April has offered to meet with me and states lack of expertise on the issue. I have met with her in the past.

Michael's response still shows, sadly, a fundamental lack of understanding of the issue. I will post his response and annotate with my well researched commentary starting with -- and ending with JH for my comments. I don't believe that Michael has officially said he is a candidate yet, but has floated the idea. He also tries to tie in unrelated issues, quite a bit, like housing. Then fails to mention how controlling the cost of housing would also be better with public, instead of private, options available.

0. Fiber helps address virtually all of our social and economic concerns. So what action will you take on it?

Fiber may help to address many concerns, Jon, but you may be overselling it a bit.  Housing prices are being driven upward by market forces, and wider access to broadband won’t change that.  In fact, they can work in the opposite direction.  Telecommuting allows people to potentially earn Seattle wages while paying for housing in Bellingham. The internet undermines the older linkage between local wages and local prices.  Homelessness is growing, but the solutions lie in better mental health and addiction treatment in many cases. Better broadband is not the barrier to those solutions. Global warming and climate change present a crisis we must address, but the transition to cleaner energy economy and better resource practices can and must occur — and do not depend essentially on faster internet connections.  Racism is our national legacy and continued shame.  Yet experience (and research) shows us that prejudice and institutional racism endures and adapts within new technologies. Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit spread hate and misinformation as readily as love and understanding.

-- Michael's justifications are old, telecom banter, and his stats are almost 100% inaccurate. For example, better broadband opens up work and housing in many other areas that are cheaper to live in. If you had good broadband you could live in Acme and work here or in Seattle. It keeps the landlord/developer cartel from using low vacancy to overvalue everything while fighting rent control. Homelessness experts tell us that the homeless need better access to broadband for everything from education to health services and job training. They can get mental health help via the internet if their connections are robust enough to simulate a real meeting faster and for less. Telecommuting is great for the environment and allows us to telecommute for better opportunities as well. Fiber reduces long commutes and global warming. This also saves human lives since people won't die in traffic accidents as often and it reduces the release of dangerous chemicals from vehicles into the atmosphere. Traffic related deaths are still one of the highest causes of unnecessary death in the US. Clean energy absolutely relies on fiber. Smart grids and new energy options need it to make better use of energy, mix in new renewable resources, and waste less energy in distribution. Better communications allow us to interact more globally and understanding each other, reducing racism and other social issues. The digital divide effects minorities more than anyone else, and removes opportunities from them. Communications allow us to organize and fight injustice! -- JH

So, yes, better broadband based on wider availability of high-speed fiber networks will help us to address our social and economic concerns — but it is not the key to any of them.  There is plenty of justification for better broadband without over-promising on the benefits. Moreover, we could have Gigabit connections and still have homelessness, poverty, racism, income inequities, etc.

-- This is again NOT true. You can't over-promise the benefits of Fiber. It literally effects 98% of everything we do everyday. Cheap gigabit provides opportunity and connects people as I've outlined above. -- JH

In my view, there are more fundamental reforms needed to salvage and re-direct our democracy.  We need to overturn Citizens United, restrict dark money, regulate campaign financing, prevent gerrymandering, and reign in corporate capture of government.  This needs to come early and hard, because right now the solutions to so many other problems are being held up by a dysfunctional government.  Broadband and Net Neutrality is a perfect examples of this — where the public supports them, but appointed and elected officials do not. That is a failure of democracy.  The bad internet policies are symptoms of this underlying and deeper failing.

-- Public broadband addresses all of these issues. For example, social media also allows us to hold our governments accountable, meet with leaders in real-time, raise money for grassroots candidates, inform people about the evils of Citizen's United, and much more. Better broadband is essential to Democracy. Open communications help prevent the problems he outlines here. -- JH

To increase internet access, I will continue to support a Dig Once policy, which lowers barriers to participation, lowers costs, and could pave the way for a public broadband option.  A public broadband option, perhaps an open access model, would create opportunities to meet policy goals such as ensuring a net-neutral provider option is available, free/reduced cost access for non-profits and educational institutions, and service coverage in disadvantaged areas that are less profitable for the private sector. For those reasons, I continue to support exploring a public broadband option, looking for the most cost-effective partnership.

