 My name is Alan Davidson. I'm the director of the Open Technology Institute at New America. Delighted to be here on our panel on the connected city. And I will say that not surprisingly, having spent two days talking about innovation and communities in America, the topic of connection and the internet in particular and the digital economy has come up a few times. So it is totally relevant that we're going to have this conversation today. And to have the conversation, I'm delighted to introduce an all-star lineup of panelists to talk about this. Their bios, very distinguished bios, are in your guide. I will introduce them then very quickly. To my left is Susan Crawford, who is the author of The Responsive City and a lovely book about cities. And the co-director of the Berkman Center up at the Harvard Law School and a dear friend. To her left is Maya Wiley, who is counselor to Mayor de Blasio in the New York City Mayor's Office and has been leading a charge on broadband in New York. And to her left is Mayor Andy Burke, who's the mayor of Chattanooga, Tennessee, and has been presiding over renaissance in Chattanooga largely around technology. I'm interested to hear that story. So in terms of the order of ceremony, there's a lot to talk about in this topic. But we're going to try and divide it into roughly two pieces. One is the question of, how do we get people connected? And what does that really look like? And what the experiences on the ground have been? And the second is, what does it look like when people are connected? And what are some of the opportunities and challenges that come in that world? And we'll try and save some time for Q&A at the end. So please get yourselves armed. And I will say, just a word of warning to the panelists. So over the last couple of days, I will say there has been almost a reverence now associated with cities are going to save us all. This is the new DC mantra, right? Like DC's broken, cities are the saviors. It's like the local, it's the Lake Wobegon version, like the women are all strong, the men are all handsome, and the politicians all magically get along together. So no pressure, you're going to be expected to solve a lot of problems here. We say the same thing at the US Conference of Mayors. So we're all in agreement. OK, well, let's start off with this experience of, how do we get people connected? It's so important today. Mayor Burke, let's start with you. Tell us a little about the Chattanooga story. All right, so Chattanooga has the fastest, cheapest, most pervasive internet in the Western Hemisphere. We have 600 square miles of fiber optic that's connected to every home and business throughout the entire city. I'm going to say that again to make sure everybody understands it. It's every home and business through the entire city. And that's really changed our perspective. To give you a little bit of a background, Chattanooga was a manufacturing town. Like many manufacturing towns, we died in the 1970s and 1980s as those jobs moved overseas. And what we've seen since 2009, as we've turned on our internet, is a change in the way that we perceive ourselves. And importantly, that brought a real change in an innovative economy to our city. And what's the uptake like? I mean, are people actually using this? I mean, it's one thing to actually bring it to the, even to the curb or to the home, but are people buying in? Right, so Chattanooga has gigabit per second speed. So the fastest speed that currently exists out there to a residence or to a business. And for us, we've seen about a 55% adoption rate so far in our city. And the gigabit service. Well, some of that is at 100 meg, which is still far exceeds. Way better than my guess. What most people are getting here. And by here, you mean Washington, DC. Here or in our country, essentially. But we've seen also a number of people adopting the gig, particularly in the business world. And that is much cheaper than it would be for most other services. Maya, tell us a little about the New York experience. It's a little bit of a different approach, right? It's not a gig everywhere, right? So, but you do have these very bold initiatives linked NYC, the new broadband task force. So, we're very jealous of Mayor Burke. Right. I was saying to him earlier, we were on a panel a year ago, so it's exciting to see how much has happened since then. But the fact is we do not have municipal broadband. So we're the second largest tech sector in the country. At the same time, 46% of our population lives at or below 150% of poverty. 36%, we're born in a country, not the United States. And of course, we have 8.4 million people. We are literally as big as the population of Los Angeles, Houston, and Chicago combined. In other words, the next three largest cities. So what do you do when you don't have an electrical utility? You have incredible, we pay a lot more for a lot less when it comes to broadband. So even if you are well-to-do or a business with resources, you're still spending way, way, way too much for way too slow speeds. Not to mention that 22% of our folks who are low income do not have broadband service. So what do you do? What we did was we started with our assets. One of the things that New York has is we have pay phones. Now, my kids don't know what a phone is. And as evidenced by the fact that they text me from the next room when we're at home. But so needless to say, we have this franchising and we have franchise power, right? So we have power, we have regulatory power, we have something to sell and we have pay phones. So