|
Broadband
Everywhere
Virginia
localities gotta have it. But telcom companies give up crucial mapping data only when someone pries
it out of their cold, dead fibers.
When
Jean Tingler fires up her Sun Sparc workstation in
the Virginia Economic Development Partnership
office, she taps into one of the most sophisticated
economic development databases in the country. On a
large, wall-mounted screen, she can display the
location of industrial and office parks and their
proximity to highways, railroads, airports, water
lines, gas lines and electric transmission lines.
She can overlay political jurisdictions, terrain
features, property lines, employment data, business
location data and just about any site-selection
intelligence that can be reduced to map form.
But
one critical set of data is riddled with holes –
the location of fiber-optic trunk lines, SONET
rings, points of presence and other elements of Virginia’s
telecommunications infrastructure. “Every prospect
wants to know [this information],” says Tingler,
director of information technology for the VEDP.
“I can’t think of a project in the last couple
of years when they didn’t want to know.”
Telcom
companies do share the information when responding
to location-specific inquiries, Tingler says, but
economic developers could use the information much
earlier in the site-selection process. For one, VEDP
can’t wow prospects with the data in the state’s
state-of-the-art presentation facility. For another,
the Partnership can’t integrate the information
into its marketing initiatives.
VEDP
isn’t the only group seeking the telecoms’
mapping data. Local economic developers lust for it,
too. So do local leaders who want to extend
the geographic reach of broadband access to their
regions and localities. By identifying the holes in
local telecom infrastructure, many hope to cobble
together a critical mass of unserved customers,
supplemented perhaps by federal grants or
tobacco-indemnification funds, to
induce telephone, cable or wireless companies to
extend their service.
But
telecommunications companies have legitimate reasons
for guarding their data closely. If the location of
every fiber line and switching station were laid out
on a map, competitors could easily identify where
the profitable, big-bandwidth customers are – and
spot pockets that were underserved. In the wake of
9-11, phone companies also worry about
terrorists. Some even fret about corporate sabotage.
A loss of service to a bandwidth-dependent customer
could be devastating, says Earl Bishop, executive
vice president of the Virginia Telecommunications
Industry Association. It’s something to be guarded
against.
The
issue has heated up since the
telecommunications crash. Devastated by the collapse
of capital markets, declining profits, a glut of
capacity and the realization that the demand for big
bandwidth will be slower to materialize than once
hoped, telecommunications companies have curtailed
their capital investments drastically. If a
community doesn’t have broadband now, no one’s
likely to deliver it any time soon.
At
the same time, the conviction is near universal that
access to broadband is vital for any community,
urban or rural, to be economically competitive in
the information-intensive Knowledge Economy. In Virginia’s
strategic plan for technology, the Warner
administration set the ambitious goal of extending
high-speed, high-quality, affordable access to
“100 percent of all households and businesses”
that request it by January 2006. Similarly, in a
recent task-force meeting to guide the development
of the administration’s strategic plan for
economic development, the goal of extending
“broadband everywhere” was one of the few
proposals to generate enthusiastic and broad-based
endorsement.
Meanwhile,
telecom mapping initiatives are under way in other
states. Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky
and
Maryland
have launched serious programs to ascertain the
quality of broadband service in their states. As the
May 2001 report of LinkMichigan puts it:
“Improving access to high-speed telecommunications
services is the most important state infrastructure
issue for the 21st century.”
Virginia
has several broadband-related initiatives underway,
too, but there’s no central direction. VEDP and
regional economic development groups are focusing
mainly on building their map of telecommunications
infrastructure for use in attracting industry.
Meanwhile,
Virginia’s
Center for Innovative Technology is examining
broadband from a customer perspective to ascertain
the quality and affordability of service,
particularly in rural areas.
