Friend Bruce Lincoln, Entrepreneur in Residence at Columbia Engineering’s Center for Technology, Innovation & Community Engagement, sent us an invite for a Community Broadband Hearing taking place next Friday, December 11 at Columbia. I’m planning to attend, and suggest those of you that fill the different roles outlined below attend as well.

If you are planning on attending, leave a comment so we can find you!

It is important that members of the local community have an opportunity to participate in the National Broadband Planning process which is currently underway in Washington.

Toward that end, I invite you to participate in an FCC Field Hearing on Friday, December 11, 2009 at Columbia University in New York. The meeting will be held in Davis Auditorium from 8:45 am until noon.

The field hearing will bring together policymakers, elected officials, not-for-profit organizations, small businesses, anchor institutions, public agencies, broadband providers, foundations, community-based organizations and community leaders, academicians, and researchers. Together we will share thoughts on how collectively we can ensure all New Yorkers have access to broadband and the educational, economic and social opportunities it can provide.

I hope you will be able to attend as a representative of your organization or constituency. To fully understand the importance of broadband access from all points of view, your participation is vital. The agenda includes a “community visioning session” where you will have an opportunity to share your thoughts, ideas, and concerns with the group.

You can confirm your attendance via e-mail to bl2317@columbia.edu.

Agenda

Friday, December 11, 2009
Davis Auditorium, Columbia University
8 am-noon

Related posts:

1. NYC Broadband Advisory Committee Public Hearing in Manhattan
2. NYC Broadband Advisory Committee Public Hearing in Staten Island
3. NY City Council Hearing: The Regulation and Use of the Unallocated Portion of the Radio Spectrum, Also Known as White Spaces on Sep 28 @ 10am

Download PDF Version

RFI Response to City Wireless Internet Access for New York City Parks and Other Open Spaces

Prepared by:

Dana Spiegel, Executive Director, NYCwireless
Rob Kelley and Anthony Townsend, Executive Board Members

Overview

NYCwireless is a non-profit organization that advocates and enables the growth of free, public wireless internet access in New York City and surrounding areas. Founded in 2001, NYCwireless serves thousands of individuals throughout the New York City metro area through the dozens of hotspots installed in NYC Parks, Public Spaces, and Affordable Housing Buildings.

Over the past several years, NYCwireless has built free, public wireless networks in dozens of New York City parks and open spaces through partnerships with local organizations such as the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation and Madison Square Park Conservancy and business improvement districts such as the Alliance for Downtown New York. These include hotspots in Bryant Park, Madison Square Park, Wagner Park, Brooklyn Bridge Park, Jackson Square Park, Stuyvesant Cove Park (the first fully solar powered hotspot in New York), Tompkins Square Park, Bowling Green Park, City Hall Park, the South Street Seaport, the Winter Garden, the Atrium at 60 Wall Street, Stone Street, Wall Street Park, and the Vietnam Veterans Plaza, among others.

NYCwireless also assists under-served communities in getting affordable internet access. NYCwireless works with Dunn Development Corporation and Community Access, a non-profit housing organization, to train volunteers and building residents to build and maintain wireless networks in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx. The networks provide 8 buildings with more than 50 residents per building with private, high-speed wireless connections.

According to a survey by NYCwireless Board Member Laura Forlano, Wi-Fi is a factor in attracting people to specific locations throughout the city for 70% of those surveyed. These findings have potential implications for economic development and support the rationale that WiFi may enable commerce and productivity that would not have occurred otherwise. For example, one respondent commutes 20 minutes from Queens to use the Bryant Park wireless network on weekends in order to work on his food and wine website outside rather than at home.

At NYCwireless, we’ve worked with many local leaders. Some of them are BIDs like the Downtown Alliance or public benefit corporations like the Battery Park City Authority. Some are local developers, like the one we’re working with in the West Village who transformed a park and part of a neighborhood from being a place for homeless people to being a place for families and children. These local leaders have transformed their communities, and helped us bring internet to the people. Unfortunately so many more come to us with visions of helping out their neighborhood, but don’t have the funds to make it happen. While NYCwireless provides a very low cost option for building public Wi-Fi, its not without installation and maintenance cost. And many of the local leaders we’ve spoken to have no current means to get the funding they need to build and create local broadband. In speaking with them, we know that with just enough funding, these people too could change their communities, and bring whole neighborhoods online. Funding must be injected into local communities in order to provide resources for these leaders to do their work.

