 Hello everyone, and welcome to Broadband Basics for Public Libraries. I'm Brenda Haug, and I'll be facilitating today's session. A little bit of housekeeping before we get started. We are using ReadyTalk. And those of you who have attended webinars with us before, this will be review, but we do have some people joining us for the first time. In ReadyTalk, all the lines are muted except for my line and Kieran's line are presented today. But you can use the chat which is in the lower left-hand corner and ask questions at any point, or just weigh in on things that are in that way too. A couple of troubleshooting tips. One thing, if you lose your Internet connection, or if this room freezes up where you can see the PowerPoint slides, that sort of thing, if it freezes up, the best way to fix that usually is just to close out and then come back in. Go back to the email with the link to the room and come back in that way. Hopefully you can hear me using just the speakers on your computer, but there is a phone number available too, and we can share that in the text chat if you need it. This session is being recorded and will make the archive available on the TechSoup website. We'll also be sending out a follow-up email, and we'll send that out later this afternoon. And that will include a link to the recording. It will include the PowerPoint slides, and then it will also include any of the resources that we talk about today. So there are a number of websites that we are going to talk about. Don't worry about trying to get the address. We will include that in the follow-up message that goes out later today. And if you are on Twitter, the hashtag for today is just TechSoup. Again, this is Broadband Basics for Public Libraries. Our special guest is Kieran Hickson. Kieran, can you go ahead and introduce yourself? Hi there. Kieran Hicks and I work at the Colorado State Library, and I'm really excited to talk about Broadband and different Internet stuff that we can do at the library, and keeping it simple. I'm glad to have you here, Kieran. Kieran has done a lot with the TechSoup project over the years, and is very good at explaining things, and very good at thinking about things from a small library perspective too. In the chat, you've probably already noticed messages from Stephanie Girding and Sarah Washburn. They will both be assisting in chat today. So again, ask questions at any point. If you are having tech difficulties, let them know, and they can help there too. But they will be in the text chat helping us throughout the session. Okay, so today's agenda has a lot we are going to cover. I'm going to talk a little bit about TechSoup, just introduce you to that if it's new to you. And then the content for the day is really Broadband basics, and we have lots of things we want to cover with that. And you'll notice the last bullet item there is lots of time for questions from participants. So again, feel free to ask them throughout the questions that you have, and we'll do our best to address as many of them as we can during the webinar, and then once that we don't get to, we can address in the follow-up message that goes out too. So I'll tell you a little bit about TechSoup. TechSoup is a nonprofit that exists to help other nonprofits and libraries make the most of technology. And many of you may be familiar with TechSoup already because of the technology donation program. And through that, libraries and nonprofits have access to a catalog with donated products from Microsoft, from Adobe, from Cisco, from Symantec. So TechSoup.org is the address, and we'll send that in the follow-up message too. But if you haven't checked out TechSoup.org lately, it has a new look just updated to a new website with the new year. There's a special section of TechSoup that is for libraries, TechSoup for libraries. And that has in addition to information about the donated technology, it has information on the webinars that we do, it has blog posts that are about libraries and technology, and it has spotlights that are featuring libraries and technology stories from around the country. I'll include that in the follow-up message too. Today's session is part of a series of webinars we're doing for the EDGE benchmarks. And the EDGE project, it's a coalition of library and non-library organizations to working together to develop public access computing benchmarks. And it includes TechSoup, it includes Web Junction, it includes the Public Library Association, some state libraries, and working together and getting lots of feedback from libraries on these benchmarks. And so this is one of the webinars in support of that project. And we'll send more information about that in the follow-up message too. Okay, well with that, that's a quick intro to TechSoup, and we'll send you lots of info in the follow-up message too. But let's go ahead and dive into our topic for the day which is Broadband Basics. And we're going to start with a poll. And what we're asking here is on a scale of 1 to 5, how would you rate the speed of your library network? Is it way too slow which would be a 1? Is it very fast which would be a 5? Is it 3 normally fine? Where would you rank the speed of your library network? I'll give you a minute just to weigh in on that one. It looks like it's a lot of it's normally fine, but sometimes it's a little slow for most folks. Yeah, normally fine seems to be the most popular