-- Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs
When the Center for Digital Government coined the phrase Untethered Nation through the release of an original wireless strategic planning guide in 2005, the paper served as recognition that broadband wireless extended the value of public networks. Moreover, the guide was based on the modest proposition that broadband landline and wireless networks have earned a position alongside roads, bridges and ports as key public infrastructures that support commerce, education, recreation and government in communities across the nation.
The Center's intention with the original guide was to capture pioneering local governments' emerging practices for the benefit of those jurisdictions that follow their lead. Some success factors from the original Untethered Nation include:
- Understanding the responsibility of a provider (including fiscal stability).
- Committing to a long-term view of wireless deployment.
- Deciding whether public entities will be providers (utility), brokers or customers of wireless infrastructure.
- Reflecting infrastructure choice in architecture.
- Pursuing meaningful pilots in limited geography.
- Developing a funding model that accounts for vendor solvency and fiscal sustainability of wireless deployment.
- Building out full deployment based on newly earned and learned competence.
The original release was, and continues to be, one of the most popular downloads from the Center's white paper repository. Over time, readers have asked for follow-up work to address issues that were beyond the scope of the original, particularly in the area of when, whether and how to invest in this new public infrastructure. Enter Building the Untethered Nation II: Understanding the Vital Role of Local Governments in Wireless Broadband Implementations, the second paper in the series.
It begins by exploring the "Great Untethering," discussing the campaign thus far and looking for answers about where we are going. The paper examines widely divergent opinions regarding the role governments should play in enabling wireless broadband, from the municipal utility builder to a broker or buyer of wireless broadband.
In that context, the sequel guide discusses:
- The major role public safety plays and will play as the government's wireless anchor tenant.
- Business models that may be most appropriate for governments to pursue.
- Competing technologies and standards, and what's on the horizon for wireless.
Extending the Network to Where the Public's Work Gets Done
A new platform is under construction. This build-out is leading to an untethering of activities that had long been placebound due to the physically connected network cable. The rise of the mobile Internet extends the reach and value of the nation's network infrastructure.
It brings the promise of fulfilling Marshal McLuhan's famous 40-year-old prediction about the network becoming an extension of us and how we live. The new infrastructure will contribute to more mobility, and to a more interconnected network -- more denseness than has previously existed. The clarion call of "chips everywhere" is made more feasible with the addition of a broadband wireless infrastructure. Like the brain, these denser pathways with greater connections can support a vast expansion of new knowledge across all human activity.
The untethering will connect a vast swath of the nation's information and human resources. It will also wirelessly connect hard assets such as roads, buses, police and emergency vehicles, and military equipment. Ultimately, it has the potential to lessen the impact of catastrophes and to save lives.
Examples of new uses for this chip-embedded and wirelessly connected infrastructure are already emerging. Recall for a moment that brisk Thanksgiving evening in 2005. About 20 minutes from downtown Chicago, a westbound commuter train approached the Elmwood Park crossing. Unable to stop, the train plowed into five vehicles, creating a chain reaction with 17 cars, standing some cars on end before the train came to a final stop. All told, 16 people were injured, leaving three in critical condition. But what seems to be only another example of an all too-common event, and a reminder of the danger of cars attempting to race the light and getting caught inside the crossing gates, this particular occurrence contains a twist.
A remote strongbox-encased camera -- recently purchased with homeland security grant funds and connected to Cook County, Ill.'s new wireless network -- captured the scene on video as the event unfolded. The video became a prime piece of evidence in a subsequent transportation safety investigation that cleared the train's engineer of any wrongdoing.
Cook County's wireless remote security camera infrastructure platform is apparently already earning its keep.
Interestingly, the construction of a wireless broadband platform harkens back to a brilliant though costly military campaign waged more than 60 years ago. The primary author of this guide recently had the opportunity to stand at another kind of ground zero, in another place and from another era.
