 Hello and welcome to Geekdom. This event is titled The Future of Broadband Internet in San Antonio. I am Matthew Manning, and I have had a passion for current and future technology since I was a child. I organized this event today to use this passion to make you all aware of the future of broadband internet in San Antonio. I want to start this evening by letting you all know what I find important on this subject. I will then introduce our panel and begin with a panel discussion. Before then, I'm also going to introduce a quick guest speaker who is going to talk about the current infrastructure here in San Antonio for the internet. And near the end, I'll open the discussion up for the audience to participate with their own questions. So Geekdom is about ideation, entrepreneurship, small business, and growth. Nothing epitomizes this more than what the internet provides for this mission. Bill Gates wrote in 2009 that information technology and business are becoming inextricably interwoven. I don't think anybody can talk meaningfully about one without talking about the other. In 2004, this is more apparent than ever. To say the least, our technology has come to the point where we now have cars, wristwatches, thermostats, vending machines, and even eyeglasses connecting to the internet. Our world involves the internet from the moment we wake up to when we go to sleep at night. According to the Pew Research Center in 2013, 70% of Americans have high-speed broadband connections at home and 32% of those without broadband own a smartphone. We live in a great city, and this is an exciting time to live in San Antonio. Organizations such as Rackspace and Geekdom are putting serious efforts into building San Antonio culture bent on being with and above the curve of technological growth. It comes down to jobs. High-tech industries will go where high-tech industries are supported. The high school and college graduates today were born into a high-tech society and know nothing of what the existence was like without YouTube and Twitter. Our San Antonio knows this and is working to ensure they can not only just come here to visit a beautiful city with delicious food, but come here to live in a beautiful, active city with a career in high-tech industry of their choice. Now before I get into this session, I want to introduce Gabriel Garcia, city attorney for San Antonio, and he's going to explain that network infrastructure for us. Good evening. I'm Gabriel Garcia, assistant city attorney. I work with our ITSD department and also with our Office of Public Utilities. Just to kind of give you a very rough overview of telecom infrastructure in San Antonio, we do have an incumbent telephone company, AT&T, that has a network throughout the city that provides DSL service in terms of a broadband offering. Time Warner is the cable incumbent in San Antonio. It also has a network throughout the city that provides a cable modem product to customers. In addition to that, we have a cable overbuilder called Grande Communications that provides a broadband product also to parts of the city. It doesn't cover the entire city, but parts of the city. So I just wanted to give you that kind of overview so that you understand that we do have service providers that provide internet service throughout the city at different speeds depending on their networks. In addition to that now, so that's kind of the private sector. On the public sector side, the city owns CPS Energy, which is our electric company. CPS Energy in the 1990s began building a fiber network that connects all other substations throughout the city. As the utility continues to grow and they have more substations, they continue to connect those substations with fiber. The city and CPS Energy entered into a memorandum of understanding. About six years ago, when I first came to work for the city, I worked closely with our ITSD department and we negotiated this MOU. So the city has been using that fiber network for city activities. Under that agreement, we have access to a certain number of fibers and then we have purchased equipment in order to actually light the dark fiber because what we get from CPS is dark fiber, essentially excess capacity. Over the years with the budget process, the city's budget process, the city connects more city facilities to that network. That's what we've been working on with CPS Energy. That is how the city has been using that fiber. Let me give you an example of how it's utilized. Several years ago, the city working with the county and other agencies in San Antonio built an emergency communication center. We needed to have fiber infrastructure to that facility. So we used CPS fiber for that facility and we're actually connected to the county. Another example of the use of fiber is we provide public education and government access channels. San Antonio College runs our education channel and the city has its own fiber that connects to San Antonio College in order to send our signal, the television signal, that then goes on to the cable providers. That's our education channel. We already have started using that fiber. Under state law, it can only be used for governmental purposes. When former councilwoman Osuna came to the city, she started promoting the idea of expanding the use of that fiber into what has come to be known as the SAVN, the San Antonio United Broadband Network. That is an idea that you'll hear more about this evening, but it's really the idea of connecting other governmental entities to this network. And this is something that's going to take time. It doesn't happen overnight. You'll hear also about some of the efforts in Austin and what they have done over the last 20 years. So I want you to understand that we do have some very valuable infrastructure in San Antonio as far as fiber is concerned, but building these networks really takes long-term planning and it takes years to really develop a network such as the type that you'll be hearing more about this evening. Thank you. And very, very quickly, this is not about free Wi-Fi across the city. I just don't want to make sure that everyone understands that that's not what we're talking about. It's not a bad thing. It's not a bad thing. And that's a great project for someone to undertake, but that's not the project that we're talking about today. Thank you. Thank you, Gabriel Garcia. Ms. Osuna. I'm going to go ahead and introduce our panel right now. I'll say their names. I'll let them introduce their titles. Actually, I'll let you guys say your names so you can introduce your titles even more properly. Go down the line here. Hi, I'm Wayne Weedemeyer. I'm the director of the University of Texas System Office Telecommunications Services. So my employer is University of Texas System. I have been the chairman of the Greater Austin Area Telecommunications Network for the past eight years. That's the city-wide network that operates in Austin and Travis County for those public sector entities that become a part of the Gatton Network in Austin. My name is Ron Nirenberg. I'm city councilman for District 8 and very pleased to have engaged this conversation with former councilwoman Osuna and carrying the torch forward for the SAVEN initiative. You know, as Matthew mentioned, I don't think anyone is under the impression that this is going to be a quick and easy thing. It's going to take many years, so it's going to take a lot of different people to work together on this. You know, we're at the beginning stages of what could be a long but important task of bridging the digital divide. I'm Leticia Osuna. I'm a former city councilwoman representing the southeast side of San Antonio. I have been very fortunate in having a career, a great career that evolved around technology. And it was kind of a serendipity that brought me into the technology field because a girl like me who grew up inside the loop at the public schools that I grew up in was not supposed to have a career like mine, was not supposed to own a software company, was not supposed to take it and sell it to a multinational company, was not supposed to be able to own their home, send their kid to college. That wasn't supposed to happen to me, and it did. And I don't like to think that having access to technology is going to be an accident for the next generation of kids. So I care very much about this issue. This is my passion. It's something that