Dig Once Sought at NTIA California Broadband Event

Fixing problems that California's rural areas have with broadband deployment requires an emphasis on the dig once initiative and everyone needs to work collaboratively, said Adelina Zendejas, California Department of Technology deputy director-Broadband and Digital Literacy Office. It will also take that collaboration of officials looking at how they can leverage as much funding as possible to pay for broadband deployment, she said.

Miguel Gamiño, San Francisco chief information officer, called dig once the least expensive way to build out a broadband network. By just being smarter on a couple of different aspects of building out broadband, officials can set themselves up to tackle the harder parts, such as rights of way, he said.

Officials need to clarify “access” to broadband and whether "95 percent of Californians connected” is determined by the whole state or by each county, said California Assembly member Jim Wood (D). If the definition is by state, then it won’t take much to get there, but going by county is a different story, he said. "Reaching 95 percent of people sounds great, but the reality is unless it's 95 percent in every county, we aren't going to come close to reaching this goal."

While the country's and state's more urban areas focus on gaining more speed in their broadband networks, areas such as Wood’s district in California's western region are struggling to just have access to any broadband, he said. Comparing his district's connectivity to traffic in the state's more congested areas, Wood said both are “barely moving” and “not pretty.”

Another struggle in California's rural areas is in getting broadband to schools. Wood said some schools just don’t have access and he's not sure about access in others because no one is reporting that information to the Assembly. “Those kids in some of the communities that have Internet access may get it at school or they may get it at the library, but when they go home to work on their homework and they need to get a Web-based application, they can't do it,” he said. "And if you're trying to fill out a college application and you're doing it on DSL or worse, you're going to be up at 2 or 3 in the morning trying to get enough bandwidth to pull it off and that's not really appropriate in this day and age."

In Santa Monica, one of the biggest struggles in getting consumers connected is assets, said Jory Wolf, the city's chief information officer. If the community had a power utility, it would have been easy to build out a network, but instead the city built its own network, which needed to have its own funding, he said. The fund allows the city to keep everything that comes with a broadband network -- from public Wi-Fi to public safety networks -- running, Wolf said. "Our biggest challenge is getting into the residential neighborhoods," he said. "The commercial sector has been very easy to penetrate because we already have lots of assets there."

The Yurok is one of the biggest Native American tribes in California -- with about 5,000 enrolled members -- but it is also one of the poorest tribes in the state because it doesn't have a lot of gaming or internal revenue, said Paul Romero, the tribe's information services director. Most of the tribal government's capital comes from grants, so to be able to build out broadband infrastructure, the Yurok has to apply for and receive those grants, he said. In the future, Romero said, the tribe will rely on things like the Lifeline program and USF to maintain its network. "I have to steal, borrow and beg to keep our broadband service operational," he said. "Once we move into the fiber, if we can't find enough partners to lease dark fiber from us, then it's going to be really difficult for us to maintain in operational state. Those are real fears we are looking at down the barrel of the gun and we are trying to figure out how to solve those."