answer yet. And then very fast, a few people weighing in saying very fast, which is lucky. Okay good, well we're going to talk about speed a lot throughout this session. So that gives us a feel for how everyone is feeling about the speed of their network right now. Okay, well again, Kiran is here with us to talk about broadband. And I think I'll let you kind of take over Kiran and talk about this a little bit, just what broadband is and start with some basic definitions. Alrighty, so a lot of times you'll hear broadband is like a wide range of frequencies and it's like, well that's nice, what does that mean? And if you think about it, I like to think about it as like a freeway or a one-lane road. And basically what they mean by the broadband is that there's space there for more than one thing to be happening at a time. So there's like more lanes. There could be a truck in one lane and a car in another lane. That's all it really means is there's more range in the frequencies that it can use. I like that. And then bandwidth is different from broadband? Right. I mean, yeah, to a degree. Now we're talking about adding a level of time. So now it's not how many lanes are there on the freeway. It's how fast can I get from Denver to Colorado Springs? Uh-huh. Hopefully, I think analogies are good. Okay, these were some of the types of connections, and we'll share a resource that explains these too. But I was curious, if people know, if you know what type of connection that you have at your library, would you share that with us in the chat? And one of the things with this, a lot of times you'll have a wire, a DSL coming, or sometimes cable coming into the library, and then you'll have a little router that makes a wireless signal. That's different than a type of connection that's called wireless to your Internet service provider. I live on the side of a mountain, and there's no cables coming anywhere near the house for electric or Internet. And I actually have a wireless radio link between the Internet service provider, 13 miles line of sight from a tower to the house. So that's kind of the difference between the wireless that's written up here and DSL with wireless access. People are starting to weigh in, and it looks like we've got a little bit of everything. We've got a lot of people with DSL, some people with fiber, some people with cable, some people with both, or more than one. Okay, how about dial-up? Are you still seeing libraries with dial-up in Colorado, Karen? I know of one, and I also know of one that's just on a satellite connection. Okay. No one that we have who has commented yet has said dial-up. Yay! Getting there, yeah. We've sold our horses and carts. Okay, well you may have noticed in the message that went out the registration confirmation and reminders that were sent out yesterday and today, there was a note in there saying, please run a speed test before this session. And I know maybe not everyone had a chance to do that, but if you didn't have a chance to run it before, that might be something to do after too. And it will be interesting, I think, in light of what Karen is going to talk about with what those speeds mean. Just curious, did you have a chance to run a speed test for today's webinar and jot down your download and upload speed? So we've got a lot of people saying yes, but they did have a chance to run that, and then some people who didn't. So I know Karen recommends that it's a good thing to do just to check in and see how much speed you're actually getting, what speed you're actually at. So if you didn't have a chance to do it before the webinar, we'll include that again in the follow-up resources info on how to do that. And the one that we shared is just one that Colorado has been using, but there are other speed tests that are out there too. All right. I also noticed a lot of folks said they had a T1. And I'll talk about that too. So a lot of times you'll hear, like, you know you have broadband and perhaps your Internet service providers will run a T1 line and you don't really know what that means as far as speed goes. It's a pretty basic metric, kind of killer, mega, giga, keeps in that scheme of things. And if you break it down really simply, we know how computers run on zeros and ones. Each one of those, either one or zero, is a bit. And that's like the smallest measurement of information. And then eight of those little bits, eight ones or zeros, make a byte, which is the same as a character. So like if you type in the letter A, that's eight little bits of information. So when we talk about kilobits per second, so that's 1,000 little ones or zeros per second. And of course a megabit is 1,000 kilobits, kind of goes up from there. So if you think about each letter that you type or each pixel on a screen being eight bits, it adds up pretty quick. A thousand of them isn't a whole lot really. And that's kind of where it's coming from. A kilobit is equal to about one page of text. Another resource that was in that reminder email that went out yesterday and today was an infographic that Kieran and maybe others worked on for the state of Colorado too. And I really liked the infographic and I think it helped me with wrapping my brain around and thinking about how to explain these things to others. So I got a couple of slides that are from that infographic. Okay, cool. Yeah, I guess if you think about like if you typed a hundred