Hold Your Horses Baltimore

by Elias Shams
In response to Google announcement last month about their plan to build and deliver high-speed broadband networks to every home in the nation, the city of Baltimore is putting  the local technology entrepreneur Tom Loveland as its volunteer “Google Czar”. Tom, the CEO of IT strategy and application design firm Mind Over Machines will work with the office of Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake as the city applies to become one of a small number of test cities for Google’s new ultra high-speed Internet service.

Google has been seeking volunteer cities for their high-speed hookup tests since the announcement. Certainly, the competition between the cities will turn into bidding war soon. Funny thing is all the mayors across our nation have already started creating their Facebook fan pages for this including  City of Rochester with the fan page called “Hey Google, Make Rochester Faster”, Kansas City and Google,  Huntsville, Ala., with 5,729 fans, Ventura, Calif., with 1,320 fans.

Baltimore and most of these cities may want to think twice before they jump on this. Based on the research I have been doing; although, the project sounds exciting and promising, but Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake might want to make sure the city has enough cash in their coffer to allocate for this. She may also want to make sure the project has enough incentives  to help turn Baltimore into 21st Century digital hubs.

I am not sure if  Baltimore and other cities realize this is just an RFI (Request for Information). Google has already received plenty of submissions from the cities across the country.  Most likely, cities which provide the most economic incentives will be favored as likely hosts.  Google is not currently asking the cities to share in the cost of the network build out. But,  as cities across the country compete with each other to host the experiment, Google may cleverly get the cities to pick up more of the costs than they expected.

What if Google’s trials remain only an experiment? Google has spent a lot of money buying up dark fiber, meaning fiber that is not currently in use, some of it built up during the dot-com boom. But it’s not still clear that Google wants to be a network service provider.

Assuming the trail actually turns to a project and Google becomes a network service provider, the cities will end up supporting the implementation through access to currently installed fiber and other existing network resources, as well as property access, zoning assistance, permitting and regulatory facilitation. From what I know, zoning and permitting usually mean costs, a lot of costs.  So, cities may lose out on some potential revenue in their ardor to win the ultimate prize. Not to mention the challenges both Google and the host cities will potentially have to find another company to manage their fiber network.

The other interesting factor to monitor is the company, CLEAR who has already invested Billions on their WiMAX wireless technology in Baltimore area to provide broadband high-speed Internet access to the city.