 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event. We're a webinar, a webcast, online show, whatever the terminology is up for debate, but whatever you'd like to call us, we are here live on Wednesday mornings, every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. Both the live show and our archived recordings are both free and open to anyone to watch. So if you do see anything of interest to any of your colleagues, friends, neighbors, family, anybody out there, please do share our website to them and have them register for upcoming shows or watch a neighbor archives. And at the end of today's show, I will show you where all of that is, where the website is, and where you can access the recordings. We do a mixture of things here on the show, book reviews, many training sessions, interviews, demos of new products and services, basically anything library related. That is our only criteria that whatever we have on the show is something that libraries are doing, something that they could be doing, some new resource or service available to them. Some of our topics, you might look at a title and say, oh, libraries, but trust us, it will always have something to do with libraries. That's what we are here to do here at the Library Commission. We do have Nebraska Library Commission staff come on and do some sessions, some episodes, for Nebraska-centric or specific things, but we also bring in guest speakers. And that's what we have this morning from the West Coast with us this morning is Kristen Rebman, who's an associate professor at the School of Information at St. Jose State University. Good morning, Kristen. Good morning, Kristen. And there also is Don Means, who's from the Gigabit Libraries Network. Good morning, Don. Good morning, Kristen. And Kristen and Don have a presentation, as you can see from the slides here, about something new, great for our small and rural libraries. We have lots of those here in Nebraska. Most of our libraries are that. We have a few large libraries in Lincoln and Omaha and a few down the middle quarter of the state, a little larger, but we are a very rural state, as are many of the states in the country, and a new way to get some internet access to your libraries using TV White Space. So I will just hand it over to you guys to take it away and tell us about TV White Space. Wonderful. Thank you so much, Krista, for that warm welcome and for the opportunity to speak today and share our work with TV White Space. Okay, so our presentation is really about small and rural libraries and how they can lead with TV White Space, which is a new wireless technology, and we'll be talking a lot more about what that technology is. So today we're going to do a little just a brief introduction, and Don is going to jump in and share a short video about TV White Space that was produced as part of his work in the field, and will be providing some background on TV White Space technology and what it might mean for the issues of access and inclusion in libraries, particularly small and rural libraries. And then we'll be taking a trip to Gigabit Libraries, their resource hub, which has all different types of resources to understand whether TV White Space would be appropriate for your context and how you might find out more in terms of how to implement or deploy the technology and equipment associated with it. And then finally we'll be talking a little bit about our Beyond the Walls program, which is an IMLS-funded project to support five TV White Space equipment deployments across the nation. So Don, I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to you and have you share that video with our viewers. Thank you. All right, hold on just a second. I will make you a presenter, Don, so you can get that up on our screen for you. You should see the pop-up to share your screen. We'll have to do that first. Excuse me, I have to. I had to already do the full screen. All right, there we go. There we go. We see it. Well, thank you. What I'm going to do here is play a two-minute overview video to shorten the typical kind of introduction and background on what we're talking about, the use of this new communications capability. Its spectrum, pardon me, in the TV bands, actually in the UHF portion of the TV bands, it was liberated or made available through the digital TV conversion, and part of that is now available for open shared use like Wi-Fi. Anybody can use Wi-Fi spectrum. They just buy equipment and then they communicate with it. This is not a service. This is a networking capability that would extend a library's network. You can see from this video how we think that could be done and valuable. I'll just play that now. It looks like you've got it muted on the YouTube there. You need to click on the sound just to go over to the right. On YouTube itself, it looks like you've got it muted. Just right. On YouTube, there we go. Yeah, there we go. In fact, some 80 million rely on art or entirely on public libraries for broadband internet access. In two-thirds of US towns, libraries are the only source of no-fee internet access. But now, we're going beyond library walls. That's right. Library Wi-Fi can support new hotspots in key locations in your community thanks to the power of TV white spaces. Wait, what are TV white spaces? Well, years ago, TV broadcasts used analog signals which were large and spaced far apart. Now, with the switch to digital, TV signals are much more compact and closer together. The unused space that remains in between these channels? That's TV white spaces. They can power Wi-Fi networks with supercharged signals that deliver broadband miles away, passing through obstructions like buildings, trees, and even over small hills. Hotspots can be fixed at locations like public book kiosks, parks, playgrounds, and even public buildings. And they're easy to move to. Moveable TV white space hotspots can turn occasional fares and markets into free public Wi-Fi zones. As one example, in Manhattan, Kansas, the hotspot goes between the community swimming pool and the ice rink as the seasons change. And if disaster strikes, these remote communications units can be deployed to quickly assist rescue and recovery. You can increase your community's emergency preparedness by installing units at other community anchors, schools, clinics, for example, creating a backup communications resource that's vital for disaster relief. As a traditional source of public information, libraries are ideal as community labs to pilot this technology and are poised to unlock the revolutionary potential of TV white spaces and Wi-Fi together. There, that wasn't so painful. No, that was awesome. That was very