[LUG-Ischia] FIBER OPTICS BROADBAND - BUILD or DIE?

[Stephen CS Howe]

'Small towns tired of slow rollout create own high-speed networks'
By Leslie Cauley, USA TODAY
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DANVILLE, Va. - Twenty-five hundred workers.
Spend enough time in this tight-knit farming community 
of 48,000 on the North Carolina border, and you'll 
hear that figure a lot. 

It's a somber reference to the number of people still 
working for textile-maker Dan River, the town's biggest 
employer. In the 1970s, it employed about 10,000 here.

But by 2000, modernization and the push to find cheap 
labor offshore had taken its toll. The town's other 
unemployment soared. 

"This town was being stepped over, and forgotten," 
recalls Mayor John Hamlin. Paul Kalv, director of the
city's electric service, is even more blunt: 
"Danville was dying."

That's when Danville decided to grab fate by the throat.

The result: nDanville, a high-octane, business-class 
fiber-optic network capable of delivering voice, data 
and video services. The system is being built in phases 
with help from World Wide Packets, a company that 
specializes in municipal networks. The state-of-the-art 
workhorse offers speeds up to 1 gigabit (1000 million bits)
in both directions.

That's about 1,000 times faster than garden-variety DSL.

"We used to have to beg businesses to locate here. 
Now our phones are ringing off the hook,"
Hamlin says, beaming. 

Danville is on the leading edge of what is quickly 
becoming a broadband revolution. Frustrated by the 
slow speed of broadband rollouts in their towns, 
local governments across the USA are building their
own networks. Their common goal: to secure a bright 
future by building a business-quality network now. 

"This is about three things," says Jerry Gwaltney, 
Danville's city manager. "Jobs, jobs and jobs." 

By taking control of their broadband destinies, 
communities say, they no longer are at the mercy 
of the big providers. Regional phone company Verizon 
finally began offering DSL service in Danville in 2003,
several years after the town first asked for it. 

Harry Mitchell, a Verizon spokesman, says the company
can't be everywhere at once. 

Beyond availability, the quality of service is a 
major driver. Residential high-speed services currently 
top out at about 3 megabits per second (million bits per second),
with 7-megabit services just beginning to pop up. 

Download speeds are typically a lot slower.

That's not enough juice for businesses. 

Absent a high-quality network, their only option is 
to lease a costly T1 data line from the phone company. 
That works for big businesses and big users, but it 
is beyond the budgets of most midsize and small operations.

By designing and building municipal networks, 
communities say they can make technology choices 
that suit their needs - and aspirations.

"This is about our ability to dream," says Lewis Billings, 
the mayor of Provo, Utah, which is also building its own network. 

As essential as sewer lines 

Danville and Provo are just two of about 800 communities
that are in some stage of municipal broadband deployment,
estimates Michael Render, president of Render Vanderslice
& Associates, which tracks fiber-optic deployments. 

According to Render, the trend is gaining steam as 
broadband becomes as much a part of a town's 
infrastructure as sidewalks, sewer lines, power lines
and gas mains. 

The trend is global. World Wide Packets, which also 
provided gear to Provo, says it is working with about 
30 communities in such far-flung spots as Finland, 
New Zealand and Dubai.

"All these communities believe they are being underserved 
by the incumbents - or not served or never-to-be-served," 
says Dave Curry, president and chief executive of 
World Wide Packets.

Provo is a good example. Qwest and Comcast were 
providing high-speed services, but the city wasn't 
happy with the speed or overall quality. About five 
years ago, Provo, tired of waiting for supercharged 
broadband to show up, decided to move ahead on its own dime.

Comcast and Qwest tried to block the plan, igniting 
a bitter face-off with the city. Provo ultimately 
prevailed, but not before a lot of mud had been slung 
in both directions. 

In July, the city started selling a 1.5-megabit-per-second
package of voice, data and video services for $89.99 a month.
(Five- and 10-megabit speeds are available for $109.99 
and $129.99, respectively.) The rollout of iProvo, which 
can ramp up to 1 gigabit, is getting a good reception. 
So far, about 400 people have signed up. When it is fully 
deployed in about two years, it will pass every house, 
school, business and municipal building in Provo.

Comcast recently unveiled a four-month special: the first 
and fourth months cost a penny, and the other two months
cost $42.95 for existing cable TV customers, plus $9.99 
for installation, down from a regular fee of about $100. 
(People who don't already buy cable from Comcast will 
pay $52.99, plus $9.99 for installation.) Comcast says 
it's a back-to-school special available throughout Utah.

The mayor isn't worried. Provo's need for high-quality 
broadband, he says, transcends rivalry - and temporary
specials. Thanks to iProvo, he says, "I can create jobs."

Not all towns have been as lucky.

Take Tri-Cities, a trio of small towns in the Chicago 
suburbs: Batavia, Geneva and St. Charles. Tired of waiting 
for high-quality broadband, Tri-Cities proposed to forge 
ahead on its own in 2002 and put it to a vote. 