what we did was literally have the opportunity to issue a new RFP, got some amazing proposals to essentially take our pay phones of which we have almost 7,500 across all boroughs, residential and commercial corridors and turn them into free wireless hotspots that have a minimum of 100 meg, largely in residential areas for the 100 meg and one gigabit in commercial corridors, free. And at the same time that's free. And that's really critical for us in terms of crossing the digital divide because we know even our low income folks are tend to have smartphones and tend to rely on smartphones to get access to the internet. So to get a hotspot where you get free high speed service within about 150 feet around the hotspot, all over the city as a seamless experience is nothing short of revolutionary for New York because that essentially has become our version of trying to scale and build a different form of municipal Wi-Fi. The second thing I wanna say about it that was critical for us is when we, what we were actually able to do is get a whole lot more revenue than we were getting from our pay phones that goes into our general fund that's actually given us revenue to do other broadband projects around the city for low income folk. And do you think there's a model that's scalable in other places? I mean, should Mayor Burke be looking at the pay phones? He's got a gig, so, right? He's so way ahead of us that we're really not even thinking about chat. I think the short answer is yes, for cities that have that kind of infrastructure and franchising power, if they can drive the ad revenue because essentially, what's paying for this is the ad revenue. The short answer is yes, and I think our consortium that won our RFP that's putting it together, who by the way are also tremendously civic minded and so it actually gives us the opportunity to use the technologies that they're creating to do other things. But I think that cities that have the kind of street furniture or and franchising power certainly can. And what's the situation like then for deployment in the home? I mean, what we were just talking about in Chattanooga is really, it's in everybody's home, right? And 55%. So, how's New York, what's the latest on how New York's doing? So, New York, again, it's really about price point. It's extremely expensive. We do have Verizon Fios rollout, which is actually sad to say, increasing competition in the city from one provider to two. That's clearly insufficient. But what we've done is we've created a broadband task force. Susan actually has been gracious enough to be one of our experts, but it's multi-sectoral. We've got venture capitalists, we've got real estate, we've got academic, we've got community-based, all working with us to think about how we leverage the assets that we have. So we actually will be coming out with, there's actually some very exciting things we have coming out that I am not allowed to talk about till we can launch. But it will be residential. But, and just in contrast, Mayor Burke, your, the situation in Chattanooga is that the city has been the primary mover in this, right? And we didn't actually dig into that, but you folks are the ones who have deployed the infrastructure, right? Right, so the city has a utility called EPB, stands for Electric Power Board. Notice the great branding there, EPB instead of Electric Power Board. And we have innovation at work right there. And it applied for a stimulus grant in 2009. So part of our funding came out of the stimulus and looking for ways to have a shovel-ready project that we could use to build an infrastructure. And to me, that was the infrastructure of a new city. And we applied for, we received that, that funded about one-third of our project, two-thirds of it was bonded out. And what that has allowed us to do really is to drive a lot of the price points, a lot of the way that we deploy it, and also to make sure that people know that there is a difference between public broadband and private. We're focused on digital equity and we're focused on economic development. That's the difference between us and the other providers. Right, so two really different models here. Susan, I mean, you're somebody who's looked at access at cities across the country. What do you think the takeaway is for communities that are looking to get connected? Well, I think it's important to look around the world because we're suffering from a couple of digital divides in our country. One is that in comparison to places like, say, Seoul or Stockholm, we don't have any global cities except for Chattanooga that are in that realm. And that means that the country is missing out on creating a giant middle class that'll buy our products and thrive and help us towards the future. It also means that we're leaving out a tremendous number of people internally. 