Nevada County, the Black Hole of Broadband (updated 9jun19)

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 29 May 2019.  A slightly edited version of this piece was published in The Union's 1jun19 print edition and also online here.]

Broadband connectivity to the internet is fundamental to the economic growth of every community in America.  And it is doubly critical for the economic development, if not survival, of small rural communities off the beaten path like Nevada County.  However, that truth has yet to be embraced by our local governments.  In fact, there are many of us who adamantly oppose the availability of broadband in these foothills for the simple reason that they are opposed to everything that promotes growth in our county, be it in housing, new or expanding businesses, or anything that invites more working families to locate here.

When we arrived early in the millennium, I got involved in the nascent efforts to promote connectivity that would attract commerce and middle-class families into our county.  For the last 30 or so years, Nevada County’s population has been stagnant.  During this time we have seen improvement in some local cultural offerings and the arrival of more retirees (I am among them).  But in the large we have also witnessed the departure of cash importing businesses and working families as their jobs moved elsewhere along the I-80 corridor, or even out of state.

Nevada County is off the beaten path.  We have slowly acknowledged the futility of manufacturing anything here that must then be sold elsewhere.  Today the county’s main cash importers are tourists, retirees, and the remaining businesses which more and more focus their revenue producing activities around receiving and transmitting digital data.  To make the point more strongly, the only cash-importing businesses that will seek a suitable home in our county are those that can import lots of bits over broadband conduits like fiber, then use locally available human labor to make those bits more valuable, and finally send those valuable bits into the outside world.  And all of that requires broadband connectivity way beyond what is available today.

Nevada County shares this ‘broadband problem’ with many other remote communities in the country.  But due to our location in an acknowledged high-tech state, and our proximity to a major modern metropolitan area, our telecom shortcomings stand out like a sore thumb.  Legal scholar and Harvard Law School professor Susan Crawford has written Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution―and Why America Might Miss It (2018) in which she documents the gathering telecommunications crisis in the United States.  In there she describes a “world of fiber optic connections reaching neighborhoods, homes, and businesses (that) will represent as great a change from what came before as the advent of electricity. The virtually unlimited amounts of data we’ll be able to send and receive through fiber optic connections will enable a degree of virtual presence that will radically transform health care, education, urban administration and services, agriculture, retail sales, and offices. Yet all of those transformations will pale compared with the innovations and new industries that we can’t even imagine today.”

The problem she reveals is “how the giant corporations that control cable and internet access in the United States use their tremendous lobbying power to tilt the playing field against competition, holding back the infrastructure improvements necessary for the country to move forward. And … how a few cities and towns are fighting monopoly power to bring the next technological revolution to their communities.”  But to highlight her punchline of how some communities are failing the challenge to bring in broadband fiber, she cites Nevada County, California.  That’s right dear people, we in these foothills are held up as a national poster child of how not to succeed in this critical aspect of promoting economic development and growth.  We are the backward child in a competitive world, and we are in the most part doing it to ourselves.

As a longtime advocate of broadband fiber to our towns and neighborhoods, I have joined with fellow promoters of this technology who work through non-profit organizations and lobby local leaders to embrace bringing broadband to Nevada County.  But over the years, our broadband walk has not matched our broadband talk.  As professor Susan Crawford points out, our county has no political leaders willing to step up to champion this critically needed technology.  Today, as our national economy continues to grow, I plan to rededicate myself to encourage our political leaders to start making measurable progress on Nevada County’s road to the 21^st century.  And as your neighbor, I invite you to also make your own voice heard to our community leaders and elected representatives.

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the addended transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

[Addendum]  Here are some bon mots about Nevada County from Susan Crawford abstracted by my assiduous partner in crime, Russ Steele – H/T my friend.

