The YouTube video is a sincere collage (complete with tear jerking music) of some of the publicity and activities cities have done supporting the project.  Take the 2 minutes and 5 seconds to watch it.  The video is a brief reminder of how consumers want more bandwidth beyond what is traditionally offered to them.

Google’s Fiber for Communities web site is their call to action for citizens to participate in the process of removing legal and regulatory roadblocks to open-access municipal broadband.  Also, it is where Google disseminates information as the project progresses.  The citizens of North Carolina recently defeated a measure heavily driven by the incumbents that would have prevented municipalities from participating in building broadband networks.  This is an example of the kind of grass-roots effort Google is encouraging on their site.  Here in Boulder we will face challenges in the construction of this network.  Many of us in the city and related industries have been working to eliminate these challenges for years.  Fortunately we are not prohibited from building an open-access municipal broadband network, but there are hurdles and requirements that must be met.  We welcome community participation in this effort.  Feel free to comment if you are interested in participating.

Throughout this process, one message has come through loud and clear: people are hungry for better and faster Internet access. With that in mind, today we’re launching a new site called Google Fiber for Communities, where you can learn more about fiber networks and keep up-to-date on our project. You’ll also be able to advocate for common-sense federal and local policies that would help fiber deployments nationwide.

By Steven Oberbeck
The Salt Lake Tribune

Google has a few Utah hearts all a-flutter.

The search engine company, which in February announced it wants to build fiber-optic networks in one or more U.S. cities, gave one local politician and several Utopia executives something to smile about when it invited them in late June to its headquarters to discuss the project.

“They were interested in our [Utopia’s] deployment model, our service providers and the technology we were using,” said West Valley City Mayor Mike Winder. He accompanied Utopia Executive Director Todd Marriott and two other network executives to the June 22 meeting in Mountain View, Calif.

Although Winder declined to speculate whether the meeting suggested Utah has the inside track on landing the much-coveted network, Mayor Dan Snarr of Murray, who didn’t attend, was a lot more optimistic after he heard about the meeting.

“It looks like we might be one of the final contestants,” he said.

Utopia is a quasi-public agency involving 11 Utah cities that have invested millions in building a fiber-optic network. And those cities joined dozens of other communities across the country in publicly announcing they wanted to be part of the Google team.

At the time, Winder viewed Google’s decision to experiment with a fiber-optic system as a validation of Utopia’s efforts since 2002 to make high-speed Internet a “fundamental utility” that cities provide.

Yet others viewed Google’s announcement as a condemnation of Utopia’s premise that private enterprise was unwilling to step up to build fiber-optic systems that consumers need.

Google spokesman Dan Martin, however, said in an e-mail the company will meet with local officials and conduct site visits as part of the process it will go through in deciding where to build its network.

“We aren’t commenting on specific communities until we’re ready to announce where we plan to build,” he said, adding Google plans to announce its target communities by the end of the year.

steve@sltrib.com

Article Continued at TelecomTV…

Jason Mendelson, Ryan McIntyre and Brad Feld, from left, are three of the founders of the Foundry Group.

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

Published: May 13, 2010

Experienced tech entrepreneurs and investors sat alongside people who had just moved to Boulder hoping to start a company in this small city, which is breeding tech start-ups at an attention-grabbing rate. In the first three months of the year, 11 Colorado tech start-ups raised $57 million in venture capital, solidifying Boulder’s place among the country’s up-and-coming tech centers.

“In Silicon Valley, you’re a small fish in a huge pond, and it didn’t seem as collaborative and a lot more corporate,” said Chad McGimpsey, who moved to Boulder a month ago and is now a regular at the twice-a-month coffee club. “Here, you’re a big fish in a small pond. Plus, there are the mountains.”

A long list of communities around the country have tried to become “the next Silicon Valley.” But very few have the mix of money, universities, a high-tech talent pool and appealing lifestyle needed to hatch tech start-ups. Boulder, however, has been luring tech industry veterans and young entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley and Manhattan with promises of a tech community that allows for lunch-break hikes in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

The town’s big successes include Rally Software, a fast-growing company that makes project management software; Socialthing, a social media service acquired by AOL; and Kerpoof, which makes Web design tools for children and was acquired by the Walt Disney Company.