I'm doing when I'm no longer in office because I think it's important, not just for hospitals and not just for county and not just for SAC, because at the end of the day there's a little girl in a classroom in Highland Park Elementary School who should be at the table across from me when I'm retiring and I can handle the baton. Okay. Thank you for that. We have great panel discussion here. I'm going to go ahead and start questions. I'll ask a few questions, and after that, of course, I'll open the floor up. So the first question is, when are we getting our free Wi-Fi? No, I'm just kidding. Actually, what do you consider is an important benefit to having high-speed broadband internet to the home? And what is the benefit for it going to the businesses? I'll take that, if I can, very quickly. Let's start with the conversation about access in the home. And so I think access in the home is really, you know, I can understand why people are interested in it. I mean, you can look at the statistics of 49 minutes to bring down a movie on your, you know, your G4 Android cell phone, and it's like 19 seconds if you've got fiber. But the reality about our devices, our handheld devices and our laptops at home is that we're not going to be mining the big data streams in our home. Not most consumers. But business absolutely is going to be driven by high-capacity access. I mean, that's pretty clear. We're moving into an internet of things. We're absolutely moving into big data mining. It is going to be all about how fast can you get on the stream and how fast can your API start, you know, filtering through results. And the sad part about it is that geography is going to drive where those businesses are going to be established. So I'm very interested in making sure that we have the bench, that we continue to maintain the bench of accessibility here, even if it is just to research institutions, to hospitals, to county government, so that we don't fall away from the geography of access. Yeah, and I'll just basically say I concur. The way I view this is that we are very much in a new phase of understanding our utility infrastructure. And as we go forward as a city in pursuing economic development opportunity, we need to begin to understand what 21st century infrastructure looks like. And that means communication infrastructure that's built on fiber. And so I see this conversation as a very advantageous one to be having in San Antonio, knowing that, you know, leaders in our utility industry have had the foresight to do some of the very important infrastructure work already. So we need to take that message to Austin, and I'm not talking about the GATT and I'm talking about the legislature, so we can begin to harness the actual infrastructure that has been pursued by San Antonio already. Yeah, and I would echo everything that has been so, so far, but I would also add to that, that the world of the Internet anywhere and anytime is a collaborative world. And without broadband interconnectability between people wherever they are, whatever time of the day it is, as they're trying to use the Internet to do the things that they want to do, without that high-speed Internet, you're going to inhibit those kinds of activities. People get the spark from somewhere. That spark needs to be kept alive through broadband connectivity to the homes and the collaboration with other people to start a software company between three or four people that say, I can do this, I can do this. Those people are eating pizza at three in the morning trying to figure out what to do, but without broadband connectivity, they're unable to do those kinds of activities that really and truly spur the home use of Internet to expand what's going on in any metropolitan area so that technology takes on a life of its own. And it's amazing what goes on when people allow themselves to access high-speed Internet at their homes and start collaborating with each other and saying, what can we do that we couldn't do before because we just didn't have it? I can't go into Starbucks and do that. I have to have that high-speed Internet connection at my house to do that. Tonight's event is being broadcast live over the Internet by NowcastSA. Thank you, guys. This will be available on YouTube as well after the event. Okay, so the next question is, we've got to base things in the future by what we know today, and future innovations are driven by today's opportunities. So tell me your observations to the downsides or the roadblocks of Internet for homes and businesses in San Antonio and Texas today. So the way that the regulatory environment works in Texas is that you can have text dot fiber running along the subdivision outside of your home. You can have dark fiber from CPS running down the main street of your subdivision, and you can't access that. The state law is pretty clear that governmentally-owned fiber is only to be accessible by government entities. It's not a competitive offering. Now there is... There are communities and there are states where that is not the case. Oklahoma is a very good example right now of excess capacity that Oklahoma's Highway Department has that they are partnering. They're doing a public-private partnership to open up rural communities in Oklahoma. The other very interesting case that's happening right now is I believe it's North Carolina where the governor just came on to start looking at public-private partnerships to start dropping in high capacity in more places throughout North Carolina. So there's conversations that are happening all over to open up the capacity access. So it's not so much a household-driven commodity model like we have today and much more a more disparate model, right? More of a water or power distribution model. And I think that those are very interesting examples to be looking at as we think about what the next 10 years of regulation in the state legislature is going to look like. If I could just pick up on that. I'm very much a glass half full kind of person when it comes to this discussion because there's a lot of things that we can do to be competitive now with the regulation. So for instance, we're talking about government institutions, public institutions. We can work right now under the current regulatory framework to connect universities, connect hospitals, connect libraries. So when I look in my own district we have the medical center and that's an industry that's driven by digital communication and collaboration. And so the pursuit right now I think the downside is that there's some limitations but the upside is there's some real economic opportunity and opportunities for innovation through the current framework. Yeah, I would like to add that the disparity between places that have fiber that's available through the private sector versus those places that have fiber that's available through the public sector is very clear when you go out at the core of most cities in Texas. And so that resource is sitting there as Councilwoman Ozuna said there's fiber running down the highway today that's available to cities all the way from here to Corpus Christi but they don't get access to that. And the regulatory environment today just doesn't give that kind of access to people all along the way to be able to use that resource because as fiber has been used again and again and again over the years is effectively the bandwidth across fiber is truly unlimited so it's not a question of whether there's enough fiber in the ground it's a question of whether or not that fiber can be utilized by everybody that needs access to it across the state of Texas and today that is not the case. Thank you guys. A little bit more of a controversial question so answer this at your own peril. Okay, so major internet service many major internet service providers are managed by executives who feel that internet is a luxury service. How do you feel about that? I'll jump into the controversial question. Actually I don't view this as a controversial question at all. In fact I think most of the folks in the telecom industry that I've talked to view this as very much a necessity. We can't now move into a competitive economic environment at the household level with individuals who are employed in many different technological fields without having some way to connect. Councilwoman Ozuna makes the analogy about the introduction of the modern day electrical