Urban Broadband Users in Minnesota

This one slipped by for me.  'Course, why should I know about this -- I'm only on the State's broadband Task Force and Connected Nations was only supposed to be on our agenda before the decision was made, but hey...

Click HERE to read the letter from the commissioners of DEED and Commerce to the Governor that recommends Connected Nations as the outfit to develop Minnesota's application for the Federal "State Broadband Data and Development Grant Program" funds that are out there under the stimulus program.  The Governor signed off and CN is off to the races.

I'm pretty cranky about this process.  Nice n'cozy.  Nice n'closed.  Nice bypass of the Task Force.  No public input at all as far as I can see.  Looks like there was lots of opportunity for providers to provide input about their confidentiality needs, not too much input about what consumers need.  Look forward to more sub-par optimistic maps, and impossible to use/verify data, peepul.

Like I said, I'm cranky today.  I think it would be useful if a few million consumers showed up at the next Task Force meeting and let us know what they think of this decision and the process that arrived at it.  It would also probably be useful if a few more million consumers wrote to the Feds asking them not to fund our application.  I would prefer to have no Federal money wasted on these maps here in Minnesota after seeing what we got for the state money we spent on the last round.  The stuff we got is actually worse than useless because the maps are full of happy talk about how great the coverage is here in the state -- if you like a 756k  definition for "broadband".  Now we're signed up for more of the same, but it's coming out of our Federal taxes rather than our State taxes.

Connected Nations is supposed to be on the agenda this next time (just like the last two meetings, but I'm not promising anything), so there's a good reason for you to do a little research, come to the meeting and express your opinions during the public comment period.

Other things you could do;

• Email to the Governor (tim.pawlenty@state.mn.us) and the commissioners (dan.mcelroy@state.mn.us and glenn.wilson@state.mn.us)
• Let them know that you saw this post and that you're cranky too
• Demand that their be some kind of public process in which stakeholders provide review and oversight of Connected Nations while they're writing the grant application
• Demand the same public/transparent process be put in place when Connected Nations is actually doing the work
• Demand more granular data, that is available to the public in a downloadable dataset and is independently verifiable (see my previous post for a little more detail)
• Demand a consumer voice in the framing of the nature of the work to be done, dang nabbit!

Here are recordings of our meeting on August 21st;

Click HERE for section 1 (120 mBytes)

00:00 - Housekeeping

00:20 - Public Comments

01:20 - Recommendation 1 - Speed & Symmetrical Service

Click HERE for section 2 (65 mBytes)

00:00 - Recommendation 1 - Speed

00:03 - Recommendation 2 - Ubiquitous Broadband (goal approved, follow through mechanism not approved)

Click HERE for section 3 (100 mBytes)

00:03 - Meeting starts

00:04 - Recommendation 1 - Speed (approved)

00:17 - Role of government

01:18 - Recommendation 3 - Opportunities for collaboration (approved)

01:21 - Recommendation 4 - Cost

01:44 - Wrap-up

Life got A Little Complicated so I'm a little late posting this reminder of the Broadband Taskforce meeting tomorrow.  But now I've settled into my room in Fergus Falls and have a couple hours to catch up before attending the Blandin meeting this afternoon.

Click HERE for a link to the agenda for our meeting this month.

We're heading into the intense report-writing phase of our work -- effectively we only have about 2 months left to go before our report is finished.  So we're pretty much out of the "gather new facts" phase and into the "get our thoughts on paper" phase of this year and a half long effort.  I think we're getting there, but the next few meetings are likely to be pretty lively.  If you can't make this one, consider putting the next one on your calendar.

Ann Treacy couldn't make the meeting and asked me to record it.  So I did.  The audio came out fine, so I've decided to post it here.  I may do this from now on -- it's a great resource for me too (given that we oldsters sometimes forget the nuances of a conversation).  Here are the links;

Click HERE for the morning session (210 mBytes)

Click HERE for the first half of the afternoon (103 mBytes)

Click HERE for the second half of the afternoon (25 mBytes)

I screwed up and forgot to turn the recorder on after the mid-afternoon break, so there's a chunk that's missing from that third file.  Sorry about that.