49% of people with incomes less than $25,000 are not connected compared to 96% of people with incomes over $100,000. So what we've done is ended up in a situation in the United States where with these limited exceptions, the rich are paying a lot for high-speed internet access and usually their only choice is their local cable monopoly and the poor are not online. In contrast to places like Seoul and Stockholm where everybody is, but here's the thing. Seoul and Stockholm wish they were New York City and Chattanooga. They really want the grit, the ingenuity, the playfulness, the dynamism of Americans. Samsung crushes everything in Seoul and Stockholm, they're too organized. They wish they could be messier. So we bring our culture together with very high-capacity connectivity and there's no limit to what we could accomplish but it will take both city will and federal leadership to get that done. Are there things that are in the way? Do you feel like there are things that are standing in the way? Yes, there are things that are getting in the way. One of them is that is a little bit of a setup. We do have a series of cable monopolies in the United States that for three quarters of Americans, your only choice is that local cable monopoly for high-speed internet access. It's a second rate inferior network, but it's in place. Now in other places in the world, they've overbuilt, which is another name for competed with those networks, by putting in fiber. What we're lacking is imagination and vision and leadership and drive that would say, great, this is a place to put capital. Let's invest in wholesale networks across the United States. They don't have to provide service directly to customers but allow for lots of retail ISP competition that would drive down prices, get all of us unlimited capacity. It should be like electricity or water. We're very far away from that vision now. And have you got, in terms of the New York experience or the Chattanooga experience, have you run into, I guess I guess policy barriers, problems? That's a little bit of a setup too, but I'm curious, what's the real-world experience? The real-world experience is that public broadband is great for lawyers. We started the public broadband and got sued. This year, we filed a petition with the FCC to expand our footprint. We won that petition and guess what? We got sued and so there are many legal barriers to what we're trying to do. And the people that we're trying to expand to, by the way, have basically dialed up. That's what they have. And for us to have these artificial barriers that say that some people can get the fastest, cheapest, most pervasive internet in the Western Hemisphere and right up the road, you can't, I think there are people in Tennessee who are wondering why that's the case. So I work for a mayor who sees no barriers, which is part of what makes New York a lot of fun right now. So there are obviously regulatory and legal hurdles, but I think if we actually had capital, frankly those hurdles would not be nearly as high to jump because whether it's defending lawsuits, whether it's thinking about the capital costs of actually putting an infrastructure that then would be public infrastructure, I mean those are all capital intensive. And one of the reasons we were able to do the pay phones franchise and turn them into wireless hotspots was because we're essentially licensing public space but it's the private sector that's putting in the capital expenses. So one of the things that, that's why we're looking for ways in which we're taking revenue and driving it into capital expense in order to drive more access into low income homes, which is part of what we're exploring through our task force. What are you finding on the demand side in terms of what, so once we, as people get this access, what are they doing with it, right? Well, one thing we're seeing is that the uptake in rural areas as well as urban areas for very high capacity networks is the same. That people, once it's available at a reasonable price, people want it, they will buy it. I mean, Mayor Burke seeing 55% uptake is much higher than what we ordinarily see actually. And all we're waiting for is that grit and ingenuity to create the killer uses of it. I think it's human presence that will be the killer application for these fiber networks being in the doctor's office, in the school room, and we're getting there. Yeah, you know, one of the interesting things, so we do have wireless corridors around New York City that are street based in addition to this pay phone franchise. And in Harlem where we're literally putting up, thanks to Private Foundation Dollars, one of the largest on the street, high speed wireless corridors that's free. It will serve 80,000 people by its estimate when it's completed. But one of the things we're seeing in the rollout is how fast utilization goes up as it hits the next block. So there's no question that as we're tracking the utilization, it's there. It's also true that if you build it, they will come is not completely accurate, right? So we do have to have the resources. I know Mayor Burke has been thinking about this as well, of how we help people get online once they have access to the infrastructure. So it is the internet of things, but one of the things that we know in New York, which our tech sector is very much about apps, is actually seeding a lot of innovation about the kind of apps that also give ways, different ways to help people adopt and see the utilization they can get from the adoption. So a couple things I think that need to be pointed out. Number one is in Chattanooga, 100 meg is the slow speed. That's the slowest you can get. So when we say that's what people are adopting, that's the slowest speed that you can buy through our service. Can I ask you how much that costs by the way? To give you, to get a gig now is $70. You can get a gig for $70 a month, right? And we're working for some initiatives that are gonna do things for Title I families to make that incredible. The second part is what does it mean to have a gig? So here's what it means for what Susan's talking about with ingenuity. Had a couple of people in a dorm room who decided that what they wanted to do was to take old videos and digitize them. So take your old