grid. We're not daisy chained together anymore we've got major energy capacity by virtue of our interconnectedness across the board in our cities and I think if we're going to truly unleash the power of our digital infrastructure or I'm sorry our economic opportunity we need to make sure that citizens are connected. I don't think we have to work very hard to convince people that digital access broadband access is a luxury at this point. I guess I'll dive right into that. I'm very much a proponent of what's called net neutrality and recently there have been rumblings coming out of the FCC that net neutrality meaning that everybody that goes on to the internet can get to any resource available on the internet regardless of who's making that resource available and I think that neutrality is one of the things that made the internet grow as rapidly as it grew because people could do anything. When you started up a company there was no question about whether if you were on the internet anybody could use that service to connect to whatever the ISP was that had that service but today I think the issue that we need to be concerned about to some extent is that the net neutrality issue is crucial to ensuring that the internet can expand and grow and fulfill everybody's demand for the use of the internet that the internet doesn't become and I don't use the word luxury that the internet doesn't become a place where the smaller players will not have a place at the table. Yeah I just want to point out so I have, as a consumer, as a resident as a household owner I have no problem paying my monthly cable bill for my internet access I mean that's okay. Where I do really start to question the model that we've accepted is that the elementary school down the street for me is also paying a cable bill for about the same level of capacity access. Now you can't tell me that a school with 793 children can run efficiently and effectively with feed which just doesn't seem like that's reasonable like I look at Los Angeles, the city of Los Angeles that was driven by the school district to go and put out an RFP to drop in fiber so that they could start having enough backhaul to support the elementary schools. Now I know that there's lots of programs available but for the most part in the community that I'm in the McDonald's is packed because that's where the Wi-Fi is. After hours at the Mission Library the kids are trampling the landscaping because that's where the outdoor plug is because the Wi-Fi is running at night. So yeah I'd like to see a little bit more penetration in some neighborhoods. However we get there. And if I can just add to that really quickly you know it's pretty clear if you look at a map of broadband access that it tracks with socioeconomics so where the areas are dark it's usually lower socioeconomic opportunities so there is a great digital equity argument to be made. Now you know you can look also I mentioned the utility, the electrical grid you can also look at how water has worked in our country. You go down to the valley, Rio Grande Valley and there are colonias that are in desperate situation because of largely utility access particularly water. So we do have an industry, a telecom industry that's competitive. Sometimes government needs to help things along but those telecom companies will very quickly point out that they recognize that digital equity issue and they're providing lower cost alternatives. Now we as a community have to have the discussion of whether that's good enough and whether we should be leveraging the opportunity that San Antonio has in this capacity that we've added in as a public. Thank you, thank you. I knew those were going to be a little controversial. So let's talk a little bit about future push of broadband internet. So other cities across the country like Chicago, Seattle and even our neighbor Austin are bringing inexpensive and true gigabit broadband internet to their citizens catalyzing economic growth with other benefits. How would San Antonio benefit from having affordable gigabit internet service? Well I think that the example of Austin is a really clear example of saying once you reach the critical mass once the providers believe that there is a ubiquitous need for them to be able to deliver their service across the entirety of your footprint then they're going to look much more favorably on what it is that they want to do in your environment, in your metropolitan or your county area. So when Austin built the greater Austin area telecommunications network suddenly the providers AT&T, Time Warner, Grande, Alpheus, CenturyLink all looked at Austin differently saying there must be a demand here for the kinds of bandwidth that people are going to need for us to come in and try to build a city. I'll give you the very quick overview Austin was announced as the Google Fiber as a Google Fiber city. And Google Fiber is going to bring a gigabit full duplex by the way. It's not the DSL asymmetrical a little bit from you and a lot to you. It's full duplex gigabit service. It was amazing to me and I'm still astounded as to how AT&T suddenly did a survey and decided that Austin was going to be the very first city in the country where they introduced their gigapower service to be in competition with Google Fiber and they're pushing that really, really hard inside the central Texas area because I think they see that there's enough people that really want to utilize that high speed bandwidth that they can go take advantage of the the press that Google Fiber generated and use that to try to sell gigapower services inside Austin. And so I think it's really important that you look to creating those little pockets that as I put it the spark starts to flame out flame and then the more it burns everybody sees that this is a place where you want to do something and the companies will come after that. They will actually come after that. And then we can argue about whether or not that's a good thing, you know? Because you introduce a competitive environment to a new industry and that could spur competitive pricing and better access. So I think, you know, again that we're at the beginning point of this conversation and we are in Texas and we have certain regulatory frameworks to work in but this conversation is a good one in my perspective no matter which direction we go. Yeah, I was going to say so we've been looking at some of the examples at how we're opening up Gigabit. So Chatnuga is one of my favorite stories which is when they did their affordable Gigabit access in Chatnuga DreamWorks Studio picked up a little subsection of folks. Now who knows? Maybe their hometown was Chatnuga and they got homesick and it happened to have fiber but I like to think that the one thing that was holding them back was that seamless integration back to the studios. So they came in and they set up an animation group in Tennessee you know the barbecue you know we can't say if you do this then this will happen but what we do know is that you can't this is something that Gabe told me and it just keeps going in my head if you have a community with no running water how on earth are you ever going to sell them washing machines? And so how can they even conceive of what that means and so I think very much about our city and I think about I don't know all of the answers yet I do know that business needs it I know that the medical industry needs it I know county runs on data I know city runs on data I know those things but I also know that there's an awful lot out there I know it's going to be important but I can't tell you what the washing machine is going to look like yet. And getting back to the Austin example of the Gatton Network once we put in 10 gigabits to every single elementary school in Austin, Texas when the kids went home and they talked to their families there was an excitement from those kids about what can I do it happened in the school district it happened in the community college it happened at the university level where they said where am I going to choose to live in these apartments and go to the community college or am I going to choose to live in these apartments and suddenly people weren't looking for cable TV they were looking for high speed internet and they made that choice based on the fact that they had already experienced that internet kinds of throughput when they were in the educational system