No, it’s not a riddle. In California, these two seemingly disparate topics could become a solution to one of the state’s most complicated problems: bringing next-level Internet access to Californians currently living without it.
In California today — the state that’s practically synonymous with the Internet — by some estimates, nearly 12 million people, or about 30 percent of Californians, don’t have broadband at home. Although many would argue the state remains a leader in developing broadband infrastructure, thousands of residents remain offline, a reality that some observers say is hindering the growth of California’s economic future and status as a global technology leader.
But there could be light at the end of the tunnel thanks to the state’s grand plan for a high-speed rail line, which — through a new innovative collaboration with a nonprofit organization called CENIC — could conceivably deliver an expanded broadband network to many of the state’s most underserved areas.
In November, California’s High-Speed Rail Authority announced a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with CENIC to expand the availability of high-capacity broadband and dark fiber technology to communities and institutions adjacent to hundreds of miles of high-speed rail bisecting the length of the state.
Founded in 1996, CENIC operates the California Research and Education Network, a high-capacity broadband network designed to deliver large amounts of data over a three-tier, 100-gigabit connection. The organization estimates that it currently serves 20 million Californians through 10,000 institutions, making it one of the most heavily used private networks in the country.
As a part of the high-speed rail system corridor, the authority and CENIC plan to create an ultra-fast broadband network that would be available to the public, connecting into CENIC’s statewide research and education network, as well as other public- and private-sector broadband networks.
According to a recent Field Research Corporation Poll conducted for the nonprofit California Emerging Technology Fund (CETF) — whose mission is to close the state’s digital divide by accelerating the deployment and adoption of broadband to unserved and underserved communities — there are still too many Californians living without access to broadband.
Earlier this year, CETF released its annual report on Internet Connectivity in California Households. The 2016 survey tracked the progress of broadband deployment and adoption throughout the state and found overall high-speed Internet adoption has increased significantly since 2008, climbing from 55 percent in 2008 to 84 percent as of July 2016.
While that might seem promising, the figure can be misleading when you consider 14 percent of people are accessing via mobile smartphones, bringing the final tally to only 70 percent of Californians with access to “meaningful” — i.e., not smartphone-reliant — broadband at home.
For Sunne Wright McPeak, CETF’s president and CEO, it’s unacceptable for a state that prides itself as the center of the technology revolution.
“This is why a project of this size is important for helping to close the digital divide in a number of the state’s unserved or underserved areas,” said McPeak. “The railway is one major step in that direction.”
To make it a reality will require working together in ways California has rarely seen.
The Beginning
Imagine the rail corridor extending from the southern tip of the Central Valley north to the Bay Area, and — on either side of the train’s right of way — massive tubes of conduit filled with hundreds of fiber-optic cables. At appropriate intervals along the way, lines would be added to extend infrastructure into communities in California’s most underserved areas.It’s an idea that came to fruition just over a year ago when members of the authority, the California Department of Technology and CENIC came together at the University of California at San Diego for a series of meetings to explore the various ways the university could engage with the high-speed rail program.
Photo: Jeff Morales, California High-Speed Rail Authority CEO
According to High-Speed Rail Authority CEO Jeff Morales, a former director of the state’s Department of Transportation who came on board to lead the California project in 2012, the MOU is all about smart solutions.
“Building a high-speed train is a very unique project. We’re talking about running trains at 220 mph, something that needs a very sophisticated, state-of-the-art high-speed communications system that will eventually run from Sacramento to San Diego,” said Morales. “Those initial talks began when we saw the potential to use that major line running right through the center of the state as a way to bring broadband to the underserved rural areas. From there, we kicked the discussions into high gear and developed our MOU.”
After revamping the business plan for the state’s high-speed rail system and reducing its operating budget from about $67.6 billion to $64.2 billion, the rail authority projected a number of promising facts: increased economic activity associated with the development of the rail could indirectly generate as many as 400,000 long-term, permanent jobs statewide; the Los Angeles to San Francisco to L.A./Anaheim route would generate net operating revenue of $1.6 million a year by 2029; and by 2025, when the rail’s initial operating service begins on the Silicon Valley to Central Valley line, the resulting greenhouse gas reductions are estimated to be 8 million metric tons of carbon dioxide saved by 2030.
Today, though, Morales is passionate about more than helping to fuel the economy and get people out of their cars. He sees high-speed rail’s potential for helping to close California’s digital divide by offering an affordable way to bring high-speed Internet access to hundreds of thousands of Californians currently living with subpar Internet access, or none at all.
“The broadband element is really complementary to what we are doing with the rail project,” said Morales. “The real point of the high-speed rail is to connect the state together in a way it never has been before, and broadband is doing the same thing. It’s giving access to people who are without. There’s so much good here, from less emissions and the boost to the economy to efficient transportation while helping to close the digital gap.”
More importantly, Morales said partnering with CENIC offers the authority a unique opportunity to run hundreds of miles worth of new dark fiber cables in a relatively short amount of time, and — most importantly — at virtually no additional cost to taxpayers.
Rather than retrofitting old broadband lines or having to tackle local government and state permitting to plan construction for new ones, the high-speed rail provides a unique and timely opportunity to expand the state’s broadband by piggybacking off the authority’s already-approved, large-scale project.
“One of the reasons the Central Valley is so underserved is because it’s not economical or feasible for private companies to lay new fiber lines,” Morales said. “We’ve seen in the past where retrofitting [fiber] has occurred, as was the case along Digital 395 [middle mile project]. But getting in
at the front end is a much more efficient way to do it because we’re already using the fiber technology, so we can do these expansions at almost no added cost.”
