My questions for Hacker News are:
1. Does the posting look realistic?
2. Does it describe someone who could get a community broadband network built?
3. How can the County get qualified people to apply?
I've been pushing on this issue since 2011. I went so far as serving on the County Board of Public Utilities and becoming its Chair in 2015. Finding that the Board had no authority over the issue, I turned to political organizing and set up the website blabnow.blog. On that site, you can see what I think we need a Broadband Manager to do at https://www.blabnow.blog/los-alamos-broadband-manager-positi...
Beyond asking for thoughts on the Broadband Manager position, I would like to read general comments on:
4. How to get local governments to take responsibility for modern communication utility monopolies?
The thing that would pop up as #1 for me is access to poles to run fiber. If this killed Google Fiber it can definitely kill a smaller upstart.
There are gatekeepers who limit this access and they work for the county, in the permit office. The incumbents have a relationship with these people, and if they don't you better believe that their folks will start building one as soon as your project is announced. All your local contractors currently supporting Comcast are also not on your side.
It is in these people's best interest to see your project die. To make things worse, they don't have to work very hard to make it happen. All they have to do is sit on a permit application long enough to cast doubt on the project. Whereas the broadband manager has a huge hill to climb in comparison: they would have to build a relationship with all the people blocking their progress or figure out how to sidestep them.
So the person you are looking for should have high-caliber government sales skills. Good luck finding someone like that who also has a masters degree in CS and will work for 140k. This person can make millions in commissions in enterprise IT sales and they know it.
I looked at some major carriers maps, and it looks like you are going to need to trench at least 25-30 miles of fiber along 502 and 84 to reach the Zayo fiber running along 25 south of Santa Fe.
THe Nuclear Security Administration is in the process of laying a second fiber path to the lab up there, and while you have zero chance of piggy backing on a DoE fiber line the planning documents might be helpful in figuring out what is viable and what isn't. https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2020/04/f74/final...
(Feel free to email me if you need further help, it is in my profile)
It depends on the cost of life in your area. Here in western europe, 140k€/year is almost unheard of for a public servant (except for a few specific, very corrupt branches of public service).
But i believe having a single person responsible for both the infrastructure and the human networking/sales is a dead end. As long as you have support from other local public utilities a less-skilled "liaison officer" (with some understanding of the technical issues) could be a separate job, or even integrated into another job posting (eg. infrastructure commission).
The hardest part for starting a local ISP is getting permission to use infrastructure to lay fiber and put antennas. If you have cooperation from local public services, you're already 80% of the way and the rest is just throwing a little money at public servant who are convinced about public service and the utility of public infrastructure.
If you just employ any commercial sysadmin, you'll get the same problems all commercial ISPs face: an inadequate network disconnected from the actual needs of the people below. Network architecture should be achieved with consent and feedback from the local communities. For example that's what the Scani.fr cooperative has been doing here in France in partnership with local city halls and smaller communities.