clear. Alright, so this is our primary website for the new libraries network, which is an open consortium, a global consortium of libraries, technology-innovating libraries around the world to do interesting things with technology, and then TV white spaces emerged as a project over the last three years. We've been working on this since it first became available. It's been in development for some 12 years since they had this idea, even before the iPhone came out and the surge in demand for wireless data communications capability exploded. So it's been a long time coming, but it's a very special thing. You wanted me to talk about the resource hub. I think that we had a couple of slides before the resource hub that I can go ahead and switch to, and then that'll sort of lay the groundwork for you to go through all of those resources. Alright, I'll change back to you now, Kristen, no problem. Okay, fantastic. Okay, so let me jump back into my, make sure I didn't go too far. Okay, so as that video mentioned, there are, you know, there's everyday uses for the radio frequency spectrum, and these portions of the spectrum are reserved for public use, and TV white space is just one segment of that that can be used by libraries to expand their Wi-Fi networks. So what do we mean by TV white space? We mean those unused frequencies in the TV band of the frequency spectrum as the video and this slide here mentioned. And so it allows us to expand physical access to library digital services by taking that broadband connection and connecting it to several remote hotspots that can be placed in the community. And so a library community network would be expanded beyond the walls of the library to reach whatever places that the library can imagine. And so this would be great for a rural library. As this slide shows, you could have a rural or small library with a TV white space station connected to an internet access point, in case you'd have your broadband coming into the library. And then there would be an antenna attached to the, or mounted on the, basically the roof of the library that would allow you to broadcast to remote radios using TV white space frequencies. So they're going to use those frequencies of the spectrum, this TV white space frequencies to communicate with the remote client radios. And so you can see in the top right-hand corner of this line, and this infographic really is the anatomy of a TV white space hotspot, which is, it works, you have remote client radios, which will extend Wi-Fi into the community, and they'll be connected to a Wi-Fi router. So the hotspot itself connects patrons to the internet by a laptop, tablet, or mobile device, just like any Wi-Fi hotspot would, that would be within the walls of the library. But now you can expand that connection to other places in the community. When we created this infographic, we had in mind that a library might want to create a hotspot in a senior center, or a clinic, or a shelter, or maybe a museum, a park, or some other type of portable event that might be moving through the community, or a temporary event like a farmer's market, or a fair, or perhaps a school. And collaborations among schools and libraries are really fantastic examples of the types of collaborations that can happen among different community-based organizations. And so the distance away from the original broadband coming into the library may vary, but hotspots conceivably, the technology could be pushed to six plus miles. But again, it's going to be really idiosyncratic to the context that you're working in, the geography, and your initial connection coming in. So there's a lot of factors in play. Okay, so as I mentioned in this previous slide, Wi-Fi plus TV white space allows for the extension of Wi-Fi networks into the community. After deploying TV white space technology, you no longer have any, you don't have to worry about wiring up another Wi-Fi network in a community center or a shelter. You can do that in a wireless fashion. You don't have to have a carrier. Once you have the initial investment of the equipment, you don't need a carrier to interact with in terms of monthly fees. I know that hotspots like checkout hotspots are getting really popular in a lot of libraries, and a lot of them are CDMA-based or basically like cell phone types of hotspots where there's a monthly fee. And so after the initial investment in this equipment, you don't have any monthly fees. So that's really an advantage to small libraries in particular in terms of like not having funding to support an ongoing program like that. And so just to focus on this issue of small and rural libraries and why TV white space is so important to them, you know, with a lot of technologies and the adoption path of new technologies, urban and developed areas are advantaged. But in the case of TV white space, small and rural libraries really do have an advantage with TV white space and the deployment of related networks. And the reasons for this are that in rural libraries, there's lots of availability on the spectrum. And Don, when he goes to the resource hub and he shows you the wealth of resources there, will show you how a rural area has an advantage over an urban area in terms of access to channels. And in an ongoing fashion, there will be less competition for channels because you have less competitors seeking those channels for other uses and other perhaps forms of media to be broadcast over those frequencies. Now there are some challenges with TV white space and we'll be talking about those a little bit later. One key one, one key challenge is that it requires a minimum connection rate of 20 plus megabits per second. So you kind of, you have to have a somewhat robust connection coming into the library before you get started with TV white space. And I think that these sort of advantages and challenges are a good lead in to have Don talk more about the Gigabit Libraries Resource Hub. Okay, great. Thank you. Excellent, Kristen. These bullets are highlights for consideration and the kind of acknowledgement here that the video mentioned the number of 80 million people relying entirely or partially on libraries for internet access. This was a peak number, I think, in the few years after the financial crisis. It has gone down now, maybe half that number now rely on libraries to that extent. But it makes the point in times of stress and need, libraries come to the fore as places people turn to for help and resources. So it's still tens of millions do rely on the library. And so, well, they all have to go to one of the actual facilities, one of the 16,000 something facilities to access that service. So our point here is why not