How NYCwireless Works

Free public internet access in parks begins with NYCwireless seeking local interest and support. We work with local organizations, such as BIDs–like the Alliance for Downtown New York–and “Friends of…” groups, that approach our organization seeking help. Once locations are identified, we assist with the design of the wireless equipment deployment plan and seeking funding to support their build-out. NYCwireless provides design, installation, and support for the networks that we build through infrastructure, volunteer help, and the extensive know-how that we have developed over the past nine years.

The equipment that we use is open source and standards based, to ensure maximum compatibility with end-user equipment, including laptops, PDAs, and more recently iPhones and wireless VOIP phones. As a result, we ensure that both industry standard and novel uses of our networks are unrestricted, allowing residents, students and artists to invent new technologies and uses for public wireless networks.

Our hotspots are built using hardware from Metrix Communication LLC. The hotspots are mounted in a weatherproof metal case measuring approximately 6″ x 8″ x 3.5″, and utilize 802.11b/g mini-pci network cards. Two 70° sector antennas, measuring approximately 2 x 4.5 x 4.5 inches, are usually connected to the hotspot via low loss LMR cabling. Outdoor rated ethernet cabling connects the hotspot to the DSL modem or other internet access line, which is mounted inside of the building. Power is supplied to the hotspot utilizing Power Over Ethernet (POE) to minimize the indoor/outdoor cabling.

Our hotspots have generally been deployed outside of park grounds and public facilities, or in the case of Bryant Park, using facilities provided by the licensed private park operator. We generally mount our equipment atop or on local buildings with the support of our partner organizations, beaming the wireless signal into the park. This deployment strategy is sometimes ideal, since equipment can be installed quickly and there are sometimes no facilities within the park to support the mounting of equipment.

We can often deploy a hotspot for only a few thousand dollars, and in under two months, to service most or all of a park. Much of this time is spent designing the network, ordering equipment and DSL internet service, and gathering necessary agreements. Actual equipment installation can take 1-2 days.

Broadband Service Availability

Access to city-owned property isn’t the biggest issue in getting Wi-Fi deployed. Getting reasonably fast internet access lines (or WiMax uplinks) is the biggest problem. NYCwireless has had tremendous success rapidly deploying Wi-Fi equipment on building rooftops and even nearby businesses, but we (and WiFiSalon as well) have spent countless, fruitless hours getting internet lines from Verizon. In a recent example, it took over 4 months to get internet service to Wagner Park, even though our gear was installed within a month of signing a contract.

Ideally, the City would provide assistance facilitating the installation of internet access lines. This would include:

• Ensuring that ISPs, including Verizon, Time Warner Cable, and Cablevision, provide connectivity in a nondiscriminatory and timely manner
• Ensuring that ISPs provide connectivity for reasonable rates comparable to the rates normal businesses are charged
• Ensuring that when an ISP claims to “not know” about a particular address, even though that address is within the city limits and contains an actual physical building structure, that the ISP is required to fix/update their database with valid information and expedite the installation of an internet access line if a phone line already exists

Sustainable Business Model

DoITT is potentially open to other business models for building Wi-Fi hotspots, though as experience in NYC and many other cities has shown, there aren’t any viable ones where businesses can independently fund the buildout and maintenance.

DoITT seems mostly steadfast in their insistence (as the Parks Department has been in the past) that no City funds should be spent on any buildout or maintenance of hotspots. This is still a really big sticking point: The first Parks RFP required that a concessionaire pay significant money to the Parks department, and the second Parks RFP required that a concessionaire pay some proposed amount of money to the Parks department.