memories, the reel to reels, the tapes that you made, and make sure that you can transform. When they started even four or five years ago, what did people want? They wanted a DVD, right? Then what did they want? They wanted a thumb drive. Now what does everybody want just four years later? They want it uploaded to the cloud. So these guys now upload at a higher resolution for their video than any of their competitors. And in a city like Chattanooga, they've grown their business from a couple guys in the dorm room to having 82 people in our downtown. It's those high growth businesses that come from ingenuity using and leveraging the technology that we have that really spur an innovation economy. And to me, that's a competitive advantage for our city because they advertise highest resolution service for digitizing your memories. So, right, so this is very exciting. You can actually see these tangible outcomes, these tangible things happening in the economy, start to project a little bit further out. How is this also changing kind of the way you do what you do in city government, right? Like, is there a hope that that changes to as people get more connected? Absolutely. Well, my hope, these guys are actually doing it. So here's my aspiration to see what happens. That it's just an electronic layer of life. It's not actually separate from offline life at all. It's the same thing, but you can see the city at work. You can understand how the city gets to show its work, which helps us understand that the city's actually serving us, which would be very helpful, and be constantly engaged, if you want to be, and be able to be in touch with all of your constituents on an opt-in basis for all the services you want to deliver. It makes for a richer, more textured, more interesting urban life. We have a practical example of this right now. So we actually are looking at this internet of things as about being civic engagement. So I mean, if we're going to be a responsive, responsible government, we actually have to be able to make sure we're reaching all our people and that we understand what they need and that they are able to get it from us. So one of the things we've done, we have 311, which is a phone number, that old telephone that my kids don't even recognize. And you can dial up and say, the sewer's blocked on my block or I need to figure out how I can apply for a municipal ID or where is participatory budgeting happening around the city. Right now, that is something that you have to have a telephone to do. We're actually digitizing that so that you can actually start to have an online user experience to do that. So if we get this, if we're able to be much more successful at getting ubiquity in broadband service for folks, we're also going to change our relationship to our residents in terms of how we do government as we also employ better technology as government in order to serve people better. So mayors are very reluctant to brag on their cities, but I'm going to go around for just a minute. Thank you, thank you, indulge us. And say it. So we started, we're trying to be ahead of the curve on open data. We have our own open data site, Chattadata. We also have a site that the city library uses where we have data that's the backup data sets, not just for our data, but also for data that's available throughout the city. So we had talked about making sure that in our transit that we had apps that could tell people when buses left and so on. We literally had the old handwritten and paper maps. So what we did instead was we opened up our data about transit, our tech community got engaged looking at all that open data, uploaded it to a site called Transit App, then went on and made sure that we crowdsourced a community that said we really want this. And within three days, no RFP, we were on Transit App and you could see all of our information without spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, without going through an RFP process, without doing all of the bureaucracy. Because our people did this, we were able to get our Transit App up within three days. Now to me, that's what open data's about. That's when you get the city involved. Bloomberg, Glanthropy's actually named us one of their first four what works cities because the work on open data, but it's that kind of interaction with your citizens that makes a difference. Do you have, how do you think about metrics for success? Like how will we know when we've reached the promised land? Is it about deployment? Is it about secondary indicators of some sort? I mean, what's the right way to think about this? We've been thinking about it both in terms of penetration, meaning so that we see that everyone has it, that everyone can afford it. But then we do have a series of metrics that we're thinking about, about what it means in folks' lives. So it's not just, we don't want broadband just for broadband's sake. We want broadband because it is the water and the electricity of the 21st century. It's not a luxury anymore. So what are the implications for educational attainment? Are we seeing our tech sector, particularly that startup innovation start to flourish? Are we seeing people get connected with government and with civic life in a different way? All of those things are critically important to why we want broadband ubiquity and affordability, not because it's just cool, although it is. You're preaching to the choir here, but sure. I don't know, do you folks have other thoughts on Susan? Well, I think what all the mayors are heading for in the National