The Success of Urbana-Champaign's Broadband Revolution - Episode 601 of the Community Broadband Bits Podcast

Paul Hixson (00:07):
Good goes around too. If you have a good ethos and a good history, then you start to build an expectation that we got to do this right and with the partner, or whether it's our board or whether it's the cities, I think people understand the increasing importance of connectivity in [00:00:30] everybody's life.

Christopher Mitchell (00:31):
Welcome to another episode of the Community Broadband Bits podcast. I'm Christopher Mitchell at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance on the Road. Today I'm at Illinois Connected, which is 2024. If you're listening way in the future, it's a pretty cool event with a lot more people than I expected. But the people I did expect to see are here and we're talking. So we have Paul Hickson, who is the co-chair of UC2B: Urbana-Champaign Big [00:01:00] Broadband. Yes. Oh, I remembered that. It's been years. Very good. Paul, how did you get into this?

Paul Hixson (01:06):
I was the CIO of the University of Illinois at the time that Mike Smeltzer, who's the father of UC2B, we'll come

Christopher Mitchell (01:13):
To him in a

Paul Hixson (01:14):
Second, and he had just applied for, and then got an NTIA grant to build out what was to become the fiber optic infrastructure that supports Champaign-Urbana, Illinois.

Christopher Mitchell (01:30):
[00:01:30] Wonderful. Mike, you've just been called out not for your good choice in cameras, a Nikon shooter like myself, but for being the troublemaker at the heart of UC2B, this is a project that I think got its start, or at least its funding from the original broadband stimulus back after the 2009 Build Recovery Act.

Mike Smeltzer (01:52):
Exactly. That was the funding through NTIA. We were a project that was funded in BTOP round one, [00:02:00] and the rules changed very much for BTOP round two, but we were an early one. We proposed building a middle mile project, which wasn't all that unusual, but we also proposed building a fiber to the home in roughly 11 or 12 underserved neighborhoods. We had to do a door-to-door survey to prove that they were underserved in terms of their broadband adoption. But as part of our Middle Mile build out, we also built to 256 anchor institutions. Now, that is way more [00:02:30] than NTIA had in mind for a community our size. NTIA originally had defined what they called critical institutions in round one as fire stations, city halls, hospitals, libraries, schools, and those are certainly all critical institutions. The Bill to Congress passed that funded all of this, talked about serving vulnerable populations.

(02:54):
So we went back and said, okay, who's vulnerable? All people are vulnerable. Let's do all the senior centers, all the senior [00:03:00] activity centers, very, very young. People are vulnerable. Let's do the head start centers. People with disabilities are vulnerable and went on and on from there. And soon we had most of the churches, the afterschool programs, just a whole wide variety. We did a Zen meditation center as an equal opportunity funder, and we plan to build fiber to all of those places. And when you populate a map that has 256 anchor institutions [00:03:30] in roughly 80 square miles, it gets pretty dense and fiber routes suggest themselves and they help make a compelling case for funding from other organizations. Okay.

Christopher Mitchell (03:40):
We're going to talk a little bit about where we are today and then go back to the history of it. But I do want to ask, how many people in Urbana Champaign, roughly?

Mike Smeltzer (03:49):
Roughly 140,000 between the two communities?

Christopher Mitchell (03:52):
So the premier University of Illinois, one of the better Big 10 schools I'll give you that [00:04:00] is down there. And then you have 140,000 people or so across two towns. Champaign is one, Urbana is the other for people that aren't familiar.

Mike Smeltzer (04:08):
And if you think of a donut, Champaign is about two thirds of the donut. Urbana is about one third of the donut, and in the middle is the University of Illinois. So all of our network planning and all that always started and ended at the University of Illinois and then had rings that went out through Urbana or through Champaign. There's also [00:04:30] another community called Savoy, which is just down to the south. It's kind of like the sprinkles on the donut. It's very small, but the university airport is there. So we had a fire and rescue place that we had, and we wanted to make sure it was well connected. Air Force one has landed at that airport. It got stuck in the mud at that airport. Once upon a time, we weren't trying to bend the rules, but we were trying to make good cases for having a very deep definition of what was an anchor institution. And in round two [00:05:00] of B-O-P-N-T-I-A started referring to anchor institutions rather than critical institutions, and we think we had something to do with that.

Christopher Mitchell (05:09):
Yes. Well, let's fast forward then more than 10 years and come back to Paul. What's the, you want to talk about Air Force One?