make that more convenient, at least somewhat more convenient, so that there are other places where library Wi-Fi, not just kind of general open internet, but access to the library, digital services as Kristen said, one of which, and maybe those popular, which is internet access, but it's not the only one. There are library databases, there are librarians and other things that the library may want to offer to patrons. We recommend some kind of a splash page or a web page where people accessing the library Wi-Fi in a remote place would be welcome and made understood what is there being offered and the different choices. Other city or county services would be another path that libraries could offer people. We also are encouraging libraries to put a physical signage in these places. You're, let's say, in a park, for example, put a sign up, say, you're now in a library service zone. And just to be clear on that, that area of access is the range of a traditional Wi-Fi router, you know, 50, 100 feet, something like that. What WhiteSpace does is provide the backhaul or the distance link to the hub as the graphic here shows where the internet connection comes into the library and then is distributed wirelessly using the TV WhiteSpace equipment. And then you see at the top there the client radio, the blue box, a regular Wi-Fi router is plugged into that. And that's what creates the interface, the universal interface that everybody uses to connect to the internet or to a network. So it's those two together that make this work. And then the other point, the other important point about the capability of the backhaul and the availability of channels, Kristen made the point, but I think it bears re-emphasizing, is that this is a really special circumstance where, at least in our view, this may be the first time ever that rural America has caught a break on the economics of an infrastructure. It's always been, I mean, electricity and telephone and water, all of it, has been more expensive and difficult to deploy because the distances are greater, there are fewer people served, they generally have less money, and so this has always been a handicap. That was the reason that universal service was conceived, whether it was the rural electrification or, as I said, telephone service. The whole idea is that once something is considered a basic service, then it is deemed a national priority that everyone should have affordable access to that as a basic service. But with the arrival of broadband, we lost track of that, and so the providers have been able to prioritize markets. We didn't use to think of ourselves as markets for these kinds of services, but what we now are, and these are increasingly, what used to be considered utilities, are increasingly understood and behaved as private companies, able to pick and choose where they invest in upgrades to their infrastructure. So in this case, because the spectrum represents the areas where broadcasters, TV and radio broadcasters operate, the more rural, the fewer broadcasters there are and the more available spectrum there is to use. So there's little or none of this available in the big metropolitan areas like New York, where I am in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, and so forth. But almost everywhere else is some or a lot, and the more rural, the more of this is available. The caveat is the flip side, and that is a lot of libraries in more remote areas, small rural libraries, have less backhaul or internet connections to their facilities, which they need to allocate some of that to support these wireless connections, which of course are two-way. And so our baseline assumption here is that it's national policy under the National Broadband Plan, under the FCC's Universal Service Fund, that libraries and schools or in the broad national plan, all community anchor institutions, shall have gigabit fiber. And the recent changes in the e-rate are built to help that happen. The additional billion and a half dollars a year raising that fund to nearly four billion dollars a year to deliver fiber to schools and libraries. Libraries, as I'm sure you're all aware, disproportionately participate in that due to a number of factors. You know, they're smaller, they're less capable of dealing with the paperwork involved, and then filtering is also an issue with a lot of libraries. So even as there are eight times more as many school facilities as libraries, libraries get much less than one-eighth of the total pool of money, but they should be more active in pursuing those. And we also recommend, as we've seen in many states, and I can't speak for Nebraska, but I hope so, that libraries are aggregating their application process under e-rates so that they can take advantage of these funds. There's also additional funds for in-house Wi-Fi expanding that because, you know, a connection to the building doesn't really help anybody. It has to be delivered to individuals in the form they can use, either at the workstations that are in the library or increasingly as Wi-Fi as people bring in their own devices. And as these devices get less and less expensive, they're more and more popular for people to bring in. And I'm sure all of you have the experience of patrons sitting in the parking lot after hours accessing the Wi-Fi hotspot, which is generally left on in most places. That's evidence of demand to try to install new library hotspots in other convenient places. So this is how you, let me see if I have control here. This is how you determine if you are eligible to do this. These two basic requirements of backhaul, at least 20 megabits, better, I mean more is better here. And then also spectrum availability, so we'll just demo this very quickly. Don, if you want to, this is Kristin still showing her screen, but I can switch to you so you can live demo this. All right, thank you. Yeah, hold on just a second. We'll get yours up. So go ahead and do the share your screen again. All right, thank you. There you are, you're on. Okay, so this is a checklist for participation in Beyond the Walls. We'll get to that, the IMLS grant that Kristin mentioned. But it's a general checklist for any library or any facility really that would be interested in deploying this. There's another two minute video that kind of runs through this list. We'll just touch on it manually here. And the first one as I mentioned is this necessary backhaul, at least 20 megabits. And then you have to check for channels and I'll demo that here. So we need a, since we're talking about Nebraska, someone give me a town in Nebraska, a name of a town. Let's go with Sydney. Let's try Sydney. I know someone from there is