Broadband Communities

JUL 2013

BROADBAND COMMUNITIES is the leading source of information on digital and broadband technologies for buildings and communities. Our editorial aims to accelerate the deployment of Fiber-To-The-Home and Fiber-To-The-Premises.

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SERVICE PROVIDER STRATEGIES Using the Wisdom of the Crowd To Guide Fiber Deployment Kickstarter meets GIS meets fber to the home. By Masha Zager / Broadband Communities B uilding out fber to the home is expensive. In the best of cases, it requires a long-term investment with signifcant risk. Even market surveys don't always reveal the true demand for fber – consumers' opinions about new or unfamiliar products aren't always helpful. Sometimes demand proves higher than anticipated, and in other cases – because of competitive response or some other reason – FTTH services take longer than expected to gain traction. Google Fiber popularized the notion of building to demand by pitting Kansas City neighborhoods against one another in a race to win earlier deployment through higher precommitment rates. However, Google wasn't the frst to use this type of approach. Over the years, many fber deployers, both public and private, have attempted to mitigate take-up risk through various combinations of demographic targeting and preregistering customers. Community groups have initiated similar eforts, sometimes going door to door gathering signatures to convince service providers there is a market for better broadband (or, in some cases, for any broadband). What all these eforts have lacked is any easy-to-use, systematic tool for aggregating demand for FTTH services. A Georgia-based broadband consulting frm, Civitium, recently developed such an online tool and spun of a new company, CrowdFiber, to commercialize it. CrowdFiber.com is currently in beta testing, with plans for full launch in the fall. 74 | BROADBAND COMMUNITIES | www.broadbandcommunities.com BACkERS AND ZONES Using the tool, a deployer or community group can set up campaigns for fber deployments and request pledges from would-be customers, called "backers." A backer can express interest by noting his or her location and pledging funds at various levels. Because the tool is map-based, each backer is assigned to a geographic zone that the campaign owner defnes. Campaign owners can easily determine which zones have sufcient demand to justify rolling out fber. Until a campaign is successful, CrowdFiber does not reveal backers' identities or addresses and does not redeem their pledges. (However, campaign owners can send email updates to backers through CrowdFiber.) Once a campaign reaches its stated goal – defned by number of backers or dollars pledged – the campaign owner receives backer ID information as well as the pledged funds. It may apply the funds toward monthly fees, connection fees, reimbursement of CrowdFiber charges or other purposes. Greg Richardson, the company's co-founder, believes "transformative changes tend to happen when technology is democratized." Mulling over how to bring democratizing forces to the problems of community broadband, he thought about Google's "fberhood" approach and about the crowdfunding site Kickstarter, and "the ideas just came together." INFIll, EDGE-OUT AND GREENFIElD CrowdFiber is fexible and lends itself to various uses. In the "infll" model, a service provider with | July 2013

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