By
partnering with regional economic developers, many
of whom are developing their own maps, and
collaborating with CIT and other groups, Tingler has
made some progress in assembling a statewide telecom
map. But it hasn’t been easy. She has leased data
from a number of telephone companies, which gives
the VEDP a better idea of what’s out there, but
the leasing provisions restrict the Partnership’s
ability to share the data with its regional
partners. “We got worn out by the whole thing,”
she says.
Meanwhile,
Karen Jackson, director of eBusiness Outreach for
CIT, coordinates a mapping committee that includes
virtually everyone in the state with an interest in
the subject. The issues get complex very quickly,
says Jackson. Virginia
is
well served by monster fiber-optic trunk lines, but
knowing the location of the information highways
doesn’t tell you how well positioned a particular region
is to bridge the “last mile” gap between the
trunk lines and the customer. Identifying the on-ramps
to the information superhighway is critical.
Making
the job even more difficult, different types of players – traditional
land-line telephone companies, cable companies and
wireless companies – deploy different, continually
evolving technologies. Someone with a fiber fixation may not
appreciate the fact that DSL service provided
through an old-fashioned copper line can provide
broadband service that suits the needs of most
people. For consumers, it’s the quality and price
of the service – not the technology – that
really matters.
There
are other complexities to consider. It’s one thing
to plot the route of a fiber-optic trunk line, for
instance; it’s quite another to figure out how
ownership of that line has been parceled out to
different telecom players. It’s one thing to know
that a certain neighborhood receives broadband
service; it’s quite another to know how fast that
service is. The state of Kentucky
has found that Internet-access speeds vary widely
over the same kinds of pipes.
Then
there’s the job of integrating data that’s
formatted differently by a myriad of sources. VEDP
can fill in some of the picture. Two state buying
cooperatives – COVANet, which supplies broadband
mainly to state agencies, and Network Virginia,
which serves mainly state universities, schools and
libraries – have other pieces of the puzzle. The Virginia
Economic
Bridge
is
undertaking a mapping initiative in Southwest
Virginia,
while the
Richmond
and Charlottesville
regions have assembled their own local data. Meanwhile, the
Federal Communications Commission can provide
certain categories of data. “Who’s going to end
up owning all this stuff?” asks
CIT's Jackson. Who’s going to tie it all together in a
usable format? “I don’t have a clue.”
The
Secretary of Technology’s strategic plan for
technology provides some general guidelines for what
comes next. The plan recommends designating “an
entity” to act as a central clearinghouse and
coordinate the state’s broadband initiatives.
It’s not yet clear who that entity will be.
Additionally,
the Department of Information Technology, in
partnership with the state’s geographic
information network, “will develop maps of
broadband coverage” that will incorporate
information gleaned from the COVANet and Network
Virginia contracts, as well as FCC data and local
exchange carriers’ central offices. This will be
plotted against demographic data from the latest
Census report such as income, education, computer
ownership and cable television access.
That’s
all very nice, but there still will be gaps in
the data. If Virginia
is
serious about mapping its telecom infrastructure and
service, the state needs the guys at the top to get
involved. The governor
needs to hold a pow wow with five or six of the top
telecom executives in the state and sell the vision
of broadband everywhere. He should acknowledge the
executives' legitimate concerns, but he also should
insist that they work creatively with his top policy
guys on ways to address those concerns. If
legislation is needed, say, to modify the Freedom of
Information Act, by which sensitive data might be
leaked to the public, he should bring key members of
the General Assembly into the process as well.
Verizon, Sprint and the other telecoms
may risk
tipping off competitors if they share data, but they
also also have the most to gain from a broadband-
anywhere
initiative. Instead of focusing on what they might
lose, they should be taking the lead to
stimulate Virginia's appetite for bandwidth. They
should be showing businesses new and creative uses
of broadband. They should be actively soliciting
proposals for public-private partnerships to extend
broadband's reach to under-served geographic
markets. They should be working with economic
developers to attract large, bandwidth-intensive
businesses into the state. If the market for
telecommunications services grows in Virginia,
everyone wins -- the telcoms most of all.
--
October
14, 2002
|
