Category: business plan

Andrew Cohill Explains Common Mistakes in Community Networks – Community Broadband Bits #45

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

This is a show I have been wanting to do for years – discussing some of the common mistakes that have been make by community owned networks. Offering broadband and other telecommunications services is a difficult business for any entity, public or private and all network owners make mistakes. The vast majority of these errors can be and are fixed so the network may carry on.

While in Dallas for the Broadband Communities Summit, I asked Design Nine founder Andrew Cohill about common problems faced by community owned networks and how to prepare for them or avoid them entirely.

We discuss how having a strong business plan is essential, with some of the requirements that should be included. We agree that a reliance on grant funding is a giant warning flag. We also discuss a number of other things new networks should watch out for, especially overstaffing.

Read the transcript from our discussion here.

We want your feedback and suggestions for the show – please e-mail us or leave a comment below. Also, feel free to suggest other guests, topics, or questions you want us to address.

This show is 18 minutes long and can be played below on this page or subscribe via iTunes or via the tool of your choice using this feed. Search for us in iTunes and leave a positive comment!

Listen to previous episodes here. You can can download this Mp3 file directly from here.

Find more episodes in our podcast index.

Thanks to Mount Carmel for the music, licensed using Creative Commons.

Community Broadband Bits 26 – Josh Wallace, Palo Alto

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

This week, Josh Wallace from the City of Palo Alto Utilities joins us to talk about the City's dark fiber network for episode 26 of the Community Broadband [no-glossary]Bits[/no-glossary] Podcast. Josh describes how the dark fiber network connects businesses, offering incredibly high capacity connections at affordable flat rate pricing.

The utility charges an upfront fee to make a dark fiber connection, which means that nearly all the ongoing revenues are net income. It is a very good business to be in, both for the utility and local businesses that would have to pay much more for their connections if the City did not offer the dark fiber option.

Despite its success in dark fiber, Palo Alto is not poised to offer any lit services — which would dramatically increase the potential number of customers. The main reason appears to be the difficulty of competing with the nation's largest cable company, Comcast. Its massive footprint allows Comcast to engage in predatory pricing and other anti-competitive tactics to ensure competitors have a miserable life. Though some cities, Chattanooga especially, have done very well competing against Comcast (one of the nation's most hated corporations year after year), other communities are simply unwilling to engage in what can be a brutal fight.

Read the transcript from this episode here.

We want your feedback and suggestions for the show – please e-mail us or leave a comment below. Also, feel free to suggest other guests, topics, or questions you want us to address.

This show is 19 minutes long and can be played below on this page or subscribe via iTunes or via the tool of your choice using this feed. Search for us in iTunes and leave a positive comment!

Listen to previous episodes here. You can download the Mp3 file of this episode directly from here.

Find more episodes in our podcast index.

Thanks to mojo monkeys for the music, licensed using Creative Commons.

Community Broadband Bits 14 – Bob Frankston

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Our fourteenth episode of Community Broadband [no-glossary]Bits[/no-glossary] is an interview with Bob Frankston, who has made many important contributions to the development of both computers an telecommunications. His bio is here, but this is his present passion:

My current interest is moving beyond the 19th century concept of telecom to community owned infrastructure. This would add hundreds of billions of dollars to the US and much more value by creating opportunity for what we can't imagine.

Our interview discusses how the Internet is much more than something you connect to via a cable or telephone company. Fundamentally, we should be building networks that allow ubiquitous access to communications, not designing networks around billing relationships. Confused about what that means? Listen to our interview below and read some of his writings.

He also talks about community broadband in an interview we previously noted. You can find our other stories that involve him here.

We want your feedback and suggestions for the show – please e-mail us or leave a comment below. Also, feel free to suggest other guests, topics, or questions you want us to address.

This show is 30 minutes long and can be played below on this page or subscribe via iTunes or via the tool of your choice using this feed. Search for us in iTunes and leave a positive comment!

Listen to previous episodes here. You can download the Mp3 file directly from here.

Read the transcript of this episode here.

Find more episodes in our podcast index.

Thanks to Fit and the Conniptions for the music, licensed using Creative Commons.