Hello again, and thanks again to LinuxFest Northwest for letting me talk about public fiber in Bellingham. I've linked to the video here. I will be writing a more extensive nwcitizen.com article about my update here, but for now let's just say I have mostly good news and some concerns. The good news is that the Public Works Commission and Public Works are actually talking about Dig Once. The other really good thing to report is that Michael Lilliquist is on top of trying to make sure the policy comes out in a way that will actually benefits the community, allows for many types of providers including CO-OPs, and creates real competition while increasing performance and lowering costs. He is also reiterating the need for real low-income connections as am I. Still, he is only one of three commission members. The other two being Terry Bornerman and Gene Knutson. The bad news is that Public Works, under the direction of Ted Carlson, has already made some suggestions that could hobble a real Dig One Policy and pervert it into a way to help only private companies expand. 1. Ted Carlson has suggested that the conduit be leased "by private providers." This is bad because we want it to read "by any licensed ISP." This small change helps make it an Open Access Network that gives us the most choices from CO-OPs, Non-Profits, and yes net-neutral local providers. The big guys can lease too which is why you need to make sure you don't allow any one company to monopolize the conduit. 2. Public Works wants to retain the right to exclude areas from Dig Once for a multitude of reasons. Most of them subjective and bad. The problem is that this excuse has been used to exclude certain areas for decades, which is why they're poorly served. This could undermine the point of a Dig Once Policy. 3. Public Works wants to set the thresholds too high for the options of using old sewer pipes. Again, setting thresholds too high will make the policy only useful on paper. For example, they want a 12" ID pipe used as a minimum for consideration. Fiber only needs a 1" pipe to start being useful. 2" is way better (867 strands), 3 (which I've suggested) much better.) Conduit itself costs very little. Still, these old sewer and water works pipes are perfectly suitable for fiber and are already there! We should use them. 4. Public Works claims they need $300K for a feasibility study. This is ludicrous. Dig Once is just a policy to put in conduit when other repairs are done. Most of the work they're outlining has to be done for any project they do, so the costs are part of any repair, whether you put the conduit in or not, and not really related to installing some telecom conduit when a larger repair is done. This seems like intentional obfuscation. Anyway, there is more coming, but like I said at least we have Michael Lilliquist trying to make sure the policy comes out right. The devil is in the details. I just wonder why we keep tolerating having to fight our government on every aspect of this common sense policy. Again, I'll keep an eye on it and keep you posted. We're almost there, we just have to make sure the big telecom sympathizers don't sabotage the policy from the get go. I'll write more on it in my nwcitizen.com article. I have sent my recommendations to the council. They also have the documentation for Mount Vernon, so why are we reinventing the wheel? Mount Vernon has an Open Access network. So why don't we just do that? Gene says that we "need the right Dig Once Policy for Belligham." Well, what does that mean? How can our policy need to be radically different from Mount Vernon's? Sure, we should upgrade from 2" to 3" conduit, but in general the Mount Vernon documents are good. They still have not met with any impartial experts on the subject even though we have dozens in our community. I mean, we literally have people in our community that used to run their own ISPs and are willing to volunteer their time to community broadband projects. Why won't we let them? Anyway, hang in there. Voice your opinion. We're almost there :). Here is the contact info for the current public works commission. Michael Lilliquist (Could probably use some e-mail high 5's too.) mlilliquist@cob.org Gene Knutson gknutson@cob.org Terry Bornerman tbornemann@cob.org