characters onto a piece of paper and you put a hundred pieces of paper into a file folder. So each file folder has a hundred pieces of paper that have a hundred typed characters on each piece of paper and you put the folders into a file cabinet and the file cabinet held 1,000 files. If you had a hundred of those file cabinets in a room that would be one gigabyte of data. I don't know if that's easy to visualize or not, but if you think about one gigabyte of data so a hundred of those file cabinets in a room it's quite a bit of information. I know some of you said you had a T1. So if you're thinking about a T1 connection that's 1.5 for megabits per second going through a computer. And if you think, okay, a T1 is like 1.5 rounded up, rounded down, 1.5. So if you had just one computer running on that T1, it would be simple to download. Yeah, it'd be your MagMax movie that runs about an hour and a half that isn't high-def. You could download that in like 8 minutes. That's pretty quick. Let's say that you have a T1 coming into the library and you have more than one computer in the library, which is probably the case. Maybe you have 12, right? And then you're looking at 20 seconds for a website page to download. You're looking at like 106 hours for the MagMax movie to download. It gets used up really fast, especially letters are one thing. An A is 8 little 0s or 1s, but when you start talking about a picture and all the pixels, or you start talking about music and all the sounds, you start using up quite a bit of that. Yeah, it was interesting when I was doing some research trying to find good resources for this webinar. Some of the things I found were from 10 years ago, and they talked about video and things like that as the exception. Those were things that people were rarely doing, but now people are wanting to stream things live all the time. I think we're just moving into more and more bandwidth, hungry types of things that we're wanting to do online. Yeah, indeed. I can't imagine a library where people aren't looking at YouTube or something like that on one of the computers at least. Okay, so this is a question that everyone seems to have is just how much speed is enough speed. In the beginning we asked people just how they felt qualitatively, how they felt about their Internet speed if they had, if it felt fine or if it was really fast or if it was way too slow, but technically speaking or mathematically speaking, how much speed is enough speed? So with the analogy of cars going down the freeway, there's two ways that the traffic is usually going, and so there's uploads and downloads. And I think for most of what we use we're downloading information. We're getting information from outside and bringing it to our computer. And there's sometimes when we're uploading, like if you're sending an email, technically your email is going up and out. But just to talk about download really fast, so I like to think of it this way. If I had a library with a T1 and I had, oh I don't know, say 10 patron access computers and maybe three staff computers, then I have to figure out, and I have a little wireless router. So my rule of thumb is for every like three public access computers that I see, I add one for a wireless person, whether that's somebody showing up with their smart phone or what have you. So if I had the 10 public access computers, three staff computers, I would add another four or so to that for wireless. And now I'm looking at 17 computers. And if I have a T1 coming in and I'm dividing that 1.5 by 17, suddenly each one of those computers is only getting 90 kilobits per second, which is really slow. And what I mean by really slow is now it's taking probably 25 seconds, 30 seconds for a web page to come up. And I know 30 seconds doesn't seem like a whole lot. People can be patient, but 30 seconds is almost an eternity if you're waiting for a web page to load, in my opinion. So how much speed is enough? I would say like a minimum of 500 kilobits for a download speed on each public access computer or for each user. And I would think more like 750 would be like nice, a nice number to hit. And if you have more than like 1 megabit or like 1,000 kilobits, awesome. Sign me up because I want to use your library. Okay, so your math was to add up every public access computer and staff if they're on the same network. And then you said one, for every three public access computers figure that you have a wireless user. And then divide the speed that you have by that. I know that's kind of scary to do math like this. But basically you're adding up how many people or how many computers basically have a straw. And then you're figuring out how much water you have coming into the library and how many people are going to be sucking at it with the straw. Kind of a weird analogy, sorry. No, but it makes sense. Okay, any questions on that? Again, weigh it in the chat if you have questions on that. And we can talk about that more too. But this is one thing I wanted to talk about is this is something that I think is also shifting. We talked about how 10 years ago video was the rare exception. And now it's just streaming TV shows or something lots of people watch. But upload speed, I know when I did this test on my home network that my download speed was fine, but my upload speed was very, very slow. So why does this matter? I think this is becoming more of something to pay attention