on. S-I-D-S-Y-D. S-I-D-N-E-Y. Okay, so this is a database of available channels. And you can see the whole country, the dark areas, there's little or none. The yellow and even orange and especially the green areas, you can see at the top, they have tons of it. And so this below is one is the result there. And so what we're really interested in here are the UHF channels, which are 14 and above. And so you can see there's lots and lots of available spectrum for Sydney to use to serve its community. So that's the big bonus news is you've got a lot of stuff. And as Kristen mentioned in her slides, this is internal networking. So there are no carriers involved. I mean, you're paying someone to connect you the facility, but this is a way to leverage that connection and expand its availability around the community without any... There are also no need for towers, much less third parties or service fees ongoing. The one point about the popularity of the checkout hotspot that I think Bear is mentioning is this is not mobile technology. Cell systems are rated for mobile. Driving down the road, your device, your phone is handing off signals from one tower to the next. There's a large network, even though it has a lot of gaps in it. There's a substantial network of towers that connect to these devices. And they're built very sophisticated that they can hand off from one to the next. And you don't even realize you're moving your connection from one tower to another. In the case of TV White Space, this is not mobile technology. These remote units are portable. They can be moved from place to place. But they're really built to be fixed, movable, or they say nomadic fixed. So you can move it around. But setting it up is there's a little more to it. They need to be tuned a little bit. And so I don't think these are yet, to be understood, is replaced with devices for these MiFi units, which are really interesting and cool if you can support them. This could be seen as a complement where these are located in publicly accessible places, is what we would suggest rather than for patron use at home. I'm not there yet. The coverage map is another kind of analysis tool. This is a map of the IMLS database of some 17,000 library coordinates. And all those little red dots there represent libraries. They actually represent two kilometer radius around the library, which you can search by state. Back to Nebraska here. So those are all the libraries in Nebraska. And each one is surrounded by a two kilometer zone. So let's just have a look at Arcadia here. And so this is a tool designed to help you kind of plan where in your town remote locations might be sited. So it looks like there's a park here by the river. There's probably other places around that might benefit from that. And that's just the two kilometers. We give these two these different radius here to the signals don't look, they're not perfect circles like this. They look more like Doppler radar. The special quality about TV white space and the reason that TV broadcasts use these frequencies in the first place is that they have this long range of penetrating capability. So they have the capability to pass through obstructions, which is a special characteristic since most wireless requires the line of sight. And when you see those microwave dishes around each other, they're pointed at other antennas, other microwave antennas that can see each other. And if they can do that, that's called line of sight, and they're not too far apart, they can do very fast communications. And if you have that kind of an opportunity, you would probably want to research using microwave instead of TV white space. But where you have non-line of sight capability, some instructions, then this is what would be something to absolutely consider. So these are just kind of steps that you go through to determine where you might want to set up remote stations. Kristen has created an extraordinarily thorough and informative and helpful self-paced course to go through this. We're running through these highlights right now, but this course is built to take everyone more deeply into the things that we're highlighting today and have you to the point where you could create a plan and then do what's called a paper evaluation. Once you've set your locations for your equipment, you're at that point, you'd want to consult with vendors. And these are the three vendors. These are the three leading vendors of the world of this equipment. They're small companies, but this is a very new thing. Though it is being explored and adopted at various stages around the world as digital TV conversion is a global phenomenon. And so what these vendors would do would be what they call a paper analysis. So you give them the coordinates, let's say, for your base station and three remote locations. They can use Google Earth and get a side view. They can see all the intervening buildings and trees and terrain between any two points and estimate the likelihood of a successful connection. So you go through this, they validate and verify your plan, and then they give you a price quote on what a system would cost. And then you make your decision about acquiring it the way you decide to acquire any kind of equipment or service. Though this is equipment and not a service except to the extent that you're getting service from the manufacturers. So that's the normal kind of process that people take to evaluate and decide if this is something for them. The equipment costs are comparatively low, really very low compared to telecom infrastructure costs because you just attach some of this equipment, the radios and their antennas to poles or sides of the building to set up the links. And so without wires or digging or any permissions or permits, it's really very low cost. The equipment itself for a simple network should be in the range of $8,000 for a base station and two or three remotes. It varies by configuration and by vendor, but let's say $10,000 for the equipment would be a network that would probably accommodate most libraries due to the backhaul, the amount of spectrum that would need to be allocated for sharing in the wireless network, and also a very good kind of first stage. You want to learn how this equipment performs in your area, that's the most important information. And you can only really know that by doing it, so you want to make a good evaluation and then you want to make a careful kind of risk assessment on what are the downsides or the potential upsides, but we think this is a real winner, especially for rural libraries and rural communities in general. So I think we had your other slide or the next item on the agenda. Kristen, do