Don't forget -- there's a series of meetings coming up in Mankato (we'll be hanging out at the Loose Moose -- I like the name) this month.  Starting tomorrow with a Blandin Foundation shindig and an open house in the afternoon, a reception in the evening, and then a full meeting on Friday.  Here's a little more scoop from Rick King;

On Thursday, July 16th Christensen Communications (104 W. Main Street in Madelia) is hosting an open house from 2:00 – 5:00 p.m.  The Minnesota Telecom Alliance is hosting a reception at the Loose Moose Saloon and Conference Center from 7:00 – 9:00 p.m.  Also note that we are welcome to join the Blandin Foundation sponsored Minnesota Broadband Policy Seminar at the Region 9 Development Commission (Suite 400, 410 E Jackson St) from 3:00 – 5:00 p.m. on Thursday.

One topic of our conversation will be a first-bash at Security, Vulnerability and Redundancy.  Once I get a good model going, I start seeing lots of places it can be applied.  In my last post I pushed out this same graphic as a way to advance broadband in the state.  Hereis is again, but the topic this time is Internet security (another of the sub-groups that had homework due today in advance of our meeting on Friday).

There have been a batch of security-related news stories recently, so I thought I'd do a recap and tie it in to the Task Force stuff we've been working on the last few weeks.  First there's this opinion piece in the LA Times that points out the pitfalls of security at the core of the network instead of the edge.  Here's the lede;

Cyber security is a real issue, as evidenced by the virus behind July 4 cyber attacks that hobbled government and business websites in the United States and South Korea. It originated from Internet provider addresses in 16 countries and targeted, among others, the White House and the New York Stock Exchange.

Unfortunately, the Obama administration has chosen to combat it in a move that runs counter to its pledge to be transparent. The administration reportedly is proceeding with a Bush-era plan to use the National Security Agency to screen government computer traffic on private-sector networks. AT&T is slated to be the likely test site. This classified pilot program, dubbed "Einstein 3," is developed but not yet rolled out. It takes two offenders from President Bush's contentious secret surveillance program and puts them in charge of scrutinizing all Internet traffic going to or from federal government agencies.

Despite its name, the Einstein 3 program is more genie than genius -- an omnipotent force (run by the NSA via AT&T's "secret rooms") that does the government's bidding -- spying. The last time around, this sort of scheme was known as the "special access" program -- "special" being code for "unconstitutional."

Einstein 3 purportedly is meant to protect government networks from hackers. But cyber-security experts -- such as Babak Pasdar, who blew the whistle on a mysterious "Quantico Circuit" while working for a major service provider -- agree that Einstein 3 offers no intrinsic security value. The program is implemented where servers exchange traffic between one another -- in the heart of a network system rather than at the perimeter, which interfaces with the outside world. This is similar to a home security system that only monitors the central interior of a house, rather than keeping an eye on the actual doors (and the purpose of hackers may simply be to enter).

At the same time, NPR is running this story that talks about how "Analysts Turn to Software for Spotting Terrorists."  Again, here's the lede;

Intelligence officials have been hoping for some time that vacuuming up vast amounts of information and putting it into a computer would uncover some sort of discernable terrorist pattern. The technique, known as data mining, is controversial because information on the innocent, as well as potential terrorists, ends up in the same database. Now it is increasingly unclear whether data mining will ever really work because terrorists don't appear to have predictive patterns.

"We don't even have enough of a data set to get a good pattern of 'What does a terrorist look like?' " says Fred Cate of Indiana University's Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research. "And terrorists, of course, are constantly changing their patterns because, quite simply, they don't want to get caught."

That's why they use one-time cell phone numbers and drop-box addresses.

"There had been, over the past seven years, this sense that if you collect more and more data and put it into a powerful enough computer, shake it and bake it the right way you'll come up with the unknowns" — terrorists who aren't yet on law enforcement's radar screens — says Jim Dempsey, the executive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a privacy group in San Francisco.

"I think, and other people who are more technically adept than I think, that's really a fool's errand."

Given all that, what can a poor hapless state like Minnesota possibly do to make things better?  Our sub-team's answer is "there's LOTS that we can do."  That's where this model/picture comes in.  As articles like these show, the parallels between Internet-security and regular meat-space security are growing ever more pronounced.  Which means that we have lots to learn from people outside the geek realm.  And our geek silver-bullets are just as much a last-resort solution as real bullets are in the real world.  Should be an interesting discussion!

I'm celebrating my (roughly) 1-year anniversary on the Task Force by writing this post.  This is my typical pattern when I'm working on something like this -- I swim around in the stuff for a while and then try to boil it down to 1 page.  I learned this from a series of really good bosses, who all were quite appreciative when I could take a pretty big topic and summarize it for them.