Conference of Mayors talks about this all the time is outcomes, safer streets, thriving cities. And with fiber and data, you can govern more effectively. You can help your city employees who are heroes every day, feel more professional and have more of a sense of discretion in what they're up to. And then you can engage with citizens using 311 like a platform for citizen engagement is tremendously exciting. How much should we worry about the dark side also of this, right? I mean, there is a- Dark fiber? I was thinking more about issues like privacy, surveillance, things that worry people sometimes about the collection of data by government, the use of data by government. This is coming up in the law enforcement context more and more. I mean, there's obviously there are plus sides and minus sides to this. How much does that piece of it worry you if we have this hyper connected city where the buildings know where we are, the cameras on the streets know where we are, the city knows where we are or what we're doing. There's great opportunities to deliver services or to engage citizens, but that might come at a price. I don't know. Do you think about that? Is it built into some of what you're building? We have been thinking about it. So for instance, when we structured the contract in the pay phones franchise, we took seriously as did the companies with whom we were contracting what the encryption was gonna be and how the encryption would get updated to protect folks privacy. We have ensured that the data and limited the use of the data by the consortium. So even though there is a private company, they're really deriving their revenue off the ad sales. They're not able to take people's individualized, atomized data and make use of it. At the same time though, we'll obviously track important things like utilization, how many folks are getting up online, but just the numbers and not the personal information. Now I will say that where this has come up for us, so we're very confident about the pay phones, where this has come up more is we now have shot spotter, which was where the NYPD has put up the ability in order to advance public safety and responsiveness of government. So that before you get a phone call that a shot gun has been fired, shot spotter will pick up the sound and communicate it so that a call will go out to the police and that they'll respond to where the shot spotter picked up the shot. Now obviously that has raised concerns about what other things shot spotter hears. So, and I think that's- And shot spotter was gonna get better and better and better. And it's gonna get right, because it's gonna be more refined. We actually already had shot spotter work in terms of police responding before a call ever went out to a place where- So one, you see how it works for public safety and yes, you have to be concerned about what people are raising. So obviously we're going through a process of making sure we have some checks and balances. I think that this is always going to be the tension as we have technology. And so the important thing is to say, we need the technological advances for the good it brings and we do have to pay attention to the protections that we need to put in place in order to use the technology responsibly. Wait, I'm sorry. No, just, and there's another great story from Chicago where they're putting up sensors in the loop, but being very careful about what's collected there, having a public process about what the, whether the information is fine grained or not or personally identifiable or not. And all the data collected about environmental quality and noise and light goes directly into the open data portal. So everybody can see what's being collected. That's really a model. Radical transparency. Well, it's also about policy is still made by people and needs to be in cities and not by machines. The title, The Responsive City was carefully chosen. It's not just a smart automatic city. There are policy makers thinking about this. And Mayor Burke, you were saying. Well, I just was going to say that when you start talking about opening up your data, people get really worried, right? It's just, citizens are rightly concerned that information that you're collecting about them is going to be disclosed. Then they start worrying about what information you're collecting. It's, it can be quite the rabbit hole. And so I think all of us try to be responsible and use best practices. On the other side, I would say the things that we're doing that involve adoption by people who previously haven't been on the web, who start to see what technology can do for their lives. You know, everybody in this room, I feel confident, understands why we need high-speed broadband for talent retention and innovation and all those things. What we don't often talk about is the way that it improves quality of life for people who haven't previously had it. So, you know, when's the last time that anybody used a phone book here? How much entertainment do you look at on the web? What are the things that you prepare, you know, for a flyer? I mean, I always had one of our literacy programs that we have for people who are working on the web and this woman looked up the name of her speaker at her church, you know, copied it, put it on a flyer and was able to pull it out. This was a senior and she was showing the class how she had done it and what she'd gone through and it made her life better. It just did. And so we gotta understand what the power of this is as well, especially for those of us who spend all day, you