Paul Hixson (05:15):
No, but I did want to say one other thing about that. When we were applying, when Mike was applying and Tracy Smith as the PIs for this grant,

Christopher Mitchell (05:28):
The principal investigators, yes. That's [00:05:30] a little academic language,

Paul Hixson (05:31):
Right? Sorry,

Christopher Mitchell (05:33):
Grant language. Thank you.

Paul Hixson (05:33):
When they were applying for that, it became obvious that if we were to get it, that you could only use the infrastructure grant to build infrastructure. Meanwhile, another professor at the U of I in the I school, Abdul Al Kama, was preparing a proposal of what to do basically for what we are now today calling [00:06:00] digital inclusion and equity. We did not know at that time that a community of the size of Champaign-Urbana would probably not get both an infrastructure and digital inclusion and equity grant approved. So we had an instance in the community where Abdul had gone out and talked to the community and done great [00:06:30] intake finding what needs were and suggesting how we would deliver if his grant was awarded. Then Mike's grant was awarded. We had an instance in the community where once the community heard that we were going to build the physical infrastructure, the people, Abdul who had talked to had different expectations. And that [00:07:00] caused us down the road to try to ask ourselves the question, how could we honor the terms of the federal grant but still address those important needs that Abdul had surfaced in our community? So we can talk about that later, but I just wanted to set that as part of the context of the beginning of UC2B,

Christopher Mitchell (07:25):
Being community driven is not always convenient.

Mike Smeltzer (07:29):
And NTIA [00:07:30] had a change of heart halfway through the grant process in round one. This is back in 2009, they said if you integrate your, there were actually three categories. There was community broadband labs, and there was sustainable broadband adoption was the other category. If you had a proposal, if you had three different proposals or two different proposals that integrated together, you'd get extra points and have a higher likelihood of being funded. Yet I think Los Angeles was the only community [00:08:00] that got both sustainable broadband adoption funding and infrastructure funding. The people that were running NTIA, they changed midway through the grant process. So Larry Strickling, he inherited the program and he was interpreting how Larry wanted to see things done, and yet the original grant documents said something else or the original solicitation for Grant said something else, and there was nothing nefarious about it. It just, things change and [00:08:30] the political winds blow in different directions from time to time. But they got to a very good place for round two because they had a broader idea of what a community anchor institution could or should be. And I have to give props to John Windau in here because he got us started back in 1997.

Christopher Mitchell (08:48):
Right around that time is when John Winden was the executive director of Shelby. The school's now Healthcare Library Broadband Coalition.

Mike Smeltzer (08:57):
Yes.

Christopher Mitchell (08:58):
Okay. Let's talk about where things [00:09:00] are right now. So Paul, or more than 10 years later, after the network is built, the core network is built. There's been a dream of extending it further. Where are we today?

Paul Hixson (09:10):
Fortunately, we are just about to complete all the passes in all the neighborhoods. The city manager in Champaign is the supervisor of the IT manager of Champaign, and he's on our board. And she [00:09:30] asked him to find an area a city block in Champaign where there was a resident that could not sign up for high speed fiber, and he's a GIS specialist. He spent an afternoon and he couldn't find one city block where there wasn't one provider. Now that wasn't all uc, two B at that point. One of the things I like to say is once we got [00:10:00] Mike's grant, it changed and improved the behavior of the other providers. All of a sudden, people who were not interested at all in providing fiber started providing fiber. So

Christopher Mitchell (10:13):
Other companies stepped up and improved their investment. Yes,

Paul Hixson (10:16):
Very much. My neighborhood right now, I could actually have gig connectivity from one of three providers. There are businesses in Champaign, Urbana that could have connectivity from five vendors. [00:10:30] And before we got the UC2B grant, you could not get any. Yeah,

Christopher Mitchell (10:36):
And Urbana and Champaign are nice, but you would not see that in absence of the grant that led to this Middle Mile network and then the Last Mile Network.

Paul Hixson (10:45):
Right. So today we are completing, and we hope that within the next calendar year, all of the fiber in the UC2B network will be throughout Champaign-Urbana, [00:11:00] all neighborhoods. So that's a huge win.

Christopher Mitchell (11:03):
And this is a public private partnership. So is there anything you want to say about the current day, Mike, or should we dive back into the history of how we got here?