There have been only a handful of interested companies (we offered to pay $1), and WiFiSalon, the only concessionaire that paid any fees under the Park’s 1st RFP was driven out of business by that requirement. Ad revenue is negligible since such networks see a fraction of the impressions that even a second-tier website sees, and sponsorship dollars are only available to the most prominent parks like Madison Square Park and Bryant Park, and such deals are done generally only through whole-park sponsorship, not sponsorship of just the Wi-Fi network.

NYCwireless fundamentally believes and the industry has seen countless times (including the companies MetroFi and EarthLink, and cities San Francisco and Portland, for example) that Ad-based business models are unsustainable for individual hotspots and even reasonable sized hotspot networks. If DoITT and the City want to really ensure that free public Wi-Fi should be made available, and that locations other than the most highly trafficked and well-to-do are served, they need to step up and offer alternative funding models.

One thing to consider is that the companies that can do the installation and maintenance of high-quality outdoor hotspots (there are few) don’t have big advertising or sales teams to make them self-funding. These are two orthogonal specialties and forcing a single company to be capable of both severely limits the applicant pool and threatens the business viability of any participating company. NYCwireless has been successful because we provide all of the back-end technical know how and support for free public Wi-Fi hotspots. We are paid by our partners (BIDs and others) to perform this service, and they do the money raising since that’s what they are good at.

If DoITT and the NYC Government insist on Ad-based models, the best way to organize the funding of the organizations that build hotspots is to separately manage the sales of ads or sponsorship through either a centralized City agency or through a separate RFP that would be awarded to a marketing or ad-sales company. Hotspots would be required to use standard, open-source and free technology for displaying ads sold through the agency in order to receive funding through the RFP program.

Eligible Service Providers

Since each public space identified by DoITT has its own local community, and the problems and issues presented by each public space differ, NYCwireless has long believed that individually choosing providers for each city park is an important component in ensuring that appropriate Wi-Fi service is provided. Modeling its program after well-received plans put forth by Boston Wireless Task Force and implemented by OpenAirBoston, DoITT would do well to ensure that:

• Multiple providers are given the opportunity to install networks in each neighborhood, park, or set of parks
• Providers make use of interoperable equipment and technology so that a park’s equipment need not be reinstalled should that provider go out of business or be found unable to provide service, allowing a new provider to assume management of the equipment
• Local providers (those who’s base of operations is within the local neighborhood of the hotspot) or providers that have local community ties and affiliations, be preferred over those that are national or regional, since this will ensure the local community will help and support the hotspot

Additional Sites where Wi-Fi Makes Sense

Existing hotspots (with the exception for the Parks Department concession-based hotspots) sponsored by BIDs and other organizations have been built without much involvement by the Parks Department, and often in spite of any blockades the Parks Department has put up. BIDs and other organizations that have the resources to fund the creation of hotspots should be able to do so, and should be assisted by the NYC government (DoITT, Parks, etc.) without having to go through RFPs and other bureaucratic measures. When requested, the relevant City agency should facilitate all aspects of the creation of the hotspot, including providing free access to City owned building infrastructure.

Existing infrastructure must be made affordable and available. A big barrier to creating local community networks is getting access to places to put equipment. One solution would be to make City light poles available free or at low cost on an individual basis for the deployment of community supported networks. NYCwireless can help out with this initiative by helping to create a standard, weatherproof, upgradable hardware package, which we currently use in our outdoor wireless networks.

DoITT is looking mostly for one or a few companies to step up and do all the work. We’ve long talked about how the City can take a grass-roots approach to getting local parks and public spaces lit up, but for the most part, DoITT is focussing only on the biggest and most prominent locations. This is unfortunate, since the people in lower income neighborhoods and further afield areas are often the ones who benefit the most from such initiatives, but they seem to be mostly left out of this initiative.

DoITT and the City should make available to any interested local community organization or BID a set of resources to help them understand how they can help themselves set up a community-based hotspot. Such information resources would include technical information, organizational information and contacts for for-profit and not-for-profit organizations that can help the community strategize and build out the hotspot. It should also provide case studies for how other BIDs and community organizations built their hotspots, including cost structures, that would serve as models.