• The rural framework of this capacity story is revealed by comparing Nevada City/Grass Valley, where local government refused to get involved in fiber, to the RS Fiber region in Minnesota, and to Otis, Massachusetts—two places where local government did all it could to bring fiber to town.
• It is important that the community, the local government, have some skin in the game; the lack of such involvement in John Paul’s Nevada City/Grass Valley has made it very difficult for him to privately finance the building of the Chip Carman network.
• Certificates, skills, adult education: that’s the workforce development model that mayor Andy Berke of Chattanooga is focused on, and the one Nevada City/Grass Valley and Greensboro don’t seem to have. It’s working well in Chattanooga, but students must physically go to a center, with its high fixed costs for buildings and grounds, in order to access adult education opportunities.
• Laissez-faire is not working for rural America, particularly in areas like Nevada City/Grass Valley where the local authorities are uninterested in intervening to ensure that their people have communications capacity.
• . . .one of the key reasons that both Greensboro and Grass Valley/Nevada City are making such slow progress toward any flavor of publicly oriented fiber is that there is no prominent public leader willing to stand behind it.

[9jun19 update] I recently received an email from a former county leader who took me to task for agreeing with Susan Crawford’s assertion that BB introduction to rural communities like Nevada County have and are being hindered by the lack of local leadership.  In our subsequent exchange he made it clear that there was no lack of leadership, but that it was our low population and population densities that did not make financial sense for an outside outfit to invest in adding to the county’s BB infrastructure.  To put a bow on it, he summarily dismissed further efforts to convince suppliers like ATT, Comcast, … until our population grew to some TBD level that would then ‘pencil out’ for the suppliers.  Attempting to understand the suppliers’ criteria and financial methodologies for evaluating the profitability from our community has not been done, and need not be done.  In short, nothing can be done re expanding BB in Nevada County until sufficient population growth occurs.

I report this exchange as evidence of how Dr Crawford’s research into the causality of poor BB penetration in the country’s hinterlands is correct and confirmed by our own experience.  Our electeds and community leaders have not stepped up because they all have considered it to be an exercise in futility – ‘it can’t be done’.

Comments

[Don Bessee]

Dr. R, That page took a long time to load. LOL

;-)

[jeffpelline]

George,
Move to a home with a three-digit address in Nevada City. The internet is just fine.

[Michael Anderson]

George, your KVMR commentary and post here at RR couldn't be more timely. We are indeed at an "all hands on deck" moment when it comes to rural broadband. I have some detailed responses to what you've written here this evening. I will break up my comments into sections for easiest digestibility.

[George Rebane]

MichaelA 807pm - Looking forward to joining all our shoulders to this wheel of our county's fortunes.

re JeffP 800pm - here's an example of the response from the idiot quarter regarding our county's BB deficit. Unfortunately, there are more of them out there to continue their work to stifle the county's economic development progress. So far their efforts have been successful.

[Scott O]

Our nation's founders understood the need to connect the citizens with whatever was available to ensure good communication. Hence, the stated role of govt in establishing a postal system. It was a good example of something 'socialized' that the govt could do. Rates were kept as flat as possible to make sure the far flung areas would enjoy the flow of information nearly as well as the large cities. The post office, unfortunately, was stuck with that same task of snail mail and packages while the world went digital. It's a pity the original idea of providing service to those most remote as well as those close in did not continue into the information age. I was at a small settlement last year in the wilds of Idaho. Warren has a population of possibly 15 year round residents. Hours of rough road or just minutes by aircraft. The US Postal Service flies mail to the Warren Post Office twice a week. It's too bad the post office didn't continue that zeal of service into the modern age to connect such rural areas all over the country with zeros and ones.

[Don Bessee]

Does anyone think our defense industry will not heavily invest in invigorating our domestic production with expedited waivers? That's our admirations point is it not? -

China's Rare Earth Metals Aren't the Trade War Weapon Beijing Makes Them Out to Be

https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/china-apos-rare-earth-metals-094030499.html

;-)

[Michael Anderson]

GR 825pm - Me too. So let's get started. I first met Susan Crawford in January of 2015 when I was the volunteer CIO of Bright Fiber Network, the corporate entity of which Spiral Internet was a DBA. This was in Kansas City and she was the keynote speaker at the Gigabit City Summit.

Here are some links to that event: http://www.gigabitcitysummit.com/news/2015/3/11/video-susan-crawford-keynote / https://www.kcdigitaldrive.org/project/gigabit-city-summit/

Her recent book, Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution, comes after her seminal work on broadband incumbents and telcos, Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age. She is also co-author of The Responsive City: Engaging Communities Through Data-Smart Governance, another seminal work that helps to explain IoT to the lay person. I view all three of her works as required reading to anyone who wants to understand broadband in America in the 21st century.