to I guess as people are doing different sorts of things on the web. But what do you think about this, Kiran? So the more we're creating content, the more we're learning to use the Internet as a tool to do something, the more we're uploading. It's no longer just receiving information kind of scenario. Now we're shooting YouTube videos with our phones and uploading them at libraries. Who knows? Maybe cats became more interesting. And now we have to document every part of it. We're creating more content. And so upload speeds are getting more important. There's still usually maybe half of what your download speed is. It's kind of the passing lane on the uphill. I know in Colorado we have a lot of mountains, so that perhaps came to me. But for upload speeds, if you're getting at least 125 or so kilobits upload speed, that's kind of a minimum I think that you'd want to see now. 250, you're feeling a lot better. 500, awesome. And that's all kilobits. So if you did some speed tests and you were noticing even just from people using the web in the library, you wanted more upload speed, is that the kind of thing you can have a conversation with your Internet Service Provider and negotiate getting more faster upload speed? Or how does this work when you're actually communicating with the Internet Service Provider? If they're tied together, you're not going to be able to necessarily negotiate an upload speed without negotiating a download speed. But you can really check your speed altogether. If the Service Provider says they're providing you with a T1, so 1.5 for megabits per second. And you test it in the morning when you come in on one computer. And granted there'll be a little teeny, teeny bit of loss at your router and at your switches or whatever. And you know that there's nobody else in the library using a computer and you've looked in the parking lot and there aren't 20 people hitting your wireless from the parking lot. And you do twice a week, you do a test, and you're not getting those speeds that the Internet Service Provider said you would. That's something to pay attention to and really talk to them about. A lot of times in a contract they'll say up to, we'll provide you with up to a T1. And to know what you're really getting, I mean I don't think we would enter a lot of contracts with like say a book provider and say we will provide you with up to 20 books a month. Well no, I want 20 books a month. Thank you. We're not going to pay for something we might not get. So it's good to keep track of that kind of thing and figure it out. Let's say you're getting your T1 in the mornings when you check it, it seems great. And then say about 3 o'clock when school gets out and all the folks come and there's a bunch of people using the Internet and playing different games or we're watching YouTube. And then also test your Internet connection speed then maybe once or twice a week and see what it's looking like when a lot of people are hitting your network. Again, my rule of thumb for adding a wireless person for every three computers might be a little low. And that really depends on the area you live in if you want to think about how many computers, how many people you see with their own devices, how many people are coming in and using your Wi-Fi. You might want to change that. So it's one thing to have a network that has a T1 and it looks a little different when you have 30 computers on that same network. Okay, so we'll address a couple of questions that have come up that are kind of around these topics. Asking for a reminder of what a T1 is. What is that, Miss? I mean, what does that mean? So a T1 is 1.544 megabits per second. So 1,544 kilobits per second. And I know rather than selling you the speed of saying, oh, we'll give you a 1.544 megabit per second connection, a lot of Internet service providers will say a T1 or we'll give you a T1N or we'll give you a T1 or T2. And you have to really kind of decipher what they mean by that. Okay, and then can we review the math for this again? So you said, okay, so you've got all of your public access computers, all of your staff computers, and then for every three public access computers is it, or just for every three computers? For every three computers that are using, unless you have two connections coming into your library and one's for staff and one's for patrons, then don't add the staff ones. But for everything that you know is using this one network, add up all the computers regardless of who uses it, public or staff, and for every three of those add one wireless, if not more, depending on your area or what you think the use is. Again, that's just been my rule of thumb. And then when you divide your bandwidth that you have, then what is it that you're shooting for? What would be a good amount to have per computer? I think it's kind of a minimum that you would be looking for would be about 500 kilobits per second per computer. And at 500 kilobits per second, they're waiting about five seconds for a web page to load. They could download one whole book, maybe off your overdrive or whatever, in about 15 seconds. They could download that Mad Max movie that's an hour and a half long and not an HD in about 26 hours. And if they're still there for 26 hours, that's problematic. You mentioned that some libraries, and we even had some people say this in the chat too that there's a setup this way, but that some libraries