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Sunriver responds to Google Fiber RFI

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

Last Friday, Sunriver joined an estimated 1,100 other cities and communities in responding to Google’s Fiber for Communities Request for Information (RFI). By now everyone has probably heard of the “Google fiber” initiative, with cities like Topeka, Kansas changing their name to Google, Kansas (if only symbolically), and mayors doing stunts like jumping into nearly frozen lakes in front of rolling YouTube cameras – all in hopes of gaining Google’s attention.

Sunriver took what we think is the “high road” – preferring to make a business case to Google. Our major selling points are:

Reach – for the cost of wiring 6,000 homes, Google would expose the benefits of gigabit fiber to over 1 million visitors per year. These visitors come for holidays and vacations, as well as business meetings and conferences based at Sunriver Resort. Compared to Topeka – Sunriver can reach 10 times the people at 1/10 the cost.
Shovel Ready – Sunriver is governed by an owner’s association (SROA) and owns and controls its own roads and utility rights of way. We are served by Chambers Cable – and Sunriver is the only cable system Chambers owns. The SROA board voted unanimously to approve the Google fiber project, and we have gotten enthusiastic support as well from Chambers Cable. Both entities are ready to “dig for Google” starting as soon as possible. We also have fiber to the node throughout the Chambers Cable system, and over 90 miles of conduit to over half of the homes.
Education – Sunriver is served by Three Rivers Elementary – a K-8 school in the Bend Lapine School District. Three Rivers has the slowest Internet connection in the district. In addition, over 62% of its students qualify for the federal free or reduced cost lunch program due to their family economic status. We are over 20 miles from the nearest higher education facility and high school students are bused 20 miles to Bend.
Telemedicine – Most medical services are over 20 miles away in Bend. Many of our retired residents end up moving to Bend as they grown older and need more medical care. Google’s RFI envisions “ sitting in a rural health clinic, streaming three-dimensional medical imaging over the web and discussing a unique condition with a specialist”.
Impact – Portland, Seattle and similar large cities have all applied as well. As many of us know, these are excellent cities and great places to “be from”. The impact of Google’s project on Sunriver will be immediate, large and very measurable. The impact on larger cities will be much less immediate, obvious or measurable.
Proximity to Google HQ – Sunriver has its own airport – which can support both business jets and turboprops. We are just an hour flight by jet from Google’s Mountain View headquarters.

Finally, TechSpace Bend came to our help and illustrated our need last week. We produced a 10 minute HD YouTube video as requested by Google, and I needed to upload the final cut to YouTube from Sunriver. I have a Qwest 6 mbps connection, but was getting horrible upload speeds that caused timeouts each time I tried. Thanks to Robert Kieffer I was able to come in to TechSpace and in about 20 minutes my upload was done! I am planning to sign up for TechSpace, and hope to be able to open the Sunriver branch of TechSpace later this year – when we get our Google Fiber of course!

Posted in General, government, Internet | 2 Comments »

How to Market Your Brand on Twitter (Part 2 of 2)

Sunday, October 11th, 2009

If you’re trying to figure out how Twitter can help your business, read on. We’ve covered the reasons why Twitter can be a useful marketing tool in Part 1 of this post, and now we’ll tell you how to take the next step.

How do I get started?

Begin with the basics. Get yourself a Twitter account and establish a presence for your brand. After all, it’s free!

Step 1: Go to Twitter.com and register your username.

Since this is for your business, your Twitter profile should represent your corporate brand, and should have a name that people will recognize if they see someone mention your business in a Tweet. For example, if I’m recovering from an intense workout @bendyoga, you know exactly which business I’m talking about, and my tweet will show up on their Twitter page because I’ve used their proper username. Likewise, if someone mentions @yourbusiness, that tweet will show up on your profile page. This is one of the key goals of your Twitter campaign: Have conversations with people about your brand.

Unfortunately, usernames on Twitter are similar to web site domain names. Most of the good ones are taken. For example, @thebulletin pulled off an amazing feat considering the vast number of newspapers across the world that use the same name. So hurry up, go get yours right now.

(more…)

Tags: twitter
Posted in General, Internet, Software | Comments Off

How to Market Your Brand on Twitter (Part 1 of 2)

Sunday, September 20th, 2009

If you’re trying to figure out how Twitter can help your business, read on. We’ll cover the reasons why Twitter can be a useful marketing tool and we’ll tell you how to do it.

