Lafayette Louisiana – POTs and PANs

Using Gigabit Broadband

Mozilla recently awarded $280,000 in grants from its Gigabit Communities Fund to projects that are finding beneficial uses of gigabit broadband. This is the latest set of grants and the company has awarded more than $1.2 million to over 90 projects in the last six years. For any of you not aware of Mozilla, they offer a range of open standard software that promotes privacy. I’ve been using their Firefox web browser and operating software for years. As an avid reader of web articles I daily use their Pocket app for tracking the things I’ve read online.

The grants this year went to projects in five cities: Lafayette, LA; Eugene, OR; Chattanooga, TN; Austin, TX; and Kansas City. Grants ranged from $10,000 to $30,000. At least four of those cities are familiar names. Lafayette and Chattanooga are two of the largest municipally-owned fiber networks. Austin and Kansas City have fiber provided by Google Fiber. Eugene is a newer name among fiber communities and is in the process of constructing an open access wholesale network, starting in the downtown area.

I’m not going to recite the list of projects and a synopsis of them is on the Mozilla blog. The awards this year have a common theme of promoting the use of broadband for education. The awards were given mostly to school districts and non-profits, although for-profit companies are also eligible for the grants.

The other thing these projects have in common is that they are developing real-world applications that require robust broadband. For example, several of the projects involve using virtual reality. There is a project that brings virtual reality to several museums and another that shows how soil erosion from rising waters and sediment mismanagement has driven the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw band of Indians from the Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana.

I clearly remember getting my first DSL connection at my house after spending a decade on dial-up. I got a self-installed DSL kit from Verizon and it was an amazing feeling when I connected it. That DSL connection provided roughly 1 Mbps, which was 20 to 30 times faster than dial-up. That speed increase freed me up to finally use the Internet to read articles, view pictures and shop without waiting forever for each web site to load. I no longer had to download software updates at bedtime and hope that the dial-up connection didn’t crap out.

I remember when Google Fiber first announced they were going to build gigabit networks for households. Gigabit broadband brings that same experience. When Google Fiber announced the gigabit fiber product most cable networks had maximum speeds of perhaps 30 Mbps – and Google was bringing more than a 30-times increase in speed.

Almost immediately we heard from the big ISPs who denigrated the idea saying that nobody needs gigabit bandwidth and that this was a gimmick. Remember that at that time the CEO of almost every major ISP was on the record saying that they provided more than enough broadband to households – when it was clear to users that they didn’t.

Interestingly, since the Google Fiber announcement the big cable companies have decided to upgrade their own networks to gigabit speeds and ISPs like AT&T and Verizon rarely talk about broadband without mentioning gigabit. Google Fiber reset the conversation about broadband and the rest of the industry has been forced to pay heed.

The projects being funded by Mozilla are just a few of the many ways that we are finding applications that need bigger broadband. I travel to communities all over the country and in the last year I have noticed a big shift in the way that people talk about their home broadband. In the past people would always comment that they seemed to have (or not have) enough broadband speed to stream video. But now, most conversations about broadband hit on the topic of using multiple broadband applications at the same time. That’s because this is the new norm. People want broadband connections that can connect to multiple video streams simultaneously while also supporting VoIP, online schoolwork, gaming and other bandwidth-hungry applications. I now routinely hear people talking about how their 25 Mbps connection is no longer adequate to support their household – a conversation I rarely heard as recently as a few years ago.

We are not going to all grow into needing gigabit speeds for a while. But the same was true of my first DSL connection. I had that connection for over a decade, and during that time my DSL got upgraded once to 6 Mbps. But even that eventually felt slow and a few years later I was the first one in my area using the new Verizon FiOS and a 100 Mbps connection on fiber. ISPs are finally facing up to the fact that households are expecting a lot of broadband speed. The responsive ISPs are responding to this demand, while some bury their heads in the sand and try to convince people that their slower broadband speeds are still all that people need.

Big Companies and Telecommuting

One of the biggest benefits most communities see when the first get good broadband is the ability for people to telecommute or work from home. Communities that get broadband for the first time report that this is one of the most visible changes made in the community and that soon after getting broadband almost every street and road has somebody working from home.

CCG is a great example of telecommuting and our company went virtual fifteen years ago. The main thing that sent us home in those days was that residential broadband was better than what we could get at the office. All of our employees could get 1 – 2 Mbps broadband at home and that was also the only speed available at our offices over a T1. But we found that even in those early days that a T1 was not enough speed to share among multiple employees.

Telecommuting really picked up at about the same time that CCG went virtual. I recall that AT&T was an early promoter of telecommuting as was the federal government. At first these big companies let employees work at home a day or two a week as a trial. But that worked out so well that over time big organizations felt comfortable with people working out of their homes. I’ve seen a number of studies that show that telecommuting employees are more productive than office employees and work longer hours – due in part to not have to commute. Telecommuting has become so pervasive that there was a cover story in Forbes in 2013 announcing that one out of five American workers worked at home.

Another one of the early pioneers in telecommuting was IBM. A few years ago they announced that 40% of their 380,000 employees worked outside of traditional offices. But last week the company announced that they were ending telecommuting. They told employees in many of their major divisions like Watson development, software development and digital marketing and design that they must move back into a handful of regional offices or leave the company.

The company has seen decreasing revenues for twenty straight quarters and there is speculation that this is a way to reduce their work force without having to go through the pain of choosing who will leave. But what is extraordinary about this announcement is how rare it is. It’s only the second major company that has ended telecommuting in recent memory, the last being Yahoo in 2013.

Both IBM and Yahoo were concerned about earnings and that is probably one of the major reasons that drove their decision to end telecommuting. It seems a bit ironic that companies would make this choice when it’s clear that telecommuting saves money for the employer – something IBM crowed about earlier this year.

Here are just a few of the major findings that have been done about the benefits of telecommuting. It’s improves employee morale and job satisfaction. It reduces attrition, reduces sick and unscheduled leave. It saves companies on office space and overhead costs. It reduces discrimination by equalizing people by personality and talent rather than race, age or appearance. It increases productivity by eliminating unneeded meetings and because telecommuters work more hours than office workers.

But there are downsides. It’s hard to train new employees in a telecommuting environment. One of the most common ways to train new people is to have them spend time with somebody more experienced – something that is difficult with telecommuting. Telecommuting makes it harder to brainstorm ideas, something that benefits from live interaction. And possibly the biggest drawback is that telecommuting isn’t for everybody. Some people cannot function well outside of a structured environment.

As good as telecommuting is for companies it’s even better for smaller and rural communities. A lot of people want to live in the communities they grew up in, around friends and family. We’ve seen a brain drain from rural areas for decades as kids graduate from high school or college and are unable to find meaningful work. But telecommuting lets people live where there is broadband. Many communities that have had broadband come to town report that they see an almost instant uptick in housing prices and demand for housing. And part of that increased demand is from those who want to choose a community rather than follow a job.

One of the more interesting projects I’ve worked on with the telecommuting issue was when I helped the city of Lafayette, Louisiana get a fiber network. Lafayette is not a rural area but a thriving mid-size city, and yet one of the major reasons the residents wanted fiber was the chance to keep their kids at home. The area is largely Cajun with a unique culture and the community was unhappy to see their children have to relocate to larger cities to get jobs after graduating from the university there. Broadband alone can’t fix that kind of problem, but Lafayette is reportedly happy with the changes brought from the fiber network. That’s the kind of benefit that’s hard to quantify in dollar terms.

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