you want to take that back or do you want me to show something else here? I think that after the resource hub we were going to talk a little bit about the, I was just going to show them the course and you could probably just click on that yourself. We can just let the participants see what that looks like. So basically you can just click on that, go to the canvas.net, which is Canvas Network for all of their online open courses, and you can search for, if you get to just their website and have to search for the course, you can just search for TV White Space, and our course will come up and you can enroll. The course, it will continue to be available until May 1st. So if you haven't had a chance to check out the resources there, like Dawn said, that we have activities in the course that are related to thinking about your own possible setup and your own planning with TV White Space. So the content itself, some of it is just background information where you can get a little bit deeper with that. And then some of it is really about shepherding you through the process of thinking about your own plan, which I think is fun and it's really geared toward you thinking about what you in your library would want to do. Okay, so that's the course. And then I think we're going to talk a little bit about the Beyond the Walls program, which is the IMLS project. I just wanted to jump in a sec here, Kristen, to let people know. Now, this is, I can see the dates on there. It says that it started February, going back to the course, February 6th. But this is a self-paced course, correct? Yes, it's completely self-paced. So it's okay that you didn't have to start on February 6th, that you can do it at your own speed any time between now and May 1st. Right, right. And the modules themselves, if anyone has interest, we could look at that during the Q&A session, if anyone has interest in looking at what the modules look like. There are five modules with the course and each one of them doesn't take maybe an hour per module. So if you haven't gotten started, you haven't had a chance to jump in, don't feel like it's too late. You're not going to need 12 weeks to finish the course. Right. The time commitment is really, really manageable to work with. I see it says there are just an hour per week, so you can definitely catch up on this, no problem. Oh, yeah, definitely. All right. Good point about the self-paced nature of the course at your own time and convenience, and you can start anytime. So to the program, I want to just touch on this so we can open it up for questions here and stay within our hour. But Beyond the Walls awards results from a grant that San Jose State and Gigabit Libraries won last year to build that course that Kristen has accomplished and also to offer grants, $15,000 subawards is the correct usage there, to libraries who have created proposals for innovative use of TV white space in collaboration with other community partners like schools or clinics or public safety agencies or museums or anybody where they would jointly look at how this technology can support their daily activities, their ongoing missions as well as be available in reserve as a backup capability in the event of any kind of a disaster or really any kind of a lights out scenario where communication could be interrupted. We're seeing even more evidence about the possibility of the internet actually going down for periods of time. Not many of us think about what life would actually be like without that, but it would be a remarkable change. In any case, I regret that the deadline for these proposals is Monday, which is not much time if you haven't already become aware of this. But if you are interested and you can put a proposal together by Monday, midnight, Hawaii time, we're giving every minute possible to the motivated people that want to jump in on this, then we will give it a look and if it has some promise, we will come back and help you develop it a little further before we do the final evaluations on these proposals. So it's a kind of a mixed message here of maybe be a little bit discouraged because it's late, but don't be totally discouraged because the window is still open if you're motivated enough to jump in. And then there's all these other items explained and here's the application form where you talk about what you want to do in 500 words and what the need is in a couple of words. It's not very complicated, but we judge these according to their creativity, the level of collaboration involved, and also the expressions of commitment by the library and their partners in doing this. So we're seeing a lot of really interesting proposals come in and some great ideas. I do know that there are a couple that are coming in from Nebraska already and it looks like the most popular collaboration is partnering with schools. And I'll turn it over to Kristin after I make this point that from what we've learned is that the schools in Nebraska are highly wired. They all have high capacity fiber, at least it seems like they all or nearly all do through network Nebraska. And by comparison, the libraries have much, much slower connections for some of the reasons we touched on above. And yet those libraries have to support or expected to support the students who leave these school environments, these well connected school environments to do homework after hours. So how can a school and library team up to increase the capability at the library using TV white space? In the short term, it might look like a base station is actually located at the school building and the remote unit at the library where they might be able to add another 10 megabits to a library who may only have an old T1 line, a 1.5 megabit connection. So that's a very interesting scenario and something that can be done now. Today there's nothing that would stop anybody from moving on a project and having it set up within a few weeks even. So I say nothing, you know, there's issues involved naturally, but I'm saying there's no regulatory or permission hurdles or any of that. If you've got the will and a few thousand dollars, then that kind of a project is possible. So with that, Kristin if you have other items on the agenda or you want to open up the questions, I think I've done enough. Thanks Dawn, that was fantastic. If you go ahead and switch back to my desktop, I'll just go ahead and close out the presentation and open it up for questions. Sure, there you go. Go ahead and open my slides back up. Just as Dawn mentioned, we have that library's white space project that we're still accepting applications for. And we just want to say thank you and again for the warm welcome Kristin for allowing