Mike Smeltzer (11:12):
No, I mean, I'm excited when we can have our little victory lap, if you will, and say that every home and every business in Champaign-Urbana has the opportunity to have fiber access that it's at the curb. If they want to sign up, they'll get connected. [00:11:30] And what Paul was referring to is there has been a mindset change. There were ISPs that we wanted to get involved in UC2B that said, no, we're doing wireless. We don't care about that fiber thing. Well, there were two of those. They now both have fiber construction companies and they're building their own fiber, not a little bit in Champaign-Urbana, but a lot in the areas around Champaign-Urbana at t. We begged them for years to start building fiber in Champaign-Urbana. Nope. Paul's got at t Fiber [00:12:00] hanging on street pole or telephone poles behind his house. I have two possible fiber providers in my front yard. You'll never guess which one I chose, but, and that's great because competition is a good, good thing and it keeps the price reasonable. I think the service level and the prices we have going in Champaign, at least with I three broadband, are best in the country. That's where we are. We're not quite there yet. Urbana [00:12:30] is probably 95% built out, I'd say, and Champaign somewhere in the mid eighties. But we're coming up on construction season and they'll probably get it all finished this year.

Christopher Mitchell (12:42):
So we go back to the beginning. This was always envisioned as being a partnership, not just between the university and Urbana and Champaign, but a provider that would be providing physical access. It

Mike Smeltzer (12:55):
Changed over time.

Christopher Mitchell (12:57):
Okay. I recall you, [00:13:00] and this could be an invention. Sometimes my mind plays weird tricks on me, but I remember you basically saying, we don't think the university should be running an ISP across the community.

Mike Smeltzer (13:10):
Well, we had no choice about that because there's a state law that specifically prohibits universities from competing in some sectors with the private sector. And broadband was fought to be one of those.

Christopher Mitchell (13:20):
And I think we probably all agree that it would be better if the university didn't get into that. I would just put that out there myself. We

Mike Smeltzer (13:26):
Had the brain power, we had the experience. I mean the team, I was [00:13:30] the director of networking at the time we were doing this and the team, we have about 20,000 access points on campus and 10,000 video cameras. And God

Christopher Mitchell (13:40):
Knows. That's a good point. I'm glad you're putting me in my place.

Mike Smeltzer (13:43):
No, no. I'm just saying that the expertise to do it was solely within the university and yes, and we leveraged all that

Paul Hixson (13:53):
And we had a billing system that could have handled it as

Christopher Mitchell (13:55):
Well. That's the hardest part of the network.

Mike Smeltzer (13:57):
You have to understand a little bit of the culture of Champaign-Urbana. [00:14:00] We don't collect garbage. We don't provide water. We don't directly provide sanitary sewer service. The cities are in no businesses other than streets and police and firemen. That's it. The cities don't have any reason to bill people. The taxes get billed by the county. So my vision was that at one point, once we got something built and working that we'd figure out how to run it in an ad hoc basis for a little while, but then hopefully either Champaign or [00:14:30] Urbana would step up and say, okay, we'll assign a couple of people to manage this and we'll just run it. That almost happened. And then there was a change of leadership at one of the cities, and we got the message loud and clear, you guys need to go look for a private partner.

(14:45):
And we did. And we looked long and hard, and we talked to some people that we felt like we needed to take showers. After we talked to them, we talked to some people that we kind of liked, [00:15:00] I'm not going to name any names here, but nonetheless, we ended up with folks out of the Pekin area that were an offshoot of family video. It was a family owned business. They looked 20 years ahead and said, alright, people aren't going to be renting video discs for the future. How can we leverage the fact that we've got shops on street corners in many of these communities? And they thought broadband was a good thing. Families change and evolve over [00:15:30] time. And at some point they said, no, we don't think we want to be in the broadband business anymore. And they sold out to a group from St. Louis, which was then ITV three.

Christopher Mitchell (15:39):
Well, this is where, and again, you can walk me back because it's more important that this be accurate. My feelings be spared. But my recollection was that one of the things that happened is when you decided, when UC2B decided to find a partner, you did search long and hard. You found a partner that fit with your values that was locally [00:16:00] rooted. And then when they sold, because you had inserted into the original contract, a right of first refusal, you had a seat at the table when that sale was being completed and you had a voice even though you did not intend to buy the network.

