BB&K Attorney Drew Clark Explains Why Gigabit networks Are Essential to Cities in Western City Magazine

A century ago, our nation had two networks of wires that pretty much went everywhere. One was for electricity, and the other was for telephone calls. Both came to be seen as necessities for modern life.

Today, gigabit networks are the new necessity. As with electrical and telephone networks in the 20th century, gigabit networks are the essential infrastructure for tomorrow’s cities.

Simply put, a gigabit network is a communications infrastructure capable of delivering broadband Internet services at 1,000 megabits per second, or roughly 100 times the average broadband download speed in the United States.

Take Copenhagen’s Smart City deployment. It’s one of dozens around the world that have installed networks of sensors enabling drivers to better navigate traffic. The network has the capability to ease parking congestion and more efficiently enable trash pickups.

Or consider the needs of 21st century businesses. Super-fast broadband is no longer optional for offices, studios, factories or hospitals. Core business assets are hosted in the cloud, shared globally and require the greatest bandwidth connection. Hospitals need secure, super-fast connections to provide access to the highest quality medical care. Residents and small businesses increasingly desire fiber-optic speeds.

Many Roads to a Gigabit

To understand how to manage this new challenge, it is useful to first examine how we got here.

Whether provided by a private company, a cooperative or a municipal utility, the electrical and phone systems were attached to poles and later placed underground in cities’ rights of way. Ensuring that citizens have electricity, communications and water has long been among the essential responsibilities of local government. Although large telecommunications and cable companies are often seen as the primary providers of communications in the United States, cities have ultimate stewardship over access to these rights of way.

Sometimes, gigabit networks have emerged as a means to strengthen and enhance an electrical “smart grid.” In Chattanooga, Tenn., the Electric Power Board utility decided to invest in fiber to promote remote monitoring and meter-reading. Only later did it arrive at the notion of becoming a Gigabit City. Mayor Andy Berke has made the city’s universal gigabit network its signature economic development tool.

In other places, a civic need came first. Aurora, the second largest city in Illinois, received a $13 million grant under the Federal Highway Administration’s Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Improvement Program. This transportation grant provided funds to build a city-owned fiber-optic network along major roads. The city later spun off the traffic-monitoring assets into OnLight Aurora, a public-private entity, and it has extended network connectivity to businesses.

In California, the City of Santa Cruz has been frustrated by the large number of individuals commuting over the mountain passage separating the beachside city from Silicon Valley — and gigabit connectivity. The city wanted to attract and retain businesses and workers whose digital needs were not being met locally. A study commissioned by the Central Coast Broadband Consortium in late 2014 found considerable fiber assets within Santa Cruz. That lent momentum to a public-private proposal to build a fiber network that would provide gigabit service to every home. Throughout this partnership, the City of Santa Cruz will own the network and a private company will operate it.

Fiber at the Root, New Applications at the Edge

Undergirding each of these gigabit networks is fiber-optic technology. There are many ways to transmit data, including older technologies like copper wires and coaxial cable systems. Wireless towers also play a role in ensuring mobile communications and reaching remote populations. But fiber is widely regarded as the necessary backbone for meeting the communications needs of residents, businesses and city and public facilities. Fiber also provides core connectivity to wireless towers, ensuring an efficient mix of wired and wireless transmissions.

The speed at which fiber enables communication may not be as important as the services now available to users. In the case of consumers, it is much more than the multiple streams of high-definition television, high-definition voice and currently available online services.

Google Fiber has taken a lead role in popularizing the benefits of ultra-high bandwidth through its “Think Big With a Gig” experiment. It is currently building or operating networks in 11 metropolitan regions nationwide and considering 11 more. One example of what can be accomplished comes from Provo, Utah. “It used to take me days to download a genome from the lab, before I could even start to analyze it,” said Reid Robison, chief executive officer of Tute Genomics, in a blog post on Medium. “But now, I can download a whole human genome in less than half an hour. That is a huge difference when someone’s health is on the line.”

Our country has only begun to scratch the surface of new applications that will leverage cities’ new networks. One ambitious national nonprofit known as US Ignite has set a goal of stimulating the deployment of hundreds of next-generation applications with transformative public benefits. These include real-time emergency response systems and air pollution monitoring.

US Ignite is particularly keen on applications that advance education and the workforce, energy, health care, public safety, transportation and advanced manufacturing. And they need more than just gigabit networks: US Ignite promotes ultra-low latency networks, which permit holographic-like experiences, such as remote surgery or symphony musicians playing simultaneously in multiple cities. This will be increasingly important as multiple secure applications make use of the same fiber bandwidth.

New Financial Models for Deployment

City officials already recognize that they will need advanced networks within the next decade. They may not know there are new options for bringing these networks to their cities.

Traditionally, cities that wanted better broadband had two choices: Beg a private telecommunications company to offer services or enter the market themselves.

No longer are cities limited to these choices. In addition to the corporate franchise or the municipal models, cities can now turn to a range of public-private partnerships for gigabit networks. This should be no surprise, given the default role that public-private partnerships have played in the construction of highways, ports and airports. But new interest, energy and financial opportunities are available within the broadband space. Cities from California to Maine are striking deals that enable open access gigabit networks to build next-generation capacity for the future.

© 2016 League of California Cities®. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission from the June 2016 issue of Western City magazine, the monthly publication of the League of California Cities®. For more information, visit www.westerncity.com

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