Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Thank you very much for inviting me to speak today. I appreciate the
introduction by my former FCC staffer Angela Wu. She has an important role
getting better broadband to the State of Washington, and I am very proud of
her work there. I also wanted to thank Galen Updike for his kind invitation to
be here. I always enjoy these meetings because I learn so much from other
states. Closer collaboration and upgrading our state’s broadband expertise
is critical to our shared success.
Now when you think of California, usually you think of our big cities: San
Francisco and Los Angeles. But actually, California is a big state with many
rural areas. From our broadband mapping exercise that began in 2007 in
our State, I know that the far north, the Central Valley, the Eastern Sierras,
the Central Coast and the southeast areas of California have slow or no
broadband.
And we know why: there are fewer consumers out there and so the Return
on Investment (ROI) often does not “pencil out” for the broadband providers
– usually rural telcos and rural cable companies - in these regions.
One of our groups did a state broadband survey through Public Policy
Institute of California and decided to focus our Digital Divide efforts on the
four groups that survey highlighted as being on the wrong side of the divide:
low income, certain minority groups (particularly Hispanic in my state),
rural/remote, and people with disabilities. I am going to focus on what we
did on the rural side today only.
So what can a state do to try and bring broadband to rural areas? California
has been working on this challenge since 2006. Today, I am going to reveal
some ingredients that might turn into a recipe for success to get broadband
to your rural areas. I don’t have any surefire recipe for success. Every state
is different but we have tried a lot of things in California – we sort of threw up
a lot of mud on the wall. So I am going to share with you what stuck. This
was all well before there was a ballyhooed National Broadband Plan! Maybe
some of this may work for you.
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1. You Might Try Forming a Broadband Task Force or a State
Broadband Leadership Council
In California, state leadership made all the difference. We were lucky in that
we had a rare convergence of leadership on broadband in the Governor’s
Office, the state Legislature and the California Public Utilities Commission. I
cannot emphasize enough how much that leadership made all the difference.
So you need to find some champions in those places to help you make
broadband happen in your rural areas.
I was privileged to serve on that Task Force, and to be one of the state
officials charged with implementing those recommendations in the last four
years, both at the California PUC and then at the Office of the CIO. Under the
Task Force, California issued two reports on what to do about broadband.
Our reports are on the Office of the CIO, State of California website, and I
urge you to read them, as they are chock full of very good recommendations
and ideas. When the FCC wrote the National Broadband Plan, I am told they
were all required to read the California Task Force report as a starting point.
The great thing about the Task Force Report is it put focus on the problem
and united leaders in the state to try and solve it. Then the Governor
assigned implementation of the report’s recommendations to particular state
agencies, and ordered us to get it done.
One of the things the Task Force did in 2007 was to perform the State’s first
every broadband mapping. We learned about mapping from Connect
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Kentucky. I always give them credit because it was key to everything we did
later.
The California Broadband Task Force had to cajole the phone and cable
companies to give us the availability information. It wasn’t easy! Phone
calls by regulators to senior company personnel had to occur, if you get my
drift. But in their infinite wisdom, the major phone companies and cable
companies voluntarily agreed to do so.
Interestingly, later on, the providers privately admitted they were glad they
did. One, they benefitted from the California mapping results. In fact it
revealed a lot of things that surprised them, they said. And second, when
the debate about the national broadband mapping took place a few years
later, they had some experience with mapping. Give California their data
was not as bad as they thought initially, and so it helped pave the way to the
national agreement with the federal agencies on data.
The reason mapping is so important is you can then nail down with
particularity where the real broadband gaps exist. This helps you avoid all
the “waste, fraud and abuse” arguments later when you are proposing
infrastructure projects -- because you can prove the areas are unserved or
underserved. It helps you find allies in the rural areas with legislators and
county leaders.
It is hard to do this work part time. In 2005, two CPUC commissioners, Mike
Peevey and Susan Kennedy, had the foresight to put some focus and muscle
on the problems by forming a non profit organization, the California
Emerging Technology Fund (CETF), whose job is to try and narrow the digital
divide. Quite a mission statement.
The California Emerging Technology Fund (CETF) was funded using $60
million in seed money donated by AT&T and Verizon in relationship to two
mergers in 2005. CETF matches this seed money in a 3:1 ratio to leverage it
into $240 million.
CETF has performed much of the work in rural demand aggregation, which I
will discuss more in #10.
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The California regulatory environment prior to 2006 was not very pro-
broadband. Everything was regulated in silos: Telephone, cable and
wireless.
So find some legislative champions who “get it” and enlist their help in
legislation and pressure on the broadband providers.
After the Broadband Task Force made its report and our mapping was done,
one of the key recommendations it had was to ensure broadband
infrastructure was build to places that were unserved or underserved.