from the elementary school through the community college through the university and so it breeds a kind of need from the community where when they go home and they talk to their families it's like why not why can't I get this here I can't do my homework I can't do my research whether it's Wikipedia or whether it's real research is a different question but I need that in my environment and that's a demand driven opportunity for every city and county to look into to say once it's in the schools it's there, it's in the kids minds once it's in the community colleges once it's in the health clinics and people can walk up to the health clinic and gather information on a public terminal it really does breed a need that they feel they have to meet when they get back home thank you guys so the next question is going to be a little bit more specific about our infrastructure that our assistant attorney mentioned earlier could you tell us more about what SAABN the San Antonio area broadband network is and also compare it to the Austin's counterpart the Gatton greater Austin area telecommunications network so the ownership is different between the two networks Gatton I believe started as an Austin independent school district initiative it started it was driven began from the schools way back in the 90s wasn't it, yeah and recruiting partners to come in to do ownership so they had ownership stakes from all of the partners so that the governance of that network is distributed among the partners in our case the capacity access is owned the lines are owned by the public utility company they're owned by CPS who's responsible for the physical integrity and then the responsibility part of it like who's going to connect all the rules around connecting partners all the rules around in kind servicing all of the rules around the multiplexers on the end points that's to be determined ultimately by the city in both networks both networks are very very much dependent on the city in terms of we call them the poll rights right so it's that those connection components of the network so really you know it comes down to how do you make sure that the stakeholders in the network and the San Antonio network have you know that they have a skin in the game that they're vested right that they have that their needs are listened to and that we can do we have a way of accepting in kind contributions to grow the network I think there are really two distinctions and the first distinction is the underlying infrastructure and organization and you have to be very clear about what that underlying infrastructure is what the organization is the other side of that distinction is if I'm a school child in Austin High School I don't care what it took to get the bandwidth to my school I just am excited by the fact that the bandwidth is there now I'm not trying to belittle or deny the fact that the organization infrastructure is crucial but you've got the side where the users are the ones that become excited about it his ilk will sit down and craft up many pages of paper to describe how it's governed and how you can expand it and use it for what it is you need to do to meet the mission of your organization if you're the University of Texas at San Antonio, if you're the Institute of Texas Cultures if you're the University of Texas Health Science Center and you want to help a doctor in a clinic that's owned South San Antonio how do you use the network you aren't as concerned about what the underlying infrastructure is and what the organization is just so you get your needs met and I think it's important that we understand the distinction we can't avoid the necessary effort to create the right organization with the right governance structure whether that's done with a contract with a city by every user that's a part of the organization that's just the nuts and bolts of what makes it happen where the users get their excitement is when they can see that they've got a network that far exceeds the expectations they've had for years and years and years and what you find is if you look at places where those networks are not there the users start self-limiting what it is that they want to do they don't even try things anymore but if you give them 10 gigabits if you give them 30 gigabits of access into a research lab and if you go do what it is that you think you want to do they suddenly start coming out with new things that they never even thought about before because they were really and truly self-limiting themselves and so I think it's important that San Antonio understand that their underlying infrastructure will be different there won't be strands of fiber available to everybody that wants to be a participant in Sabin but there will be bandwidth available to everybody whether it's strands of fiber whether it's a different colored wavelength on a pair of fibers you can put 64 wavelengths on one pair of fibers today and so when you're talking about 64 wavelengths at 100 gigabits per wavelength you can serve a lot of schools for one wavelength on one pair of fibers at 100 gigabits and not give anybody the sense that they're going to be limited or inhibited in what it is that they want to try to do I think Sabin has a great opportunity to structure a very firm underlying organization so that everybody sees what it is they're participating in and in that vision you can say what happens when I need more how do I get there and if you can fulfill your needs the underlying infrastructure and governance is not nearly as important as the people that want something done and they ask for it and if you know how to go find Gabriel and knock on his door and say hello to their 100 gigabits and he says here's the organization here's what you do this is what the cost is then everybody can make those decisions and Gatton is different every entity owns their own strands of fiber we have from 72 to 114 strands of fiber own 11 rings all over the city so every place is connected with a ring every entity owns their own strands to do with whatever they want how long has Gatton been doing this? 24 we have 538 sites with the 7 public entities the school district, the community college the university, the state of Texas the city government, the county government the lower Colorado River Authority the network cannot connect non-governmental entities by the laws that we use to incorporate our organizational structure to make up what is Gatton does the state regulatory framework that we have and again I know I'm hammering this point the underlying infrastructure and the organizational infrastructure are crucial but the users don't care what that is if they can get their needs met all they want to know is if they go ask their president or they go ask their city council person how do I get bandwidth to this school you can give them an answer you might not like the cost the real cost for the answer you don't tell them no you tell them whoa until we get the money and then when you get the money they have an answer and so we're not going to be a blockage for people doing what they want to do we're going to be maybe a slow lane for a while for them to create that organization to get there but once Gabriel has done his job everybody will know exactly what it takes to add more to it and you can fulfill your needs whether you're a science academy or a charter school or a city of Texas health science center doing genomic scanning and trying to process the human genome for every patient that walks through the door what you just said one of my favorite stories about opening up broadband access is in Santa Cruz when they finally opened up a public access government run gigabit to the university when you talk about institutions holding themselves back that was it that was the tipping point for them they were able to get money they were able to fund graduate students they were able to make a name for themselves in that emerging field so like I said with the washing machine we've never had it so how do we even know what a washing machine looks like do you have anything to offer as well? my head's spinning Miriam did you get all that? where I am on this is quite simply we've got institutions within our community that need to connect some of them are in the medical center some of them are at UTSA some of them are across the world and so that's what I say well we've got the infrastructure gave how do we figure