Byte Me by Marv Dealy
ATCAA Fast Internet?… NOT!
After a couple of reports in another area newspaper, I thought it was appropriate to get a few facts straight about what ATCAA (Amador, Tuolumne Community Action Agency) is and isn’t dong in regards to the effort to bring fast Internet to a neighborhood near you.
One newspaper article had the Tuolumne County board of supervisors responding to an oral report that the county was working with ATCAA on a five-county (Mariposa, Tuolumne, Calaveras, Amador and Alpine) information aggregation project with comments that led one to believe that ATCAA’s efforts would lead directly to more houses or businesses hooked up to the Internet with fast service, possibly by the end of the week. The board reportedly told the person making the report that this was a good effort, underlining that body’s misunderstanding about what the ATCAA involvement is and isn’t going to accomplish.
Another newspaper article reported that there would be 1,000 new hookups over the five counties as a result of the ATCAA efforts, and says further that Michelle Shelton planned to meet with local ISPs (Internet Service Providers) to discuss bringing the five counties “under her purview into the Information Age.”
Since I know Michelle and know that her efforts have included both politicians, ISPs and many others over the past twelve months or more on this project, I found this second newspaper report particularly odd, so I called Michelle and asked to sit down and talk to her for this newspaper.
We met at Hava Java (yet another place you can find this fine fish wrap) and talked for nearly two hours – we would have gone on but we both have day jobs.
We started out with my asking just what is Michelle’s day job. She said that she was the former special projects manager for ATCAA but for reasons of health had to step back and work on just California Emerging Technology Fund (CETF) and broadband related activities on behalf of ATCAA, a move which eliminated about half the hats she formerly wore.
“I’m the project manager for the CETF grant,” Michelle said, “and that entails managing all the folks who are working on this project, doing broadband advocacy, and then following all the points of the grant itself which include forming a policy group and getting favorable local policy for broadband, doing the aggregation of demand infrastructure mapping and demand survey, and then doing some outreach and engagement projects to try and get people online. That grant is almost finished; June 30th is when we wrap up this portion of year one. We’ll be reapplying in April for year two plus some other grants that are coming up to start the next phase.
“We applied for a three year grant back a year and a half ago to do outreach and engagement projects to expand our neighborhood information centers. CETF came to us and said we love your project but we have something we’d like you to do ahead of that, which is the aggregation of information project. So we’ll fund you for that, then we’ll talk about doing your outreach and engagement project after you’re finished.” Michelle said that since that date four more areas in northern California have started similar rural aggregation and demand survey projects for CETF.
I asked Michelle why we’re spending money studying whether there’s broadband in the middle of nowhere, when it’s pretty much common knowledge that it isn’t and she replied “What we’re doing is some updates and corrections to the California Broadband Task Force report that includes a series of data called the Baker data which were voluntary mapping by the ISPs. The rural aggregation project managers discovered when they got it all assembled that the ISPs weren’t exactly honest about their territories. They over claimed in some areas and under claimed in others, plus the study didn’t capture every single ISP in California.
“CETF decided to do some more intensive mapping, taking a look at what what’s really out there. The demand study – random telephone surveys and self-select surveys – was to try to tie all that together, to take the Baker data and the mapping that we did and construct a demographic overlay of what people are self reporting about what their needs are, and then turn that into a marketing report to help the ISPs make their ROI so they can go do buildouts.
“It is pretty bizarre for ATCAA to be doing the aggregation of information project, but fortunately we can hire the people we needed because they gave us sufficient money to do the study. We had to get through this first project to get to what we wanted originally, which was to expand our neighborhood information centers and get to the meat of the matter – serving our client base, which are low-income, disabled, seniors.”
I asked Michelle how folks could go about seeing for themselves the results of the survey work by the group and she said, “the actual results, not the analysis, are on the Central Sierra Connect web site at www.CentralSierraConnects.org at the link to the Demand Survey.” You can see the questions and responses, but no personal information about anyone responding.
“One of the important things we’re finding is where service starts and stops. We don’t have an accurate picture of the coverage footprints of some companies. We did discover one statistical anomaly in the data that indicated that of the forty percent of the people who said they didn’t have access to DSL actually were in areas where it’s been recently made available.”
“There’s a follow-up we’re going to do with some of those households because we’re very curious why they think they don’t have access to broadband when they actually do.”
To summarize, there are two things to take away today: one, ATCAA isn’t going to hook up anyone to fast Internet at the end of the day. They’re a conduit for a bunch of money being spent on mapping information necessary for existing ISPs to figure out what areas to chase and how many potential customers there might be in those areas.
Two, if you haven’t checked with your local phone company or one of your local ISPs who resell DSL, contact them right away and find out if you’re in one of the areas where service has been recently extended from pre-existing “DSLAMs.”
Email questions to Marv at: marv.dealy@throck.com.
Marv Dealy founded Throckmorten Enterprises in San Francisco in 1988 and moved the company to Big Oak Flat in 1996. Open Monday through Friday, 9-ish to 5-ish. 209-962-7308. The company provides technical support for HP’s webinars, professional website design, computer repairs, and has recently begun providing wireless ISP services. The company also publishes the Yosemite Gazette.
