Charlotte's City Checklist for Google Fiber – Part 2

In the previous blog post we discussed Checklist Item #1 – Information about existing infrastructure. This post covers Checklist Items #2 – Ensuring access to existing infrastructure and #3 – Helping make construction speedy and predictable. All three items are required to be filed by the City of Charlotte to Google no later than midnight PT May 1.

Helping to ensure access to existing infrastructure.

The request from Google is for “clear, predictable rules, and reasonable terms” to attach fiber to any city-owned utility poles, ducts, and conduit within the public right-of-way. The City of Charlotte is asked to provide a description of any “state laws, local ordinances, and/or commercial agreements” that satisfy this request. Google further asks that the city work with them to ensure access to these rights.

An example Google provides for a Municipal Ordinance that helps ensure access is this one from Anacortes, WA:

“A franchisee erecting or maintaining poles shall allow anyone constructing under the authority of this chapter and the city, joint use of its poles upon payment of a reasonable proportion of the cost of such poles installed and shall obey any order issued by the city’s director of public works relative to the joint use of poles.” Title 5, Ch. 5.44, § 5.44.190(D)

Helping to make construction speedy and predictable.

The third part of the Charlotte Checklist focuses on how the city's existing permitting and construction process aligns with the speed and the size of the Google Fiber project. Google provided a Permitting, Construction, and Maintenance Plan and asked the City of Charlotte review it and identify areas that may differ. For areas that differ Charlotte is asked to explain why and to outline ideas on how to accommodate a network build of this size in an accelerated manner. Charlotte is also asked to submit the existing permit application, and to identify any “construction constraints' that could impact the deployment time line.

Google provided their ideal construction plan for the project broken down into sections on the Permitting Process, the Construction Process, and Maintenance.

A partial list of Google's Permitting Process:

• Permit applications and responses will be transmitted electronically

• For underground construction Google wants to submit a plan view only

• Google's permit applications include the applicable area will have at least 180 days to complete installation. Ideally Google would like the applicable area to be as large as possible, potentially even covering the entire city. The minimum area cover should be 20,000 households or 300 route miles of underground installation.

• A permit application response time from the city of no more than 10 days. If not approved Google would like a detailed list of alterations needed to get the permit approved.

A partial list of Google's Construction Process:

• Google Fiber will implement the city's standard traffic control plan during installation

• Underground construction may include micro-trench, plow, open trench, directional bore and pneumatic bore.

• Separation distances from existing facilities are specified as 24 inch horizontal separation, 12 inch vertical separation, and 24 inches deep.

• Standard are provided for asphalt and concrete cutting, restoration, and replacement.

Google's Maintenance Plan includes:

• 48 hours electronic notice to the Right-of-way operator's maintenance department before commencing planned work.

• Service wire drops to the home are considered a maintenance activity.

The City of Charlotte is also asked for a “Construction Constraints List”. This identifies rules and regulations that might impact the time line of construction. This includes any rules such as time of year certain construction work can take place, tree-trimming regulations, historical site regulations, landscaping and environmental factors, etc.

Lastly Google will need to deploy “network huts”. These will be dispersed throughout Charlotte and Google requests that they be placed on city-owned sites. A Network Hut License Agreement was provided to the city for review. The specific location of the huts will be jointly determined between Google and the city during the network design process.

The due date for the City of Charlotte to submit the checklist is midnight PT on May 1, 2014.

Charlotte's City Checklist for Google Fiber – Part 1

After the February 19, 2014 announcement of Charlotte being considered as a deployment site for Google Fiber, a time line began with the following key dates:

Charlotte's City Checklist is a collection of best practices recommended by several organizations including the Fiber to the Home Council, The Gig.U report (The University Community Next Generation Innovation Project, or Gig.U, is a broad-based group of over 30 leading research universities from across the United States ), and the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

There are three parts of the city checklist:

1. Information about existing infrastructure. This includes information on utility poles, conduit, and water, gas, and electricity lines.

2. Help to ensure access to existing infrastructure. In order to avoid duplicating of poles and/or digging up streets Google is asking for the ability to access and lease existing infrastructure.

3. Help to make construction speedy and predictable. Google requests that the City of Charlotte ensures an efficient and predictable permit and construction process appropriate for a project of this size.

The first step is identification of existing infrastructure and which is and isn't owned, operated, or controlled by the city. As you may recall from our earlier blog post, Google selected Kansas City as the first Fiber City in part due to the fact that the utilities in Missouri and Kansas has a mixture of public and private ownership. This infrastructure information will be used for Google Network Design and Fiber Route Planning, and includes detailed information requirements in the following areas:

• Addresses

• Streets

• Right of Way and Easements

• City Boundaries

• Parcels or Lot Lines

• Poles (city owned, operated, or controlled)

• Streetlights

• Overhead strand (city owned, operated, or controlled)

• Existing Underground Utility Routes

• Manholes

• Pavement Condition Index Score by Street

• Zoning

• Building Footprint

In order to minimize distribution during the build process Google has also requested:

• Existing Spare Conduit Available for Lease

• Existing Dark Fiber Available for Lease

• Infrastructure Maintenance Plan (road and power)

• Potential Hut Site Locations by Address

In the next blog post we will discuss Checklist Items #2 – Ensuring access to existing infrastructure and #3 – Helping make construction speedy and predictable.

Google Network Hut Drawing

Google Fiber: Charlotte city leaders talk on WFAE

Charlotte's popular public radio station, WFAE 90.7, held an on-air conversation about Google Fiber with Charlotte city leaders yesterday. Representing the city of Charlotte were Phil Reiger - Assistant Director, Charlotte Department of Transportation; the city's designated project manager for the Google Fiber effort, and Jeff Stovall - CIO for the city of Charlotte.