Most importantly, funding sources must be created that can support local organizations doing the heavy lifting. There are leaders in every community in New York City who have the power and will to create local solutions for bringing the internet to the people, and bringing all of their community members to the table. Setting up a fund such that any local group can apply for and be granted a few tens of thousands of dollars per year, for a period of 3-5 years, to use to bring Wi-Fi to a park or a public space would help tremendously.

Additionally, building developers and Condominium and Co-op boards have tremendous ability to create solutions, as NYCwireless’ work with Dunn Development Corporation has proved. Providing a tax incentive for for-profit developers and funding for non-profit developers to light up the public and semipublic spaces they create would ensure that anywhere people go they would have internet access.

Funding can also be attracted via state and federal sources, as well as through private companies and individuals. NYCwireless has been successful, but why not have hundreds of NYCwireless-like organizations, each working to solve local broadband issues.

New Technologies

In the long term, it is important to recognize that laptops and mobile devices may ship with newer wireless standards. However, the industry is quite a number of years from this happening, and for the foreseeable future, Wi-Fi is it–Apple introduced Wi-Fi on laptops 10 years ago, and those laptops are still compatible with today’s Wi-Fi networks. All laptops sold in the US today ship with Wi-Fi (802.11a/b/g/n) adapters and have so for the past few years. They will continue to do so for a number of years to come, and the various forms of Wi-Fi are all backwards compatible with each other such that an 802.11b network deployed 8 years ago (by NYCwireless) is still usable by today’s computers. Wi-Fi is so widely distributed in homes and in businesses that it is almost unthinkable that computers 10 years from now won’t be able to use Wi-Fi networks installed over the next few years.

Additionally, Wi-Fi equipment installed in hotspots by NYCwireless generally has a 3-5 year lifetime for the Wi-Fi radios (our hotspots consist of access point computers with Wi-Fi radio cards). Our hardware is field upgradable to new Wi-Fi radios, and we expect that our hotspots, with upgraded radios, to have a 5-10 year lifetime.

Furthermore, there exist no other widely deployed local wireless internet access technologies that are available on the market, let alone ones available for $500-$1000 per hardware installation. WiMax, though beginning to see wider deployment, is not suitable as hotspot equipment (it is much more similar to cell data towers), and no standard shipping laptop today contains a WiMax card.

The wide availability and deployment of Wi-Fi makes it the only reasonable wireless technology choice for hotspot deployment, and we urge DoITT to require Wi-Fi as the technology of choice for any hotspot installed in a City Park or Public Space. We also recommend that DoITT require that open-standard, field-upgradable equipment is used, and require industry standards and possibly open hardware that ensures vendor lock in isn’t possible.

Insurance Requirements

NYCwireless has hotspots where there is NO equipment on park property at all (its on a neighboring building rooftop). Beyond insurance requirements for the actual installation and physical maintenance of equipment, no significant insurance requirements should be required. Furthermore, we have inquired of insurance agencies about seeking coverage according to the Parks Department’s requirements, and were informed that such insurance would be “an invitation for lawsuits” and would be expensive. The equipment used for NYCwireless hotspots is installed in publicly inaccessible locations, so liability for such equipment is inappropriate.

Related posts:

1. Our Take: NYC RFI on “City Wireless Internet Access for New York City Parks and Other Open Spaces”
2. NY Daily News Published Poorly Researched Article about New York City Hotspots
3. Congratulations to NYCwireless for Creating the Best Hotspot in New York City

Basically, the City wants to light up more Parks, and is looking for ways to make this happen. We’ve provided lots of suggestions both on and off the record [1, 2, 3], and some of what we’ve said (and certainly what we’ve successfully done) has started to seep through. We should be celebrating that the City is asking questions first before issuing a blanket RFP and they seem to have learned a bit after being burned twice before by the Parks Departments previous RFPs, but the jury is still out on how progressive their ultimate plan will be. This RFI represents baby steps in the right direction, though there’s still a long road ahead for those of us that want to see free Wi-Fi in all city parks and public spaces.

