[1st-mile-nm] Mea Culpa and Comment

[Arthur Maccabe]

Actually, I expect that we are closer to agreement than disagreement.   
My statement starts by focusing on infrastructure and transitions to  
providing services -- I really meant to emphasize services.  As you  
point out, the existence of physical infrastructure does not imply the  
existence of services.

I can't say that I am well versed in the specifics of the issues that  
you identify (shame on me since I've lived in the state for 25+  
years).  However, when I suggest that our challenge is to push service  
to the edge, I intend to include pushing through all obstacles that  
interfere with the delivery of services.  As you suggest, many of the  
obstacles will be financial and political only a precious few will be  
technical.

In case you're not fond of "pushing services to the edge," I have  
another way of expressing the sentiment  :) :)
     Making place irrelevant so that place can matter.
One of the things that defines New Mexico is that people tend to have  
a strong (social) connection to place.  However, economic  
considerations frequently make it difficult to maintain this  
connection (economies of scale tend to favor metropolitan areas).  The  
goal of connectivity is to reduce the negative economic impact for  
rural -- making place irrelevant.  Flattening the cost of connectivity  
is the first step.

If you don't like that one, I have another :) :)
     IT extension services
This one is from Dan Reed when he was in North Carolina.  NC turns out  
to be a very rural state with an economy based on tobacco, furniture  
and textiles (i.e., really bad things for their economic future).   
Dan's notion was to build a service infrastructure, based on the  
agricultural extension services model, that could support IT as an  
economic engine in the rural parts of NC.  The ag extension service  
model was successful because the service was pushed out to the edge,  
where everyone could take advantage of the service.

Now, we need to articulate the economies that will be enabled by the  
presence of IT extension services.  I think this is Peter's point.  In  
retrospect, it seems that it would have been easy to articulate the  
economies that would be enabled by ag extension services -- I doubt it  
was.  I expect that a review of the times would show that the  
development of ag extension services was very controversial step and  
that many of the initial attempts failed.  As long as I'm on the topic  
of economics, it's worth remembering that two of our most successful  
networks, the interstate highway system and the Internet, were not  
motivated by the economies that they enabled.




On Feb 12, 2008, at 10:45 AM, Marianne Granoff wrote:

> I agree with almost everything that you have said about NLR and I2,
> but I have to take exception to this last paragraph.  A great many
> of the rural areas of our state have more than adequate fiber
> deployment because the rural phone providers in this state have
> invested in fiber deployment for over 20 years.  For the most part,
> these rural LECs put their customers first.  On the other hand, some
> phone companies with dense population centers in NM put their money
> in 1) other states, 2) paying attorneys to fight regulation, 3)
> paying SEC fines for past bad behavior, 4) paying their high-priced
> executives' defense attorneys in criminal lawsuits, 5) paying for
> expensive media advertising saying how much better they are, 6) paying
> lobbyists to overturn consumer-oriented regulation at the State and
> Federal level, and 7) paying attorneys to fight with their customers.
>
> The challenge is not to "push" network services to the edge.  The
> challenge is to understand that the same services can be had in rural
> areas of NM today, but that such services will cost much more because
> the cost per person is more in rural areas.  I would offer that the
> solutions can be found by inviting the rural LECs to partner in some
> innovative ways instead of paying out-of-state consultants mega-bucks
> to find out what exists.
>
> I have never had a rural LEC in NM tell me I could not order a T1/DS1
> or a T3/DS3 (usually provisioned on fiber).  Our urban phone company
> has responded that they cannot provide even a DS1 on more than one
> occasion, unless I want to pay "construction costs".
>
> My two cents.
>
> Marianne Granoff
> NM Internet Professionals Association
>
>
>
> At 08:34 AM 2/12/2008 -0700, Arthur Maccabe wrote:
>
>> In the end, it's critical that New Mexico move forward in building
>> adequate communication infrastructure.  This is far more important in
>> New Mexico than in our neighboring states like Arizona or Utah where
>> population is much more centralized and they tend to ignore the rural
>> parts of the state.  I like to think  of our challenge as the need to
>> push (network) services to the edge.  As we go through this process,
>> there will be false starts.  We can spend our time complaining about
>> the problems that we have run into, or we can try to learn from
>> failures and move on -- there's clearly a lot more to do.

-- 
Barney Maccabe
Chief Information Officer (Interim)
Professor, Computer Science Department
University of New Mexico
(505) 277-8125  maccabe at unm.edu