The ghosts remain at Arromanches on the wide beaches of Normandy, where the remnants of Mulberry Harbor pay tribute to British engineering ingenuity. Mothballed British vessels were assembled and limped their way across the English Channel completely under their own steam. They were anchored and sunk to form the first components of an artificial harbor just off the coast of France. Along with caissons, floating quays, moorings, floating roadways and docks, the harbor became a platform, without which the D-Day landings at Omaha and Utah beaches could never have been successfully executed.
As D Day -- a campaign that changed the face of Europe forever -- began, likewise, the mobile broadband infrastructure will form the technology platform that will support vast opportunities. New uses will emerge and new users will be attracted as the great untethering campaign unfolds. Still, as the mobile Internet flows into both major aspects and minor niches of human culture, it would be unrealistically optimistic to expect it will deploy seamlessly, without fits and starts.
Wireless broadband deployment is complicated by a highly volatile technology environment as higher speed cell phone, Wi-Fi, WiMAX and satellite technologies compete for market niche and market dominance. The discussion that follows [and is fully explored in the complete report] focuses on the great untethering campaign as it presently exists: examining governments' roles as builders, buyers and brokers; the state of the industry and its solutions; the shape and the elements of the emerging infrastructure.
The Role of Government: A Public or Private Investment?
Clearly, local governments are becoming deeply involved in wireless broadband, yet have significantly divergent opinions when it comes to thinking about and determining what role or roles they will play. Understandably, municipal leaders are struggling with the value propositions of building, buying or brokering wireless services.
In reality, many local governments do a little of each, mostly using hybrids that fit with the community's unique histories, priorities and politics. For this reason, the authors broached this discussion directly with those involved in daily wireless considerations, interviewing a cross section of municipal leaders in early 2006.
When CIOs and other county leaders think about wireless, deployment runs along a broad continuum -- from legacy wireless voice systems (such as an 800 megahertz radio system for first responders) to extensive Wi-Fi coverage throughout their jurisdictions.
According to a recent survey by the Center for Digital Government, governments lack consensus about which role is best to assume when involved in broadband, whether in wired or wireless deployments, as the chart below demonstrates. Still, governments and their leaders exist to make decisions and each government needs to decide what its primary role will be. These decisions will be driven by weighing cost against potential reward and scientific feasibility. The decision will, in the end, be determined within the context of each community's values.
The Choices: Build, Buy or Broker
Public entities are faced with three main role choices, although hybrids are likely to proliferate as infrastructure development moves from conceptual to the concrete.
Build -- An entity owns and builds the infrastructure and delivers wireless services across the network.
Buy -- These governments mainly consume services from third parties for internal operations, leaving citizen provision of wireless broadband to the myriad of private sector providers that decide where, when and if they will offer services within various geographic sub-regions.
Broker -- Governments acting as brokers may enter into agreement or contract with one or more wireless service providers to ensure service provision within their jurisdiction. These may also be referred to as public-private partnerships.
In a tradition that traces back to New Deal-era rural electrification, a considerable amount of people see government's role as an agency that helps bring broadband to rural, poor and underserved consumer markets where private sector development lags. This role selection involves a delicate dance, and at times, pitched battles with local incumbent telecom providers. Despite appearances, such conflicts are not governed by deliberate confrontational politics and mean-spiritedness, but arise based on the specific characteristics of the user community and the impact on private sector business models.
The Role of Governance in Wireless Broadband Initiatives
Another key ingredient in a successful wireless broadband initiative is identifying a good place to start. The best start to a local government initiative comes with a shared vision of the community leaders' role.
This vision can then lead to fundamental questions that must be answered before moving forward. Should the local government primarily be a consumer, whose job it is to create a "government only cloud"? Within the narrow role of consumer, government can either deliver or broker those services -- but only to that government itself.
Other governments have taken a different approach and view of emerging communications infrastructure, whether untethered or wired, in a more holistic manner. This view is broad. Such governments have taken action to promote universal broadband access and have looked to wireless opportunities to increase the speed of the build-out at a significantly lower cost. They see the world through the lens of the municipal utility. Yet as governments will soon discover, duplication of infrastructure serves no one's interests.