us to come present. It's always such a pleasure to be able to reach people, especially via the online space and these webinars. So we just really want to encourage anyone to contact us. We love to talk about TV White Space and all of these activities that we're involved in. So drop us an email, connect with us on LinkedIn. However you feel comfortable, we'd love to be in contact with everyone. So thanks again. Great. So questions anybody out there? Yes, we did have some questions that came in while you guys were talking. And we'll just start at the top of the ones we have here. Actually, one of our libraries who did apply, Sydney, who I mentioned earlier, Sydney Public Library, I did not know they had sent in an application, but I knew that their director, Andrew Sherman, was on the line and asking some questions. But he did say that they have actually submitted an app for Sydney. But he wanted to know, is there any risk that these frequencies at some point could get designated for a specific service by the feds? Like could they potentially be no longer? Well, this is true of all spectrum. All spectrum. All spectrum starts out as the public airwaves. And then over time it's allocated to mostly for commercial use. And so these take the form of licenses for specific frequencies to carriers to use to build into their systems and then resell services through. Large chunks of spectrum are held by the defense department and then other government agencies are holding these. It's the it's the responsibility of the FCC to manage all of this and their obligation is to optimize the use of spectrum. So this is kind of a general term. But what it usually what it tends to mean is that if spectrum goes unused, either a licensee acquires it but doesn't use it or no one actually asked for it. Then the FCC is obligated to try to find other ways to use it. So this particular spectrum is highly desirable, generally speaking, because of its characteristics that we talked about. They call this beachfront spectrum because of its penetrating capabilities. So in certain places it's tremendously valuable. It's a strange phenomenon when you when you consider a single channel might be worth a billion dollars in Manhattan, New York. And in parts of Nebraska you couldn't give it away for free because the carrier that to use it would have to build towers out there. And they would consider that even just a tower too expensive to serve it. So I guess the risk would be where the technology was not used by who we think are ideal users, the public services sector, to use this public domain spectrum. Which is shared by the way, like Wi-Fi. We share those frequencies when we connect via Wi-Fi with other Wi-Fi. That's why they don't work so well sometimes. But I would say this is an extremely low probability, especially in areas where there's a big abundance of the spectrum like in Nebraska. Yeah, we use it before, yeah, well it's there, absolutely. The next question actually relates to what you're talking about about Wi-Fi, you know, strength up and down. Someone says sometimes our TV channel reception is good and sometimes the signal is too weak. Would this be true for the wireless accessibility using the TV white space? Interesting question. Variability of TV signal strength. I think the transmit, the broadcast signals, which for TV radio broadcast are measured in thousands or even hundreds of thousands of watts. These radios are low power, like 5 and 10 watts, which is kind of phenomenal that such a low power transmitter receiver can do data communications over miles, but they do. They have the advantage, their penetrability makes them less disrupted by rain or even snow, which disrupts most other kinds of wireless data communications. So I can't say that they perform at a totally constant rate all the time, but I haven't heard that they experience a lot of variability due to conditions. Once they're set up, you have a measure of the signal strength and that more or less is what you get, at least as far as I understand it. It might be a good question to put to a vendor though. Right, they might know if they've, what experience or, and I saw you did have on your website links to information about the Kansas project, so maybe see what else. That was just set up. That's a good resource. The first of Manhattan, Kansas, was an early, an early user highlighted in the video. They also deployed one in the senior center, which has been a big success, and then another one in the park, also a success. And we just learned the other day that they were looking to go kind of a next stage project and build out white space. But the city informed them that because of the success of these remotes, that the city has decided to build fiber connections to these same places because the demand has been proven through these. Start out with a TV white space, show the demand and that it's actually being used, and then that convinces the city to invest in the fibers. Interesting. Precisely. So, yeah, wireless pulls fiber. Users demand just what you said, perfectly expressed. All right. Okay, another question. What about equipment maintenance? Once you get the tower and the... No towers. No towers. Just a pole. A pole you would mount the base station antenna on a pole, and then the pole would be clamped onto typically the side of a building or maybe on top of a building. And then the remote antennas, if you could remember that diagram, kind of looks like old TV rooftop antennas. Though there are some new ones that are much smaller, they look like a regular Wi-Fi router. Though their range is not going to be as far because the antennas are smaller and indoor. But the outdoor ones have a kind of a lateral spar that aims back at the base station to optimize the link. The maintenance issues seem to be very, very low. There's a setup where there's the attachment, the installation of the units, and then the tuning of the radios to optimize the signal strength. But then at that point, they were pretty much static devices, not unlike a regular Wi-Fi hotspot. The vendors are available by phone and through the Internet for installation and support. The base station can be monitored directly through the Internet from the vendor's location. They can see what it's doing and how it's performing and can offer additional support. You may, depending on the kind of local support you have, you may want to engage the services of a local wireless ISP or someone with experience in radios to come and help you get it set up or even look at it if it's experiencing some difficulties. But all the stories we're getting is that these are very stable systems once they're set up. That's good to