We Must Anchor Our Communities With Fiber

I've recently learned that there's still some debate going on as to whether or not all community anchor institutions need fiber. Let's put that to rest here and now.

Before going any further, let me admit upfront that I understand that we might not be able to bring fiber to every community anchor institution in the country. In some limited circumstances, point-to-point wireless technologies like microwave may be the best or only option for getting these buildings connected. But the point still stands that they all need access to fiber-like speeds.

When I say "fiber-like speeds" I mean bandwidth that starts at 100Mbps and goes up from there. The reasons for needing this much capacity are clear and manifold.

Take schools, for example. A few weeks ago, I wrote a post that laid out a simple equation: to support one classroom with 20 computers that each want to access an HD video stream encoded at 8Mbps from PBS's archives requires 160Mbps of simultaneous bandwidth.

The really important thing to take away from this example is that unlike residential broadband, where there's an assumption that not everyone will be online at the same time, in schools there's the likelihood that everyone will be wanting to get online simultaneously as they're all in class at the same time. And in fact I'd hope that every computer lab is being used all the time since most schools have far fewer computers than students.

But what about those schools that have embraced the concept of one laptop per child? I've heard of schools like that in the US today. So how do you support 1,000 kids in the same building with 1,000 computers all trying to get online at the same time?

Putting aside what capacity would be needed so they could all stream HD video, to simply surf the Internet each computer needs at least 1Mbps to have a reasonable experience, where more time is spent learning rather than waiting for pages to load.

So 1,000 computers at 1Mbps each means that school needs at least 1Gbps today.

Going even further, the high school I went to, which was large but not the biggest in the Minneapolis suburbs, had more than 2,000 students. If they were able to equip every student with a laptop, they'd need more than 2Gbps.

These are the fiber-like speeds that schools need to support today's applications, let alone tomorrow's. Imagine if those 2,000 computer-toting students all want to start streaming HD video to supplement their classes! Soon we're talking about a single school needing 10Gbps+ of bandwidth, which only fiber can reliably deliver.

But schools aren't the only community anchor institutions that need fiber. Let's consider hospitals.

In a hospital you're somewhat less likely than schools to have everyone online at the same time, but what you do have a lot of is moving around big files like MRIs and CT scans combined with the urgent need to transfer data quickly.

Advanced imaging technologies are allowing doctors incredible new insight into the innerworkings of a patient's body, but to get that insight you need to handle very large files, often hundreds of megabytes. Here's a paragraph describing the range of files produced by digital imaging technologies:

"Medical image quality continues to increase thereby increasing the image size. The size of a medical image averages 38MB (megabyte) for digital radiography, 20MB for fluoroscopy, 225MB for angiography, and as high as 350 MB for Echo... Digital pathology (DP) is an emerging trend in the digitized image archive sector. DP images have high resolution and each image size can vary from 0.5 GB to 2 GB. A 100 bedded hospital performs 40,000 to 45,000 radiological examinations each year, which amounts 2GB of storage space a day, or up to 1 terabytes (TB) a year."

To keep things simple, let's say the average result is just a 100MB file.

Now let's look at how long it takes to upload/download a file of that size at various speeds. First we must convert MB into Mb (8 bits to 1 Byte), so 100MB equals 800Mb. Now divide that by your bandwidth, or:

800Mb @ 1Mbps = 800 seconds
800Mb @ 10Mbps = 80 seconds
800Mb @ 100Mbps = 8 seconds

The time it takes to move a single 100MB file at 10Mbps might not seem too bad, but you must realize that if a hospital only has 10Mbps for the whole building then it's unlikely that all 10Mbps would ever be free to transfer a single file. Also, what happens if you have multiple files to send or receive at the same time? Or multiple people are trying to transfer simultaneously? Or what if you're trying to transfer one of those 1GB files mentioned above?

Now think about this in terms of an emergency room situation, where ER doctors need to get access to these files quickly, where they may need to be able to consult with remote specialists efficiently, and where seconds wasted waiting can mean the difference between life and death.

In these circumstances, having insufficient bandwidth means putting lives at risk unnecessarily.

And this is only looking at one pretty basic use of broadband to improve healthcare. There are a host of other broadband applications available for use today. But in order to support them as well as the needs for moving around digital imaging files, hospitals must have access to fiber.

Let's take this discussion a step further. While community anchors are often referred to in terms of public institutions like schools, libraries, and hospitals, I think when it comes to how fiber can anchor communities it's important to consider the needs of major employers in any given area, because without them to anchor employment communities can't survive.

There's lots of talk about how fiber can create new jobs and attract new businesses to communities that get wired, but what's as important and significant to economic development is how fiber allows existing businesses to stay put.

I've heard of many employers across the country, especially in rural America, that want to keep growing where they started but can't because they don't have access to 100Mbps connectivity and beyond.

Whether it be a manufacturer that needs to be able to communicate with the top materials engineers from around the country to build their next generation of products, or a catalog retailer with a booming online business, there are companies across the country that are begrudgingly having to consider taking their jobs elsewhere if they can't get access to fiber. (I'm going to be working on finding and sharing stories like these in greater detail on this site in the weeks ahead.)

These are all clear and present reasons for why if we want our kids to have access to the next generation of education, if we want everyone to benefit from the opportunities of telemedicine, and if we want our businesses to be able to grow where they are, then we need to anchor our communities with fiber.

But the unfortunate reality that most communities face is that today many of these anchor institutions are stuck starving for bandwidth with nothing better than T1s available, which can only deliver 1.5Mbps and often cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars a month.

That's too little bandwidth for too much money to enable the next generation of healthcare, education, and economic development. And while this lack of access to affordable, substantial bandwidth is a problem across the US, it's especially acute in rural areas, where the lack of competition has kept prices high and speeds low, leaving many communities unable to fully use the broadband applications of today, let alone be able to prepare themselves to utilize the apps of tomorrow.

We've got to find a way to get everyone's head out of the sand on these issues. We can't afford more milquetoast generalities that hold onto 20th century mindsets about the bandwidth needs of community anchor institutions. We are already a decade into the 21st century. It's time we recognize what's possible today if only we had enough bandwidth, and to commit ourselves to coming up with a plan to anchor every community's public and private institutions with fiber, or at least fiber-like speeds, across the entire US as soon as possible.

As without it, we're going to be stuck dealing with the bandwidth constraints of the 20th century while other nations forge ahead, fully equipped to take advantage of all that the 21st century has to offer.