-- We need a real commitment, not just more exploration. Exploration has been going on for decades. How much more investigation needs to be done? We are being outpaced by even neighboring cities at this point. The COB is simply stalling. It's time just to say that out loud and deal with the issues.  -- JH

At this point, I am not supportive of the City becoming an actual service provider. I think we may be able to achieve our equity goals within a public-private partnership model. In this model, we would use access to the public network in exchange for the service provider agreeing to a set of principles and practices.

-- Ok, then the Dig Once policy needs to include an option for co-ops, and non-profits. They currently aren't even talking about that. -- JH

1. What will you do to establish a Dig Once Policy that will include a mixture of entities including co-ops, non-profits and local providers?

As you know, I have been the leading force for keeping this on the City’s agenda from the start. I speak out in support of this policy at every opportunity.

-- Well, I don't know this because we still don't have one and should. Also, Michael and the council have still yet to have a proper hearing, or create a panel, including Public Fiber Experts. -- JH

You have read my emails and memos, which are critical and skeptical of the staff’s first Dig Once proposal as needlessly restrictive and not very workable. I think my objections to that bad policy put up a roadblock that forced the Administration to step back. They wanted to get their policy through, and then call it done. Instead, they appear to have retreated and I don’t know when they will be back with another proposal.  As you saw, once bitten, they turned to hiring a consultant to look into the matter.  Even there, I pushed back against the administration.  They wanted a “feasibility study,” which would only serve to emphasize costs to develop a system.  I preferred a “market study,” to show the benefits and the return on investment.

-- Michael is correct here. We need to fire Ted Carlson and other upper echelon people putting up unnecessary, ridiculous, barriers. I know that the lower level workers don't get why Ted and Eric are acting the way they are in relation to infrastructure. -- JH

As you have said yourself, a Dig Once policy is a no-brainer. It seems to me that we could have adopted a simple Dig Once policy separately and well ahead of the longer term endeavor of evaluating public broadband.  The administration, with city council acquiescence, went along with this. I believe I was alone is saying that there is no need to tie these two together. I said then, and I believe now, that we can adopt a Dig Once policy now, and not have to wait until we have agreement on public broadband.

-- Again, Michael is correct here. We need to fire Ted Carlson and other upper echelon people putting up unnecessary, ridiculous, barriers. I know that the lower level workers don't get why Ted and Eric are acting the way they are in relation to infrastructure. -- JH

With regard to the entities, you will recall that I specifically objected to the language in the draft policy that seems to restrict who could have access to the network, if we made it available. I think we should be more open and accommodating towards non-profits and co-ops, rather than favoring large telecomm companies. The original draft language had it the other way around.

-- Again, Michael is correct here. We need to fire Ted Carlson and other upper echelon people putting up unnecessary, ridiculous, barriers. I know that the lower level workers don't get why Ted and Eric are acting the way they are in relation to infrastructure. -- JH

2. What will you do as mayor to address the lack of transparency coming from the public works department and the over-quotes that even your internal investigations have shown have occurred, that are being done to protect big telecoms by upper echelon staff including their reluctance to release public documents even via public records requests?

That’s a tougher question, because I have not been privy to those conversations in the past. As you know, there is a clear separation between administration and law-makers. My intention would be to review proposals and scopes-of-work prior to bidding process, to make sure they accord with what we really want and need.  The Roeder Ave bid is an example, where we spec’d a 4” conduit, when we already had conduit and fiber in the area.  A 2” conduit much have been sufficient to achieve the bandwidth and redundancy we want.