The (Mostly) Good

• DoITT seems to recognize the value in Wi-Fi in parks and public spaces, and indicates that they are clearly aware of the work that organizations other than the Parks Department have done to grow free public Wi-Fi.
• DoITT is open to how they should organize any public-space Wi-Fi initiative, though there are still funding issues (see below).
• More parks are being added to the list of possible Parks Department sanctioned free Wi-Fi, however this does beg the question about how parks not on the “official” list are going to be able to get service.
• The City wants to work with more BIDs in offering free Wi-Fi, though they don’t acknowledge the fact that the BIDs and other organizations that have created free Wi-Fi hotspots have done so without much involvement by the Parks Department, and often in spite of any blockades the Parks Department has put up.
• DoITT is potentially open to other business models for building Wi-Fi hotspots, though as indicated below (and as I have been saying for a number of years), there aren’t any viable ones where businesses can independently fund the buildout and maintenance.
• The City is willing to provide both signage and some publicity for the Wi-Fi hotspots.
• The City will provide free access and use of city-owned property to facilitate the installation of equipment.
• DoITT seems open to reducing insurance requirements for running a hotspot, but even this doesn’t go far enough. We have hotspots where there is NO equipment on park property at all (its on a neighboring building rooftop). Why such installation strategies should require ANY general or personal liability insurance is a mystery (we do carry liability insurance for equipment installation and maintenance).
• Any submissions must be mostly non-proprietary, which means that we should all be able to read whatever companies submit for the RFI (we will publish our submission for all to read on this site). DoITT should go one step further and commit to actually publishing all submissions, so we don’t have to file Freedom of Information Law requests just to get them.

The Bad

• DoITT talks a lot about “other comparable wireless Internet service” versus Wi-Fi. In the long term, I suppose its important to recognize that laptops and mobile devices may ship with newer wireless standards, but we’re quite a number of years off from this happening, and for the forseeable future, Wi-Fi is it–Apple introduced Wi-Fi on laptops 10 years ago, and those laptops are still compatible with today’s Wi-Fi networks.
• Access to city-owned property isn’t the biggest issue in getting Wi-Fi deployed. Getting reasonably fast internet access lines (or WiMax uplinks) is the biggest problem. NYCwireless has had tremendous success rapidly deploying Wi-Fi equipment on building rooftops and even nearby businesses, but we (and WiFiSalon as well) have spent countless, fruitless hours getting internet lines from Verizon. In a recent example, it took over 4 months to get internet service to Wagner Park, even though our gear was installed within a month of signing a contract.
• DoITT is looking mostly for one or a few companies to step up and do all the work. We’ve long talked about how the City can take a grass-roots approach to getting local parks and public spaces lit up, but for the most part, DoITT is focussing only on the biggest and most prominent locations. This is unfortunate, since the people in lower income and further afield areas are often the ones who benefit the most from such initiatives, but they seem to be mostly left out of this party.

The Ugly

DoITT seems mostly steadfast in their insistence (as the Parks Department has been in the past) that no City funds should be spent on any buildout or maintenance of hotspots. This is still a really big sticking point: The first Parks RFP required that a concessionaire pay significant money to the Parks department, and the second Parks RFP required that a concessionaire pay some proposed amount of money to the Parks department.

There have been only a handful of interested companies (we offered to pay $1), and the WiFiSalon, the only concessionaire that paid any fees was driven out of business by that requirement. Ad revenue is negligible since such networks see a fraction of the impressions that even a second-tier blog sees, and sponsorship dollars are only available to the most prominent parks like Madison Square Park and Bryant Park, and such deals are done only through whole-park sponsorship, not sponsorship of just the Wi-Fi network.

As I’ve said many times before and as the industry has seen countless times, Ad-based business models are unsustainable for individual hotspots and even reasonable sized hotspot networks. If DoITT and the City want to really ensure that free public Wi-Fi should be made available, and that locations other than the most highly-trafficked and well-to-do are served, they need to step up and offer alternative funding models.

One thing to consider is that the companies that can do the installation and maintenance of high-quality outdoor hotspots (there are few) don’t have big advertising or sales teams to make them self-funding. These are two orthogonal specialties and forcing a single company to be capable of both severely limits the applicant pool and threatens the business viability of any participating company. NYCwireless has been successful because we provide all of the back-end technical know how and support for free public Wi-Fi hotspots. We are paid by our partners (BIDs and others) to perform this service, and they do the money raising since that’s what they are good at.

