Full Transcript:

Mayor Graham Richard: I am Mayor Graham Richard, in the city of Fort Wayne, Indiana. We are here hosting the Killer Application Conference for high-speed broadband.

Benjamin Higginbotham: You gave the keynote presentation here, earlier today at the Killer App Expo and I was really excited with what you have done with the city from broadband perspective it's just absolutely amazing. Tell us a little bit about what you have got from a fiber perspective? And then we will talk about Wi-Fi after that.

Mayor Graham Richard: We like to say that, we are trying to be the most wired and inspired city of our size in the country and we started actually first with the challenge of bringing broadband to our community to help us improve our public safety services and we brought together over 40 different local broadband suppliers, experts and this was in 2001 and then we were able through our request for proposal select, it turned out a local entrepreneurial company that worked with the city by mounting on the antennas, on towers and other city functions buildings that were like fire stations, other water towers, places that we could assist and in return for that we were able to help this smaller company start to put up a Wi-Fi system. Significantly ahead of many other communities, we now have hotspots through out the community and free Wi-Fi downtown. But most importantly are mobile data terminals from the police cars have been able to be operated, so much more efficiently that we no longer have any squad meetings, we are able to wirelessly with incription send data back and forth, identify finger prints. We can actually take a photograph obviously in a situation where you need to have an accident report or information and again digitally send that back to where we need to have that information, without the Officer leaving the scene at all.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Right now, you have got gigabit inter-connects between all of your schools, it goes into library and it connects direct to you, so you can have real time video conversation, you can sling big stuff back and forth and the beautiful things is that, fibers so as new technology comes along you just switch out the equipment on the either end, you got a 10 gig, you got a terabit speed, so you have got that interconnected. Then you also have got fiber going past every home, but not necessarily into every home. Can you explain that a little bit?

Mayor Graham Richard: Well, the philosophy that Verizon has used which I concur with, I think it is strategically very important, when they decided to overlay on their copper system, they decided that they would basically bring fiber to the home, to the premises. So, when you decide that you want to signup, basically all of the electronics are right there on the back of the home and you can take their broadband package, soon they will be offering their FiOS to TV package and that makes an direct competitor very healthy competition with the cable provider Comcast. So, what I like about our situation is, we have not used substantial public dollars into private investments, private companies that are now vying to woo the public with high-quality services. We have already seen the run-rates and the costs be very competitive, the costs are coming down, run-rates are going up. You have two very, very substantial competitors, one using coaxial cable with fiber to the node. The other then using fiber all the way to the home.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Where does it go from here from a consumer standpoint?

Mayor Graham Richard: Well, I think we are still in that stage of the products being sorted out, whether people will decide they want to pay for online health and education capabilities, this conference is about application. So, we are really excited about things like our new smart green home, which is a 90-year-old home in an older neighborhood, you can’t get much more environmentally effective then recycling a 90-year-old home and put in all the state-of-the-art electronics in that home in an older neighborhood. So, what we are trying to do is find ways to use the high-speed broadband to help us improve education, help us get people who want to get a better job to get better skills, help people who need healthcare, to be able to get access to that, reduce unnecessary trips and the expense of having extra vehicles and cars that are costly to particularly low and moderate income families. We are excited about the way high-speed broadband helps businesses, particularly small companies, get started. If you decide you want to invent the next new Google or if you want to be myspace.com or an inventor on the Internet, we have got them the best bandwidth, certainly in the Midwest for you to come as a college student and used to high-speed Internet connectivity at your college campus, income to Fort Wayne, we can match that, we can match it really almost anywhere within the community, at good reasonable prices. So, we think this is a way to create more jobs, retain more jobs, get young people to come into our community and it was a strategic approach, we decided as a community, we couldn’t bring the oceans and the mountains to Fort Wayne, Indiana , so let’s go our there and say we want to be wired and inspired, we want to come up an innovative new ways to encourage people to start their business in our city.