Venture capital dollars are following the entrepreneurs to Colorado. From 2007 to 2009, venture capitalists invested $1.9 billion in 275 Colorado start-ups, up from $1.6 billion in 247 companies from 2004 to 2006, according to the National Venture Capital Association. The money is coming from Colorado venture firms — including the Foundry Group, a prominent firm in Boulder — as well as from Silicon Valley and New York.

The recipes of other cities for creating the next Silicon Valley usually leave out a few main ingredients. Richard Florida, who wrote “The Rise of the Creative Class” and studies why certain cities foster creativity, cites three crucial factors: talented people and a high quality of life that keeps them around, technological expertise, and an open-mindedness about new ways of doing things, which often comes from a strong counterculture.

“Boulder has reached this beautiful sweet spot, where it has many advantages of a university town — tech and talent and openness — but without many of the costs and traffic and congestion that may disadvantage incumbent centers of innovation,” Mr. Florida said.

This balance did not come about accidentally. Natural foods companies like Wild Oats Markets and Celestial Seasonings started here, and several national labs and big-tech companies like I.B.M. opened outposts. Early on, the biotech, telecom and data storage industries took off in Boulder, bolstered by Sun Microsystems’s $4.1 billion acquisition of Storage Technology in 2005.

“That generation of entrepreneurs had their success, and importantly, they don’t leave,” said Brad Bernthal, director of the entrepreneurship initiative at the University of Colorado Silicon Flatirons Center. “Lots of places, you get your money and you go retire somewhere. This place is a destination for people.”

The center makes sure that those veterans cross paths with young entrepreneurs. It hosts meet-ups, a campuswide business plan competition and a law clinic, where entrepreneurs get free legal help on things like intellectual property protection.

TechStars, a three-month mentorship program that has taken place in an old gym in Boulder since 2007, has spurred the start-up community’s growth. Of the first 10 companies that went through the program, eight received venture funding, five were acquired by bigger companies and three are still active. But David Cohen, the founder of TechStars, is equally proud of one of its failures, because he said it showed how supportive Boulder’s tech community is. After EventVue, which built online communities for conferences, shut down, job offers from other tech companies came pouring in.

Almost half of the 30 companies that have gone through the TechStars program have decided to stay in town. Several of them share space — tiny offices and a big common room, kitchen and deck — above Aji, a Latin American restaurant downtown.

One is Everlater, for making travel journals on the Web. Its founders, Nate Abbott and Natty Zola, moved to Boulder to save money by living in their parents’ basements after quitting their jobs on Wall Street. But when they arrived, Mr. Zola said, “We realized it was an incredible place to start a company.”

The Foundry partners, even though they are not investors in the company, routinely give them an hour of their time or have them over for dinner. A relationship with a TechStars mentor led to a partnership with Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.

The Foundry partners also run the coffee club and hold office hours, where anyone can meet with them for free advice on their business idea.

Still, Boulder depends on Silicon Valley. There are not enough investors in Colorado to finance growing companies. Many entrepreneurs open California offices, including Matt Galligan, who started and sold Socialthing and is now the founder of SimpleGeo, which makes mapping and other location tools for software companies.

“The community here is terrific, but in terms of generating business, there’s no substitute for Silicon Valley,” he said.

Though the University of Colorado has opened to the tech community, it plays nowhere near the pivotal role that Stanford does. “Creating a culture somewhat like M.I.T. or Stanford, where it’s expected in the technical disciplines that you will do a start-up, or at least it’s not looked at askew, is not part of the faculty DNA in most departments yet,” Mr. Bernthal said.

And maintaining such an inviting culture, where top venture capitalists will freely give people an hour of their time, will be difficult if Boulder’s tech scene continues to grow.

