Update from "Completing BTOP Deployments and Driving Toward Sustainability"

[#1]

I recently attended “Completing Deployments and Driving Toward Sustainability”, the mid-course symposium for BTOP grantees held in Cleveland on October 5-7^th.  This event was organized by the NTIA and One Community, a BTOP award winner in northern Ohio started by Lev Gonick.

For those of you who don’t know Lev, he is currently vice president for information technology services and CIO at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. His One Community model served as the inspiration for the NTIA BTOP program and he will be speaking at the Calix Users Group in two weeks.

Key Take Aways

As for the symposium, it was heavily attended by BTOP winners. There were over 450 attendees from 152 grantee organizations representing the entire range of middle mile, community infrastructure, and computing center awards—of course, there were a number of Calix customers in attendance including Bristol, VA and Delta Communications LLC (Clearwave).  Here are some of the highlights I took from the meeting.

• There is a wide variance between projects and how they are progressing
  Some of the projects that are further along have taken the approach of hiring an experienced operator to build and operate the network.  This has allowed the grantee organization to start thinking more long term about expanding last mile and working with local communities on sustainable revenue. 

• BTOP funds draw down has been accelerated
  The date for final draw down is September 30, 2013.  This is 21 months earlier than the last date for the RUS BIP award drawdowns, so the BTOP grantees are under a great deal of time pressure.  This was highlighted in many of the panels where many recipients spoke about their struggle with negotiating pole attachments, make readies and project managing their construction.   

Planning for Partnership

In search of sustainable revenue streams BTOP awardees are looking at local, county and state government, education and healthcare facilities.  Many also mentioned mobile backhaul as a great opportunity-something One Community has already done.   Some are looking at stimulating FTTH builds by the private sector.

Calix believes that these BTOP middle mile and community infrastructure projects will create opportunities for public-private partnerships that Calix customers can leverage to expand their FTTH footprints.  And, while I acknowledge a slight bias in the matter, I strongly believe that our solutions are ideal for building out community infrastructure projects and then having these systems in place to cost effectively deploy last mile, as follow-on projects in local communities.  I encourage each of our customers to attend the Calix Users Group conference in a few weeks so that you can find out for yourselves.

[#2]

Dave, great summary and some interesting tells. We are working with several BTOP programs and as you know I was involved with the development of OneCommunity. Lev is both a great advocate and spokesman for the impact of broadband and helped to demonstrate the power of building community partnerships. 

The acceleration of middle mile projects also means that local, independent and municipal providers need to think about how they would like to leverage the federally funded fiber and wireless projects that cross the country. The middle mile will be there, will the local communities have the infrastructure they need? Have they started to think about digital economic development and the impact this will have on their own communities. Most of these communities did not receive stimulus grants and are not prepared to take advantage of the power that this new infrastructure will provide.

We agree that the future requires greater collaboration and the development of public-private partnerships to create sustainable long term benefits will be one of the keys to our nations future success. Much of the country is resource constrained. It does not matter whether its human or financial capital. We need to find a way to cross those bridges and move the country forward. BTOP/BIP were a great start, but just that. We have to find a way to fuel the capabilities of all of our communities. Glad to have folks like you participating in the change.

[#3]

Mark,

Thanks for your comments and support on this. I think your past work at One Community and the work you are doing now is exactly what these BTOP projects will need to leverage what they have built and the infrastructure local service providers need to thrive.  One thing that is very clear is that the backhaul costs faced by many local service providers really hurt the economics of last mile in rural areas,.  Hopefully, these BTOP projects will help level the playing field between urban and rural communities for getting to peering points.