For example, in jurisdictions where current penetration rates for Internet connectivity exceed 90 percent, municipal leaders claim they did not need to build their own wireless infrastructure for public broadband because it would be duplicative of existing private sector infrastructures.
Another variable affecting governance roles was reported by counties that have large urban cities within their bounds. These counties were often specifically prohibited by statute from providing emergency services such as police and fire. These entities tended to house lower consumers of wireless because they were not primary providers of emergency services.
Still other counties that cover very wide geographic regions report they have encountered difficulty from a cost standpoint deploying universal wireless broadband, even when it is badly needed. However, even in these counties we are beginning to see some innovative and targeted Wi-Fi projects and, in some instances, emergency services have became anchor tenants for more ambitious wireless deployments.
Governance: Summing Up the Fight
If local governments do decide to own and control a broadband municipal utility, this direction requires delicate balancing of cost against economic opportunity. Clearly, managing the expectations of private sector providers, legislatures and the courts becomes a major challenge.
Some counties have large coverage areas. In these instances, the goal of public, universal wireless broadband appears to be less attractive from a cost perspective. Due to extensive lobbying efforts by influential telecommunications providers, 14 states have already placed some restrictions on municipalities from building their own wireless or wired broadband networks, adding a number of implementation barriers.
Nevertheless, governments are often wrested into setting up their own networks as a response to complaints from constituents who say they are ignored by their incumbent telecom company, which they claim provides poor, little or no broadband service in their geographic location. Telecom providers often respond by saying they do provide this service, but customer demand is low, thereby increasing their cost. Customers respond saying they refuse to purchase broadband services for as high a price as incumbents offer, particularly if the company is unresponsive from a customer service standpoint. Providers then argue that although there are some areas where coverage is not provided, this is simply a temporary situation and the market will work this out over time.
This argument is, of course, of little solace to businesses, which are relocating or opening new businesses and don't have time to wait for the market to catch up. Many public officials can recall angry calls from businesses claiming they were being forced to relocate or lose their business because they were unable to get the service they needed when they needed it.
Yet these same providers have taken their case to state legislatures and argued convincingly that local municipalities put the taxpayer at risk by carrying unsustainable, long-term debt. Furthermore, they argue that since technology is changing so quickly, localities will soon be saddled for years with outdated technology infrastructures. The point is that such infrastructures will drive citizens to abandon subscriptions with local government entities in favor of the nimble, private sector, advanced technologies.
While the debate continues, some cities and counties have chosen to build, maintain and operate municipal wireless networks themselves. They obtain the necessary funds, perhaps through issuing bonds or seeking lines of credit, to build the network, then act as an ISP by selling Internet access at various speeds to interested residents.
Other cities and counties have created partnerships. Government Technology associate editor Shane Peterson describes such partnerships in this way: "In one popular arrangement, a private sector company assumes the upfront costs of deploying the necessary network infrastructure, such as antennas and access points, and the municipality allows the companies free access to streetlights or traffic lights in the municipal right of way to mount the equipment. Established telephone companies raise the loudest opposition to these municipal maneuvers because the companies have the most to lose. No matter if the municipality builds and owns the network or strikes a deal with a private-sector partner to get the network off the ground, an established telephone company could lose many customers to the new service and losing customers means losing money."
Irrespective of whether a government assumes the build, buy or broker role, the one role that government cannot afford to assume is that of no involvement.
Excerpted from "Building the Untethered: Understanding the Vital Role of Local Governments in Wireless Broadband Implementations," by Al Sherwood, Senior Fellow for the Center for Digital Government and former deputy CIO for the state of Utah, Paul W. Taylor, Ph.D., Chief Strategy Officer for the Center for Digital Government and the Center for Digital Education and Richard J.H. Varn, Ph.D., Senior Fellow for the Center for Digital Government, former CIO for the state of Iowa and former Iowa state senator.
A full copy of the strategy paper can be downloaded here.