Benjamin Higginbotham: I'll say you did something right, because we broadcast your keynote live on the Internet from the conventional hall and we were able to get feedback from the Internet community while you were doing that, there was a chat room that was open and there was more than one person said “Wow, I really want to move there” as you are just talking about the fiber and the Wi-Fi, and so clearly something is being done right there. What if you're too bleeding edge, so you have got fiber going to the home, you have got all this fun jazz, what got a Wi-Fi mesh, what WiMAX is really what takes off? Where do you go from there?

Mayor Graham Richard: Well, I believe that you are going to have competitive technologies throughout the next decade or two and that’s good. If that happens, my guess is that, one of the current Wi-Fi providers, may be the one that we have worked with, younger local company will move to that technology, they will migrate to that. The other approach is if you have, I think, a complimentary systems, redundancy is not bad. Sometimes you want to be mobile and so you want a Wi-Fi, you want a WiMAX, you want a wireless broadband connection in a mobile within your community or mobile around the country or around the world, but I still believe that the information innovation highway, the system, the network that connects all the networks around the world is fiber based. And right now, we don’t see something that will in the near term out pays for reliability, for speed, for capacity the tremendous catalytic factor of fiber and so I believe that the commitment made by Verizon by some fiber that the city has installed, I believe that’s a long term lasting investment that we will get a return on investment many fold. For example, we just did a study of existing businesses in Fort Wayne and of site selection specials, eight years ago no one said that a key reason for having a business located in Fort Wayne, Indiana was the availability of broadband. Today the number one issue is trained, skilled workforce available for the companies and number two is availability of high-speed broadband. What that means the economic development location decisions are going to be made in the future not so much by whether you have low tax environment, whether you have a wonderful, beautiful mountains, whether you have a clean mountain streams and you are close to an ocean, they got to be made particularly in the Midwest where we competing around the world, they can be made by decisions that you can have impact. If it is the second most important factor about growing or expanding a business, then having broadband becomes critical to retaining and gaining jobs.

Benjamin Higginbotham: One thing you mentioned in your keynote that was fascinating and frankly I had never even really thought of it before is, you have got fiber going into the home, you got fiber going into schools, you got fiber going into library and in all the businesses, now you have got it is kind of light, going to all these different locations, if a catastrophe strikes you can just stay home and you have got an interconnected entire city interconnected, ready for disaster management and you can do whatever you need to do right over that fiber connection into any location here and I just thought that was fascinating.

Mayor Graham Richard: Well, I believe that homeland security is really about "hometown security" and yes you can have that infrastructure, but you still have to figure out how to use it and we are just beginning that process, I don’t want to mis-represent here, we are creating a new public safety training academy with five colleges and universities to help five thousand first responders get to just learning and training and be connected. We are working with Citizens, we have what this called CERT-Community Emergency Response Teams. We are training people to be able to work in their neighborhood, if an avian flu outbreak happens and you don’t have to have a snow day in the summer and everybody parents and children alike have to stay home. So, you are right, I think that we have not thought about on a national level the huge value of "hometown security" and high-speed broadband and connectivity, redundancy becomes very important having robust systems, let’s take Mayor Ray Nagin , I am told that when he finally talked to the President of United States two days after the well about 48 hours after being in the dark, it was through an Internet protocol phone account that they remembered, that they had on one of the laptops and that was their redundant backup system.

What we know about the web, it’s very robust, there is lots of, it is like a network system that has the ability to self heal in some ways and find other ways at building communication linkages and passages. Now, that fabric of communication in an emergency can be hugely valuable and important. Unfortunately we have to have a crisis to see this, this of the shootings in a Virginia recently, all of those college students, their families and friends what did many of them do, they immediately got and went to the web. Some of them went to the web before they went to their traditional television system, or they got their TV from the web and they got their news about what was happening on their campus through that social network system that allows people to communicate and work together. We need to be thinking as public officials about how we do that better for safety, not just for traditional policing, but in that case of an emergency. So, yes we are beginning to try to find ways to use high-speed broadband to help us be a safer city.