“We are seeing much more inclusiveness in Kansas City,” said Rick Usher, Assistant City Manager of Kansas City, Missouri. Usher was referring to the approach that Google has taken whereby deployment of fiber is going to neighborhoods where there is demand. With support of the cities, non-profits and local businesses, there is a concerted effort to bring gigabit broadband to those who otherwise might be left behind and to create a demand in those neighborhoods.
Technology seems to be the least of the challenges to getting to all potential customers. Things such as credit worthiness and availability of devices are critical for adoption and Usher explains community efforts to solve these challenges. He points out how one organization, KC Digital, led a crowd-sourcing effort to help those who couldn’t afford the $10 application fee required to be express interest in being part of a Google Fiberhood.
An organization that formed around the same time and was inspired by the excitement surrounding Google Fiber, Connecting for Good, is using the Google Fiber platform as a backbone of sorts uses a mesh WiFi network to provide no-cost Internet access to low-income people in public housing projects [edited on 6/15/13 to reflect corrections pointed out by Connecting for Good founder, Michael Liimatta] . Additionally, this organization refurbishes donated computers and supplies them at low-cost to the people in these communities.
Usher points out that one of the early lessons is that economic development is directly related to bandwidth and that they are learning what it means to be a gigabit city. Things such as hackathons have been one way to discover applications that turn the raw bandwidth into something meaningful. As Usher indicates, Google’s involvement is much more than that of a provider of bandwidth, “Google has become a part of the community.”
2013 Broadband Communities Summit coverage brought to you by the Matrix Design Group and M3 Multifamily Media Management.
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