David Olson, Director of the Cable Franchise Management Office, discusses open-access community fiber, and the City’s response to Google.
Here’s a great piece the Willamette Week did back in ’99 about David and the City’s battle with AT&T (now Comcast). You’ll note the similarities between what we face now, with no fiber in Portland while Verizon customers in Washington County have it, and the situation with slow broadband rollouts a decade ago.
At Sheldon Renan’s last Tuesday, Mary Beth Henry, Deputy Director City of Portland , and David Olson, Director of the Cable Franchise Management Office, told us that the city is ready. The resolution will fly through. And everything that a government needs to provide- plans, documents, infrastructure pictures, charts, maps and graphs.. man paper, organizations, everything that Google needs from governance is there. It has been since telecom throttled open access and Portland spent eight years in court with Comcast.
Google says, “As a first step, today we’re putting out a request for information (RFI) to help identify interested communities. We welcome responses from local government, as well as members of the public.” (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/think-big-with-gig-our-experimental.html)
What is required now is that we show Google what a difference their Google 1G testbed provides. This will be a huge weight in Google’s decisions. They will gather responses until March 26th. Tell them why this matter to Portland, to you.
Notes I took at the meeting about what areas will be especially relevant:
1) Our creative and technical reputation
2) Social factions of inclusiveness, collaboration, grass roots bottom up
3) Green power usage
4) Street cred for our use of bandwidth to build community
I frickin’ love this video. David is a very smart and capable apparatchik. Google needs to choose Portland just to work with him. He is a kick. If the Google thing doesn’t work out, he can always get a one man show.