One thing to keep in mind is an architecture for a public service is pretty different from an architecture for a private commercial project. Commercial ISPs optimize for selling as many subscriptions as possible, making it artificially harder/crappier to share connections. When you're running a public project, you're trying to break even (plus save some money for hardware renewal and future investments), but trying to make profits is antithetical to your goals. Here's a few pieces of advice, feel free to take or ignore:
- router freedom: you should enable all clients to run their own hardware if they wish
- ouf-of-the-box router acquisition: for clients who don't understand (and don't want to) network settings, still have a commercial "box" offering for 2€/mo or paying the hardware cost upfront
- public IPs and reverse DNS: since some of your clients will want to selfhost their infra, you need (free or really cheap) options for that
- your routers should support multiple multiple client connections on a single uplink, so that people in more remote communities who share uplink (eg. wireless over >10km) can still benefit from advanced features ; as much as a i despise legal responsibility for the person on the lease, this enables people to share their connections without becoming liable for what other people do with it (not sure if that's a concern in USA, but definitely a concern in France)
- you should setup a "public access" program so that local cities/communities can request shared internet access for librairies and other public places; setting up public wifi networks is a "hard" problem for them and contractors ask for crazy amounts (dozens of thousands of euros for just a few access points)
- your network should serve as educational tool: partner with local associations, high schools, universities and companies so you can take trainees to learn all about network infrastructure... Internet is a public good but lack of access to infra/knowledge is often a barrier to get people to maintain that infrastructure
- two kinds of people may be very interested in early access to your network: people who don't have broadband yet in their communities (because commercial ISPs can't bother to serve them), and organizations with broadband but bad service (usually due to bad routers, or lack of advanced network features) ; the former is easy to get connected for cheap using wireless links (given permissions to lay antennas on high points), while the latter has more money upfront to develop your fiber local loop, which in turn helps develop the network to reach more users elsewhere
- human proximity/support is the most important part of public service, no matter how wrong things can go, having actual humans facing you to tell you all about what went wrong and how they're fixing it is very valuable... commercial ISPs are well known to crap on their customers, local communities and regulators. if you plan to open a public service internet access, there should be 7/7 support (not 24/24, except maybe if some commercial clients are willing to pay big bucks for that) and an actual physical location you can visit in person in case your phone service is down, or you need to bring damaged equipment, or you'd like an actual human being to face you to answer your questions
- social justice is an important part of public service: there should not be a huge wage gap between the different workers ; ideally, there would be equal pay for all, but that can be a tough sell to your local government (who can sometimes be as corrupt and greedy as national governments) ; in any case, noone should have more than twice the pay of the lowest-paid workers (including cleaning staff), because that's good for morale and cohesion of the team reducing competition and envy and fostering cooperation for the benefit of the entire project ; support staff in particular should have technical background/formation (unlike commercial ISP support staff who doesn't know shit and just gets in the way) and decent working conditions, they are the primary interface between the service and the customers, and having happy/knowledgeable support staff is one of the top criteria to ensure happy clients and good service
There would be plenty more to say about economical models and political concerns, but i think that's already a lot to go through. Good luck with your project, it's a pretty cool one! And don't forget to partner with local non-profits/coops/schools, they can be an invaluable source of insight/feedback into how to do things well given a local context.
It there any perspectives of game-changing in that field? And what can be done to change it?
I'm genuinely curious about it.
The thing is, Google refused to pay bribes. Had they spent to the tune of a couple million in "campaign donations", the opposition would have collapsed.
1. Not realistic, but not outside of normal for an management infrastructure/ops position. What you are writing is what you hope for, but sometimes it sends a red flag to potential applicants. The worry many high level people have is that they will be turned into the 'do everything' person. Trim a few of the less directly related requirements off of the description (e.g. Microsoft certification).
2. Yes... but also No. There are a lot of people who push through their careers collecting credentials and turning it another rung on the ladder. Chances are you will get a rosy candidate at some point, who will put in two years of aggressively spending your budget to inflate their resume and then move on. Not that a majority of people are this way, but the filters are set in such a way that this is what you are likely to end up with.
3. Other comments will say 'pay more', but it will be difficult to meet market rates for this skillset when working with local governments. If you can't get approval to raise the comp, instead try to split this role up into a team. Governments won't pay one highly skilled person 250k, but they will pay four people 80k, and one manager 120k.
4. Politically? Find someone with pull, and make sure that it's 'their idea'. Something that they can put on their win list.
Procedurally? Don't boil the ocean. Handle it iteratively. Start with commercial areas and new housing developments. White-glove your initial smaller install and it will create the broad demand from the community to expand it.
Love what you are doing. Hope this helps.
https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/1-_beds/?searchQuerySt...
How can we change this? As a taxpayer, I'd be perfectly happy allocating some of my tax dollars to pay efficiency wages in situations like the one in this post, where hiring someone with specialized skills can save the community millions of dollars.
