BRIDGING THE CUMBERLAND GAP

Tired of getting nowhere in its dealings with Verizon, a local Maryland government takes on broadband by forming its own telecom provider, Allconet. By running the carrier like any other utility, this town is hoping to form a template for other frustrated small communities--and give the Bell company a run for its money.

Nestled in the foothills of the Appalachians is Cumberland, the county seat of Allegany County, where a few local government engineers have hatched a plan to bring broadband to the Maryland community. Frustrated by their dealings with Verizon Communications and searching for an economic development tool, the municipal governments have taken matters into their own hands. They've decided to make broadband access a public utility, bypassing incumbent carriers entirely. And they're doing it over the airwaves.

The Allegany County Net, or Allconet, is a completely self-reliant network provider that will ink its own agreements with ISPs to offload traffic onto the public Internet. The county will build Allconet using equipment from three vendors: point-to-multipoint base stations from Alvarion (formerly BreezeCom), a Sonet ring from DMC Stratex Networks and point-to-point backhaul equipment from Marconi. The county also plans to become the local high-speed provider for its residents, running the local broadband pipe as if it were a gas or water utility.

The local government spent years trying to negotiate terms with Verizon to provide broadband infrastructure at reasonable prices, said Jeff Blank, Allconet's supervisor of microcomputing and networking. But because of its small size, the county made no headway. Faced with the closing of its smokestack industries, Allegany County, like many other communities, wanted to try its hand at luring high-tech and biotech businesses that were fleeing the bigger metro areas on the Eastern seaboard. But without any kind of data infrastructure in place, attempts were futile.

“We're 150 miles from the nearest major city,” Blank said. “We're so small, we're completely off the radar scope. The only thing for us to do was build our own carrier-class network.”

That may sound like an overreaching conclusion, but Allegany County is unique among its rural brethren. It already had a complex broadband wireless network in place to serve its government offices and schools. Built in 1996, the point-to-point radio network links 95 government buildings, creating a network of 4000 individual workstations to include a computer in every school classroom. Compared with other rural counties, many of Allegany's residents already were used to high levels of bandwidth, especially its students.

With government offices already grounded in wireless through the point-to-point network, the county's first thought was to lay fiber. But it hit a stumbling block. Connecting the county's sparse, widespread populace with fiber would have cost $180 million. By comparison, the radio buildout will cost the county between $2.9 million and $5 million, most of which the county plans to raise through state grants, Blank said. With that investment, Allconet will be able to offer 85% of the county's population, 95% of its businesses and 100% of its business parks broadband access.

For consumers, each base station will transmit 360° on the 2.4 GHz unlicensed frequencies offering 3 Mb/s of capacity. For business customers, Allconet will transmit from the same base stations using the 5.8 GHz frequency to offer up to 60 Mb/s of capacity.

The network would have the same reliability as any commercial network, Blank said, from the self-healing capabilities of the Sonet ring to diesel generators at every base station site for backup power. Blank and three other engineers will run the network, each representing one of the four government entities behind Allconet: the school board, the city of Cumberland, county government and the public library.

Stratex officials, who are providing the radios forming the Sonet ring, said they haven't seen a network like it yet. Used to dealing with carriers and large enterprises working on much larger scales, Stratex essentially is building the same carrier-class infrastructure and self-healing architecture it would build for a major data carrier, except it's for a small county government, said Stuart Little, director of solutions marketing for Stratex, formerly Digital Microwave.

“They're literally breaching the digital divide,” Little said. “We hope this type of model will be effectively repeated.”

It looks like Little might not have to wait long for that repeat. Neighboring counties have begun following Allegany's progress closely, Blank said, especially when they heard Allconet will be able to lease a DS-3 for $3500 per month, while its equivalent in the high-tech corridor of northern Virginia runs $14,500. Maryland isn't alone, either. Several other local municipalities in the U.S. have taken on their communities' broadband needs. But most of them have opted to do it using fiber.

“There are a lot of cities that are being overlooked for broadband, places the RBOCs have chosen to ignore,” said Andy Fuertes, broadband wireless analyst for Allied Business Intelligence. “A lot of the cities want to bring in new business but can't without broadband infrastructure. Some of them feel it's their civic duty to provide broadband services to the community, just like commerce or education.”

Fuertes said that while there is one other community in Roseville, Minn., that has deployed commercial services locally, Allegany County's network is fairly rare. But he expects that more will follow their examples, especially as broadband becomes more ubiquitous in metro centers while rural and far suburban areas are left behind.

So far, Verizon appears to have ignored Allegany County's project, but that hasn't impaired its funding requests in the Maryland legislature. Analysts said Verizon's indifference is no surprise because there's no profit for high-speed data in a small town like Cumberland. And the Bell companies are unlikely to start paying attention any time soon, said Abby Christopher, senior analyst for Ovum.

“It's simply a question of margins, and the fact is that the margins aren't there in these rural counties,” Christopher said. “From the RBOCs' perspective, they have no reason to put in new COs or deploy DSL. And what services they do offer are due to federal law. They're simply following the letter of the law, but they aren't doing anything else.”

In the case of Allconet, the local government may just be taking pressure off Verizon to provide more advanced services to rural communities, especially if they can provide those same services with the help of public grants, Christopher said. Under the Bush administration, there will be even less pressure to cross that digital divide, she added. Despite President Bush's promises to bring broadband to the masses, his public policy initiatives have been to take regulatory pressure off of the Bell companies.

Allconet might become the model for tiny communities unable to gain ground with their local exchange carriers. If those communities follow Allconet's example using wireless technologies, it may have the additional benefit of reviving the ailing broadband wireless industry, Christopher said.

Still, Allconet sticks by its belief that it has stood up to the monopolistic might of Verizon. While he hasn't heard a complaint from Ma Bell yet, Blank said the Bell company's attitude may change if Allconet is successful. If the county excels at luring industry to its small community, and if the county gets a sizable part of its population on broadband access, Verizon may start getting nervous.

Said Blank: “That's going to be a major loss of revenue for Verizon no matter how you look at it.”