Andrew Cohill: New Mexico statewide and local broadband initiatives
Andrew Cohill, president and CEO of Design Nine, described the U.S. broadband model as broken in a discussion on broadband initiatives in an afternoon technical talk at santa Fe Complex. “If the overnight delivery business ran like telecommunications,” Cohill said, “each home would have three roads for package delivery. Each carrier would own and deliver packages on its proprietary road.” There’s another option, however, which is a developing a “single, very high-performance” open fiber network with a wireless overlay.
“What’s broken is not the technology, it’s the business model,” Cohill said. “They way we do broadband in the United States is upside down.” Rather than build a system that has decreasing costs, the existing network system has higher costs with higher consumption.
Instead, Danville argued, the U.S. should build a system of high bandwidth networks that are open to service providers but free to users. The providers would pay the network operator to use the system, which reimburses its costs, and charge end-users for their actual consumption of services.
Fabian Trujillo of Santa Fe’s economic development department described the work of the Santa Fe Broadband Coalition, which he described as an ad hoc group in the initial stages of developing a plan for the city. He said the timeline was a year or less to develop a proposal for the city but the group was only being formalized at this point. Trujillo is organizing a series of community meetings to communicate about his work.
Click here to learn more about Cohill’s presentation.
Andrew Cohill has worked in broadband deployment since he directed the Blacksburg Electronic Village at Virginia Tech from 1993 to 2002. He currently serves on a variety of boards for organizations working on extending broadband service across the nation. Design Nine provides engineering and design services in s full range of broadband and telecom planning, design and project management services.