-- Again, Michael is correct here. This project was intentionally over-speck'd to drive the cost up unnecessarily. The same was true of the Holly St. repair, where they installed excess conduit and then refused access to everyone but the big telecoms and themselves. How about all of the times public works refused to put in conduit when doing multi-million dollar water main repairs, like in Happy Valley? How about the fact that there are traced, abandoned 2" water and gas pipes everywhere that can carry fiber that Ted Carlson flat out claimed weren't usable. How about the parts of the network they lost track of? The list of examples goes on. We need to fire Ted Carlson and other upper echelon people putting up unnecessary, ridiculous, barriers. I know that the lower level workers don't get why Ted and Eric are acting the way they are in relation to infrastructure. Remember, Eric and Ted ARE NOT the people out there with hard hats on doing the actual work. -- JH

You assert that upper echelon staff are protecting big telecomm, but I have no evidence of that. You may not like what they are doing, but that does not mean they are intentionally protecting big companies. As far as I know, there is no communication with the major telecomm of this sort. Telecomm's probably have no idea that the City is talking about a Dig Once policy, and they might even support it as being to their benefit. Who knows? Like I said, I haven’t heard of big telecomm being involved.

-- Just for starters, I have 1,600 e-mails just between AT&T and the COB Public Works Dept. I also have a document showing us giving AT&T $1 million in corporate welfare and public fiber. Michael is aware of this. This list goes on... -- JH

The tower on Sehome Hill might be an exception. But even there, the City had its own motivation and need to re-build the tower.  Rebuilding it was not an act of “protecting” AT&T.  As I saw it, from what little was presented to the city council, AT&T was paying part of the cost of the project, so that they would have the right to co-locate their equipment. That seemed like a reasonable and fair exchange. I think they paid about 10-15% of the cost. The City gets 100% of the use we need, for 85% of the cost.

-- Funny how he leaves out the Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile small cell stuff. Why would we ever give money to AT&T for any reason? AT&T paid the smallest part of the cost. The project was approx. $1.45 million. We paid the million and then leased them access at such a low rate that it will take them 30 years to give the city any real money back. By then AT&T will have made tens of millions of dollars off of our public fiber. The same fiber they refuse to give us access to. -- JH

3. Have you taken campaign donations from WAVE, Comcast, CenturyLink, Verizon, or any other big telecom?

No.

4. What speed down and up do you think is acceptable and at what latency? 

I’m not a technical expert on this, but I think the 25/4 Mbps down/up is too slow.  As I said in my remarks during city council meetings, this is a minimum standard.  Almost by definition, our goals should be significantly better than the minimum.

At this point, we don’t need Gigabit, but I think 100 Mbs is a reasonable goal, and widely available from commercial providers. I have seen the number 100 Mbps used for rural broadband targets, so it is certainly reasonable for urban settings. (I personally get about 50+ over home wifi-to-cable.)  In coming years, the number would continue to move higher.  Maybe 250 Mbps should be our aspirational goal.

-- Wilson, NC provides 50 MBit symmetrical for $10 a month for low-income. Chatanooga, TN $70 for gigabit. $27 for 100 MBit. South Korea is $24 for Gigabit. Mexico City is $60 for 200 Mbit symmetrical fiber. Why should we settle for 100 MBit? -- JH

Symmetrical rates are more important in business settings, I think, and I’m not sure what upload rate ought to be for residential settings. I don’t know much about latencies, but certainly latencies below below 30 msec are reasonable to expect, and 15 msec is not uncommon. 

-- This is NOT true. Symmetrical is default with fiber and needed for good two way communications, even with say, your doctor. This is again, big telecom banter. Saying that only businesses need good access. Everyone needs good access via fiber. -- JH

5. What are the advantages of 100% FTTH coverage? 

Fiber-to-the-home is the gold standard, of course, and allows Gigabit bandwidth and fidelity.  But I believe you can achieve 100+ Mbps without fiber reaching the premises.  As with symmetrical rates, I see FTTP as more important for business situations, or perhaps when working from home. Certainly, we ought to build out a network that allows for FTTH eventually.

-- Michael's thinking here is old. Fiber removes the problem of latency, costs less to maintain over time, and is critical infrastructure. It is NOT a gold standard. It is THE STANDARD, or should be until we discover something faster than the speed of light. It's cheap, durable, and reliable. Installing fiber is a no-brainer. -- JH

Yours,

Michael Lilliquist