Paul Hixson (16:15):
That's correct. And actually I was on the board at that time as well, and we had some very serious discussions about who would make a good partner. And one of the things, and Mike's [00:16:30] too modest to say it, but I'll say it, remember, I began at the beginning parts of this interview to talk about how Abdul had surveyed the community about the needs for what we should be doing in the area of digital inclusion and equity. Well, knowing that we couldn't spend Mike's grant in that way, if we were going to have to get a private partner and we were going to have to [00:17:00] basically seed over to that partner the IUs for the use of our fiber. We wanted to get something in return. And Mike suggested that they contribute money toward a community benefit fund. And we accumulated that and it got to a fairly sizable amount. And one day we had a board meeting, and it's the only time I ever was late or missed [00:17:30] a board meeting. And our chair at that time, Charlie Smith said, well, Paul will be the chair of the community benefit fund.

(17:40):
And so I had to pick up on what Abdul had started several years before and go back out and ask the of the community, the underserved, what do you need and explain that we are not what Abdul had promised you, but we can [00:18:00] do some things together. And so in 2018, we actually were able to award, I think it was about $110,000 back into the community, to people who were already running computer labs in churches or we had a professor at the U of I who recently just passed away who was doing phenomenal programming with youth at the Boys and Girls Club. He was teaching [00:18:30] them how to basically code by getting them interested in programming model cars. And so we had some great things going. And then now we have continued that work and now moving forward into the future where we are, we've got not only a great partner in I three, but now we have our chancellor at the campus has [00:19:00] initiated what he has called the campus Community compact. And it attempts to deal with six areas of pressing need. And it was in response to the social unrest that happened about two years ago

Mike Smeltzer (19:17):
From

Paul Hixson (19:18):
George Floyd, George Floyd murder. Yes. And so the Campus Community Compact is attempting to deal with making technology more accessible, but also making police [00:19:30] community relationships better education, more accessible in non-formal ways to people in underserved areas. And so one of the six areas that we're working on is making technology accessible. That works in total parallel with what the UCDB board is trying to do, what the state of Illinois is now trying to sponsor through federal funding. [00:20:00] And so we kind of see these things coming together in an important way.

Mike Smeltzer (20:06):
That's exciting. A small correction in the name of historical accuracy. We don't have to do that around here. It was really Abdul's idea to set aside some of the income. We were collecting our own money. I mean, we were billing and doing that for a while. It was to set aside some of the profits if there were profits of what we were doing. And when we negotiated with I three, because we did have [00:20:30] that right of first refusal, we got them to commit to what, a seven year funding period where they would kick in $50,000 a year maybe. Yeah, $50,000 a year for that fund as well as a small amount just to keep the board running. I mean, we have insurance and accountants and so forth. Abdul has to take the credit for that. I mean, I ran with it, but it was Abdul's idea. You borrowed his idea. He encouraged me strongly.

Christopher Mitchell (20:55):
Great ideas cannot be restrained. So one of [00:21:00] the things that I recall is after the transition then, this was something that was fairly common was that ITV three I think had a threshold where they had to have community signups before they invested in a neighborhood. Then that all went away at some point. How did that work out? Or am I just

Mike Smeltzer (21:18):
No, no, they did. And we had done that back in the grand period. We had got people, we had, I dunno, 500 people that had already signed up and committed, I think a minimum of two or $300. Some people [00:21:30] as much as $500 towards that would be applied to their early bills. But nonetheless committing that they wanted the network and they wanted Fiverr because we wanted data to see where the interest was. I don't know that anyone from I three will admit to it, but their whole, you got to have 30% was really just helping them spend their capital wisely. They never stopped building. If they had available equipment and they had available people, they went and built the next neighborhood on the list, whether it was 32% [00:22:00] or 26% or 20%. Because in reality, if they had 15% maybe pre-sign up, then it was a pretty good sign that they were going to do. And at the time, they were the only game in town. So they said that and they encouraged people and they had to prioritize somehow. And you might as well let people vote with their checkbooks so to speak. They never denied anybody just because they were in a low neighborhood. [00:22:30] They just got done later.

Paul Hixson (22:31):
But occasionally we'll still have somebody who finally I three builds into their neighborhood and they say, now where do I go? I had a hundred bucks on this and we honor

Mike Smeltzer (22:43):
It, right? Yes. We had the money set aside. I three is administering it. And they have a whole process for dealing with that.

Christopher Mitchell (22:52):
I like to go back to those things because I think it's important to note that when those things happen, sometimes people that are [00:23:00] paid to sling mud will say, oh, well this isn't really going to serve everyone, but here we are. All the neighborhoods are being connected.

