Community Access Internet

Yesterday, Bob Ingalls and I attended the second planning meeting for an ambitious project, currently called Central Sierra Connect. It is being spearheaded by the Amador-Tuolumne Community Action Agency (A-TCAA), with funding from the California Emerging Technology Fund (CETF). Although the project is in its early stages, its objective is to facilitate broadband availability to unserved and under-served areas of five counties: Mariposa, Tuolumne, Calaveras, Amador and Alpine. Significantly, all five county governments have indicated that they will participate and several business communities were also represented. Of the 25-30 people who attended yesterday’s all day session, several expressed the opinion that there is currently a window of opportunity for this issue to be addressed by the counties of the foothills and if we do not start the process now, we may fall so far behind the urban areas of the state that we may never catch up.

A-TCAA has been invited to apply for a $250,000 grant from the CETF, which could be received as early as Q2 2008. They have already received a “pre-grant” of $10,000 to prepare the application. Part of that process has been the two planning meetings that took place in Sonora, aimed at bringing together participants (stakeholders, in planning-speak) from the five counties. Those of you hoping to see new wireless towers springing up in the next six months are likely to be disappointed. This is a long term project and the first step will be to develop a comprehensive plan that addresses the issues concerning all of the stakeholders. This phase of the project is likely to take a least a year from the time the grant is awarded. Years two and three of the grant cycle will implement the plan.

So, to recap, A-TCAA has received some money to help them apply to receive more money to pay for a plan. Believe it or not, this is real progress and I’m excited about it. It means that there is agreement across all of the foothill counties that this is a serious issue that requires action (or at least a plan of action). They have the support of a major source of funding in the CETF, which can open the doors to other sources. The participants in the meetings so far have been committed and capable. Bob is a member of the Infrastructure team and I have chosen to work with Outreach. The other teams in the project are: Advisory Council (administration), Demand Survey and County Liason.

The next milestone will be a completed grant application to the CETF, which we plan to submit by the end of February, for consideration at CETF’s March board meeting. There should be a Central Sierra Connect web site available soon and I will continue posting here as we progress.

On April 18th, representatives from Conxx, Inc. gave a presentation to a general meeting of Network Sierra, which was also attended by several members of county government. Conxx provides a turnkey system for replacing the telco infrastructure in a county or region. Their technology was developed in Alagany County, Maryland and they hope to replicate it in rural areas around the country. As Marv Dealy reported in his Byte by Bite column:

While a bit larger than Tuolumne County, comparisons between the two could be made and the information was compelling. To summarize, this company is providing services to the county, to businesses and to residents that include Internet connections with speeds up to 26 mb at very affordable rates. The system can also provide other services traditionally only offered by a telco like AT&T, such as voice circuits, T1, DS3/OC1, Frame relay, ATM and more. The system uses towers and antennae, fed by wire when available and linked with microwave when not, to broadcast a cloud, and the company said that the trees in Maryland are just as tough as the ones surrounding Craig Will’s house, high in the mountains up Highway 108, and that they don’t present a problem.

The discussion turned to how such a system could be financed in our county, and it appears there are pots of money that, if the pots can be connected, could do the trick.

Here are the Powerpoint slides used in the Conxx presentation.

Note: Use this link if you have trouble viewing the slides in this post.

This is the first fully integrated technology solution that I’ve seen that seems to address the needs of Tuolumne County. It’s not inexpensive (~$5 million) but such sums have been provided to other rural areas through grants. It’s important to stress that we don’t expect that any significant amount of money will be available from Tuolumne County. We will however, require support and cooperation from the county in order to proceed with such an ambitious plan. So far, I’m cautiously optimistic that such support will be forthcoming.