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from: Midwest Business

HB 1500 is the Katrina of Telecommunications in Illinois
4/4/2007

Carlini’s Comments, MidwestBusiness.com’s oldest column, runs every Wednesday. Its mission is to offer the common man’s view on business and technology issues while questioning the leadership and visions of “pseudo” experts.

Carlini's Comments CHICAGO – Has your network infrastructure plan collapsed? Fort Wayne’s network infrastructure in Indiana is wired and inspired.

Some states (including Illinois) are looking at passing statewide bills that will give AT&T the ability to have one statewide franchise in order to put in Project Lightspeed or U-verse without having to negotiate with each municipality. I think that is great. Pass HB 1500 in Illinois. Have a statewide franchise.

In exchange for a statewide franchise, though, there must be a mandate set that every business and household has a network connection of no less than 1 Gbps by 2010. That would be my bargaining position for its passage. That would create a lot of good jobs in Illinois building network infrastructure as well as building Illinois into a competitor.

Anything less is unacceptable. When it comes to highways, we have many politicians claiming it’s good to create road-construction jobs. When it comes to information highways, no one wants to show their ignorance and nothing gets done.

Would municipalities and their politicians give up all their negotiating rights in order to get a better statewide network infrastructure? Do they even realize what a good network infrastructure is? If they did, they would be where Fort Wayne, Ind. is today instead of being way behind and trying to argue about their rights to negotiate.

HB 1500 has put a huge spotlight on the inadequacies of understanding a basic layer of municipal infrastructure: the network infrastructure. HB 1500 is the Katrina of telecom in Illinois.

Spotlight on Unpreparedness

Ten years ago, broadband connectivity wasn’t even on the radar screens of site-selection teams looking to locate corporate facilities. Today, it is one of their top three issues.

Does your city or village council really understand that? How many city and village councils have actually tried to upgrade the network infrastructures for their whole municipality in order to make the municipality more appealing for economic development?

Upgrading network infrastructures should be a prime concern of all municipalities in the Midwest. Instead, most are not seeing it as important to their viability and only a few are past the talking stages if they have any concern at all.

How many residents out there can claim they can get a 30 Mbps package today to their house? U-verse hasn’t even claimed that speed yet let alone actually deployed it anywhere. The initial U-verse service offerings are just 500 Kbps, 1 Mbps and 1.5 Mbps.

Do you think your municipality may be behind?

Having a 30 Mbps package available today to your house would be pretty impressive. Not fast enough for you gamers or architects sending out CAD drawings to clients? How about a 50 Mbps package today on fiber? How about a 200 Mbps package coming up in the next year or so?

The capability is not restricted to the north side of town or the new subdivision down the street. It is in the whole town. Where is this? As Rodney Dangerfield once said in the movie “Back to School”: “How about ‘Fantasyland’?”

With packages on the low end that are 20 times faster than DSL and more than 30 times faster than the highest speed U-verse is offering on the high end, Verizon’s service offerings today in Fort Wayne to every household are a reality.

This is the model major cities should be looking at if they want to remain viable in the next 20 years. Forget partial solutions or guaranteed use of copper that you can eventually run 20 Mbps services on in a couple years and only if you are on the right side of town.

By the time you get that, they will be getting 1 Gbps in Fort Wayne. In talking to the mayor of Fort Wayne (Graham Richard), their 2000 initiative (“Wired & Inspired”) that started all of this has paid off in securing people’s jobs and even creating more jobs within Fort Wayne.

The Verizon investment was in excess of $100 million and they connected 128,000 homes and businesses. By doing that, they also created a solid network infrastructure where companies like Raytheon have expanded to create hundreds of good-paying jobs.

One salesperson who was facing relocation got to stay because he set up a remote office in his home with 30 Mbps connectivity. His company’s home office was so impressed with what he configured that they made it the model for remote offices across the whole company.

Too bad your community doesn’t have that type of package available. As far as that company is concerned, your neighborhood is just too antiquated for their operations. Hopefully Wal-Mart is hiring summer help.

Your Politicians Are Antiquated

Who is going to be better prepared to compete in a global economy: the average worker who has a DSL line today at home and will be able to move up to Project Lightspeed in Illinois and its maximum of 25 Mbps in three to five years or someone in Fort Wayne who has 50 Mbps today and will likely get 1 Gbps in that same time frame?

Scratch that question. That is making the assumption that the Illinois worker can actually get DSL in their neighborhood today.

That is not a given. Did you know that Naperville, Ill. (which is the fourth-largest city in Illinois with a population of about 129,000) only has a 63 percent penetration rate of DSL? They are not fully covered and they haven’t even made a decision on Project Lightspeed.

Forget Project Lightspeed, too, because that is also making the assumption that residents in Naperville can actually get it in their neighborhood. That will not be a given either. Compare this to the current resident on the network in Fort Wayne, which is the second-largest city in Indiana with a population of about 252,000 people.

It’s already in place and you can get 50 Mbps today.

Can you hear the property values crashing in Naperville? I can. Do you hear that sucking sound? That’s the good jobs being sucked out of Illinois. Ka-ching. Ka-ching. Don’t worry. You won’t hear that. That is the coffers for Illinois payroll tax revenues. You’ll hear that from other states.

Test Your Local Politician

Don’t know who to vote for in the upcoming election? Here are some questions to ask candidates to see what they know:

1. What is the difference between a gigabit and a gigabyte?
2. How much faster is 100 Mbps than 1 Gbps? (This is a trick question.)
3. What is the definition of a high-speed network? (If under 1 Gbps, do not elect. If 10 Gbps or more, vote them in.)
4. Forget Wi-Fi. Ask them the benefits of fiber over copper connections.
5. What is FTTH?
6. What is FTTP?

The vast majority of your elected officials are antiquated when it comes to understanding the importance of a network infrastructure and what it means to economic development and regional sustainability. Remember that you put them there.

You may recall that chart I had comparing the growth of St. Louis and Chicago after the Civil War. Back then, St. Louis was far ahead of Chicago in terms of population. Too bad its politicians made the wrong decisions. In 35 years, Chicago significantly surpassed St. Louis.

Look at the chart again.

Restricting network infrastructures or keeping old ones in place will have the same effect. The only difference is that the growth in population and commerce could happen in 15 to 18 years rather than 35 years. How long will it be before Fort Wayne surpasses St. Louis?

Carlinism: Municipalities should look at their network infrastructure as the foundation to build commerce. There isn’t much to build on without a solid network infrastructure in place.