it out so that's very informative thank you for beating that into my head I know I enjoyed it I really did I have a few more questions before I continue on to those I just want to remind us all we are going to have open questions after I'm finished and I also want to thank those just tuning in right now online and now cast SA who's broadcasting and streaming this to YouTube and on their website so the next question I have is going to be a little bit more involved in that so there have been discussions on the Sabin in the past and my understanding is that the fiber network was never intended for residential or commercial use so how feasible is it to eventually use that network to supply advanced service to the greater San Antonio area's 2.3 million citizens and what work would need to be done to make that happen I don't work for CPS and I have no visibility into their day to day operations or into you know their their network maps or any of that and I'm just going to that's about all that I can really say on that topic well I'll just maybe disagree with your premise just slightly it hasn't been a conversation we've had very long in fact it was the leadership of Councilwoman Ozuna that really brought this to the fore and so we're at the beginning stages and feasibility I think is still to be determined you know but feasibility will always rest upon our ability to create change within our regulatory framework that we exist in her so the image right now is the sense that when this was first proposed it was proposed under the under the guise of this is only for our public institutions so that we can comply with the regulatory environment that exists today but the fact that the access and the capacity that we're talking about is just a smidgen of what is available you think about what's going to be happening in broadband 50 years from now it's pretty exciting to think that in 1997 we were already planning for that the only thing that I'll say is that as Councilwoman Ozuna alluded to earlier you can do a public-private partnership and so as you want to build out infrastructure where there is not infrastructure today you can enter into a public-private partnership and say I want to put 144 strands of fiber up I'm only going to wind up owning 96 of them and somebody else is going to own the rest of those and you can use that as an incentivization to private industry to say hey do you really want to partner with us in a way that you can get a benefit out of this we pay for our share of it you pay for your share of it everybody understands the policies and procedures that govern it but you use that as a catalyst to expand out into places where you really have an interest in expanding and at that point the cable companies the telephone companies are more than willing to do that I don't know what the experience has been in Gabriel's organization but when somebody goes and digs up a street one of the first things that happen is everybody that knows anything about putting utilities underground is they're looking at that construction job and saying can I participate usually what happens is they'll say can I put my own piece of conduit in when you're putting your conduit in and I'll split the cost of what it cost to dig this street up repair the street back when it's all said and done so there's already the history particularly in the underground world throughout the metropolitan areas where people have said let's do a public private partnership the university bills conduit underground and AT&T and Time Warner and CenturyLink and Grande all come in and say can we drop a conduit in there at the same time and we say sure if you pay your share of the cost so public private partnerships I think have a big opportunity in being able to extend it to places where it doesn't exist thank you guys I only have a couple more questions left before I open it up to everybody so let's start wrapping it up a little bit so the next question I want to lead into is currently businesses paying increasingly high price for their connectivity this kind of cost makes it increasingly hard on small businesses to operate do you see this as an issue and if so what can be done about it oh yeah it's absolutely I'm so you know I'm on the southeast side I live there I was a serving city council woman there and so you look at the needs of the southeast side and you know it's very young lots of young people lots of people who are aging in place there are some significant healthcare needs for that community well you know guess what drives healthcare today it's data driven they require big pipes to start moving lots of information hospitals on the south side on the east side on the west side are having a hard time making a go of it because they're the level of business subscriptions that they have to keep their mission going just aren't doing it for them and my fear is that they're going to have to vote with their feet they're going to have to just geographically change locations in order to accomplish their mission of providing healthcare I don't think that's fair or right and so I like this conversation of Sabin and I work so hard on it because I think this as we move down the path of public hospitals and public schools and county and city services my hope is that we'll have our business owners going to the chambers of commerce as well and saying you know this is a big issue we need gigabit access too because we need to be moving MRIs or we need to be you know hooking into all of the scanned data or we have these live videos or whatever it is and that takes you know catalytic events like something like a public utility or a public entity network like this one that we're talking about for those conversations to start I think it is an inhibitor to businesses choosing where to locate themselves because the cost of internet service at the kinds of bandwidth that people need when their business is internet intensive is going to be a determining factor in whether they locate at A or B or C or D in today's world it's just very clear that that's what happens and that's why you find if you look at a place like Austin you look at Dallas Richardson North Dallas corridor you look in Austin and you look up the northwest side of Austin and down the southwest side of town you'll see very large concentrations of internet provider internet intensive companies have located there because they know that they can get the service and it won't be nearly as expensive as if they located in a part of city where it doesn't exist and they have to pay a really high price to even get it there before they can access the service the only thing I'll add is that we can continue to keep the conversation at just the public institution level and understand it as an economic opportunity and so in my mind inherently economic opportunity discussions are questions about equity so you know I'll just echo what councilman Ozuna said in that in order for us to achieve the sort of equity that I think is important for our environment for small businesses we need to ensure access to a broadband network that serves everybody alright and then the last question that I have before I open it up to the audience is what actions can we the citizens of San Antonio and Texas take to support the cause of bringing this high speed gigabit internet to our homes and our businesses thank you for that question that's a great way to wrap myself I wrote it for you I think what I'm thinking of if we really have this conversation some of you are parents be thinking about the school environment for your kids and when you're engaging with your healthcare providers, your doctors, your hospitals be thinking about that and in terms of concrete steps there's no greater way than affecting a change then figure out who your city council person is and who your state legislature is and tell them that this is an issue you're paying attention to and San Antonio was so low that your voice on that one issue would really make a difference I think so those are some concrete steps that you can take in the meantime follow what we're doing we've got now Cass San Antonio was following it very closely I've been following it you can see some of the other efforts I think somebody's here is going to open up a facebook page for us but just keep on with the amplifying of this message and how fast we'd like to see it happen yeah and on that note in