When SBC and Comcast got wind of the plan, they went 
into combat mode. Both already provided high-speed services
locally and felt another network wasn't necessary. 
Supporting the plan was Fiber For Our Future, a grass-roots
group whose sole funding consisted of passing the hat at 
local meetings. In the face of an estimated $1 million 
advertising blitz by SBC and Comcast, the group never 
stood a chance. The plan was soundly defeated in a 
referendum in April 2003.

"They flat-out lied," says Annie Collins, a member of 
Fiber For Our Future. She says the carriers' claims that 
taxes would have skyrocketed "just weren't true." 

SBC says all it did was get the facts out. Comcast says 
it only tried to make people aware of its full range of 
services.

SBC, for its part, contends that governments have no 
business getting into broadband. "Where private 
alternatives exist, government should not try to compete, 
especially when it's being done at the initiative of a 
few and at the expense of many," says Howard Peak, 
executive director of external affairs for SBC. 

Fiber For Our Future isn't giving up. According to Collins, 
the group collected enough signatures - 3,000 - to put 
the broadband plan back on the ballot in November.

The core issue, she says, is control. "Why should somebody
else decide what our destiny should be?" Collins asks. 
"Why not decide our own future?"

Tricky to manage 

The jury is still out on how these communities will fare. 
Technology is tricky to manage, and financial risks remain.
A few towns, including the Atlanta suburb of Marietta, 
started down the broadband path and have since pulled back.

Given the growing importance of broadband to businesses,
however, a lot of towns feel they don't have a choice. 

"This was never a case of 'Build it and they will come,' " 
says Hamlin, the Danville mayor. "This was a case of, 
'If you don't build it, you know they won't come.' "

Plans call for nDanville to be rolled out in three phases.
The first phase, which involved wiring local schools and 
government offices for Internet access, was just completed. 
The second will take nDanville to area businesses, offering 
voice and data services. The third phase will take the 
service directly to consumers with a full bundle of voice,
data and video. Total expected cost: about $37.5 million. 

Funding for Phase 1, which cost about $2.5 million, 
came from Danville's municipal electric utility reserves. 

Funding for the other two phases hasn't been set. 
If nDanville doesn't prove popular, it may never get 
beyond the first phase.

Still, the early signs are encouraging. 

Luna Innovations, a company that specializes in nanotechnology,
a leading-edge area of science that focuses on molecular-level
technology, decided this year to set up a branch in Danville. 

Luna, based in Blacksburg, Va., plans to use the site to 
develop and manufacture a range of commercial products: 
composites, textile additives, medical supplies and more.

Luna is recruiting nanotechnologists from outside the area
but is hiring locally for other technical and manufacturing
jobs. Charles Gause, a Luna vice president, says he expects 
the Danville office to employ several hundred workers within
five years.

The company is taking over a former warehouse that dates
to the 1870s. It is in the heart of Danville's historic 
and now mostly abandoned tobacco district. The irony isn't
lost on Gause. 

"Danville kind of missed out on the 20th century," Gause 
gently jibes. "But now it's going to come back and dominate 
the 21st century."

Lots of possibilities 

Education is also getting a lift. 

Local schools used to spend about $400,000 a year to get
voice and T1 lines from Verizon. They're paying the city 
more - about $600,000 a year - for nDanville but are getting
a lot more firepower. "This thing does in seconds what 
used to take 15 minutes or more," says Dianne Locker, 
a local school administrator.

She says nDanville paves the way for a raft of possibilities:
advanced college placement courses, home-based instruction,
teacher-parent meetings via the Internet and videoconferencing
galore. 

"If you want to recruit high-tech, you have to be high-tech,"
says Locker, adding: "Nobody moves to Danville without first
looking at the schools."

On a recent visit to Galileo Magnet High School downtown,
technology was everywhere. The whole school is essentially
a Wi-Fi hot spot. Students surfed the Web on their 
school-issued wireless laptops. You wouldn't think you 
were in a 200-year-old farming community that, until a 
few years ago, had only dial-up access. 

Verizon isn't sitting idle. It has spent about $7.5 million
on a Danville network since 2002. DSL was formally rolled 
out in 2003 and is available to about 60% of the city. 
"We think we have a pretty good network in Danville," 
says Verizon spokesman John Knapp. "And it's getting 
better all the time." 

To be sure, nDanville is no cure-all for the city. 
Dan River is operating under Chapter 11 bankruptcy 
protection; it hopes to emerge later this year. 
Unemployment remains a crushing 14%. Among the adult 
workforce, nearly a third don't have high school diplomas. 

Still, nDanville is already a huge success by at least 
one measure. It has given this town something that 
seemed unlikely just a few years ago: hope. 

Says city manager Gwaltney: "If we keep our vision 
- our tunnel vision - and stay the course, the sky's 
the limit for us.'"