For communities seeking to launch public access community Wi-Fi, the issues are not just technological. As seen in the many proposals submitted for public Wi-Fi in high profile cities such as San Francisco and Philadelphia, there are many different adoption models possible. This is particularly true for public private partnerships where many proposed approaches remain largely untried as business models.
Public Benefit Broadband (PBB), originally launched in 2003 to help bring broadband to under-served rural areas in America, has worked to perfect a regional public/private partnership model that it believes would serve most rural communities.
"We were of the belief that the pure municipal play has considerable history behind it," King said. "You can create a municipal utility or you can create a municipal authority or intergovernmental entity. And while that might be all well and good, we thought back in 2002 that this approach also might be politically confrontational and could in fact become compromised for any number of reasons."
"The municipal play is somewhat restricted by its own jurisdictional boundaries," King added. "It can only be so big. And one of the real issues was creating a scaleable model that allowed mobility, meaning that as people move from one community to another, they needed to still have the ability to connect. So we developed our model around those realities to the market.
"If a public private partnership was in fact the answer, we said it really needed to be national. And in order to create a national public private partnership, it has to be structured to circumvent political challenges. So our vision began with the belief that we need to create a national group, PBB, whose mission is to implement a nationwide public private partnership. And in order to do that, we needed to create specific state organizations. So our model is all about PBB establishing individual state consortiums."
Pilot Consortia
To initially develop their approach, PBB undertook four proof-of-concept pilot projects in California, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Nevada. Two of these, under the banners of the Pennsylvania Broadband Consortium and Central California Broadband in the Fresno area, have progressed to what PBB calls phase two.
"Essentially the strategy is to create a state consortium with bylaws and the operational structure that will allow multiple organizational entities to collaborate," King explained. "One of those organizational entities is a city. Others are the private sector and universities. In the first phase, the work is very much proof-of-concept. You are doing studies, developing the business case and perfecting the process. In phase two, the communities that went through phase one organized themselves into specific community entities."
In the case of Pennsylvania, PBB secured both federal and state grants
to develop the Pennsylvania Broadband Consortium. A federal grant of $50,000 from the Appalachian Regional Commission was matched by a state grant from the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development to develop three pilot projects in the Commonwealth -- Somerset County, Potter/McKean County and Beaver County. Each of the three pilot communities assembled leadership teams to develop the needed organization and contributed local funds to match those dollars being invested by the federal and state governments.
Somerset and Potter/McKean Counties now have moved to phase two, and the work the PBB did the local community in Beaver County prompted an incumbent Internet provider to move to provide broadband service, negating the need for a community effort there.
According to King, the passage of legislation in Pennsylvania prohibiting municipalities from developing municipal wireless to the public in the future has worked in PBB's favor. "That really helped our model there," said King. "We are a non-profit collaborating with the private sector. So we are not opposed to the private sector. We love those guys. We are simply giving them a better way to serve the rural markets where they can't make their traditional model work. But it also happens to get around all the laws."
The other pilot project moving forward is situated in Fresno County. Here a community-based collaboration, the Fresno Area Regional Jobs Initiative set out to establishment a regional broadband network comprised of a hybrid of fiber and wireless. This developed into a consortium of community participants including the cities of Fresno and Clovis, Fresno County, and the Fresno Regional Jobs Initiative and CRI organizations through the Office of Community and Economic Development at Fresno State University.
Fresno model is following exactly the same steps PBB has laid out. "However, Fresno is a bigger deal simply because it is not rural," King said. "It is a big city of 500,000 people and is not consider necessarily under-served. But we found that even in this instance, the program can work very well if there is a strong community fabric wanting to do something that will differentiate itself from other cities."
Open Access
As King describes it, the initial launch of any project is almost like drawing lines in the sand for rural America. "The incumbent's initial response is usually that they don't embrace our approach," he said. "But by being open access, the door is open for them to participate."
Ultimately PBB is seeking to bring a hybrid of wireless and fix wired services to communities, but they will generally launch with wireless. "When you enter a market, wireless is the quickest and cheapest way to enter and get the buzz going," King argues. "But as we expand a program in a region, the object is to do a lot more than wireless because you have to. The community and the regional initiative needs to recognize that they will have to compete with the incumbents, but only if the incumbents choose not to be partner in the consortium.
"At some point down the line, we believe that incumbents will join because they will see the value of a co-branding strategy, especially to serve rural areas where they really aren't focused much anyway."
PBB is now to in the processes of discussing the possibility of developing further projects in dozens of other communities. However, the first priority is seeing the current projects through to full implementation. "You don't want to get too far ahead of yourself," King adds. "It is not until we have moved to implementation that we will have a complete story."