addition to communicating with public representatives understand what the frame of the discussion is currently we have opportunities to connect very important institutions around town that would provide access for everyone because they're public institutions we are not yet at the point where we can discuss residential access but it's okay to be thinking about that we really need to have concrete action at this level of the conversation right now in order to continue to move San Antonio Broadband Network forward thank you guys very much and now I'm going to turn you over to the crowds to ask their questions I've already got one hand raised look how excited these people are we're not going to throw the microphone so we'll have a few questions from the audience and then I'll close things down for the night I'll go ahead and pass the microphone back to you so first off I want to say hey thank you very much for coming together and talking to us about these issues it's always great when these sorts of things are engaged in a nice dialogue back and forth with everyone right after your question how can the public actually do something about it so the reason I came and attended tonight is I am actually a part of a condo group down here in downtown and we have over a hundred units I also work in cyber security so I know a little bit about technology and I'm hoping that we have enough density in my unit that we might actually do something along the lines of open up like a request for proposal or request for information to hopefully get private broadband contractors to potentially serve our units as a third or fourth option to the two that are currently here we've been seeing increasing costs over the years you know for the same level of service or decreasing levels of service and I really want to try and increase competition anyone here that's willing to help me to understand what roadblock blocks I might run into whether they're San Antonio or Texas legal requirements a lot of monopoly contracts are granted to large telecom agencies or anything along those lines or anyone that's done anything like this before I would love to get any information I can and can you guys talk about you know any experiences that you guys know or anything that you can help out with whether it be and I'm sorry sir but I think I'm from district two not eight so San Antonio but yeah so that's why I'm here and yeah anyone that has any help whether they know how to any interested ISPs that would be willing to run a fiber to our building to help serve over a hundred units or anything so let me answer that in two ways the first way is that the University of Texas undertook an experiment where we went to a low income housing area and we provided the dedicated bandwidth connection to the low income housing area and then we went around and literally knocked on the doors I say we it was from the OBJ School of Public Affairs they went around and knocked on the doors to find out how many people were really interested in broadband internet access in the public housing area and they said we're here to implement that for you and connect you back to the internet they used the Gatton Network as the catalyst to get it started it took off to the extent that they purchased a not an internet service because there's a difference they purchased a point to point circuit from their facility to a location where there were more than one internet providers those are typically called carrier hotels and the internet providers in a city will peer with each other in that city because they have to to survive they got connected into the carrier hotel with a dedicated circuit and then they became peered with all those internet providers as a way to de facto for all intent and purposes they became their own internet provider for that one institution and that was a much less expensive proposition in saying we're going to sell 60 separate internet services to the people there and so we do have some experience in Austin with undertaking what we could do to try to deliver internet to a location where it didn't exist now somebody has to have the experience to go and operate that on a day to day basis when you connect into a carrier hotel you're on your own you have to understand what's going on and I could use a whole lot of three and four letter acronyms but essentially you need to understand what that really means so that you can serve that constituents with that service and so every cable company every telephone company will sell you a point to point connection from point A to point B they don't sell it as internet service they sell it as a point to point connection it's got a cost associated with it it's much much less than internet service would be to get to a location they wound up paying about $1,800 a month for a point to point circuit from their location to the carrier hotel in downtown Austin in 903 or 904 Colorado street and then they had to go out and buy their own router and institute a router as an ISP like device and they used network address translation so they didn't have to go out and buy a huge block of internet IP addresses and they just ran that and so their real expense was the capital expense of buying their router the cost of the circuit was about $1,800 a month and then I think they paid $300 a month to peer with everybody in the carrier hotel they were serving about 50 people they peered with everybody in the carrier hotel yeah yeah yeah right that's what a carrier mean you pay money some carrier hotels operate by a point to point interconnection agreement for every ISP in the building other carrier hotels operate when you connect to this effectively ethernet switch that all of them are connected to they just advertise their IP space to you and you can choose whether to advertise your IP space to them or not and you pay for that privilege of being in a carrier hotel you know Ron, Wayne thank you all of you I had a quick question it was a small it's basically the same question what can I as a citizen do to try to utilize all the resources available to me to support you know the process of becoming a city with fiber you know that'd be like the ultimate goal and hopefully before SA 2020 that'd be also a big goal but that was a question I know you mentioned speaking to politicians I didn't catch exactly which ones but I did want to ask you said it was a numbers game so if everybody in this room were to do that do you feel like that would be enough to catch someone's attention you know I think about it a lot you know as a policy person and as someone who cares about this and I think about it in terms of a business person you know what's the financial model the incentive for its telecommunications company to do this and you know that's the way that you get the conversations going is you deliver a block of voters to a state legislature that is sympathetic to digital divide to equity and that understands that underneath all of this conversation is business right it's our economic development our future and I think that the other side of that equation is that we don't talk about equity all of the time we also have to be breaking it down in terms of business so for a lot of the telecommunications companies it doesn't make economic sense for them to be digging up South Flora Street or to be digging up Pleasanton Road if there's already if that infrastructure has already been laid it doesn't make sense you know to be doing you know parts of Southwest 1604 if it's already there so you know what's the what's the economic story and the gain for someone big right like where you partner right we figure out a way to do a partnership like they have in a lot of other communities and I think that that's the story that we just have to keep telling our legislators because they're not cybersecurity specialists and they don't come out of a technology background and you know for them it's like I've got it on my cell phone I've got it at home what are you and so we just need to keep telling them the story of opportunities lost about you know what what you want your future to be and about you know people voting with their feet and leaving our community because it's not here well sounds like there's a Facebook page under development so we probably get that information to you anyway so I actually work for an organization that's on the southeast side of San Antonio I'm familiar with