We opened filing windows, first for unserved areas, and then second for
underserved areas. We published criteria that had to be met. Applications
were taken on a first come, first serve basis.
The Legislature helped the CPUC by blessing the CASF with a bill, and
classifying it in a way to protect it similar to the high cost funds.
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As of July 8th, CASF has achieved the following:
When Broadband ARRA program hit, the CPUC acted swiftly to allow ARRA
applicants to obtain CASF funds to serve an unserved or underserved area
for up to 10% of the project. Having this additional 10% match towards
their projects helped give California applicants a leg up in the rush for BB
ARRA grants.
Just this year, a legislative champion, state Senator Alex Padilla, got a bill
SB 1040 passed to extend the CASF for another five years for another $125
million total.
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Now why is the telehealth system particularly important for our rural
broadband goals? Like many of you, California did not get as many
broadband ARRA grants as it would have liked for its vast rural areas. But
through our telehealth network, we will push infrastructure to hundreds of
rural areas throughout our state. We expect that our BB provider, AT&T,
will build enough capacity to serve others in those communities. Further,
the FCC rules allow the telehealth network to sell excess capacity to others
in the rural areas by paying their fair share of the network costs.
Does your state have a state e-Rate type fund? California has our
Teleconnect fund that assumes a school, library, health care facility and
community-based tech center takes the federal e-Rate discount and gives
them another 25% discount off Internet and telecom services. It is funded
through an end user surcharge on intrastate communication services. Can
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you use your state e-rate personnel to do outreach on broadband
awareness?
Public libraries are natural public access points for PCs and digital literacy
training centers. Can you take their broadband signal and throw it via WiFi
into the parking lot or an outdoor patio to provide after hours broadband
access for a rural community?
As for 2-1-1 referral services, if you have a 2-1-1 referral service in your
state, consider adding your public computer training and digital literacy
training sites to the local referral service so people who call the service can
be referred to those services.
10. Finally, You Might Try CETF’s Secret Sauce: Rural and Urban
Regional Consortia
First, California divided our rural areas into groups of 6-7 rural counties in
geographic areas that made sense. We had seven groups and we call them
our Rural Regional Partners.
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McConnell Foundation has become an investment partner with a 1:1 match
in a strategic joint venture in North California.
Here are some key project phases we went through with each Rural Region.
First, CETF staff performed initial fact finding to listen to regional leaders and
stakeholders about three things:
3. Find out in this process which entity is the most trusted and logical to be
the “fiscal agent” or “managing partner” of the broadband project.
The Planning Phase takes about 2-3 months to gather input in order to
formulate this work product: A detailed project Work Plan for that rural
region.
Next, we would gather and analyze data about potential aggregated demand
by the user sector, including an assessment of telemedicine, public safety
and emergency response opportunities.
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• all public agency groups (law enforcement and public safety including
prisons, emergency response and services, K-12 education, higher
education and research, libraries, general government services from
fed/state/local agencies, public health and medical care, and
national/state parks) and
• key business sectors (at least the top ten employer groupings).
Develop the process and format to track the potential demand by user
category in order to quantify the potential aggregated demand by
community and county.
Identify the specific personnel who will be involved in interview and surveys.
Describe the outreach and engagement plan to local, state and federal
elected officials.
Next, we take the investment prospectus that we have developed and meet
and negotiate with broadband providers that CETF and the local partners
have convened. We show the broadband providers the demand from the
stakeholders and our preferred scenario for new infrastructure.
Our goal and work product for this phase is to have an agreement from a
broadband provider(s) to deploy broadband in the region. Success!
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Another critical part of the Secret Sauce: Each year, CETF convenes the rural
consortia in person to share lessons learned and tackle common challenges.
These annual meetings are pivotal in getting the Regional consortia and
leaders to be responsible for and accountable to each other to demonstrate
progress. It has fostered tremendous collaboration and an esprit d’corps
that adds “magic” to the “secret sauce”. A power learning tool is to
introduce a discipline of feedback using performance data.
The CETF president Sunne McPeak says that its success comes from putting
“dedicated people together with an agenda and then relentlessly pursing it.
She emphasizes regular reporting and monitoring of progress and results.
CETF uses quarterly progress reports, annual visits and public reporting at
annual workshops and peer reviews of final reports to create established
mechanisms of disciplined accountability.
Conclusion
I have given you a possible recipe for broadband success in your state. Have
hope! California began with just a small handful of people with a lot of
determination. We were fortunate to have strong state leadership develop
as we went along, but much of our success is setting goals and pursued
them in relentlessly with non traditional, “out of the box” ways of thinking.
I strongly encourage you to find champions, leverage what assets you’ve got
in your state already, and use Rural Regional Consortia to develop leadership
and an infrastructure plan, as you promote rural broadband. Together we
can get this job done.
Thank you.
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