This picture resulted from the great work of the sub-group that's taken to calling itself The Ubiquity Gang (although I also kinda like Team Ubiquity as a moniker).  I was inspired to draw this as we were working through our homework assignment for the meeting next week.

We were trying to figure out how to organize all our recommendations and this is what popped out as a way to describe ALL the things that need to be done.  We're thinking that a really important point that needs to be made is that our efforts aren't likely to be really successful unless we have an approach (and accountability) for each of these things.

Of course, this might be a little too abstract for ya.  So here's a version that's got more than 12 words on it (click on the image if it's too small to read).

The way to read this is from the center to the edge.  For example: "stimulate the building of infrastructure by assisting with rights of way" or "oversee activity by tracking connectivity with surveys and maps" or "lead broadband efforts by managing -- setting goals and establishing accountability."

There's a reason these have V1 in the title -- I'm sure we'll make these better before they're done.  But they help me get my arms around what we need to do, and how interconnected all these activities need to be.  A plan that only addresses one of these things feels like building a one-legged stool to me...

Click HERE to watch a brilliant Bill Moyers interview of a whistle-blowing health-insurance insider who describes how health-care reform is probably going to get blown away by the industry.  As I watched this guy demonstrate how they own the legislature I was struck by the exact parallel we face on the Task Force and how our proposals will also probably get blown away.  Right now we're in the "charm offensive" phase, but woe betide any proposal that we may come up with that infringes on that cozy status quo.  His description of the motives, strategy and tactics is quite stunning and enlightening.  This interview is a very cogent description of why there are 7 reports prior to ours that have resulted in no action here in Minnesota.

The moral to the story?  If we get a decent report out, we're going to have to lobby those same politicians (and the bureaucrats who carry out their legislative mandates)  more effectively if we want anything to happen.  It's going to be very hard to overcome the advantage that the providers enjoy.  Case in point?  The recent Notice of Funds Availability (NOFA) for the Federal broadband stimulus.  It's clear that the incumbents got to the rule-makers and cut themselves a great deal.

We need to learn from this guy peepul.  Watch this interview and start writing your playbook.  Mobilize your constituents (education, libraries, business, consumers, environmentalists, etc.).  We're going to need your help.

The issue of mapping is on our agenda for the next meeting (Friday, July 17th in Mankato). Oops, I guess not -- just got our agenda and it's dropped off, scheduled for next month instead.  Connect Minnesota (a subsidiary of Connected Nations) won Minnesota's broadband mapping RFP a while back and they've just released the final versions.  You should go to their web site (www.ConnectMN.org) and check out the maps for your local area.

There are lessons we should learn from this, and things we should make sure find their way into the State's next RFP for mapping...  These are things I (speaking as a policy-maker now) can't do with the Connected Nations maps

• View the maps quickly (God their system is ssllllooooooowww -- each time I change any parameter on the interactive map it takes 20-30 seconds to refresh -- and howcum there aren't any maps for Ramsey County? -- and why are the maps delivered on web sites described with an IP address rather than a domain name??)
• Verify the data (this information lies behind broad non-disclosure agreements -- we have to find a middle ground here between what we are getting and what we need peepul)
• Understand whether the providers' stated speeds are actually available rather than just stated (in many cases they're not -- due to circuit, distance or sharing limitations -- which bears on our plans for the future)
• Understand the cost per mBit of the services (arriving at some sense of affordability of the services so we can make good decisions about what to do in that regard)
• Understand the capacity of the services (we need this for planning -- is the infrastructure maxed-out right now or can some providers take on more customers, or increase speeds?)
• Understand the penetration of the services (so we can figure out where we need to aim our digital-literacy, digital-inclusion efforts)
• Understand the tiers of service available to residential and business customers (these maps appear to only address residential service, but a big focus of our effort is to deliver ultra high speed services to entities that need them)
• Provide a public dataset that others (the State, cities, counties, citizens) can use in their mapping systems

All of this is old news.  The point of this post is to remind us that we're not getting a perfect product here and that we need to do better the next time around.

Ann Treacy caught a bunch of video at our meeting last Friday -- click HERE to watch the folks that came out to testify.  Ann also did a fantastic job of summarizing the rest of the meeting -- so if you want to read about our "speed" deliberations, scroll down past the videos to her summary of the meeting.  If you have thoughts about where we're going with broadband speed recommendations, post 'em in the comments.