Is Twitter really worth using for my business?

Let’s address the skepticism that many business owners have about social media. If you believe that Twitter is a fad, it’s only for kids, it isn’t applicable to your business, it might hurt your brand, or that you can’t measure the results, you should read the arguments against these concerns here.

Suffice it to say that most well known brands have an active presence in social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, or they are in the process of getting there. Why? Because that’s where the people are (and are probably talking about your brand already), the cost of involvement is lower than traditional marketing, and there aren’t many better ways to build loyalty and brand awareness within your customer base.

Here’s a short summary of why Twitter can be useful for your business: (more…)

Tags: twitter
Posted in Internet, Software | Comments Off

How to Find #Bend on Twitter

Saturday, July 25th, 2009

You’ve probably seen people use the # pound sign in Twitter posts, and maybe you’ve wondered what they’re for. They’re called hashtags, and they’re mighty useful.

What’s a # hashtag symbol mean?

A hashtag is a great way for people to organize around a topic on Twitter. Think of them as categories, or ‘tags’ that can be used to identify tweets related to specific topics.

For example, if you search for Bend (without a hashtag) on Twitter, you’ll probably get something like this:

Anything with the word “bend” was found. However, if you search for #Bend, you’ll find what you’re looking for:

Hey, it’s Bend, Oregon! If you’re looking for (or talking about) activities in Bend, use #inbend:

Ok, that’s cool.. so how do I search Twitter like that?

You’ve got a lot of options, but here are a few popular methods.

Twitter Search – it’s on the right hand side of the page when you go to your Twitter profile:

Topsy – nice search that sorts tweets by popularity:

And it shows top authors for a given topic, which is a good way to find people you might like to follow:

Another good search is Twubs, which shows related hashtags, like #centraloregon and #bendites:

If you prefer to browse, the Twubs homepage provides a nice index of hashtags by category:

Fantastic! Can anyone use hashtags?

Yes! You’ll find them especially useful for events, such as the #ppp or #ignite-bend. Go for it, and don’t be shy – help us give Bend a voice in the Twitterverse!

Next Post: How to Market #YourBrand on Twitter

Tags: search, twitter
Posted in Internet, Software | 2 Comments »

Broadband – A Government-Provided Utility?

Friday, April 24th, 2009

IndyWeek.com has a great article about the city of Wilson, North Carolina and their efforts to develop a publicly owned broadband network. Wilson isn’t the first city to do something like this; in fact, as of April 2008, there were 44 government/municipal ISPs in the U.S. serving 60 cities. But what makes this interesting is how commercial ISPs – Time Warner Cable and Embarq DSL specifically – are reacting to this government-sponsored one-upsmanship. They’ve pushed legislation before the state government that effectively prohibits government-owned competition (not in so many words, but that’s the net effect.) But I won’t bore you with the details that are available elsewhere.

As you can imagine, this is the gateway to any number of intriguing discussions. Should Bend undertake a similar effort? Would cheap, government owned broadband help attract businesses to the area? Is broadband service really a utility? If so, how does it compare to other local utilities, such as Water and Sewer (hmm… flooding issues, anyone?). I could go on and on. But for now, let me just throw down a few bullets:

Wilson’s fiber network is funded with $28M in bonds
Wilcon population is 50K (compared to Bend’s 80K)
The “Fiber to the Home” council website has some great resources and whitepapers. This whitepaper [PDF] in particular is worth a read. In addition to the data on how many municipal ISPs there are, the paper includes these tidbits:
- No municipal ISP has yet “failed”
- Average “take rate” (%’age of potential subscribers that sign up) is 54%
- Most municipal business plans only require a 30-40% take rate to be profitable.
- Many municipalities report increases in home-based businesses, and increased attractiveness to businesses considering relocating to the area.
Our nearest public network is the one in Ashland (I think?)

One thing I don’t have a good feel for is what the interest for something like this would be locally. Bend Broadband has (IMHO) always been one of the better ISPs in the nation. Do we really need something like this? If so why? What would be the most relevant issues? (And what would it mean to have an ISP that was subject to the whim and mercy of voters???)