you let me so thank you and we're also part of a magnet media magnet network the media justice and so my question is particularly with this what will be done I guess for communities of color and what does this mean for low income communities specifically the communities that we work with on a daily basis thank you so I look at what what the Dallas ISD is proposing to do and I look at city of Los Angeles and their solutions in terms of how they're addressing this issue Dallas ISD with their network they're looking at disconnect hotspots we can we can map them and in those hotspots figuring out a ways of using publicly owned access to drop in you know Wi-Fi towers so that that can those can be you know kind of points of connection for the community I think that's a great model it's low cost it leverages what we already have and it starts to get at some of these issues I also like to think about this conversation in ways you know there is out there a $10 a month ISP or service offering that exists in communities where there seems to be more competition than ours so there's an eligible class of people that are able to get that level of subscribership I really don't understand why that's not available in San Antonio that has been a mystery to me and that's another kind of conversation that I'm hoping somebody picks up and continues you know to see why why is that not happening here so those are a couple of things that I've been thinking about as short term a short term conversation that maybe we can see some kind of action if I can just add to that I think those rate discounted rates actually do exist but we also have to track the infrastructure so this is again where we have advantage with CPS fibers that is widely distributed but you know I think we have pretty well established telecom in San Antonio and those discounted rates exist but you know we have to take a look at where they're not available alright I got another question Hi my name is Patrick Asher from 2000 to 2008 I still work for them for AT&T for SBC communications at the time my job there was the IOF planner so any DS3 or faster circuit in the San Antonio metro area went across my desk and I designed the fiber networks to deliver those circuits so I have a unique knowledge of the economics of building fiber in San Antonio now I have to make my disclaimer everything I say I'm not representing AT&T these are my own opinions but my experience in that job a couple of things from 2000 to 2008 are you guys familiar with House Bill 2128 okay House Bill 21 House Bill 2128 says AT&T will provide services to libraries, non-profit hospitals non-profit universities and schools for cost plus 7% the way they determine that okay pennies buddy you know that too but how they determine that is not the cost to put the fiber down the road how they determine that is we always put in at least a 72 fiber cable it goes up to 800 pair fibers that we 800 strand fiber cables the cost to those two fibers over 7 years and they only have to sign a one year contract so my point is the rates are really cheap and they're so cheap that we were seeing with e-rate funding most schools in San Antonio were paying $90 a month in 2004 for a gigabit ethernet connection matter of fact I've designed gigabit ethernet connections well I first designed OC3s to just about every school in San Antonio then I went through and did giggies then we were doing multiple giggies then as soon as we got our 10 gig product our Decaman product online I was starting to move out of that job 10 gig circuits to the ISD to most schools South Sands SAISD Northside Independent School District the hospitals, the universities they all have had giggie circuits for a long time now the reason I bring this up is that money and that investment that AT&T did we actually put a lot of money in I'll tell you we didn't get the money back but what it did we put fiber down the road to every one of those schools and those businesses along the way that needed to get fiber services they didn't have to bear the cost of the placement by the way in San Antonio you pay about $20,000 to $50,000 a mile assuming there's conduit or structure involved already there for fiber placement that wasn't a part of their rates and so it allowed a lot more businesses in San Antonio I see what you guys are doing is competitive with that and that could be dangerous and not just for AT&T but for Grande Communications for Google when they want to get here as you guys start being competitive with delivering to the schools that investment that these companies are putting in fiber down those roads to those schools they won't be able to make they won't make that investment anymore and because you guys are delivering that service you guys are starting to build that last mile and that's going to I think there's some danger there that you should look at and be careful about characterizing San Antonio schools as not having Gigabit Ethernet services they've had them for about 10 years Do you guys have anything to add to that? As a university we use House Bill 21-28 extensively to get to clinics that are connected to the Health Science Center the Health Science Center San Antonio connects to about 65 clinics that are not under its administrative organization but they do partnerships with those clinics to do telemedicine in and out of those clinics and we do Gigabit, Gigaman Deckaman we do aggregated Ethernet with Gigamans across those connections where we buy telecommunications in Austin what we discovered was when we sat down and started designing the Greater Austin Area Telecommunications Network there was a lot of pushback from at that point in time, Time Warner and AT&T about this is going to destroy what it is we're trying to do what we've seen is that the demand for the services that were created to a certain extent by the fact that Gatton exists and people go into the places where those high bandwidth connections are available whether they're from Grande whether they're from Time Warner whether they're from AT&T and soon to be Google Fiber people are choosing those places based on the fact that that service is now available the other side of that issue is to say what we've discovered and because we connect through the University of Texas we connect about 175 school districts all over the state of Texas through our university campuses so in San Antonio we connect Floresville ISD in San Antonio we go to Bandera because it's still in the San Antonio Lada and so it probably crossed your desk and we bought a gigabit circuit out there but we connect those circuits what we discovered is part of what I think is important to note is that when we put those circuits in suddenly there was the capacity for AT&T to sell because we turned out to be the first one to put in the fiber we paid for that fiber to go in and we were house bill 2128 rules and when that fiber went in then there were other businesses that were able to acquire circuits you bought a gigabit circuit right yeah once you get to anything over a T1 or maybe a DS3 for short distances it's all delivered on fiber anyway and that was used as and you're right I don't know whether they put in 144 or 288 strands I don't care they delivered the service in the cases about two of the sites that we showed up at where we wanted that service and then that became a catalyst for those entities in that community to go out and be able to buy a service that up until that point in time they couldn't afford to buy because nobody paid for it a couple of things to be aware of is house bill 2128 you have to buy it now a minimum of three years the PUC changed the rules you have to buy it for three years and the most you can buy it for is five years we were trying to buy some for ten years they wouldn't sell us a ten year service they would the most they'd sell it to us for it's for five years and you have to buy it for a minimum of three years they go all the way up to Decaman we own Decaman's all over the place where we can't build it's just too expensive for us to build a fiber out to sites one of the difference based on how many kids are on the school watch program and so in Houston, the Valley, and San Antonio almost every school in those areas have a gigabit fiber and 90% of that is paid by e-rick funding so there's a big difference between Austin and San Antonio in the school that happens as the University of Texas