Can We Build a Smart Community Readiness Scorecard for Broadband Networks?
A month ago I announced the Connected Communities 2024 State of Broadband effort. To date, the response from City Managers and Civic Broadband Leaders has been super encouraging. I have made new connections with more than 100 City Managers serving local communities in 20 states. I have also connected with state, county and local government broadband officials across 25 states and territories.
My new connections have shared some great resources. Civic broadband champions in Oregon and Indiana shared with me links to very helpful repositories of information about broadband in their states. In Indiana, the state’s Office of Community and Rural Affairs maintains a site that includes Indiana’s broadband goals and the key broadband metrics by which it measures progress. Notably, the site calls-out that broadband for the state’s rural healthcare clinic is a priority for Indiana. I thought it was interesting that Indiana tracks — along with broadband to homes, schools and businesses — the number of rural health clinic connected with new service and the number of rural health clinic with 1GB service.
In Oregon, a monthly newsletter released by the state broadband office includes links to media coverage of broadband in the state. Recent newsletters include a lengthy piece from the East Oregonian on efforts to spread online education across the eastern part of the state, an article announcing that DMV testing is now available online and an article from the Outlook Online on a $2million investment to shrink the digital divide in Eastern Multnomah county.
How Best to Assess Whether a Broadband Network is Smart Community Ready?
The State of Indiana’s metrics regarding rural healthcare clinics and the media articles regarding progress in Oregon help to highlight a key question at the center of the Connected Communities 2024 State of Broadband effort — is there a way to create a scorecard that community broadband leaders can use to evaluate whether a broadband network is Smart Community Ready? I am aware of previous efforts to create a readiness assessment for communities. What I am proposing here is different: a readiness assessment for current and future broadband networks. Do the current and/or proposed networks have the key elements necessary to:
· Make quality healthcare more accessible,
· Keep seniors in their homes,
· Improve pedestrian safety,
· Enhance energy efficiency efforts, and
· Offer high-quality educational and vocation opportunities.
The foremost challenge, of course, is identifying the metrics that should be a part of such Smart Community Readiness Scorecard? What do I mean by this? In 2022, I wrote an article about a successful Smart Parks project in the City of Las Vegas. In the article, I described how the city’s had originally planned to use a CBRS wireless technology to connect the cameras and sensors deployed to enhance the safety and usability of the park but needed to pivot to an alternative connectivity solution to achieve a positive outcome. To conclude the article, I summarize the experience of the City of Las Vegas this way — effective smart community solutions are rarely one-size-fits-all. While from experience we may know this is true, it also can help to have a yardstick against which to measure progress.
Via the 2024 State of Broadband effort, we will try to identify the key metrics — in addition to served/unserved and broadband throughput speed — that can help capture how ready an community’s broadband assets are to enable an expansion of online education, connect and meet the unique cybersecurity requirements of anchor institutions, and ensure that organizations like Free Geek can readily address broadband adoption challenges.
We need your help. Is your city, town or community using broadband networks to enable/support a smart community goal in a meaningful or innovative way? We would love to learn more. Please connect with us on LinkedIn or via email bill@connected-communities.consulting. Thanks in advance for your interest and for any information you can share with us!
About this Medium Site
On this Medium site, I explore an array of topics related to the transformative power of smart and connected communities. A central question for this observer of the so-called smart community movement: how will municipalities, real estate developers, universities and other leading organizations develop, deploy and support smart and connected community projects at scale?
I welcome feedback and comments from readers.