I'd like to just start from the beginning of your post and work our way down.

You wrote: "In fact, there are many of us who adamantly oppose the availability of broadband in these foothills for the simple reason that they are opposed to everything that promotes growth in our county, be it in housing, new or expanding businesses, or anything that invites more working families to locate here." I will agree with you that there is a contingent of no-growthers still in Nevada County but they are today in the distinct minority. Even reasonable partisans of the far left now recognize that we have a both a housing crisis and that the local economy is not sustainable with just a service and tourism industry. Both the arts and tech are now seeing a renewed focus, largely via a resurgent ERC, and I encourage you to attend the next meeting at 7:30 AM on June 6th at the Tech Hub, 104 New Mohawk Rd., so you can see for yourself how much things have changed.

You wrote: "We have slowly acknowledged the futility of manufacturing anything here that must then be sold elsewhere." Actually, you would be surprised at how much niche manufacturing is still happening here in Nevada County, and growing. That is one of the main focuses of the NC Tech Connection. In fact, there is an event tomorrow morning to discuss this very subject: https://nctechconnection.org/event/made-in-nevada-county-manufacturing-connection-meetup/

Be there or be square! (-;

More later...

[Gregory]

" I first met Susan Crawford in January of 2015 when I was the volunteer CIO of Bright Fiber Network, the corporate entity of which Spiral Internet was a DBA. This was in Kansas City and she was the keynote speaker at the Gigabit City Summit."

Crackerjack piece of work, that. Well done!

[Russ]

For the past year, I have been writing about, compiling articles and whitepapers on rural broadband issues on my Rural Economy Technology blog. I also look at some of the economic issues associated with rural broadband and the future of LEO Satellite Internet.

https://ruraleconomytechnology.com

If you would like to discuss an issue, please leave a comment on my RET Blog. Thanks!

[Russ]

Congratulations George on getting this KVMR Editorial posted as an Other Voices in the Union. I hope it garners more attention than it has here on RR.

https://www.theunion.com/opinion/columns/george-rebane-nevada-county-the-black-hole-of-broadband/

[Russ]

There are 800 communities that "got it done" Why, because they had dedicated leaders who understood the consequences of failure.

Communities invest in telecommunications networks for a variety of reasons - economic development, improving access to education and health care, price stabilization, etc. They range from massive networks offering a gig to hundreds of thousands in Tennessee to small towns connecting a few local businesses.

This map tracks a variety of ways in which local governments have invested in wired telecommunications networks as well as state laws that discourage such approaches.

Our map includes more than 800 communities, of which 500 are served by some form of municipal network and more than 300 are served by a cooperative (updated January, 2019):

See the map of those communities here -- https://muninetworks.org/communitymap

If you start with the attitude it cannot be done, it will not get done.

[Russ]

I submitted this letter to the Union Editor on May 26th and received acknowledgment on May 30th. I am still waiting for publication.

Supervisors Deny 70 Household Critical Infrastructure

By Russ Steele

Nevada County supervisors oppose new cell tower read the headline!

"Nevada County Supervisor Ed Scofield said he usually supports new cell towers. However, he wasn't going to approve one at 13083 Wildlife Lane.

Speaking near the end of a Tuesday hearing for a tower, Scofield said the proposed 110-foot AT&T tower would bring broadband access to only some 70 homes."

In today's digital world Broadband access has become critical infrastructure, just like water, power and waste management according to the Brookings Institute, California Public Utilities Commission, the Federal Communication Commission and other future assessing organizations.

Would the Supervisors deny 70 households access to water, power, or waste management? No! So why do they deny 70 homes access to more economic opportunity, better education, and healthcare that is available on this critical infrastructure called broadband?

I have invested 1,000 of hours promoting broadband in Nevada County, mapping broadband deficiencies, working with Congress and the FCC to promote federal investment in rural broadband. Now that it has arrived Supervisor Schofield says, "We do not need that" Really, how clueless to the needs of modern digital society can a Supervisor be?

This kind of leadership is destroying the economic potential of a beautiful County. It would help if you had a more knowledgeable representative.