system as I said we connect school districts all over the state of Texas and we do that normally through an affinity with the local university so let's take the Rio Grande Valley we probably have ten school districts that are connected in the Rio Grande Valley so that they can do is via distance learning from the University of Texas Pan-American or the University of Texas Brownsville campus into those schools and when those kids graduate they've already got nine hours of credit to show up at UT Brownsville as a freshman and so we use those services extensively to deliver connectivity to the school districts in those areas we do that so that those students get the benefit of that kind of connectivity and it has to be a Gigaman we have to buy Gigamans are better to do that and so they use those school districts use that service and they reimburse us that cost we buy it under 21-28 we became a USAC authorized provider so that we could declare the cost of that service that you AT&T or early Southwestern Bell would charge us we can say okay the piece of the FCC that will reimburse education and health care sites for some of their cost based on the economic determination of what they're like and the schools it's all based on school lunches how many kids get subsidized school lunches that percentage if you're a provider if Sabin is a provider that goes to a school then Sabin can become a USAC authorized provider and depending on what that percentage is 30-90% of that cost is actually reimbursed by the FCC for that transport cost it doesn't have to be a telephone company it doesn't have to be a cable company fiber transport is authorized under the USAC rules by the FCC to be reimbursed if Sabin is what's called a USAC provider so Sabin can become a USAC provider any school or any authorized health center can take advantage of that the USAC reimbursement under the FCC rules now I'm facilitating this discussion but it doesn't mean I can't inject my own rules and answer some of my own perspectives I will acknowledge that I don't represent anybody so it makes it even better basically you mentioned competition being a scary objective and in my opinion competition is starkly in a very very important catalyst innovation and future development and if you don't have it because you have monopolistic or oligarian companies running the show and not allowing the people to dictate their buying and their selling their choosing of their competition you don't have growth so if you have something like SAABN coming in and scaring the telecoms and these ISPs they're going to adapt so they deserve to be scared of competition in its root and I agree you don't change up the rules of the game when you start in with massive capital investments we're very cognizant of that and this is not about changing up the ground game it is about recognizing that we've got this economic reality we've got a demographic reality and we've got a connectivity gap that really is happening so we should have a plan to address that there's connection to the home issues absolutely there's bandwidth issues that are happening absolutely I know like where when I when we started our company we chose the DC area we chose to live in an area that had fios and when you're making determinations about where you want to go our geographies in San Antonio about getting that same level were very very slim of the level of capacity that we could get as a resident and then now even moving into the school environment for our kids like just not absolutely not the same the not the same environment at all it's not a couple of conversations with ITSD in San Antonio I think they're running something that's the equivalent of 10 gig on a backbone and it's a shared backbone that the city uses to interconnect their sites what their client side connections are off of that backbone I don't know what those actually they could be down to 100 megabits because it's an ethernet at that point and it could be all the way up to 10 gigabits if they wanted to run the 10 gigabits so it's a shared backbone at 10 gigabits how does that compare to AT&T well they again when you buy a home service it's always asymmetrical almost always asymmetrical meaning they're not going to give you as much capacity from your computer out to the internet as they are from the internet to your computer and so it's asymmetrical what what the city's IT department has done is it's something and they'll publish rates of 3 5, 10 gigabits 10 megabits of service that's what's coming to you that's not what's going away from you what the city's got is not 10 megabits the city's got 10 gigabits of a backbone so it's a thousand times faster to be able to transport whatever they want so they won't get congestion I don't know how many people use the home internet service when you go home at 6 o'clock and you try to do something on the internet it seems slower than it was if you're awake at 4 30 in the morning it seems liquidy split fast but you do it at 6 30 at night it seems to slow down a little bit and that's all because they're just doing statistical multiplexing and shoving that stuff upstream and upstream and upstream and once you reach a certain point the bandwidth's going to congest mm-hmm I got to wrap things up the I only have time for one more question sorry guys but if you hang out hang out after the event you can ask him personally but I real quick want to touch on that too it's up to the speed they advertise with this fiber coax hybrid network they were available to get as residential users today and most small businesses can afford and a gigabit connection on a fiber network it's not really advertised up to because to max out that connection as you mentioned earlier takes an insane amount of connectivity involved to interrupt that so that's just my little tidbit that I know so one more question my question is what is the next step forward for the leadership of this endeavor what are you going to do next and what is the next step toward making this a reality oh thank you so what we're hoping to do is I've been I'm not looking to get grant funding for this this has been a really kind of a personal mission for me just thinking about the community that I'm from thinking about the kids that I'm meeting and thinking about what opportunities I'd like to see for them 15, 20 years down the road I've been talking to a lot of potential stakeholders in this to come together we want to go and take a look at on the Austin network and we want to come up this isn't something that you start with no plan you were mentioning some of the costs that were available to school districts to hospitals and there are costs involved with this no question and so for a lot of institutions probably won't make financial sense but there will be some that it does and so we want to be thinking about we want as we go forward we want to be clear-eyed about it this isn't just a trek off into an unexplored we want to know what it looks like moving forward so I think that's what's going to happen in the short term we're going to go and do a kind of a little trip out to fact finding or discovery whatever and then we're going to be looking at bringing someone in to help us do some costing models of what it looks like whether or not you invest in last mile this way or you do last mile with the private offering I mean there are real questions that we don't know the answer to and we should not start without having an idea of what those answers are and then we have a panel discussion of Brailled Awareness at Geekdom and here we go and maybe more to come we don't know maybe I can get the ISPs in here that would be interesting I don't know if they would attend but they might but let me go ahead and wrap this event up it has been my pleasure to host tonight's event and thank you for those who made it out tonight and those are viewing it online I want to give thanks to our panel for being here tonight thank you to Gabe Garcia Latisha Ozuna, Ron Nuremberg and Wiedemeyer for your information and I want to thank Randy Baer for helping me orchestrate this event tonight and Geekdom for enabling me to host it also thank you to nowcastsa.com for streaming it online and putting it on YouTube for me thank you guys and thank you all it's been a wonderful evening they might stick around and answer some future questions or some current more pending questions of exciting nature