have a separate network for staff and a separate network for public computers. Is that something that you see a lot or that you recommend? It is something actually that I would recommend to be to have a separate network. And I know a lot of times there has to be a little crossover, especially when it comes to your print system, like if you have one copier, both the patrons and the staff need to be able to use it. But you're able to set that up. Keeping them separate can really help if something goes wrong. There's usually less staff, so you can have a slightly less of a connection, although what the staff uses is usually high use. If your ILS, if your CIRC system is in the cloud or something like that, that might be something that's really important just because there's 10 kids watching YouTube videos, and you still want to be able to use the software to circulate a book or check something in and out in a quick fashion. This is lots of good stuff coming in, and Walt has shared some things from his library. He brought up the computers and the age of computers and how they can be very slow too. So we've got the bandwidth that impacts how fast people are accessing things, but then also the speed of the computer is impacting things too. Can you maybe say a little bit more about that connection or what matters there, I guess? Right, so back to our freeway analogy. Let's say I have a seven-lane highway and I'm going to jump in my vehicle and get from Denver to Colorado Springs. If I'm in a 1972 VW van, I'm just not going to be able to go as fast as if I'm in that Porsche. It's just kind of how it is. I think there's a lot of good reasons to keep the VW van and to fix it up as best you can, but at some point you have to realize you're driving an egg beater, and that's just that, painted with flowers and peace symbols. Absolutely. So if your computer is slowing down your patron's experience, that's definitely something to consider. That's not optimal to say the least. If they're able to bring in their own laptops, that's wonderful, but for those who don't have it, you're immediately putting them in a slower vehicle. You're immediately not letting there be any good access for them. I try to think about keeping a computer going for three or four years. In non-library tech land, that's like an eternity, but four years you should be looking at at least upgrading what you have currently anyway. Technology changes so fast. I have no idea what next year will bring. Okay. Karen, do you see a question in the chat from Cheryl? I'm going to put it in the chat too, to advise a new library director who's seeking broadband to tell that person to add up all access points and multi-py them. Is that the... So one megabit would be great. I think that would be definitely the shoot for it for a new library director. If you can get 750 kilobits per second for each device using the Internet, that's fine. That's a good medium amount. Again, the more, the better. In lots of areas, your Internet service provider cannot provide enough. It depends on really where you live, I think, on that and what your service provider can get you. But definitely if you have the availability from the Internet service provider and you have the financial wherewithal, if you can get one megabit per second to each patron computer or staff computer, whatever is using your network, that's great. I think the federal government recently was saying that they wanted anchor institutions like libraries are to have a gigabyte connection. That simply isn't possible where I live, but I think is possible in more urban areas. Is there anyone on who has ultra-high-speed Internet so that kind of gigabit connectivity? Okay, it's coming. By June, and then, yeah, I think it's just certain communities that it's in at this point. But that's exciting to think about the potential of that. Okay, we have someone on from Chattanooga, and that is one of the places yet where you read about it, so that's great. Right. Again, if you have less than 500 kilobits per second coming to each terminal, that's something to look into, and that's something you can start using that as a talking point for getting more from your stakeholders or your ISP. That might be a good point. You just mentioned talking to stakeholders, and we wanted to spend some time talking about communication, about broadband. When you registered for the webinar, people weighed in on what you were most hoping to learn, and we were seeing a variety of things. We were seeing people who wanted help explaining things to non-techy people, so breaking things down, analogies and things like that. And then people wanting help explaining things to, or communicating with tech people, so understanding basic terms and how things work. And then people also saying that they wanted to convince others of the need for more, how to have those conversations, how to advocate for that. So curious, what are your biggest challenges? And I think on this one I set it up so you can choose more than one. As you communicate about broadband, talk to others, stakeholders, or other people that you talk to about the library's bandwidth. What are your challenges with that? Okay, let's take a couple more seconds for that, and then we'll show the results. So communication challenges, what are your communication challenges? As you talk to others about broadband. Okay, communicating with tech