However, there are only 470 of these positions in the whole government. Congress allocated the positions through the budget process, so call your representative and suggest they approve more (you could also mention SL, the non-STEM version of ST). Agencies are always asking for more senior-level headcount, the limiting factor is what Congress will approve.
I’m just weary from trying to fight horrible broadband providers blocking every step of the way. Maybe the answer is to go over their heads.
This won't answer your immediate questions, but they've been heavily involved in getting startups to move to small communities. Municipal broadband is a big part of that, and I believe some of them worked on those efforts in Vermont.
Try talking with Allan and Mariela Saenz at Los Alamos Network, losalamosnetwork.com.
My blog is still there at fiberlanm.blogspot.com.
My home Internet connection is through Los Alamos Network.
I believe that the Carson Electric Co-Op in Taos uses REDInet to provide an Internet option to their customers.
I heard for years that the San Ildefonso prevented us from connecting to REDInet. Then Alan told me that he and Comcast and everyone else buys capacity on the link that Lumen operates for LANL.
We need a someone employed by Los Alamos County who knows what's going on.
I moved to Camp Verde, Arizona. Things were even worse here, but the small cable company sold out to Suddenlink out of Round Rock, Texas, and that sold out to Altice, from France, and I think Suddenlink here is similar to Comcast in Los Alamos. There's nobody like Allan, and cable's fatal flaw is that upload speeds are capped at 10 Mbits/sec. I paid over $300 a month for a couple of years for less, and now pay about $130 for 50 down, 8 up. Sigh.
Trouble is, if you offer gigabit, or even 200 megabit, symmetric, for a few hundred customers, you need 40 gig or 100 gig upstream, and that's a big-city thing. Citylink in Albuquerque does have that, and I suspect LANL does, too, though I'm not in touch with them the past 8 or 9 years.
Also, for WFH (work from home) for LANL, within the county or from Taos through Belen, there's still the fact DOE (Department of Energy) really, really wants all LANL traffic to go through ESnet (Energy Sciences) so latency that could be microseconds inside town becomes at least 70 milliseconds. That makes a huge difference in how useful it is.
Other nearby resources are Jane Hill and Cybermesa in Santa Fe, Richard Loewenberg and his first mile mailing list, also in Santa Fe and John Brown at Citylink in Albuquerque. The subscription web page for 1stmile is:
https://pharrowtech.com/news/pharrowtech-telenet-and-unitron...
The trial is expected next year. Follow up on it and consider it later on. It could bring down the cost to a fraction and has an expected bandwith of 1Gbit/s per person.
That article you linked is marketing speak.
You should check about where it came from. It's a spinoff from Imec. Which is one of the most unknown R&D companies in the semiconductor area for the public ( Eg. ASML is similar, but ASML is a for-profit)
https://madned.substack.com/p/thin-pipe-part-i
https://madned.substack.com/p/thin-pipe-part-ii
They probably have lots of contacts.
I think the long game that local politicians miss (or are financially motivated to not see) is that broadband is becoming as important to communities as roads. It facilitates lowering the costs of so many things, benefits companies+individuals+government, improves equality of access+opportunity, on and on.
If you know people who might be interested in the Broadband Manager position, please tell them about it.
>> "Verizon 5G Home Internet, meanwhile, is a fixed wireless access service (FWA) powered by 5G Ultra Wideband that provides ultra-fast Wi-Fi connections to the home."
[1] https://www.verizon.com/5g/home/ [2] https://www.t-mobile.com/isp
Also, consider looking at https://godigitalmarin.org/ on what they've done.
https://www.whipcityfiber.com/
They got municipal fiber to their town and then started providing services to other towns in Massachusetts to do the same. All the tiny towns around my slightly larger town have gigabit fiber now for $79/month while I'm stuck at 25% of that for the same price from Comcast (my town is "fully serviced" by Comcast and thus not eligible).
Step 1) Hire somebody who has experience running a facilities based last mile gigabit class ftth isp. Sorry to say your job posting requirements and duties doesn't look anything like that right now.
Step 2) Have that person recruit the rest of the team