Related posts:

1. Response to City Wireless Internet Access for New York City Parks and Other Open Spaces (DoITT RFI)
2. NYCwireless Testimony for NY City Council Hearing: The Regulation and Use of the Unallocated Portion of the Radio Spectrum, Also Known as White Spaces
3. NY Daily News Published Poorly Researched Article about New York City Hotspots

Here’s a press release from Josh Breitbart and Free Press about the hearing:

Groups Call on NYC to Open Public Airwaves to New Technology

City Council should embrace ‘white spaces’ and bring high-speed Internet to all New Yorkers

NEW YORK — Community media, public interest and immigrant rights advocates are calling on the New York City Council to endorse “white spaces” technology that could boost the economy and drive down the cost of mobile phone calls and Internet access.

White spaces are the unused portions of the public airwaves between television channels. According to a study conducted by Free Press, one-fifth of New York City’s television channels are currently not being used. New technology can use this vacant spectrum to send powerful, high-speed Internet signals — connecting New Yorkers to a fast, open and affordable Internet.

“Opening the white spaces would close the digital divide, and it wouldn’t cost us a dime — or, rather, it would save us a lot more than a dime on what we’re paying now for Internet access and cell phone service,” said Joshua Breitbart, policy director of People’s Production House.

The Federal Communications Commission is currently considering whether to open up the white spaces to the public. Engineers at the FCC, through extensive testing, have shown that low-power, mobile devices can utilize white spaces to connect to the Internet without interfering with TV broadcasts and wireless microphones on adjacent channels.

Lobbyists from the National Association of Broadcasters, cell phone carriers and wireless microphone companies have launched a misinformation campaign to prevent white spaces from being used to provide high-speed broadband access.

“Unfortunately, many key decision-makers simply lack the bandwidth to investigate the benefits of white spaces technology,” said Timothy Karr, campaign director of Free Press. “Instead they hear misinformation from industry lobbyists who come knocking with lies and spin meant to paint this technology as a danger to humanity.”

A draft resolution currently before the City Council, sponsored by Councilmember Gale Brewer and Speaker Christine Quinn, claims white space devices would be “devastating” to Broadway productions. The City Council Committee on Technology in Government is holding a hearing on the resolution on Monday, Sept. 29, 2008, at 10 a.m., in the Committee Room of City Hall. It is a public forum where anyone can testify.

“White spaces could provide an affordable alternative for people like me who use expensive phone cards to call family and friends back home in other countries,” said Abdulai Bah of Nah We Yone, a community group that advocates for African refugees in New York.

Related posts:

1. NYCwireless Testimony for NY City Council Hearing: The Regulation and Use of the Unallocated Portion of the Radio Spectrum, Also Known as White Spaces
2. New York City Council Approves Public Broadband Commission
3. Community Broadband Hearing at Columbia University on Dec. 11

Very curious too that:

(a) The report from Diamond Consultants is only about the digital divide, since I was under the impression that the research was supposed to be about a lot more than just the digital divide, and

(b) This is being presented as “the Bloomberg Administration’s plans”, because I would think that the Bloomberg Administration would present their own plans and not have a consultant present for them, and further their “plans” should be based in part on the findings of the Broadband Advisory Committee, who’s whole point of existing is to bring a different perspective and set of expertise to any “plans” that are created.

Overall, I’m not too hopeful for what will be presented. I suspect it will be much too little, and frankly at least 6 months too late. This administration inexplicably has shown no spine for dealing with internet and network access issues and tends to kowtow to Verizon and Time Warner Cable. But, maybe, I’ll be pleasantly surprised.

CITY HALL – On Wednesday, July 30th at 11:00am there will be a briefing from the Mayor’s Office and Diamond Consultants for the Broadband Advisory Committee regarding the Bloomberg Administration’s plans for bridging the digital divide in New York City.