I want to highlight one person -- Bill Arthur from Orr, Minnesota.  Click HERE to watch his testimony.  Be patient, he gets off to a slow start while he's doing the introductory part of his comments.  But about 3 minutes in he gets to the points he wants to make.  From there on he nails it -- talks about broadband mapping and rural-broadband system-design in ways that really make sense to me.

Bill's a good example of "don't judge a book by the cover" -- under that curmudgeonly exterior lurks a retired Fortune 100 hotrod and serial entrepreneur who's still running on all cylinders and has a lot to tell us about how to organize broadband in rural communities.  I'm really glad I met him.

Hi all, this is my standard "don't forget, there's a meeting coming up" post.  Especially aimed at you Urban Users in Duluth.  The Task Force is going on the road this summer and this is our first meeting outside the Twin Cities.  There's a lot of stuff happening.  The Blandin Broadband gang is organizing a series of events the afternoon and evening before our meeting (that would be tomorrow, Thursday) and then on Friday the results of those events will lead off our agenda.

Here's scoop on the Blandin stuff;

Greetings,

The Minnesota Ultra High-Speed Broadband Task Force will be meeting in Grand Rapids on Friday, June 19. What do you want the Task Force to know about our community and region?

To prepare for their visit, the Blandin Foundation and the Arrowhead Regional Development Commission invite you to attend:

Broadband in Rural Minnesota: Critical Issues for Consideration

Thursday, June 18
3 - 5 pm, Sawmill Inn, Grand Rapids

During this free seminar, we will explore some important questions for our region including:

• What is broadband?
• Why do we want broadband?
• Where are we now?
• Where do we want to go?
• How do we get there?

The seminar will include regional panelists, and time for participants to organize their regional voice for the Task Force meeting the following day. Please RSVP to broadband@blandinfoundation.org if you'll be participating in this important conversation.

There will be two opportunties to interact with Task Force members:

Thursday, June 18, 7 pm - Informal "Meet and Greet" reception at the Sawmill Inn. Please RSVP to broadband@blandinfoundation.org if you'd like to attend the reception.

Friday, June 19, 8 am - Task Force Meeting at the Sawmill Inn. Community Coffee from 8 - 9 am, followed by prepared statements from Fred Bobich, Bob Fenwick, and me. 10 am will be an open mic period for any and all residents to address the Task Force. We'll use time during the seminar to prep for the open mic opportunity.

I hope you will be able to join us.

With best regards,

Bernadine Joselyn, Director
Public Policy & Engagement
Blandin Foundation

And here's the press release about the Task Force meeting;

For Immediate Release
Contact: Rick King, Chairman
(651) 848-7819
Jack Geller, Task Force Member
(507) 381-0720

Minnesota Ultra High-Speed Broadband Task Force to Meet
June 19 in Grand Rapids

Grand Rapids, MN – The Task Force charged with examining Minnesota’s broadband future is
traveling to selected rural communities this summer; their first stop is on June 19th in Grand
Rapids.  The Task Force, which was established by the Minnesota State Legislature in 2008, will
meet at the Sawmill Inn from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. and is open to the public.

Interested citizens are particularly encouraged to attend the morning session starting at 8 a.m. for
coffee and rolls with the Task Force members, who were appointed by Governor Pawlenty.
There will also be an open public comment period at 9:15 a.m., where any member of the public
can share their views on broadband deployment and use with the Task Force.

At 9:45 a.m. there will be formal testimony presented to the Task Force members from a regional
panel comprised of:

• Bernadine Joselyn, Director of Public Policy, Blandin Foundation
• Fred Bobich, Ruttger’s Sugar Lake Lodge
• Bob Fenwick, Commissioner, Arrowhead Regional Development Commission

The mission of the Minnesota Ultra High-Speed Broadband Task Force is to make
recommendations to the Governor and Legislature regarding the creation of a statewide high-
speed Internet access goal, and a plan for implementation by 2015.
The 26 Task Force members represent urban and rural constituencies, business and home
Internet users, and public and private sector organizations. The Task Force meets monthly to
examine the multiplicity of issues involved and to draft goals and recommendations in
preparation for their November 1, 2009, final report. For more information about the task force
visit the website at: http://www.ultra-high-speed-mn.org

Some come on down and join in the conversation!