WFAE reports:

City officials are working closely with Google on logistics and planning for the potential network, studying everything from placement of utility poles, water and gas lines to housing density as they study the feasibility of laying thousands of miles of fiber optic cables in the city.

The city has until May 1, 2014 to complete a "Fiber Ready Checklist". Google's website says:

We’re asking cities to provide us with information that can speed up planning and construction (e.g. maps of poles, conduit, existing water, gas, and electricity lines). We also ask that they streamline processes (e.g. permitting procedures and access to local infrastructure) to make it easier for a construction process of this scale to move quickly.

Google hopes to have updates on which cities will get Fiber by the end of the year.

Hear the audio recording of the Google Fiber discussion on the WFAE website.

Picking Up The Gauntlet

I spoke with Hunter Goosmann regarding Google's consideration of a fiber network in Charlotte. Hunter is the Executive Director of ERC Broadband, an Asheville, NC based non-profit providing fiber-based network services to the Western Carolina region. I asked him his thoughts of the Google announcement and his response was they “threw down a gauntlet”. Essentially this means that Google is challenging companies to compete with them. Let's hope the existing residential Internet providers pick up the gauntlet and compete!

Hunter expressed the response we want to see from existing providers, a positive one where he welcomed the competition, felt good about his own company's capabilities, and thought Google would help raise the bar for everyone. ERC Broadband isn't the only company to feel this way. On March 11 RST announced they were making North Carolina the first Gigabit state. RST’s network offers up to 100-gigabit per second, symmetrical broadband service to businesses and homes in metropolitan and rural communities statewide. North State also announced their plan for gigabit broadband service for "tens of thousands" of customers in its service area in High Point and surrounding areas by the end of the year. It appears these companies picked up the gauntlet prior to it being thrown down! It's great to see infrastructure providers getting ahead of the curve and increasing capacity. Let's hope they can compete with the pricing gauntlet Google laid out in Kansas City.

So why do we need the full Gigabit synchronous connection? Applications today such as video uploading, collaboration tools, Netflix downloads, etc. are already pushing the envelope for traditional connections. For example here is a speedtest from my house on TWC broadband:

Speedtest from my house on TWC March 30, 2014

Not bad for traditional standards. I remember when upload speeds were in the 384-768 kb range, so getting a full megabit upstream is better than before. But what does this mean in every day life? Recently I recorded a video of a pitch made at Tech Breakfast Charlotte, compressed it from ~1 Gb down to 182Mb and uploaded it to my Vimeo account from my house. How long did it take? About 25 minutes. Imagine if I hadn't compressed it! So is Gb upload speed in demand now? For anyone uploading large files such as video it sure is.

A Gigabit connection also prepares us for the future and the Internet of Things. This Scrolling Interactive published on the CNN website explains how everyday items are becoming connected to the Internet. Your coffee maker, your refrigerator, your clock, your thermostats...the list of potential connected devices is almost limitless. Each of these devices will require online connection, driving the need for more and more bandwidth. This is no different than when wireless devices gained first 3G connections, and now 4G connections. We are doing things on our smartphones and tablets that were not possible 5 years ago.

By increasing the capabilities of the Internet infrastructure we unleash a variety of new products and services, lower costs, and enrich our lives. We support Google Fiber in Charlotte and the “throwing down of the gauntlet”. We hope all Internet infrastructure companies pick up that gauntlet and compete for our service.

Image courtesy of Satiz TPM

Three Year Anniversary of Google's Kansas City Fiber Announcement

On March 30, 2011 Google announced that Kansas City was selected out of 1,100 cities for deployment of an ultra high-speed broadband network.  Google has since announced fiber deployments in Austin, Texas and Provo, Utah, and named 9 more cities currently being evaluated for fiber deployment. Charlotte is one of the 9 cities being considered.

I spoke with Ryan Weber, President of KCNext the technology council for greater Kansas City. One of the reasons why Google choose Kansas City was that it straddles two states (Kansas and Missouri) with a mix of government owned and privately owned utilities. Google wanted to test these environments and the metro area met these needs. The Kauffman Foundation is also based in Kansas City and was an active participate in the effort to convince Google to select the city.

Some readers may not know that Google's fiber deployment is a residential application. They named the neighborhood deployments as “Fiberhoods”. It isn't that homes need 1 Gb of synchronous Internet speed today, but it is how the Internet will be used in the future with the Internet of Things that is driving their forecast for bandwidth. Businesses do not have direct access to Google Fiber today, but Ryan told me it is in the works.

It should be highlighted that Google's Gb of bandwidth is symmetrical, which is unusual for consumer applications which tend to be asymmetrical with greater bandwidth for downloads than uploads. This is significant for home users and entrepreneurs who upload large files such as video, and collaborate online with multimedia tools. See the following speed test result from a Kansas City Google Fiber user:

Google Fiber is more than just Internet access; they offer high-definition TV, DVR with two terabytes of video storage, and a Terabyte of online storage space for other Google applications as well. Here is a summary of Google's current plans in the Kansas City market:

• Gigabit + TV: $120/month ($300 construction fee waived) Includes a Nexus 7 tablet.

• Gigabit Internet: $70/month ($300 construction fee waived)

• Free Internet (5Mb download, 1Mb upload): $0/month (for at least seven years) + $300 construction fee

Homeowners sign up on a waiting list, and once there is sufficient demand Google begins the fiberhood build.

Google has clearly thrown down the gauntlet for high speed Internet access with TV to the home. Incumbent providers like Time Warner Cable and AT&T have been responding with offers of their own (Time Warner ups speeds, slashes rates), proving once again that when competition thrives, consumers benefit. The last time I witnessed such a competitive disruption was Skype's IP 'phone' service. We embrace the potential of greater competition in Charlotte as it will lead to improved services and pricing for everyone.