know. They don't need much backup or support once they're there. They're pretty much there. Having those companies being available for help afterwards, they do, I guess, keep up with their installations. Sure. This is all pretty early in the market. All the installations are important because they're all kind of stories that stand out. So everybody kind of rises and falls on the experience and the stories from these installations. Okay. We did just have a comment too. Actually, Tom Rolfesier from the CIO's office here in Nebraska, who I know you guys, I believe, have met with or spoken with. So that was excellent observation that you had about Nebraska schools and libraries working together with the Nebraska link and all of that. Hey, Tom. Just to follow up on that, I think there is an opportunity. It's pretty clear in Nebraska. Just kind of the size, the structure, the rural nature and the institutions in Nebraska. Tom's office, the office of the CIO, the state commission all represent, at least from our perspective, an opportunity for a strong statewide collaboration to explore this stuff exhaustively and through mutual support find better opportunities. So I definitely encourage that. And we always have new libraries joining into the connection with the schools here in Nebraska. So that's definitely something for lots of different options out there for our libraries. But that's one that I know some are jumping on because it is such a good connection. As you said, they already have set up for the schools and the libraries can now partner with them and join in and get access to that good internet connection. And it's been successful so far. If anybody has, we're getting almost to 11 o'clock. I just want to remind people if you do have any other questions, do type them into the questions section and we'll grab them. One last question, which I know I can answer and you guys may know as well, is about e-rate. Can you discuss how libraries would be able to use internet funded by e-rate? Is this an issue to use outside the building? I am actually the state e-rate coordinator for public libraries here in Nebraska, so I do handle it. And TV White Space is actually not e-rate eligible. And it has to do with exactly what you mentioned in your question, being outside of sending the internet outside the building. e-rate does still have the restriction that it must be used in the eligible location in the school and in the library. The fact that sometimes your Wi-Fi does go outside the walls and down, you mentioned people sitting in your parking lot accessing it. That's okay, but this is something specifically for the purpose of extending the internet beyond the library that does not meet the e-rate requirements. They did do a pilot project back in 2011-12 with lending out hot spots, internet hot spots. The FCC did to see how that would work, but they did not then use that information to add it to the e-rate eligible services and say, okay, yes, you can provide internet beyond the walls of the school or library. So at the moment TV White Space would not, if you are getting your internet and then sending it out using this, you cannot get e-rate on that internet anymore because you'd be providing it outside of the library's walls. So any of the costs for putting up the antennas and everything and all that equipment is not e-rate eligible because of where it's getting sent out. Crystal, may I add to that or even take a slight exception to it? TV White Space has zero cost to it. This is just open spectrum equipment. Exactly, and so while that may not yet be eligible, there's no prohibition itself against the use of TV White Space. It's the interpretation of how it's being used, and our position on this is that it is eligible under the Ancillary Use Clause. Ancillary use, and as the e-rate coordinator, you can certainly correct me here, but we developed with a grant from the Knight Foundation a year before last a legal opinion with one of the leading e-rate law firms in D.C. saying that if the use is considered ancillary, which means a very small amount of the bandwidth or the data at the library is being used in other ways, it can be considered ancillary and therefore eligible, which also says if it's too difficult to calculate what that is, for one reason or another, then it's also ancillary. Which part is extending beyond, yeah. Yeah, so that's our position that it is eligible. It doesn't hurt your eligibility, shall we say, in your current e-rate applications to use this in that circumstance. And our baseline for this is that even if the libraries don't have gig fiber today, they're designated for that. And as a fraction of a gigabit, you know, a few tens of megabits, you know, 10 megabits is 1% of a gigabit. 100 megabits is only 10%, which we would consider small ancillary. So these are really small amounts of the bandwidth to allocate for this kind of ancillary use. And then also the remote locations we are encouraging libraries to think of as library properties. You know, it's a physical library service space. Now I know there's a lot of, you know, it gets much more ambiguous about what that is, but a library kiosk would definitely be a library property, like a bookmobile would be a library property. How about a book corner in the city hall? So these kinds of interpretations kind of get up at the edge of what's possible. We think the ancillary interpretation is solid. Right. And actually, Tom didn't made the comment as well that if the remote locations are eligible locations, like you said, another branch of the library or the school or the bookmobile or some of the location that you then say to e-rate is, this is one of our places, then of course, yes. There you go. There you go. Good point. So there are ways. So be ambitious about that. We've gotten encouragement from the FC all of our meetings to be more assertive in these interpretations. Now the checkout hotspots is an ongoing service fee, and I can appreciate that's a different thing. Right, right. And you did explain the difference to that earlier, yeah. And just like you said, how you described with Manhattan, Kansas, getting the TV white space and then that showed what the demand was for the fiber. Same thing with FCC and e-rate is if we keep asking for it and they see that it's a demand, that's how they change. Every year the rate eligible services are changed or reviewed every single year. And if they keep seeing applications or things saying, hey, we're looking for this, they will look at them and see, oh wait, maybe we need to rethink and add that in. I mean, when e-rate first started back in 97, 98, a lot of this, everything we have now didn't