know, working on our phones and forget what it's like for people who really haven't had adoption in the past. I wanna open it up for questions in a second, but one thing and this is a very, this kind of very DC-centric kind of question, but there are 19,000 municipalities, more than 19,000 municipalities across America. We've talked about a lot of good ideas here already today, right? Do you guys talk amongst yourselves? Like, what's the right way to make sure that the really good idea is the transit system, the LINC, NYC, all the things you wrote about in your book? How do we make sure that people are sharing that and not reinventing the wheel? Actually, these guys, they're very busy running cities, but they do talk to each other. Well, and we're grateful you're here, yes. This is where the role of universities is central because they become platforms for convening the people from the private sector, the people from the public sector and students who should be working local government, by the way, and getting all the share best practices and trade information that's self-serving. That's what I'm doing. I will be doing it at Harvard Law School, having that kind of incubator for best practices, best ideas, because you can't expect a company to do it. They're always gonna have their own interests at heart and the city is busy doing its work. So what's left? The university. That's very true, and because of US Conference of Mayors, because of leaders like Mayor Burke, who are both not just innovative leaders, but also very generous leaders, and Mayor de Blasio, who chairs a task force called the Cities of Opportunity Task Force, where we, and broadband is one of the issues that is part of Cities of Opportunity, and part of it is to be a peer-to-peer network. But I think it equally important is not just cities learning from each other, which is extremely important, but actually cities starting to work together to push states and the federal government to step up and recognize that we need a new national urban agenda. Oh, that's true. Well, I can't say it better than that. You know, we do talk, and I'm so impressed by what New York is doing. They have different challenges, and they're addressing them head on, which I think is incredible. Susan and I are both part of a group called Next Century Cities. We go through US Conference of Mayors. I think the issue now is that we have a lot of cities talking about this. How do we expand out the group? Because it's a little bit self-selecting. How do we make sure that we penetrate that next layer of cities? Because I think all of us are believers in our country and the way that cities and these problems can get solved. Questions from the audience? Maybe we'd start in the back over there. Hi, I'm Ian Wallace. I'm co-director of New America's New Cybersecurity Initiative. And you've spoken a little bit about the dark side, particularly the uses and misuses of the technology itself, surveillance, one thing or another. Another area that we've been looking at is the extent to which as you roll out more technology, you risk creating new digital divide. That the poor and the elderly get more exposed to the technology, but they're also exposed to criminals and bad people. I just wondered what cities are doing to help mitigate that risk, and what level of responsibility you think you have as local governments? It's a problem we'd love to have, so we're working on having that problem. I used to work with my father before I was mayor, and my father would always say, can you come look at this should I click on this? I'd say, dad, you're not gonna break the computer. It'll be all right, just click on it, it'll be okay. I think for us, what we're trying to do is to take that next step of how do we improve literacy or acumen digitally? How do we teach people what they can and can't do? And so I mentioned earlier, I was just at a class where this woman was showing the fire that she made for her church. We're trying to give people very practical skills about what increases digital literacy, like how do I pay my bills? How do I look up phone numbers? Just things that make a difference in their lives. And the other part that we do with that is say, what are the dangers out there? What are the things that you have to worry about because you can't do one without doing the other? And we run all that through a nonprofit, but it's essentially a government initiative along with our private partners to make sure that we are increasing acumen and literacy. Yeah, and here's a place where the intermediary level can be extremely important. So the idea of having a nonprofit who is providing that kind of training, again Chicago's a good example of this with Smart Chicago, Austin is also doing this, closing the digital divide, digital literacy, cybersecurity training. But you need to have a point person in the city government whose job it is to make sure the intermediary exists and is doing a good job. And that's still rather rare in America to have that kind of leadership. So it's both these things, leadership from the top, intermediary, in the neighborhoods, talking to people, working with them. We do know that closing the digital divide requires that kind of hand-holding and intermediary help. Question up here? Or, well, you can do, oh, do you wanna go back there, Andrew? Well, we're, oh, okay, nevermind. We'll go right up here. Sorry, it's hard to be confusing. I think if you speak into it, yeah. Sandra Fried at the Gates Foundation. So first of all, as a resident of Seattle, we would