people, convincing others of the need for more, that seems to be the biggest. And then those who are weighing in and saying other, please share in the chat. And then a lot of you are saying everything, that all of those are challenges. So can we talk about that a little bit, Kieran, just how you communicate? Let's just go right down the list there. What advice do you have for communicating with tech people? Well, I think a lot of tech people that come from outside of libraries are not understanding what happens in libraries and what people are using the Internet for. They're used to setting up things for businesses or corporations where it's really not expected that there's going to be a lot of people watching YouTube videos all day. There's not a lot of game playing. There's not a lot of these kind of high use things going on. And so explaining, and a lot of times we shove a lot more computers in a smaller room than a lot of other people. So explaining to the tech person, I'm going to have 20 patron access computers available all day. And look at how often I have people on this information here of how many times a day I have people using my Internet. I'm serving 100 people a day. So they get the idea of how many people that you're really dealing with and the kind of things that they're going to be doing. And I think the kind of things they're going to be doing also helps convince people of the need for more. You're looking at people who are perhaps scanning in a document, maybe their resume or projects, and maybe photos and uploading it to something on the web to reformat it, to do some graphic design so that they can print it out so that they can go get a job. So we're talking about economic development. Maybe they're doing other things, but there's definitely a need in our libraries I think for things that do take a big amount of bandwidth. Communicating with tech people also don't let them fool you. A lot of them just throw out numbers and they don't realize how much jargon they're using. Kind of like when I go home and I talk to my wife and I talk about weeding or the ILS broke down and she has no idea what I'm talking about because we do this in libraries too. We throw around this jargon or these letters to the ALA and the PLA and the ILS companies. It's the same kind of thing. It's a profession. They have jargon. It's okay to not understand. I know we're in the business of figuring stuff out for ourselves and looking up information and knowing. It's okay to be like, hey, what do you mean? When you said, I can get you a 2015 high-speed Internet, like 2015 is a what? Oh, the 20 is download and the 15 is upload. Oh, okay, 15 what? 20 what? Are we talking kilobits or are we talking megabits? It's okay to ask questions and to get an answer. I think that's don't let them run by you really fast and not explain it to you. Something I've seen libraries do too is just get really familiar with their own network. So putting a post-it note on the router so you remember which one is the router and which one is the access point or whatever, I think getting familiar with your own network in that way I think can help too. So you really feel a little bit more on top of that. Just constantly learning. This is the kind of stuff where you can know a teaspoon full or you can know an ocean full. It's just constantly learning I think, but not being intimidated by it and just asking questions like you said. I think that's good advice. I mean it's the same process we have to go through. When I worked at the John C. Fremont Library we had a tech closet and I didn't know anything about it. It seemed really foreign to me and we asked and we labeled everything so that I know if the staff computers are working and the internet for the patrons on that wall is working but the internet over here on this wall doesn't work. Which little box do I unplug and plug back in? And I labeled things with tape and markers and I also took a picture of it with my cell phone and placed it into a Word document like this picture, this thing is this, it does this. It's somewhat time consuming I guess to organize things but once it's organized it'll save you a lot of time when something goes wrong. And then it makes it easier when you're not there to help others. Okay open this Word program. You see that thing I took a picture of? That thing is called a router. I don't even know what that thing is called. Who cares what that thing is called? Unplug it. Plug it back in. You can show them a visual. Yeah that kind of leads into explaining to non-tech. Some of that can help with that having things labeled and using visuals. Any other advice on talking to people who are not technical and explaining things related to broadband? Well I think analogies are something I fall back on, relating it to something that I understand helps me. I know what it's like to get stuck in traffic or I know what the set of Harry Potter books, I know how long, how much space one set of Harry Potter books takes up. And to think about data in that way, to think about it in terms of things that I can picture, that makes it easier for me. And then the next one was communicating the need for more. And this is a quote we were asking Ron Carly who's involved with the EDGE project and is with ICMA which is that Sarah might be able to tell me what that stands for in TechChat for city managers. And so we asked him just when librarians are