California Agencies Follow Up on Broadband-Expansion Report
SAN FRANCISCO -- California agencies are starting to follow up on a state report on extending broadband availability and subscriptions, participants said. The state Department of Transportation plans a workshop, tentatively set March 18, on cooperation between agencies in routinely laying fiber conduit in connection with highway projects, said Robert Wullenjohn, policy branch chief of the Public Utilities Commission’s communications division. The work reflects a recommendation in the final report of the California Broadband Task Force, issued last month. In setting up or changing the state Advanced Services Fund, Teleconnect Fund and High Cost Fund B, the PUC is carrying out other task-force proposals, Wullenjohn said Tuesday night at a program sponsored by Women in Telecommunications and a University of San Francisco program.
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The PUC set up the Advanced Services Fund in December, in response to an earlier task force recommendation, Wullenjohn said. The commission put up $100 million in matching money to encourage broadband deployment this year and next in underserved areas, defined as having service slower than 3 Mbps, if money is left over after projects for unserved places, he said. Legislation has been introduced to make the program ongoing, Wullenjohn said. It’s financed by a 0.25 percent surcharge paid by subscribers to intrastate telecom service. The PUC will set selection criteria for grants based on a staff report due out March 10 and plans to accept applications in June, he said. The standards will include criteria such as homes passed or served, the speed and cost of service and maybe the low-income population served, Wullenjohn said.
The commission also is required to produce in June its first annual report on progress toward the legislature’s goals in creating state video franchising, Wullenjohn said. Starting in March 2007, the PUC has issued 23 franchises under the Digital Infrastructure and Video Competition Act. Separately, responding to network-providers’ complaints, a state bill would lift a $2.5 million cap on grants for facilities construction in low-income and rural communities without wireline phone service, he said. The PUC has funded five projects from the Rural Telecommunications Infrastructure Grants Program. It gets $10 million a year from the California High Cost Fund A, Wullenjohn said.
A task-force finding that 96 percent of those in the state have access to wired broadband turned out “a lot better” than many task force participants had expected, said Russ Gyurek, a corporate consulting engineer at Cisco. He led the buildout working group in the task force. But the research also produced a 20-page list of communities without high-speed access, he said. “There’s corridors of service, and then there’s big huge swaths of California that are unserved,” Wullenjohn said. Adoption, at 53 percent, is another matter, Gyurek said. “If you're a service provider, you're, like, ’that isn’t great.'”
“The California Emerging Technology Fund is taking a lead role in seeing what needs to be done to follow through on the demand side” to close the big gap between the availability of broadband and how many people subscribe, said Emy Tseng, the project director of San Francisco’s Digital Inclusion Programs. Its first efforts involve computer- purchase and technology-literacy programs, she said. A task force finding that Hispanics, “the fastest-growing population in California,” lag “far behind any other ethnicity” in broadband adoption creates “a really interesting policy issue,” Tseng said. Changing that will require making Hispanics aware of Spanish-language online content strongly relevant to their lives, she said.
The task force produced unprecedented maps with great detail on local broadband availability and acceptance, said Wullenjohn and Gyurek. “We reached for the stars and think we got ‘em, because we didn’t think the carriers would be so cooperative,” Gyurek said. The competitive sensitivity of the information required strict nondisclosure agreements and keeping the underlying data outside the hands of the task force, by using a secure contractor, he said: “We got participation for 99 percent of the coverage.”
The task force was “very well-rounded in terms of participation” and looked at access needs broadly, Gyurek said. It took into account “a big concern in terms of technology talent moving out” of California, he said. Cisco has “a stake in the game,” Gyurek said. “We want quality broadband in the state for our employees. Most of us telecommute at least one day a week.”