Page 2: Let’s play this gig
“I don’t want to get all preachy, but this is a big deal.” -Mammoth Lakes Town Councilman John Wentworth.
What Wentworth is talking about is pushing Mammoth towards becoming a “Gig” town, taking advantage of Digital 395 and creating a new standard where every local home and business is connected to the D395 backbone.
Wentworth delivered his presentation about leveraging D395 at a joint Planning and Economic Development Commission (PEDC) and Town Council workshop on Wednesday.
He also delivered the presentation before the PEDC last week.
It helped to hear the presentation twice. Wentworth talks pretty fast, and it generally appears like his tongue is having a hard time keeping up with his brain.
In a nutshell, we have a fiber optic network sitting outside our back doors with the capacity to work at 200 times the speeds we enjoy now.
The issue is how to bridge that last “mile” from street to table.
Inyo County issued a press release last week on the same topic, as it is seeking a “last mile” partner.
So what do these last mile connections cost? An article appearing at www.dailyyonder.com last month about a small town in Mississippi (Quitman, pop. 2,300) stated, “The first connections will be made this month. Five trial homes are already in operation. The cost estimate to construct each line to a home is $10,000, an estimated $10 million total cost.”
Is it worth it? That’s half of the question. The other half might be, “Can you afford not to have it?” As Wentworth said, “You’ll [as a community] either be connected and woven into the larger fabric, or not.”
As Blair Levin of the Brookings Institute said in a speech last month to the Urban Land Institute, “While some incumbent broadband providers argue consumers don’t need faster speeds, markets are already recognizing the added value of the abundant bandwidth that comes with fiber. Studies indicate homes connected to fiber enjoy a market value $5,000 greater than equivalent homes limited to just cable and copper. The presence of next generation networks is now a leading requirement for economic development recruitment. A recent Fiber to the Home Council study showed a $1.4 billion gain in GDP by 14 communities with widely available fiber.
First, while most municipal officials understand that everything a community does ten years from now will be affected by the quality of the broadband networks it uses, they don’t yet understand how many things communities do today will affect the broadband it has ten years hence.
Cities in the United States in the next few years may split between those who have the choice of cable v. copper and those who enjoy the choice of cable v. fiber. Real estate development involves many factors, but if you are thinking about investing in a community where the mayor can’t tell you how they intend to be in the cable v. fiber camp, think again.
Cities need to recognize the economic reality that we buy broadband as a community, not individually.
If there is any audience that should understand the importance [of this] … it should be the real estate industry. The mantra of the business is ‘location, location, location.’ What makes one location superior to another is not an individual building, but the clustered activity that a location shares. Developers, who know how to work with governments need to start thinking creatively to make sure everyone in and surrounding their developments has access to that faster, better, cheaper bandwidth that will be the table stakes for where people want to live and work in the gigabit era.”
As Eric Mack of CNET (who lives in Taos) wrote in 2012, “North Americans are running in a relay race right now against the rest of the world in an information-based economy and society, but we’ve got to pass the baton of information access to our rural anchor leg, and I promise you that dude (or woman) running the anchor desperately wants to grab that baton and sprint.”
In short, this has to happen. Ideally, at least in Mammoth, Suddenlink partners with the Town of Mammoth Lakes to build out this network. If Suddenlink balks, the Town needs to be prepared to move forward on its own. Town Manager Dan Holler said Wednesday that he didn’t think this is something we want to get into as a town (the fiber network business). It may not be something we want to get into, but if the alternative is to do what Mammoth normally does (stick its thumb up its ass and watch the world go by), we need to get into it.
If members of Town Council plead poverty as a reason for not being able to get something done, they’ll need to revise their spending priorities. If they don’t wish to revise their spending priorities, the voters will need to remove them.
But as Wentworth said Thursday, “I think Council is 100% on board.”
In regard to finding the money, if this means revisiting past Councils’ “political commitments,” as they relate to spending, so be it.
For example, could Mammoth Lakes Tourism operate effectively on a $4.5 million annual budget instead of $6.5 million? Answer: Yes, even if MLT wouldn’t be happy about it.
As Wentworth concluded, “This is an opportunity to have real influence over our future … we don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth. Let’s figure out a way to get on it and ride.”
