More news from the Broadband Communities Summit in Dallas. Some very interesting stuff from the economic development track.
Michael Renders is the expert on FTTH and broadband survey research . He had some very interesting findings about the value of broadband and its impact on economic development. He estimates that a FTTH network brings $1600 per house/business passed per year in increased economic activity to a community. He also estimates that people will pay up to $5500 more for a house that is connected to a FTTH network than a similar house without such a connection.
Jane Patterson, former leader of broadband development in North Carolina said that 31% of rural North Carolinians made money off their network connection through home businesses and that another 14% are planning to start home businesses.
SNG’s Michael Curri talked about how doing business technology assessments provides great base data as well as a pathway for direct business assistance to increase business vitality. (Michael Curri did a webinar for Blandin Foundation within the last year.)
Christopher Mitchell provided a great list of success stories of how communities have spurred business growth by meeting local business’ bandwidth needs. He highlighted the variety of approaches that these communities have used, some community-wide, some business only.
Heather Gold, FTTH Council president, demonstrated their new FTTH Community ToolKit. It looks like a great tool! Check it out.
Greg Richardson of Civitium talked about his new concept – Crowdfiber. Essentially, this is using the Kickstarter model tied to the concept of Google Fiber. It combines the tools of social networks with the many online payment networks with the goal of raising funds to create fiberhoods, ala Google. Look at www.crowdfiber.com or follow him at @crowdfiber.
Andrew Cohill of Design Nine helps communities take control of their future. He believes that money is not the determinant factor. He says that there is plenty of money for broadband – cities and counties spend tons of money on all kinds of things with little thought and that plenty of money is spent on broadband in every community every month – the goal is to capture this money for locally owned and controlled projects.
Cohill believes that communities need to do the hard work of answering this question: What do we want our community to look like in 20 years? Vision drives the process and the results. Generally, this vision is similar between communities – new jobs, keep their kids, new businesses. The problem comes when people want these new results, but don’t want anything else to change!
In response to my question about examples of incumbents willingly partnering with communities, there were no great examples; the only examples were providers late to the initiative as an attempt to save some of their market share.
One interesting concept was the Reverse RFI: in essence, offering public assets like poles, right of way, fiber conduit, etc. available up for use by providers. The Reverse RFI is an opportunity to make better use of these public assets for better broadband.
This was one session of a very interesting day!