Posted in government, Internet | 2 Comments »

Bend’s French Connection

Monday, December 15th, 2008

The Le Web conference recently wrapped up their ’08 session (in Paris, fwiw). The news coming out of it has been interesting on a number of fronts, but one piece has attracted a lot of attention: Le Web founder and host, Loic Le Meur, and TechCrunch founder, Michael Arrington, have been on friendly terms up until recently, but they’ve started trading blows in a bit of a kerfuffle that started during the closing “Gilmore Gang” session. It’s an Us. (or U.S.) vs. Them debate about how the different cultures in Silicon Valley and France/Europe affect entrepreneurship. While watching the Gilmore Gang video, I was surprised to recognize the same insecurities in European tech entrepreneurs that I share with people here in Central Oregon – an acute awareness and sensitivity to the fact that, “we’re not Silicon Valley”.

It was a surprising epiphany, that Paris and Bend have this commonality, given how profoundly different the two cities are in pretty much all other aspects. It gave me a bit of hope that the debate might turn up a nugget or two of insight into the nature of the issues we face. Unfortunately the panel was populated entirely by Silicon Valley personalities, so insights were in short supply. It didn’t help that some of the overinflated egos on stage were knocking back wine at a good clip. It was entertaining (in the train-wreck-fashion that all Ugly Americans are), but not insightful.

Let me try to nurse at least a little wisdom from the discussion and do a quick rundown of the issues as I see them. I doubt these will come as a surprise to any of you, but maybe some speculation as to how they might apply to the European startup community will turn up something useful … (more…)

Tags: bend, culture, silicon valley, Startups
Posted in Internet, Startups | 2 Comments »

The GigaOm Whitepaper on ISP Bandwidth Caps

Sunday, October 5th, 2008

A newly released GigaOm whitepaper by Muaayyad Al-Chalabi talks about an issue near and dear to our hearts here in Central Oregon – the trend by ISPs toward bandwidth-based pricing. Bend Broadband recently switched to just such a plan. As one of their customers and as a participant in the lively discussion that preceeded the new plan taking effect, it was with more than a little interest that I read the paper.

This paper was only recently released and makes several arguments about why such plans may be harmful to customers and ISPs alike. Since it comes from a fairly well known/respected website it will likely be oft-quoted in future debates on the subject. It seemed worth bringing this paper to your attention since it touches on some good points at the center of this issue and provides some interesting data. However I would be remiss if I didn’t also point out what appear to be a few of the fundamental flaws in reasoning used by the Author …

On Power Users & Scale Free Networks

A large part of the paper is given to a discussion of “power users” (the top 1% of bandwidth users) and how they act as “hubs in a scale free network”. Unfortunately the Author shows a surprising lack of comprehension not only of the nature of the problems that ISPs face, but of some pretty fundamental computer science concepts. In the example given in figures 1 & 2, the author claims a more hub-like network structure (figure 2) is 60% more “efficient”. This is incorrect – the structure has 60% fewer “routes” for data to travel, but does not reduce the amount of bandwidth required. Each route simply carries more data, so the system is at best the same when talking about the issue of bandwidth caps. (In fact, it’s probably worse due to the effects of uneven bandwidth usage on the “last mile problem“.)

The paper also claims that power users are critical hubs in social networks. However there is no substantiation for that claim, and given that social networks (e.g. MySpace, FaceBook, Twitter, and Linked In) are not inherently bandwidth intensive, it’s not clear what relevence this would have even if it were true.

On Trends and Pricing

One point the paper makes, that is irrefutable, is that household bandwidth consumption will be increasing in coming years. This is absolutely true. However the author incorrectly assumes that ISPs won’t be adjusting their price model over time. He combines the fairly conservative plan that Time Warner is experimenting with (5GB cap, $1/GB over) with Cisco’s prediction that in 4 years the average household will consume 200GB/month and concludes that users will be paying an average of $215/month in 2012. The likelihood of this happening is essentially zero. Demand from users, and competition from other ISPs will force companies to raise caps and lower pricing on a regular basis. We’ve already seen the effect of consumer pressure here in Oregon where Bend Broadband increased their cap from 20GB to 100GB in response to customer demand, even before their plan took effect. Thus, the $215/month figure would seem to be pretty meaningless – there are too many unknown factors unaccounted for.

[Update, Oct 6, 2008: Tom Lee over at TechDirt is a bit harsher in his criticism, and points out basically the same flaws.]

Posted in Internet | Comments Off