The Next Generation Network Connectivity Handbook: Top Ten Overall Lessons

On July 21, 2015, Gig. U and the Benton Foundation published a comprehensive guide for communities who want better broadband for their residents and businesses. The Next Generation Connectivity Handbook: a Guide for Community Leaders Seeking Affordable Abundant Bandwidth is an indispensable tool in lowering the initial, daunting information barrier for cities just beginning to navigate critical Internet infrastructure issues. Today, we share the Handbook’s Top Ten Overall Lessons drawing on the experiences of 25 Gig.U communities who have worked on this issue for many years.

Lesson 1: Organizing community resources and stakeholders is essential for making gigabit projects economically viable.
Lesson 2: Start with a clear understanding of how your city’s rules and assets affect deployment costs.
Lesson 3: Because it takes a long time to plan and deploy a network -- and it always takes longer than you think -- the right time to start thinking about how to improve the economics is today.
Lesson 4: Incumbents only respond to a potential change in the status quo. Inaction by a city leads to inertia in the market.
Lesson 5: Cities who act will have to choose between the quick, short-term win and the harder, longer-term win.
Lesson 6: While success depends upon broad support, it also depends on nimble decision-making.
Lesson 7: There is no one-size-fits-all solution. There are multiple solutions to multiple community needs with multiple trade-offs. But all efforts improve the situation relative to the status quo.
Lesson 8: Experiments don’t always work the first time. That’s why they are called experiments. Make sure the community leadership understands this and that there is a path for “lessons learned” to improve performance in successive iterations.
Lesson 9: Scale matters.
Lesson 10: Above all, local leadership is the single most important ingredient for success. If there are local leaders who put this at the top of their agenda, it can happen. If not, it won’t.