love to have the services that are available in your cities. Congratulations there. Mayor Murray's work, you're working on it. And we're excited about change to come. So I work on a team that funds public access to information. And I wanted to, I guess, make a plug for this intermediary that you're talking about because the risk, not only as identified earlier for the low-income folks is the greater dark side, the other risk is just lack of access. Either they can't afford it, they can't afford the hardware, or they don't have the wherewithal to the training program. So the plug I wanna make is for this intermediary to also provide hardware, not only training, but actual access to technology. We happen to fund public libraries as a venue for that. There are other spheres, too, so I just wanted to make that plug for the full response to those people who could be excluded. So I was gonna tell a little bit about what we've done. So I formed a task force much like they're doing about what we've called a gig tech and entrepreneurship. And out of that, we decided that we needed somebody to do this full time every day. And we formed an entity called the Enterprise Center and took basically most of the main people in Chattanooga who were working in this issue from the public sector, the private sector, the university side, everyone and put them, we're all together now on the board. And essentially out of that grew a couple of main projects. One is an innovation district, another was digital literacy and the other, then the final was to make sure that we were branding and promoting our tech and gig community. So every day they wake up and that's what they do. We work a lot with them. They also are in part funded by a very vibrant philanthropic community that we have. So when all that comes together, you can make a lot of headway on these important issues. And I think having an intermediary that does that, the Enterprise Center is making tremendous progress in Chattanooga because that's their mission every single day. Can one of the, I think this is such an important point as was this large, not issue of both adoption, but also how people can protect themselves. And this is why I'm gonna go back to resources because I think one of the things folks have to recognize is happening is revenue's been shrinking as the expenses of cities, the infrastructure needs, the needs of the population have been expanding. And so I think it's one of the things, and this is why we say the state and federal government cannot abdicate their responsibilities, is we fundamentally need our philanthropic partners, but at the end of the day, if we're really gonna do right by our people, we have to actually be fighting for the revenue streams that provide the services, that understand that access to tech, the infrastructure, the technology, and all the opportunities that it builds is as important as public schools and water and electricity. And so that's part of why I say because we are going to be so burdened with just trying to figure out how to create more public infrastructure. I mean the costs of that are astronomical. So we've got to work together and actually saying we need revenue stream for this. It's why stimulus was so important and we don't have number two stimulus. And just to bring this all full circle, if the city can show its work be understood, be seen, people are much more likely to be enthusiastic about paying for more stuff. So there actually is a nice virtuous cycle here. I just want to give you a story on the hardware from Kansas City where there's a nonprofit that will give you digital literacy training and hook you up with internet access, but they won't give you a computer that you can buy for $50 until you go through the classes. And they've got a whole staff of people refurbishing old computers that are being donated. People are being trained to refurbish the computers that are being donated. So it's one big ecosystem of training, hardware and connection in neighborhood, which is excellent. I think that we have about four or five minutes left so we can take despite what this clock says up here. So two or three more questions. Let's start back there. Can you hear me? Yeah. My name is Yuen Chong. I'm a Millennium Challenge Corporation in Arizona State University. And I wanted to pick up on that point about the cost of infrastructure, particularly fiber optics. And my understanding is that a majority that costs something like 60 to 80% of the cost of installing fiber optics is actually just like digging and like civil works. And so I was wondering if any of you have had any experience with pairing, installing fiber optic cables with other infrastructure projects like laying down water pipeline or building roads, that kind of thing. Well, that's the smart policy and I can hear Maya say it to my left and she really should just say it. What's the phrase for that? Dig once. Therefore. Therefore. I'm sorry, I'll send it out. We actually have some shortsighted policy in the United States where the Department of Transportation, the federal level is not enthusiastic about allowing you to lay fiber at the same time we create freeways. And that's dumb and we should fix that. And there are a lot of dumb things like that circling around. But you really should, when you open up the streets, it's like a root canal. You do it slowly and it's painful. But every time any big city opens up its streets, it should be putting in lots of conduit and space so that you can eventually have this fiber optic network. I have a local mayor