Still, many tech types in Boulder move here precisely because they want to escape Silicon Valley and its institutionalized tech scene. “There is a feeling in Silicon Valley that if you win, someone else loses,” said Kimbal Musk, chief executive of OneRiot, a real-time search engine based in Boulder. “It has driven success, but it has also driven people to leave.”

In Washington, D.C., Google is learning there’s nothing wrong with a little diplomacy.

In a Federal Communications Commission filing earlier this week, Google reiterated its support for Net neutrality regulation, but it didn’t take sides in the ongoing debate over whether the FCC should reclassify broadband services to help ensure the agency has the authority to enforce that regulation.

The FCC’s authority was challenged earlier this month when a federal appeals court sided with Comcast, ruling that the FCC had no legal basis for censuring the company for violating its Net neutrality principles.

Net neutrality proponents, including the Open Internet Coalition–a group that Google helped found to promote open access to the Internet–have asked the FCC to reclassify broadband Internet services as a telecom service instead of an information service to make certain that the agency has the legal teeth to enforce new regulations concerning broadband.

In a blog post explaining the company’s position, Rick Whitt, Google’s Washington telecom and media counsel, wrote that the search giant was more concerned with ensuring Net neutrality policies instead of participating in a debate over the legal gymnastics it will take to ensure the FCC has authority for regulating broadband services.

“To us, this has never been about regulatory rigidity but about protecting consumers and keeping the Internet open for innovators,” Whitt wrote. “So while we’re not wed to any particular legal theory to justify the FCC’s jurisdiction, we do believe some minimal oversight over broadband networks is essential.”

In its actual filing with the FCC, Google diplomatically tried to position itself outside the reclassification debate.

“We continue to believe that the FCC has ample legal authority to adopt broadband openness rules” and that we support whatever jurisdictional fix is “most sustainable legally,” Whitt referenced in his blog.

This differs from the position of the OIC, which includes companies, such as Skype, Facebook, and TiVo.

“Post-Comcast v. FCC, consumers lack any protection against violations of the Internet Policy Statement, or against discriminatory treatment of content or applications over broadband providers’ networks,” OIC Executive Director Markham Erickson said in a statement. “It is imperative that the commission move expeditiously to solidify its legal authority by initiating a generic proceeding, through the circulation of a public notice, which would lay out a regulatory framework for broadband networks and services based on solid legal footing.”

In D.C., a quick study
Google is relatively new to the Washington, D.C., lobbying scene. While the big phone companies for decades have had teams of lawyers and lobbyists working the nation’s capital on behalf of their interest, pouring millions of dollars into causes and campaigns, Google has only been in D.C. in force for a few years.

But the need for a strong presence in the nation’s capital has been growing, especially as the Internet giant faces increased scrutiny over a bevy of issues including, privacy, copyright concerns related to its Google Book Search settlement, digital rights issues, and competition surrounding online advertising. In several instances it’s been outmaneuvered, most notably in its proposed deal with Yahoo in search.

But Google has been a quick study and the company has increased its lobbying efforts. In 2009, it spent $4 million on lobbying in D.C., according to the Lobbying Disclosure Act Database. This is up from $1.52 million in 2007 and $2.84 million in 2008.

Now it appears that Google is handling the Net neutrality debate with more finesse and diplomatic care. The company is trying to walk a thin line between pushing the FCC toward finishing its rule making without encouraging the agency to broaden its authority too much.

Lobbying for an open Internet, Google is still keeping pressure on the government to impose rules that will ensure broadband providers can’t slow or block traffic running on their networks. While broadband service providers mostly disagree with Google that Net neutrality rules are needed, the companies are finding common ground with the search giant.

Going ‘light’
Last month, CEO Eric Schmidt and Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg co-authored an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal praising aspects of the FCC’s National Broadband Plan, which will provide a road map for policymakers and lawmakers over the next decade to promote affordable and ubiquitous broadband. But the executives warned that when it comes to regulating the Internet, the FCC needs to take a “light” approach. And they encouraged the FCC to continue “creating the right climate for private investment and market-driven innovation to advance broadband.”