The Broadband Advisory Committee was established in 2005 with the passage of Introduction 625-A creating a joint public broadband commission to advise the Mayor and the City Council of New York on how the resources of City government can be used to stimulate the private market so that residents and businesses of New York City have more options in terms of high-speed Internet access. The goal of the committee is to educate the general public about broadband and the newest communication technologies, and to give New York City residents the opportunity to comment on how the digital divide in New York City can be closed. To support these efforts the Broadband Advisory Committee has held public Broadband Hearings in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens. The Committee will hold its fifth and final hearing in Staten Island this fall.

Diamond Consultants was hired by the New York City Economic Development Corporation to determine the breadth of the digital divide in New York City and develop programs and initiatives to provide greater digital inclusion for all residents. Chris O’Brien, a Partner in Diamond’s Public Sector practice, will be detailing Diamond’s findings and its recommendations for the City’s next steps.

The meeting will take place in the Committee of the Whole Room, City Hall, New York, NY on Wednesday, July 30th at 11:00 am. This is a public meeting and all are welcome to attend. For further information please contact Kunal Malhotra, Director of Legislation & Budget, 212-788-6975 or Kunal.Malhotra@council.nyc.gov.

Related posts:

1. NYC Broadband Advisory Committee Public Hearing in Manhattan
2. NYC Broadband Advisory Committee Public Hearing in Staten Island
3. NYC Broadband Advisory Committee Meeting on March 30 in The Bronx

Learning the right lessons and emulating the right policies here will enable the United States to improve our broadband performance faster than in the absence of proactive policies. The report analyzes the extent to which policy and non-policy factors drive broadband performance, and how broadband policies related to national leadership, incentives, competition, rural access, and consumer demand affect national broadband performance. Based on these findings the report makes a number of recommendations to boost U.S. broadband performance.

Executive Summary (pdf)
Full Report (pdf)

The report is extensive, and has some very good policy recommendations that should be heeded by all levels of government.

Overall, at the broadest level, nations with robust national broadband strategies–that is, those that make broadband a priority, coordinate across agencies, put real resources behind the strategy, and promote both supply and demand–fare better than those without.

Related posts:

1. BBC Report: Broadband World: Mapping the global picture
2. Diamond Consultants to publicly brief Broadband Advisory Committee regarding the Bloomberg Administration’s plans for bridging the digital divide
3. International Summit for Community Wireless Networks Call for Panels

Related posts:

1. Network Neutrality Challenge gaining momentum
2. The Coming Network Neutrality War
3. NYCwireless Network Neutrality Broadband Challenge

I nominate the end-user to make the decision. If, as I propose above, Internet access providers were to provide explicitly different tiers of service for different, explicitly laid out throughput plans charged at different rates, the user could make that decision. And it would be a free market decision that even a libertarian would love. The carrier would need to decide whether to (a) eat the cost of upgrading its infrastructure to allay the risk of losing customers to bad performance or (b) implement tiered service to save network upgrade costs but risk losing customers who don’t like paying for tiered service. But, hey, that’s business.

Carriers know all this. But, as it turns out, they don’t want to frame the picture simply because they don’t want to be in the Stupid Network business. They’re addicted to adding value. They’ve convinced one class of customers, music and movie moguls, that they can add value for them. Importantly to the carriers, the value they propose to add is network-resident value; the return of the Intelligent Network. Network-resident value is business as usual, even when it imposes huge costs on the rest of society. This is why they persist in framing the two issues as inter-related.

Harold Feld also has weighed in on David Weinberger’s blog:

Which leads to my final point. The very idea of traffic control is that you have to give the ISP the power to decide what is best. But wouldn’t it actually MAXIMIZE network efficiency to treat capacity as a spot market and let users decide? This does not require any great sophistication (assuming the right software). Furthermore, because we keep hearing that it is a relatively few number of sophisticated “bandwidth hogs” that are causing all the heartburn, altering the incentives of these few highly sophisticated actors to change their behaviors will have a substantial global effect.

But the Telcos and Cable Cos do not like this choice, because they want to own the customer.

No related posts.