in conversations or talking about the need for more bandwidth, what are from a city manager perspective how to approach that? And his response was that managers are going to want to see the quantitative case made with some cost-benefit analysis. How much more does it cost us to go from X to Y and with what benefit? So Kiran, thinking about that and thinking about advocating, how do you show that? How do you show that kind of cost-benefit analysis? So the International City Managers Association, ICMA, when I'm thinking about what the town needs, when I'm thinking about my community and my library, I'm thinking about in Florence we have a lot of small businesses that are antique stores. When they come into the library often what they're doing is uploading a picture to eBay or Etsy or one of those kinds of sites typing in a description. They're often checking their email to see if anybody's bought anything that they're selling. They're doing banking. They're filling in their tax forms. They're different quarterly business taxes. They're using those kinds of things on our Internet. So if they're waiting say on my T1 line with 30 computers hooked to it, if they're waiting 45 seconds for one webpage to load or if they're waiting somewhere in the range of 15 to 20 minutes for a picture to upload, I'm wasting their time. I mean not that I'm wasting their time. It's a library. They came in. But that's the kind of being able to improve that connection is going to help them. It's going to help businesses in my town. And that's businesses, but even at the list of really simple digital literacy, the more bandwidth we have, the more people that we have using the computers, the more folks that we're helping to interact with their community worldwide or locally. I think that's really important. There was a dollar general that opened in Florence. And they had an online only application. And we had a stream of people come in to fill out that online application because there wasn't a computer at the store where usually sometimes they have a little one. And a lot of people were asking me like, can you print it out? And it didn't print out very well. And it was taking some time. And so I went and I thought, this is a great opportunity for me to partner with the dollar general folks. And I went down there and asked the guy and I was like, hey, a lot of people come in and fill out your application. It's online. Would you like to take this time? You could have a class. You could meet with the prospective employees, whatever. And he was like, yeah, no. If they can't fill out an online application, I don't want to hire them because they won't be able to use my cash register. And I was thinking it's a dollar store. Like everything's a dollar. How complicated could cash register be? But if we're talking about keeping folks in our town employed, if we're talking about economic needs, if we're talking about keeping people in the workforce, if we're talking about jobs, if we're talking about the benefits to our community, bandwidth actually really plays a role. I mean, unless the world radically changes really quickly, whether you like it or not, most stuff is on the Internet. I don't know where everybody is, but round where I live, if you want a hunting license, it's online. If you want to do your quarterly business taxes, they used to have a coupon book you'd fill out and take to the bank. That's all online now. It's the way the world works. Okay, let's see if we've got any questions out there that we haven't addressed yet. Again, Wagan, if you have anything to add to this in the chat about your experiences with advocating for more, I know a number of people talked about that their biggest issue with bandwidth is just money, that they don't have the budget to have more broadband than they do. So are there things you can do in that case, or any advice for them? Kieran, if you're maxed out on what you are spending is as much as you can budget. Any advice there or anything you've seen or heard about? There's a lot of interesting partnerships I think going on with schools and with city halls and other anchor institutions basically in your area. There's often fiber going to school district or schools, and if you're close to that, geographically, physically close to the school, it might not be that much to have fiber run to your library. There might be a middle-mile provider of broadband that would help do that project. I know we've talked a lot about taking your connection and dividing it by the number of stuff, and so it's scary to think about dividing it by more stuff. But partnering with other people might give you the financial wherewithal to get a little more bandwidth. The Internet is becoming a very important service. I know some libraries will have maybe a DSL line and a cable line, and looking for those kind of discounts, especially if you're dealing with a local company or there's a local ISP, local Internet service provider, talking to them about what you as an institution can provide and what kind of discounts they can ask about. There's also different government discount kind of things like e-rate, and I wouldn't call it a discount thing, but like a refund thing I suppose, and looking into whether a little bit of paperwork on your end can save you significant amounts of cash. Hey, Walt who's in Michigan shared in the text chat that Ironwood has lost startups, so his