This is not the first time the two companies have come together to ask for a “light” regulatory approach. In October of last year, Schmidt and Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam posted a joint blog highlighting their agreements on the Net neutrality issue and calling for the feds to ensure the Internet “remains an unrestricted and open platform–where people can access any content (so long as it’s legal), as well as the services and applications of their choice.”

While Google may be advocating for “light” regulation, the company believes that some regulation is needed to ensure broadband providers don’t abuse their position as the gatekeepers to the Internet.

“Unlike other Internet stakeholders, last-mile broadband providers have the ability to carry, to intercept, to inspect, to manipulate, and to allocate capacity for others entities’ Internet traffic over their broadband access networks,” Google said in its filing. “Today the evidence shows that the increasing vertical integration between content and conduit only heightens broadband providers’ financial incentives to use that unique network control to operate only in their private interests.”

But AT&T has argued that if new Net neutrality regulations are imposed, Google, which has begun offering voice services through Google Voice, needs to adhere to the rules as well. Google argues that it does not have the same control over customers’ traffic as broadband providers.

Specifically, Google said it does not have “the ability to interfere with the routing of other entities’ traffic.” It can’t “make some packets go faster (which necessarily slows other packets) at the last-mile router.” The company added, “Servers, data centers, and private fiber backbone networks do not possess the unique advantages or ability to control ‘Other People’s Packets’ that last-mile broadband providers have.”

Google also wants the new rules applied to wireline broadband services as well as wireless services, something broadband providers, AT&T and Verizon Communications strongly oppose.

In its filing, Google pointed out that AT&T’s “steadfast unilateral refusal to allow the Sling mobile app on its 3G network only highlights the need for a neutral third- party arbiter in the mobile space to conclusively distinguish between reasonable network management and an unacceptable anticompetitive practice.”

Even though Google is pushing its stated Net neutrality positions, the company is taking a less aggressive stance when it comes to the reclassification issue. First Google said it believes that the FCC has the authority to impose new rules and enforce them. But in the wake of the Comcast decision, the company recognizes this authority has been questioned and needs to be cleared up. Google stopped short of saying how this should be done.

“To be clear, Google is not wedded at this time to any particular legal theory to justify the commission’s oversight authority over broadband networks,” the company said. “We support whatever is sustainable legally.”

Google is currently vetting over 1,100 RFI submissions to find the few finalists that assembled the appropriate players to test out a model for building an open-access municipal network.  Their approach is different that the bureaucratic direction of the FCC with the National Broadband Plan.  They know that they do not have all of the answers and are looking to the experts to develop some solutions.  I applaud Google in their efforts and whether they select Boulder, Colorado or not, I will support their efforts to the fullest.  Sam, Mark, and David at Telecom Pragmatics are smart guys and I know that they understand what Google is trying to accomplish.  I trust that their report fully divulges Google’s true intentions.  As a community that has been driving FTTH for two decades, we need to fully open our experiences to Google to make their little experiment a success.

“We definitely inviting the Comcasts, the AT&T service providers to work with us on our network, and to provide their service offering on top of our pipe – we’re definitely planning on doing that,” Minnie Ingersoll, product manager and co-lead for alternative access at Google, told BroadbandBreakfast.com.

“We’re looking for other service providers to be able to come in and offer their service on top of our network so that residents have a choice when they open up their accounts,” she added. “They get the connection from us, and then they have a choice as to who they subscribe to.”

That sounds great on paper, but it is a very disingenuous way of putting ISPs on the spot for their existing practices. Traditional providers value their infrastructure above anything else. Not for their investment in it necessarily, most ISPs and telcos want to keep that to a minimum, but for the strategic advantage it offers.

Costumers rarely have actual alternatives, you get the Internet that is available at your location and that’s that. At best, you may have a choice between two viable options, but there is usually no choice. And since ISPs are careful no to tread on each other’s turf too much, the status quo is very much against open access and actual competition.

Now, Google is not only showing that super-fast broadband connections are feasible from an infrastructure point of view, something that most telcos complain about, but also that you can even do it while enabling anyone to compete using your own fiber. That is the point that Google is trying to make with its Gigabit fiber optics network plan, ISPs need to start competing on actual services not just the territory, if there is going to be a real market for Internet access.