From Kunal Malhotra, Director of Legislation & Budget, Office of Council Member Gale A. Brewer:

Coming on the heels of successful public hearings in the Bronx and Brooklyn where hundreds of people attended, the New York City Broadband Advisory Committee will hear from policy experts and Manhattan residents and business people in a Public Meeting of the Broadband Advisory Committee in Manhattan. During this official hearing on the borough’s Broadband status, the City Council seeks to answer the following questions: How important is affordable Broadband to businesses and to under-served communities? How will high-speed Internet connections improve the quality of life for all New Yorkers and their families?

“New York is the most dynamic city in the world. But when it comes to the Internet, we’re working to catch up to other jurisdictions,” said Council Member Brewer, Chair of the New York City Council’s Committee on Technology in Government. Brewer sponsored Local Law 126, which created the NYC Broadband Advisory Committee. “I am excited to work with the Mayor’s Office in making New York a place where you don’t have to pay to go slow. We need affordable high-speed Internet connections to bring in jobs, help schools, and make the city safer.”

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 27% of American households are still not using the Internet at all and “those with less education, those with lower household incomes, and Americans age 65 and older are less likely to have embraced broadband than those who are younger and have higher socio-economic status.” Seeking to address these same imbalances, Broadband Advisory Committee Chairperson, Shaun Belle, and CEO of Mount Hope Housing Company said, “Understanding the challenges to Broadband connectivity for the average New Yorker is a primary focus of the Broadband Advisory Committee; exploring and potentially implementing solutions to address these challenges will be the basis of our future planning.”

Andrew Rasiej, an Advisory Committee Member and the Founder of the Personal Democracy Forum and MOUSE said, “These hearings are critical to focusing broad political attention and building consensus for the need to guarantee all New Yorkers an opportunity to participate in the 21st Century economy.”

The New York Broadband Advisory Committee was created by Local Law 126, a bill sponsored by Council Member Gale Brewer. The purpose of the Committee is to advise the Mayor and the City Council on how to bring affordable high-speed Internet connection to all New York City residents, nonprofit organizations and businesses. The public hearing in Manhattan is the third in a series of five being convened in every borough. Queens and Staten Island hearings are scheduled for early 2008.

Related posts:

1. NYC Broadband Advisory Committee Public Hearing in Staten Island
2. NYC Broadband Advisory Committee Meeting on March 30 in The Bronx
3. Diamond Consultants to publicly brief Broadband Advisory Committee regarding the Bloomberg Administration’s plans for bridging the digital divide

NYCwireless will be there to help represent the interests of free public Wi-Fi, which hasn’t had as extensive distribution as midtown and downtown Manhattan. We’ve heard from a number of people and organizations in the Bronx that there’s a tremendous interest in free public Wi-Fi. We’ve been working with Professor John McMullen and his students at Monroe College to build more free hotspots in local businesses.

If you have any interest in helping New York City get affordable, universal, ubiquitous high-speed internet access, you should join us at this meeting.

The public hearing will be on March 30, from 10am-12pm at the Gould Memorial Library Auditorium, Bronx Community College, University Ave. at W. 181st Street. Council Member Brewer and Borough President Carrion invite all Bronx residents, nonprofit organizations and businesses to testify about the availability and affordability — or lack of — of broadband (that is, a high-speed connection to the Internet) in their neighborhoods.

Some questions that the Committee has are:

1. Why is a fast affordable Internet connection important to you?
2. What do you consider an “affordable” fee to pay for an high-speed connection to the Internet?
3. If you have a broadband connection, what do you use it for (e.g., help your child do his/her homework)?
4. If don’t have broadband or if you had a faster connection to the Internet, what would you use it for (e.g., market your business on-line or look for a job)?

The hearing in the Bronx will kick-off a series of five public hearings that will be convened in every borough of New York City. Based on these hearings and with the help of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, the Advisory Committee will report their findings and recommendations to the Mayor and City Council.

Related posts:

1. NYC Broadband Advisory Committee Public Hearing in Manhattan
2. NYC Broadband Advisory Committee Public Hearing in Staten Island
3. Diamond Consultants to publicly brief Broadband Advisory Committee regarding the Bloomberg Administration’s plans for bridging the digital divide