I'd love for you to talk to, by the way. Yes. One last point on this though, there's also, because I don't think we should miss it, because there's tons of fiber in New York City. The issue isn't whether there's fibers, who owns it, and whether there's actually an ability to get any of that bandwidth for public use. So that's just a flip side problem, right? So we're off, we do need dig once, we do need these reforms, we're trying to figure out how we can be more efficient as a city. But I just want to say that out loud, because it is the fundamental way in which we've developed broadband in this country, and we can start to shift that. And Chattanooga's fiber optic network was laid as part of a smart grid. So the reason that we have this fiber optic everywhere is the stimulus package actually funded was funded through the energy, department of energy to be a smart grid for resiliency, and to make sure that we were using our energy sustainably in Chattanooga. Another question? Okay, well, was there one up here, I think? You kind of spoke to two different aspects to this, the measurable and the intangible in a sense, that this is the impact on people that enhances their lives and isn't quantifiable necessarily the other side of it being the quantification of impact. Are there measures of thumb that anybody's using yet? And I was involved in a broadband task force in my community, but we didn't have it at the time. Of the impact financially that you can claim that's being made through the introduction of broadband and have you run across it in looking across jurisdictions and municipalities? Well, we've got some very broad numbers. We think that GDP ticks up by 1.5% based on every uptick in broadband, but there isn't great economic evidence. I'm not gonna claim that we have the ultimate economic studies that we need. We need more time to develop that, and it will be developed, but we don't have it yet. We've been looking for it. We've been talking about whether we could get an industrial economist to maybe give us some projections for New York because it is important because really there could be so much cost savings that it's even wrong to think about it as a capital expense, right? I mean, that's a very different way of thinking about it, and it does go back to the evidence to support it. For us, I think right now what a lot of foundations are looking at is our innovation district and what's going on there economically. So we've had a lot of interest in studying that. Of course, I trace a lot of that back to the fiber and what happened when we changed that conception of what we are. When Chattanooga goes from what Walter Cronkite called in 1969 the dirtiest city in America to the place that we say we're at the head of the game in 2015 on infrastructure and broadband and innovation, that's a big change. And I think for us to be able to show the numbers on what that innovation district is doing is powerful. We didn't have great numbers for electricity either, but we went ahead. Yeah, fair enough. So exit question, maybe we could just go down the line really quickly, 10 years from now, if we were having this conversation sitting here, the connected city 2025, what do you hope that we'll be talking about then and what do you think we, in a good world, what will we have achieved by then? How will we have reached that promising and what will it look like? Well, I'll start so that can have more time to think. Very chivalrous in the sound, right. What I hope is that very few of these topics are still being bandied about on a panel like this. And then in fact, what we're talking about is how you measure that success, particularly on equity. And the big issue to me for a city like Chattanooga is how do you build that equity? Because we cannot end up with a country that has high speed fiber optic broadband to certain neighborhoods and only certain people. If we do that, then we're really gonna just widen the gap that currently exists in our neighborhoods that you and I can see just driving around any modern American city. Whereas if we take this seriously and we work on both the infrastructure but particularly on adoption and literacy, we really can try to find the ways to shrink that gap and that that will be what we're talking about is how do we continue to shrink that gap instead of talking about, okay, what do we spend on infrastructure or how is it that we do all this? That's the conversation that will know, okay, we've made progress. Who can follow that? Yeah. So Ditto, and in order to get to equity, that what we actually have is a network of networks because we've come to understand broadband as fundamental as water and electricity. We've come to see it as a public necessity and therefore have public space for it. And that that network of networks is actually driven and is completely updated by the new technologies that make it increasingly more affordable but that at the end of the day, it's seen really as public space for everyone which is fundamental and which then we see the benefits of across all communities, no matter race, national origin, economics, and it's ubiquitous. I agree. I can't add except to say it will disappear, I think from our consciousness. Like a street grid, it just is there and supporting everything we do and supporting a thriving, diverse, inclusive, interesting, and economically successful country. Well, you have helped prove our thesis that innovation and great ideas are coming from the cities and communities. So please join me in thanking our panel for joining us today.