BTOP Grantees Face New Challenges and Opportunities in Final Year, NATOA Panelists Say

"Sustainability is a really, really important challenge,” said municipal lawyer Jim Baller of the Baller Herbst telecom law firm. “In part it’s a challenge because we know the value of advanced communications infrastructure is going to be there, it’s going to grow, it’s going to grow in many ways that are not even imaginable today. But the transition from the development of networks to the point at which we have a wide range of must-have applications that will require and be driven by the existence of these networks is ahead of us. We have a transitional period we're going to have to go through."

The fiber infrastructure “is not going to be outmoded in five years,” said Broadband Program Director Lori Sherwood of One Maryland-Inter-County Broadband Network. The “legacy” of BTOP decades down the road will be the “spider web of fiber across the country,” she said. She described how this fiber may have value for years and how BTOP projects may be able to remain sustainable by tapping “FirstNet and the next sets of grant opportunities,” building on the resource that’s in the ground now from the coming public safety interoperable network. Baller pointed to the metrics that he said indicated success, such as 57,000 fiber miles completed and more than 326,000 households and 7,400 businesses subscribed to broadband due to BTOP adoption programs.

The panelists also emphasized the BTOP grant challenges and problems of the last two years. The federal FirstNet program that became law in February resulted in seven public safety broadband grants’ suspension in May, for instance. These seven grantees have lingered with uncertainty since then (CD July 19 p4). Several states proposed restricting community broadband with new laws, which Baller called “an unadulterated ugly.” He has helped fight these broadband barriers as part of his legal duties, he said. In 2012, such bills were proposed in Minnesota, Georgia and South Carolina and one in South Carolina passed, he said. These bills “could theoretically have a significant adverse impact” on BTOP grantees keeping them from fulfilling their goals in those regions, Baller cautioned. “We are doing our best to counteract such measures and undo ones that do exist already in as many places as possible.” Baller’s done consulting work for Google and for FCC National Broadband Plan architect Blair Levin’s GigU project linking communities that have colleges to super-fast networks.

Some fiber projects have run afoul of providers who complain of overlapping coverage, noted NATOA President Joanne Hovis. These providers are not always happy with the prospect of competition, and it would be “truly unfortunate if these [BTOP] projects are unable to build fiber where it’s so badly needed” or “where competition is so badly needed,” she said. “It would be unfortunate if fiber networks are stopped in their tracks because of federally funded copper networks.” She said she wishes for “more political guidance in this matter."

Pole attachments pose a challenge for many BTOP grantees, panelists said. It’s uncertain how long resolving those issues will take and how much they'll cost in any given grant, Sherwood said. One huge challenge was the 2011 tsunami in Japan, which “put a stress on fiber” availability on an international level, she said. “Up in Maryland, we actually secured our contract just prior to the tsunami, so we benefited from that."

These BTOP grants benefit communities in major ways, panelists said. They all identified strong successes. These benefits will visibly “begin to pop” in the next six to nine months, Sherwood predicted. Fiber needs to be connected to libraries, schools and community centers, she said. There’s been “a very strong uptick in recent months of marketing” and “customers are beginning to line up,” Baller said. These grants give “robust connectivity” to the sectors that most need it, he said. “We have a critical need in this country to improve our education system, to improve our healthcare system, to improve our capacity for economic development, right away."

These grants may have helped create jobs in ways people haven’t yet considered or quantified, argued Hovis. She saw benefits within the first nine months of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009’s passage, she said. “What I saw was the creation of jobs just in the process of planning, partnering, and building projects or expanding existing projects in order to prepare grant applications to compete for BTOP funds.” It’s “visible, and it’s real,” agreed Sherwood, adding that BTOP is “definitely having an impact” on job creation “on all levels."

The middle-mile business model pioneered in many BTOP grants has “transformative” potential, Hovis added. It’s begun to “show real dividends” and seems to be stirring “new rounds of projects,” with local rather than federal money, she said, pointing out recent efforts in Santa Fe, N.M. “The most significant contribution of the program will be in the awakening of tens of thousands of businesses and communities to the potential benefits that access to broadband, particularly high-capacity broadband networks, can provide across the economy,” Baller said. Four billion dollars is not an enormous sum in the bigger picture, but it accomplished a shift in awareness, he explained. Awareness matters because the U.S. started “well behind” other leading nations in broadband investment, he said. “But what the BTOP program has done … is put broadband front and center in the attention of our nation as something we've got to do right over the next few years if we want to be the leading country in the world.”