Bob Panoff Community Needs & Technology Choice Subscribe to Newsletter Tell a Friend Print this Page 11/10/2007 All Service Providers Should Embrace "Community Broadband" Projects If they're well-planned and done properly, these projects have a foundation of cooperation and support from across the entire community. Ideally, the entire community becomes stakeholders, vested in the idea, supporting the community broadband project as if it were the "hometown team," and making a broad public-private partnership possible. Such partnerships enable community traffic to be maximized and aggregated on the community network. This insures significant revenue and cash flow. Local service providers are usually quite interested in such situations, enabling the "public" part of the partnership to focus its efforts and investments in incrementally expanding network infrastructure and services to specific portions of the community with special needs, or to promote digital inclusion, social and economic development within the community. Never consider a community broadband network as an isolated entity. Understanding the community and assessing its overall requirements, in the broadest sense, is the most important first step. The data collection process itself can be used to educate people, local institutions, and businesses about what is realistically possible and to build consensus around what network services the community actually wants and needs, as well as identifying local providers that can participate in the effort. Toward that end, it is important to identify an effective marketing strategy that reflects the community's unique character. This is usually the key to marketing a successful community broadband network and a sustainable business model. Successful networks and network business models are also based on applications and services that solve real problems and deliver real applications for people and organizations within the community. These networks are sometimes appropriately focused on specific applications, such as public safety or municipal services, but for the broader community-wide projects communities often envision, the market assessment usually identifies many applications, as well as the potential to enable cross-sector collaboration that builds the application infrastructure that is so often needed for the community broadband network to deliver its full potential. At that point in the project where the requirements are well understood, the focus moves to network design and the choice of specific technologies. These designs usually involve a mix of technologies, particularly when the "community" is a large and diverse regional geography. In recent months, the community-broadband pendulum has swung from hyperbole to pessimism, and will certainly swing back. Luckily, there are a number of statewide initiatives developing, where connectivity in underserved rural areas is the more practical No. 1 priority. A complete plan and a balanced approach will help these projects move forward and help the "community" broadband market develop. back Related Items: • City of Lompoc • W2i Announces 3rd Annual Best Practices Awards Winners • ITIF Releases National Broadband Policy Report • Dillon: Avoid Taking a Long and Arduous Path • Doug Townsend, IT Director, Medford (OR) - Part 2 • Tallahassee `08 Comments No records were found. Post new comment: Only registered users can add comments. Please Log-in

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