community has lost startups because of unreliable Internet service. So I think that I know I'm in Lawrence, Kansas, and we're pretty close to Kansas City, Kansas, and they were selected as a Google City, so they're getting ultra-high-speed Internet, and the conversations that I see around that are all about the business opportunities that that creates, so it makes it a really attractive place for entrepreneurs. So there's definitely a connection there. I also have a question, sorry. If you are in a position in a community where you're losing startups because of poor Internet connection, that's definitely something where you want to be partnering with the City Hall, the Chamber of Commerce, the Business People's Association, or whatever you have in your area, and to look at it as a community problem, and not just a library problem. That would almost be a fun webinar to do, kind of a flip side to making do with the best you can get, but to looking at those communities like we have Chatnouga on where this ultra-high speed has been, where it's available, where they have it, and looking at what possibilities that's created, I think that would be an interesting perspective too, even if it's not available in all of our communities yet, just to give us that sense of what a difference it could make. Robin had a question about fibers. So if fiber is available in the community, what are the benefits to switching to that? Well, I mean, faster speed, more scalable. So I know I was recently at a library where they had a section of cables coming out of a wall thicker than my arm, and I'm not skinny, but an arm, it's big. They had to have that many just because of the nature of the material of the cable and how much it could literally physically handle, whereas when you're talking fiber optic, one little cable can hold a lot more. So I don't know quite how to put that back in the analogy of the freeway, but it's like a freeway that has 9 million more lanes but doesn't take up any more space. And it just allows for faster speed. I think it's hard sometimes to not just look at what's happening now and that, oh, that could be better, but also to realize that new opportunities would present themselves with higher speeds too, just new opportunities would go with that. So it isn't just that what people are doing now would be more comfortable or faster. It would, new things, new things could happen. Right, and it's not like we're trying to turn libraries into just this Internet thing, but if you think about what libraries have always provided is a connection to the world. And right now the way the world connects isn't the occasional book from some great philosopher that's been scribed out by somebody who's writing each copy by hand. It's not even, we've invented the printing press. Now it's all on the Internet and for better or for worse, this is the way the future in the world is going. If we're going to provide our community with a way to not only get information from the world, but to be able to participate in what's going on in the world, we're talking about Internet speeds and we're talking about providing that in libraries. We're almost at the top of the hour again. One of the things we're going to do is send out a follow-up message and it will include any resources that we talked about today, but also we have other resources that we've put together, things like monitoring performance, managing bandwidth, some troubleshooting tips, a little bit more about ultra-high speed Internet, and just what that is because again I think that librarians can be part of the community conversation. So it's not just about looking at your community and choosing from the ISPs or getting the best deal from the ISP, but it really is thinking about what might potentially exist for your community. So we have lots of resources we're going to send for that. Thanks so much Kieran for sharing your perspective. I know this is something you've been working on in Colorado, helping people with the BTOP, the Broadband Technology Online Program, is that right? Opportunity Program. Okay, great. So you have lots of experience with kind of helping people take it to the next level and that's helped a lot in this session too. We do have another benchmark webinar coming up next month. It's also a basic session like this one, and that one's on PC troubleshooting. And we'll have Joe from the Washington State Library. He'll be talking us through some just basic PC troubleshooting tips in that session. So I hope you'll join us for that. I'll include registration information for that in the follow-up message too. And if anybody has any specific questions or confusion about what they're being told by their Internet Service Provider or any way I can help, please feel free to email me. I'm more than happy to be a resource. Okay, well thank you. That's generous. So we'll include Kieran's email address in the follow-up message too. Okay, well with that I don't see any other questions and just want to thank everyone for being here. Thanks for your good questions and for the good work you're doing. And we hope to see you at another webinar soon. You'll get an evaluation form if you can share your thoughts on how today's webinar was and also your ideas for future webinars that will help us in our planning. Thanks again Kieran, and thank you Sarah and Stephanie for helping out in the chat. I hope to talk to you again soon.