. But we’re working on it.”
“Ultimately, there are a couple of things that could result from these studies. One is that some of the larger telecommunication providers could see that there is an opportunity in this area. The second - and this is not outside the realm of possibility - is that the jurisdictions themselves could move forward with implementing a fiber-optic plan. That’s what we hope to find out through the first part of this project,” said Tim Reamer in Buena Vista and Rockbridge.

***

The Office of Telework Promotion and Broadband Assistance is working with localities across the state to help them achieve solutions to the last-mile problem.

“There’s a lot of money out there - but what we’re finding is that once it gets into communities, it’s not being aggregated. So first responders are spending it on what they want, the schools are doing the same thing, hospitals and clinics and whatever are spending money on what they want to spend. Well, that’s great - except that if you aggregated those dollars that are coming in, and still stayed within the rules and regulations of each of the funding sources, you could probably get a bigger bang for your buck and cover more than what they’re currently doing,” Karen Jackson said.

So communities need to be smarter about how they allocate the resources that they do find available to them. That’s part one of Jackson’s message. Part two is that she would like to see communities work together across their political boundary lines as they can to achieve similar economies of scale.

“We’re going to have to be extremely creative in partnerships and anything that we can pull out. The locality-by-locality theory is good, but at some point it would be nice to have them all interrelate to one another - so we have to be careful that as we go locality to locality that we don’t start to create a bunch of islands that don’t talk to one another,” Jackson said.

Communities working through this problem would also be well-advised to watch what others are doing to attack the problem.

“Manassas has used a cable franchise to do broadband over power lines. Franklin County used a public-private-partnership model to do wireless broadband in their county. There are a lot of examples out there - and there are models out there that nobody’s used yet. To my knowledge, nobody’s leveraged the (Public-Private Education Facilities and Infrastructure Act) yet. How would that look? How would you structure that kind of deal?” Jackson said.

Glen Sink at the Center for Rural Virginia has a specific kind of public-private partnership in mind.

“You and I read about the rural electrification of America and the rural electric co-operatives that were formed. Telephone co-operatives were formed in the Valley. And the discussion we’re having from a policy perspective is - is there a need for Internet co-operatives?” Sink said.

“I think we’re going to see over the next year the evolution of this as a way to serve that last mile where communities step up and form themselves a co-operative and make some investment and create that mess, whatever level it is. And I know that our electric co-operatives in Virginia have been a part of that and are looking at that extensively,” Sink said.

Maureen Corum in Nelson County said county leaders are studying the co-op model.

“We feel very strongly that it’s got to be a public-private partnership,” Corum said. “We don’t want to get into the business of being an ISP. What we want to do is find those providers, make them understand that there is demand, that they can make money here, and bring them in. It may mean that we help build the infrastructure - that is a role for government. But operations - no.
“The co-operative is an excellent business model - and the fact that we have an electric co-op here on the ground with us pushing us to look at other solutions is excellent,” Corum said.

House of Delegates member Joe May is also on board with the public-private-partnership model.

“My initial thought was we might well have to go to an Rural Electrification Administration-like program to get this done. But that had a little more bureaucracy in it than I really would like to get involved in. I’m willing if it’s absolutely necessary - but it looks like public-private partnerships will be a much better approach to it, and it does reduce the amount of bureaucracy,” May said.

“By going the public-private route, you get private companies that have the knowhow and the equipment and link them up with the local governments in a true partnership, and let them provide the customer base, and they do know how to bill for things and basically how to keep a customer base organized and on target,” May said.

Toward the public end of a public-private partnership, May sponsored the legislation that allows the state to get involved in providing some seed money to localities working to get a broadband Internet system up and running.

“I consider broadband to be a utility - just like any other utility. So if they can use the funding for other utilities, such as sewer and water, why not use it for broadband? Broadband is becoming every bit as much a utility as those others are,” May said.

***

One stumbling block that comes up from locality to locality has to do with the level of technological expertise that members of county boards of supervisors and city and town councils have - and more importantly assume they don’t have.

“I was just on the Eastern Shore, in Onancock, and the town council had just come from a broadband meeting the night before - and the problem was that the people who came in and made the presentation were too technical,” said former governor Mark Warner, who made his fortune in the telecom business before going into politics and thus is no stranger to geekspeak.

“The challenge is to make sure that it doesn’t come out as technospeak, technobabble, so that people can understand what it is that they’re talking about,” Warner said.

Karen Jackson with the Office of Telework Promotion and Broadband Assistance is already working toward this end.

“We get comments from people who serve on boards of supervisors who come to some of our educational classes and say, We need to get smart. We’re used to making decisions about water and sewer and things that have been around for a very long time - and now we’re being asked to make decisions about wi-fi and technology and towers, and it’s all new ground,” Jackson said.

“The final piece of this is - once you’ve got all this information, how do you get it in the hands of communities that need it, and how do you get it implemented?” Jackson said. “We can produce all this information, and we can get all these guidebooks put together and get everything lined up so it’s really kind of turnkey - you know, if you’re a community, take this thing and work your way through it, and at the end of it, you’ll be ready to do a broadband deployment. But if a community still can’t get their arms around this stuff, what do we need? Do we need staff to be able to do that? Is the information enough?

“We’re really going to be looking at how to handle the community outreach - and how to get this stuff to them and make it useful so they can walk their way through it and actually come out with a deployment at the end of it,” Jackson said.

***

Let’s do something that people like Karen Jackson and Glen Sink and Tim Reamer and Maureen Corum wouldn’t dare allow themselves to do right now. Let’s assume that they achieve their ends, and there isn’t a locality in Rural Virginia that isn’t as fully connected as any metro area.

“Are we competing on a level playing field now? No,” Corum said of her efforts in the economic-development arena, which are hampered by the last-mile issue.

“We are feeling the pressure - from Northern Virginia, from Lynchburg to the south, and even from the Valley - in terms of growth,” Corum said. “Economic development in Nelson County is about balance. It’s retaining and preserving the quality of life while at the same time making sure that folks do have good jobs - whether they choose to outcommute, because they don’t want that job here, or they can telecommute.”

“A magazine called Area Development puts out a site-selection survey every year - both for site selectors and for corporate representatives. And broadband continues to move its way up that list. It’s in the top 10 - and this list includes things like workforce,” Reamer said.

“These aren’t extravagant things. It’s up there and is considered as important in a lot of ways as the skilled-labor base that exists in a community and the interstates that are in close proximity or the transportation network. So yeah, it’s something that continues to be of great importance, and it’s growing every year,” Reamer said.

For further reading

Center for Rural Virginia - www.cfrv.org

Virginia Office of Telework Promotion and Broadband Assistance - www.otpba.vi.virginia.gov