exist, obviously. It's a fluid thing, so it doesn't hurt to put in things that you're not sure and if they get enough, they'll, something, you know, it'll set off notices and alarms somewhere. Well, we're saying it doesn't require them to do any interpretations at all. There may be a challenge and then it would become that. But we're saying today, it qualifies not the equipment yet, but the spectrum certainly does and supporting the same thing. Some providers will be looking into, well, how do we pay that, how much it costs for the equipment and that. They're always looking for ways. All right, so any other questions coming in? We're just at a little after 11 o'clock. Anybody have any last minute questions you want to desperately ask of Kristen and Don before we wrap up for today? We do have a just comment saying, thanks, excellent webinar from Tom. Thanks, Tom. I have been throughout the show grabbing any of the links that you have mentioned, the links to the video. I already had somebody ask about that video because it's a very good, concise couple of minute introduction to how this all works that you can share with your community, your stakeholders, whoever that you want to pitch this to. And the website and the class that Kristen has going, all of that is I've been adding links to our delicious account here so you'll be able to have easy access to those afterwards with recording of the show. One point on raising money. I think this is often a question. We had one project in Southwest Colorado, small town. They were running a trial project and they had set it up a couple of remotes on Main Street in their city park, which was supporting the market, which wasn't expected use. It was really valued, but they had their budget cut just in the middle of the trial project. And so they didn't have money to buy the $6,000 system. So what they did was start, use a Kickstarter to raise the money to buy the equipment. And in 20 days, they had raised the money and not only raised the money, but they had raised awareness in the community that the library was getting busy helping serve the community. And so it was a great story. There's so many ways like that now that you raise some funds on things like that, yeah. If you're determined, you'll be able to find a way. Absolutely. All right, it does not look like anybody typed in any other new questions to us, so I think we won't wrap it up for today's show. Thank you very much everyone for attending. Thank you, Kristen and Don. That was a really good explanation of this. I have to admit, when I've heard about TV White Space here and there, and hadn't spent enough time as I should have investigating what it is, now I am definitely more on top of how to promote it. I knew it was a new way, easy. But now I can actually talk about it if I wanted to myself. I know what you mean. People hear it and they go, oh no, not another entry into the alphabet soup of telecommunications. I do not want to hear about it. Look at it a little bit. It gets interesting. All right, I'm going to pull back screen control to my monitor now here. There we go. And there's my screen now. As I said, here is the Gigabit Libraries website, and I have put into our delicious account. Let's see if I can make sure it's going to show here. Links to this and the class, the video that you had. There is a video link on YouTube. So all of these you'll be able to access afterwards when we put up the recording of today's show. And the recording will go on here is our, this is the page for today's show, but this is our Encompass Live website, pretty easy, nlc.demoraska.gov. You can also Google us, search us anywhere online. So far this is the only thing called Encompass Live. So type that in, you'll find our show. We have our upcoming shows listed here, but right here underneath, I want to show you is where our archives will be posted. This is our last week's show, Build a Better World. It was about our upcoming summer reading program. We have a link to the recording, presentation slides, and this one is to Hannah, but then down here links to all the websites. And Kristen, if you send me the slides or post them somewhere yourself, we can link to that for people. Definitely, yeah, I'll definitely send this to you. We have a slide share account that we use for that. So when the recording is available, I'll let everybody know. It should be sometime later this afternoon as long as YouTube cooperates and does things quickly. So that will wrap it up for today's show. I hope you join us next week on our topic is Conversation Circles, a simple ESL program. This is about a really interesting program that's done at Los Alamos County Libraries in New Mexico. We have English Conversation Circles trying to get patrons who want to practice speaking, live speaking English with other people. So Elizabeth Rivera from that library will be with us next week to talk about their program, see if that's something you might want to get started in your library. So please do sign up for that and any of our other upcoming shows. I do have things scheduled for the first date in April. I'm just waiting for confirmation on the description for that and May dates coming up, so always keep an eye on our schedule. We are here on the calendar adding new topics all the time. Also Encompass Live is on Facebook. We do have a link here to our Facebook page, which I've got over here. So if you are a big Facebook user, do give us a like. We post updates to what's going on in the show right here this morning. I posted a reminder to log in on the fly for people. When our recording is available, I post in here. There we go. Reminders about the next show. It's recording from last week's. So if you are using Facebook a lot, do like us over there and keep up with what's going on with the show. Other than that, that wraps it up for this morning's Encompass Live. Thank you very much everyone and we'll see you next time on the show. Bye. Thank you so much. Bye-bye. Thanks a lot Kristen and Don. You go beyond the walls of Nebraska for sure. I heard about this from Bangladesh. Someone in Bangladesh told me about this. I mean of course I knew about it. They heard about it. We do. We do have people, even today as you show in the intro slides, registered attendees from all over the country. These kind of webinars do go out to anyone who wants to attend. We're free and open to anybody. All sorts of varying topics. You have someone online just saying they're logged in from Kansas. Not as far as Bangladesh. Some attendees from outside of the country and some presenters have been known as well, Canada, Britain. Well, great job. This is really well done. Thank you. Thank you.