The problem is, ISPs are happy with the way things are and, if it wasn’t for Google providing the ‘incentives,’ nothing would change in the foreseeable future. But maybe the country that invented the Internet is satisfied with constantly being an ‘also ran’ in all worldwide broadband availability and speed studies.

GREELEY, CO (KUNC) – Even in the 21st Century high-speed internet service is not a given in many parts of the state. But several groups are hoping to tap into federal stimulus money to fill in the gaps. KUNC’s Brian Larson spoke to Northern Colorado Business Report Publisher Jeff Nuttall about what’s driving the competition. © Copyright 2010, KUNC

Photograph by Eva Kolenko

Product manager, co-lead, Alternate Access team, Google.

Big idea: Creating next-generation broadband networks — featuring speeds up to 100 times today’s standard — to spur the coming wave of online innovation. “Being a catalyst is an ambitious goal for us,” says Minnie Ingersoll, 33, about Google Fiber for Communities. “Pursuing high-speed networks that are open for third parties to offer retail service will lead to new business models. There will be new deployment techniques. Our guys are excited to dig up streets and experiment. And there will be new apps and services.” Cities such as Hampton, Virginia; Greenville, South Carolina; and prototypical everytown Peoria, Illinois, have already publicly stated they’re competing to be picked as test sites. “The response so far has been exciting,” she says. “Even cities that have broadband are interested.”

Growing up geek: “I grew up in Pasadena, basically on the Caltech campus where my dad’s a professor. I always thought I wasn’t that interested in tech, but that’s because I was comparing it with the grad students always hanging around my house.” When Ingersoll went to Harvard Business School in 2000, she says, “I quickly realized I am entirely techie. I love the Valley’s meritocracy, the brainstorming spirit, that it’s not about money.”

Ingersoll got her job at Google thanks to … her mom: “Google had an ad that said ‘You’re brilliant, we’re hiring,’ and my mom saw it and called me: ‘Minnie, you’re brilliant, and they’re hiring!’ ” In the recruitment process, Ingersoll took advantage of her experience as a Stanford computer-science grad to network with former classmates who already worked there. “Nothing prepared me for Google, but now I think I can say that Google has prepared me for Google.”

Favorite Googleplex perk: “I can’t pick one.” [Long pause.] “Okay, it’s the chair massage,” she admits. “It’s just 15 minutes. It’s not a full massage that would interrupt your whole day.”

Cable or DSL? “I have Comcast. But I probably do most of my computing at work.”

Last book she read: “I’ve gotten lazy. I do podcasts. I prefer when someone else reads me the front page of The New York Times or the CNET tech news. My favorites are the Slate podcasts, particularly Political Gabfest. It’s so rare to find an intelligent commentator like Emily Bazelon. I did enjoy The Nine, by Jeffrey Toobin. It’s as close to a page-turner story of the Supreme Court as you get.”

Guilty pleasure: Music videos, particularly the Director’s Label box sets. “I play them as background music, with some pretty awesome directors — Spike Jonze, Stephane Sednaoui — adding rad visuals to the audio experience.”

Offline hobby: Surfing. “I live in San Francisco, so I like to surf in Pacifica on the way to or from work,” she says. “When you’re underneath a 5-foot wave, you’re not worried about a meeting with [CEO] Eric [Schmidt]. It’s mind-cleansing.”

Blue Crush or Point Break? “Hahaha,” she laughs. “How about Step Into Liquid? I did see a play called Point Break Live, a reenactment of the movie where Keanu Reeves — I mean, heartthrob Johnny Utah — is chosen from the audience and his lines are fed to him via cue card. It was awesome.”

Beloved sporting gear: Swim fins. “You could say that I’ve decorated my apartment with sporting equipment, but I especially love my fins.” Ingersoll, a high-school jock who has taken up triathalons, says, “I never was a swimmer until I joined the UCSF masters swim team. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to keep up. The secret of doing swim team is the big huge fins!”