Signal to Noise

Well I arrived in Boston after the show actually got underway, which was a part of my plan. However, since I didn’t eat anything before I got on my afternoon flight in Cleveland, I was a little hungry (just a little) and had to burn up even more valuable “show time” eating a turkey club in the hotel restaurant. That wasn’t part of my plan. But I was just too hungry to function.

Anyway, here are my thoughts from this event, with some pictures scattered throughout.

First off, it’s a very tightly-focused event. It’s all about wireless technology in the municipal / public community vertical. So there are a lot of local government people here. In fact, I was hoping to see more state-level people here but, if this event is any indicator (and it is), the interest in muni wireless broadband seems to be coming from the local community sector, where public safety, education, and other public services are managed. These seem to be the industries most driven by wireless applications and maybe that’s why there are so many of these types here.

At the General Session–the largest ball room used for this event–I got to listen to state CIOs from Massachusetts and Rhode Island talking about the wireless initiatives going on in their states. There were several common themes: First, the phone companies seem to be a common enemy of the drivers to ubiquitous broadband wireless. Second, the attitudes of municipal CIOs seem to stick close to educational initiatives as opposed to privatized services or even public safety services. Despite these predictable vantage points, I was pleased by some of the fresh thinking I heard.

For instance, Massachusetts has an official stance that ubiquitous broadband is important for economic development. This is increasingly true. And it isn’t just broadband (this is where the “infrastructure attitude” of municipal leadership may indeed be falling short) because broadband is great, but if you don’t have privatized services enabled by the ubiquitous broadband effort, then you frankly don’t have economic development. Still, it’s good to hear people hanging on the coattails of politicians talking a good talk, so economic development it is. Predictably, when asked what the role of the state is in building these ubiquitous networks, the answer was “funding”. Of course local government has to be much more than a bank. So I was pleased to hear the next round of commentary. The speaker said that the state’s role, aside from funding, is to establish interoperability standards and provide oversight for the civil engineering issues of building a muni network. For example, building codes and access ordinances. There are situations where it makes sense for a larger governing body like a state to establish standards for its member communities so that all the local city councils don’t have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to standards adoption, credentialing vendors, and so on.

I was also encouraged to hear that the demand for municipal wireless networks is actually real. In some areas, people are scratching their heads trying to figure out WHAT they would use such a network for if only they had one. Not the case among the people at this event. They say that muni WiFi in particular is being asked for specifically by individual constituents. Now, I’m all about ubiquitous network infrastructure. All IP, all the time. That’s something to vote for. More encouraging were the examples of how individual communities could benefit from ubiquitous wireless broadband. Esme Vos, the event’s organizer, provided some fantastic examples during her keynote.

Esme said that everything benefits from connectedness. I agree wholeheartedly with her. Mobile applications from garbage collection to EMS dispatch could benefit from broadband. Police dispatch in particular NEEDS broadband access for mugshots, fingerprinting, and other mobile imaging applications. And then you have the consumer, who, bless his dear heart, wants to be online ALL THE TIME, and would rather LIVE and WORK in a place where Net access is worry free and always on. Now that’s a pretty significant factor.

The YouTube generation cares more about the Internet as a media delivery mechanism than it does about ABC, NBC, and CBS. So building muni networks attracts PEOPLE, and people, of course, create economic activity, etc.

Another point that came out during the afternoon General Session was that, when it comes to Muni networking projects, local government organizations are just too disconnected and ineffective to rollout these networks soundly and efficiently.

For example, as one of the state CIOs pointed out, the city of New Orleans had planned to do a sewer refresh project. It would’ve cost the city an additional 1% of the project’s cost to pull fiber into every sewer in the city. Yet nobody knew this at the time because the sewer district didn’t know they were supposed to be factoring fiber into their estimating.

Tomorrow I’m participating in a round-table discussion about the present and future of wireless personal devices. Should be big fun.