Full Steam Ahead for Change
According to CENIC President and CEO Louis Fox, the MOU his organization has put forth with the rail authority is an innovative collaboration unlike any other.“In this particular arena of broadband technology you find people willing to work together from not-for-profit to the private sector to government. There is a real spirit and collaboration here that I haven’t experienced anywhere else on this level,” said Fox. “This MOU will involve lots of participants who have never worked together in the past. Its success won’t be technically complicated, but more about good communication and proper project management.”
Photo: Louis Fox, CENIC president and CEO
The authority and CENIC plan to achieve these objectives by working together to develop a strategic plan that will engage all parties — including the private, public and governmental sectors — in the planning process to design, deploy and manage the growth of its broadband infrastructure.
“We are pleased to see this new stage of collaboration,” said McPeak. “We’ve been encouraging just such a partnership for many years, and it’s worth noting this is a breakthrough kind of agreement in the government realm, and one there should be more of. It’s a significant collaboration of efficiency in government, and a good example of how to do it right.”
Likewise, the California Department of Technology’s Broadband and Digital Literacy Office is playing a role.
Adelina Zendejas, the department’s deputy director who leads the office, works to build relationships between key private, nonprofit and community-based organizations, as well as public stakeholders interested in promoting broadband expansion, adoption and inclusion. She agrees the CENIC/authority MOU is a great example of government working together to unite California.
“On a day-to-day basis, we are very involved in developing these important partnerships, seeing opportunities to collaborate and pulling everyone together to make it happen,” Zendejas said. “It’s our goal to support and take advantage of any vehicle that would enable government to provide better services to its citizens. While the high-speed rail won’t hit the most underserved northern territories, there are pockets of underserved and unserved it will reach that can be leveraged to make some extraordinary changes in how we communicate with our citizens.”
Who Will Benefit?
“The question here isn’t what are the pitfalls, but how big is the upside?” said Morales. “There is no real downside to this peering. It’s simply amatter of how many others can we help to deliver this technology to?”
One of the state’s largest underserved areas spans the length of the San Joaquin Valley. According to McPeak, upon its completion the high-speed rail will be able to bring broadband into one of California’s biggest economic engines: its farms.
“The fields are an area that remain woefully underserved, and the high-speed railway corridor will get broadband to a major part of our economy. That’s tremendously important in a state like California, where we want the most productivity possible. And in today’s world, that requires wireless communications,” McPeak said.
For Fox, the possibilities of a broadband network are further reaching.
“This project allows us to see a future we can only dimly imagine,” said Fox. “Expanding this network will not only lead to more participation in the workplace, it will also lead to innovations with the research community once we allow everyone the tools they need to be part of a 21st-century digital citizenship.”
But When?
Under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the federal government provided $7.2 billion in funding for both broadband infrastructure deployment and sustainable adoption programs.Consequently, in 2008, the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) was created to promote the deployment of broadband infrastructure to unserved and underserved areas.
Over the past seven years, CASF has funded more than 50 projects to reach more than 300,000 households, including the Central Valley Independent Network (CVIN)-CENIC and Digital 395 projects, the 583-mile fiber-optic network connecting San Bernardino County to Mono County providing 10-gigabit high-speed Internet access to communities, Indian reservations, military bases, schools, libraries, health-care facilities and government offices.
Despite the success of those kinds of initiatives, CASF is running short on funding. According to publicly available California Public Utilities Commission records, there are currently more than a dozen broadband infrastructure projects totaling $144 million awaiting approval, with less than $100 million of available CASF funds remaining.
But broadband brought to certain areas via the high-speed rail project could put some of those projects in the queue on track a lot faster. The authority broke ground in Fresno in 2014, and to date 119 miles of railway are under construction extending from the Central Valley in Madera to just north of Bakersfield. Work includes building bridges and structures on which to lay the track, as well as trenches for the ductwork that will carry the rail’s dark fiber communication technology.
Although Californians might not be able to hop on the train to take them from San Francisco to Los Angeles in under four hours anytime soon, they should be able to connect to broadband in just a few years.
“The communication capabilities are expected to be available much sooner before the real [high-speed rail] service, possibly as soon as the early 2020s,” Morales said. “Because we’ll need the communication system for the trains in place several years before service can begin, we’re looking to be delivering those same benefits to communities along the way long before they’ll be riding the train.”
Building Smarter Cities (and People)
In April 2016, CENIC established the world’s first 100-gigabit connection for a K-12 school. And in May, L.A. became the first local government body to join CENIC, leading the charge for a growing number of California smart cities to follow suit.“By bringing government bodies and state universities together, it will give California a powerful edge,” said Fox. “What those new applications will be, we can’t say for sure, but we know they will have profound effects in smart manufacturing, health, government and education.”
Think everything from smart water control and intelligent traffic management systems to natural disaster monitoring and IT connectivity for all. In San Antonio, for example, streetlights adjust during inclement weather to reduce accidents. In Chicago, monitors on trash dumpsters help control the city’s rodent population. And in New York City, the bike sharing program offers hundreds of fleet stations connected to a special app, available for use 24/7.
According to McPeak, the most obvious benefit to the high-speed rail’s potential new broadband line will be just as eco-friendly as the train itself.
“The most environmentally friendly commute is the virtual trip more people will be taking, one that will save just as much time, money and resources,” she said.
