Philadelphia '05

Local Government: Building the Business Case

Greg Richardson, founder, president and CEO of Civitium, a digital-cities consulting firm, asked whether major cities are inclined to cooperate with statewide broadband initiatives. In Maryland, a relationship between a statewide SAILOR network and the City of Baltimore has evolved over the past five years and now includes a portion in Baltimore itself. In Rhode Island, 21 of the 37 cities are under 20,000 people and need assistance. Cities and towns may be unique in their connectivity needs but need interoperability across the state especially for emergency services.

One concern with large-scale (i.e., statewide) networks is migration to new technologies such as WiMAX, including WiMAX 802.16e standard for mobility, that requires hardware upgrades. But “as long as pre-WiMAX technology is kept more as a backhaul technology, we’re not looking at end users to have to replace the network cards in their laptops and replace their business units,” said panelist John Dolmetsch, president and CIO of Business Information Group (BIG), which concentrates on large-scale wireless networks (over 500,000 square miles deployed to date).

Councils and governments in Northern Virginia area are working to link their fiber networks, but roadblocks are cost and getting 17 different governments to link and agree on something. “In some ways, it’s like herding cats,” said an audience participant from Loudon County. “We all need to work together.”

WINS (Rhode Island)

Bob Panoff, founder and principal of RPM-Strategy, a Massachusetts-based consulting firm, is working on Rhode Island WINS (Wireless Information Networks) “to drive innovation to the end user/enterprise down through the value chain through wireless.” Rhode Island is small, dense, rural/urban and a good test bed try new things at scale. A pilot will kick off this summer or early fall with service clusters in and around the Providence and downstate areas.

A nonprofit public-private partnership/consortium has chosen four broad application and industry segments in which to drill down: public safety, health, education, and mobile workers. In each, “there was excitement about advancing current applications and think of new ones,” Mr. Panoff said.

Fire, police and EMTs don’t talk with one another, especially across jurisdictions. “We found potential for collaboration across functions and organizations, and that got them very excited.”

Eleven organizations of higher education in Rhode Island have Ocean Network (a fiber ring consortium). About 60 percent of students live off campus and could become better connected and integrated with campus life with broadband-wireless connectivity.

Healthcare professionals were interested in biometrics coming into the ER, patient monitoring, and using remote translators for non-English-speaking patients.

Among mobile field workers, MetLife wants to make an assessment of automobile damage as quickly as possible in order to hand out checks to increase the profit margin and cut down on car rentals and other costs incurred by the insurer. It can also allow the lowest possible bid on the repair.

Looking at three different network solutions, Mr. Panoff said that, “from an operational point of view, a hybrid network of WiMAX going to fiber backhaul and Wi-Fi at the edge made the best overall sense to the team. As long as we keep WiMAX at the transport layer, we buffer the ultimate user from changes in technology.”

The most challenging piece was an approach to the software, Mr. Panoff said. “A network that is targeted at driving innovation puts different requirements on the software, having something that’s open, modular, and able to accept new devices and new applications—that’s the trick.”

He also promoted the benefits of collaboration—having a set of partners—to contribute their assets. “The electric company has fiber and towers, the state has towers, the educational consortium has fiber,” Mr. Panoff said. “The idea is to contribute the assets they have to build a better network than they would have had they done that solely on their own dime, and provide an incentive to add new applications and drive usage up, which is part of the business model.”

SAILOR (Maryland)

“We’ve come a long way since the early 1990s,“ said Mike Walsh, network manager for the SAILOR Project in Maryland, now in its fourth generation using a mix of fiber and wireless technologies to connect the Maryland library system. The 355-MB network is based out of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, which serves as the state library system (24 libraries total) and now county governments, the education system, and community colleges.

“Basically in the State of Maryland, if you’re nonprofit or receive a majority of government funding, you can be on the SAILOR network,” Mr. Walsh said. Three counties are complete, two counties are in construction, seven counties are awaiting tower approvals (getting everyone to sign on the dotted line), and one is awaiting tower construction.

The network was T1-based until 2000, but at a certain point SAILOR began spending a lot of money for T1s for only limited increases in capacity. “We can’t keep living with telcos as they’ve traditionally existed, so we need to do something else. We need to make them out of the T1 model to a ‘Beyond T1 project,’ to provide equitable bandwidth to everyone.”

SAILOR looked at dark fiber, leased capacity from alternate vendors, and finally wireless, which was limited by towers and real estate. But it was low-cost with a fixed infrastructure and mostly a fixed price. Capacity can be increased with architectural enhancements that don’t really change recurring costs.

After a second-round RFP, BIG Wireless, Inc. in York, Pennsylvania, won the contract to deplay an unlicensed network typology and ring architecture, including an option for county multipoint (because of concerns about last-mile, including counties, libraries, K-12). Any county can take that competitive-bid contract and include a multipoint option without having to go to bid again. Counties agreed to provide tower space and a system for permits.

“Probably the biggest time burner in the whole process is meeting with people and explaining the network and convincing them that SAILOR is here for good,” Mr. Walsh said. “We’re not taking money out of your pockets. Libraries are trying to do good things for you.” Relationships have stretched to 10 years now, and some of these counties are saving $100,000 per year with less than one year ROI under the contract versus paying for T1s and fractionals.

Intra- and intercounty transport is included, which is helpful, for example, for healthcare services among counties with and without hospitals in providing patient information. SAILOR pays for last hops to municipalities. It also works with emergency groups, that were initially afraid their networks would be crashed. SAILOR also works with Network Maryland, which has a different topology and focus. But SAILOR backbone helps back up Network Maryland in areas the latter cannot reach.

“Whenever we increased bandwidth to a site, we would double the amount of Internet usage every six months,” Mr. Walsh said. “When we put in wireless, the same thing happened again. The discovery was that people hadn’t realized they could get more. If you build it, they will use it.”

SAILOR uses Chariot on both ends of a circuit to get the stated bandwidth. It does environment scans and talks to customers on a regular basis, and anticipates traffic one year in advance. The entire network was funded with e-Rate money. All told, the project will cost about $2 million if all the points get put in.