Mike Smeltzer (23:09):
And I live in a very nice neighborhood and I was one of the last neighborhoods that I three built to in Champaign. They're not done, but they have some equally nice neighborhoods they haven't built to. They have some middle income and lower income neighborhoods they haven't built to, but they didn't just go after the money first, which is I kind of expected them [00:23:30] to because that helps fuel future growth. But they took a very broad approach to it and they paid attention to those percentages. And now we're at a point where we don't care because everyone's got it or just about everyone's

Paul Hixson (23:47):
Got it. And just to show what a standup partner we have, we recently had the first major outage, and it was not their fault. [00:24:00] Somebody that they contracted with cut their fiber and the system was down for 18 hours. And guess what they did? They gave everybody who lost service a $10 credit on their month's bill.

Christopher Mitchell (24:18):
That's a great credit.

Paul Hixson (24:20):
And it was noticed appropriately. But good goes around too. And I think that if you [00:24:30] have a good ethos and a good history, then you start to build an expectation that we got to do this right. And with the partner, or whether it's our board or whether it's the cities, I think people understand the increasing importance of connectivity in everybody's life and nothing brought it home more than covid. And all of a sudden your kids are dealing with school that [00:25:00] way and it's Zoom or it's teams, and so God

Christopher Mitchell (25:04):
Forbid it's teams.

Paul Hixson (25:07):
So you realize the essential quality of connectivity if you're going to get a job, apply for a job or you're going to get training. Right.

Christopher Mitchell (25:17):
Well, let me ask about that because the other one thing that we haven't talked about, this will probably be the last topic. So if you have a point you want to make, just shoehorn it in somehow. I think there was like a thousand accounts originally that were going to be designated low income [00:25:30] and have affordable service. $20 a month is stuck in my head a little bit.

Mike Smeltzer (25:34):
Our original thing was 20 megabits a month, symmetrical for 20 bucks. To this day, three is honoring that. I believe those customers that signed up, when was it, 10 years ago?

Christopher Mitchell (25:49):
More than 10 probably.

Mike Smeltzer (25:50):
Yeah, 20 10, 20 11. They're honoring that, but they're not just delivering 20, their lowest service package, I think is a hundred to a hundred, and they're still doing that. For the 20 bucks [00:26:00] that we had originally set up, it was 20 bucks for 20 megs. That was our little thing. We originally had symmetrical equipment. Now they've since gone to asymmetrical equipment, but they're using it symmetrically, so it doesn't matter.

Christopher Mitchell (26:13):
We're not going to get into GPON. No,

Mike Smeltzer (26:14):
We're not.

Christopher Mitchell (26:15):
Or potentially XGS-PON, I'm guessing. There we go. I've lost people.

Mike Smeltzer (26:21):
I don't spend a lot of time on the Nextdoor app, but I get notifications and email that. so-and-so asked a question and invariably, once a month, somebody new moved [00:26:30] to town, they want to know who to get for broadband. Five years ago, I used to answer some of those and I was the big expert, and I don't even have to anymore. There's 20 people jump on and say, we got I three and we love it. We have I three and we love it. We have I three and they take good care of us. That's unsolicited. And they have that kind of relationship with the community and with, I'm sure most of their customers, no one's perfect, but they do

Christopher Mitchell (26:58):
Closing comments.

Mike Smeltzer (27:00):
[00:27:00] It's always good to see you. May Minnesota have better luck on the hardwood in the years future.

Christopher Mitchell (27:06):
Yeah. I feel like the women are doing better and the men are, we're looking great. And then the transfer portal, you're just rolling the dice, so who knows what's going to happen. No, it depends on whether the Timberwolves win, how I'm feeling about basketball at that point.

Paul Hixson (27:23):
Well, I'd just say that this has been a great opportunity to have this conversation because you [00:27:30] don't quite realize and appreciate what you've done over the long haul till you have these sorts of conversations. I mean, we deal with the world week by week, maybe months year, but we're looking back over now 10 years of partnership with our current private partner. That's kind of remarkable. And what we set out to do, we've done, and we just asked [00:28:00] them in our last meeting, when you started with us, gig was all you could do. We hear that in some of your newer markets, you're now doing, you have 10. When are you coming back to us? And that discussion's ongoing. If you have a good partner and you establish that, you can never tell where it'll lead.

Christopher Mitchell (28:25):
Yes. And to reiterate, it took time to find that partner. You didn't just rush

Paul Hixson (28:29):
Through [00:28:30] it. So in an R one university with a lot of researchers, our computer science department is one of the top in the country. Actually. 10 gig connectivity could be a recruitment tool for faculty. So we look at this both for the people who are needing the very cutting edge and those who are underserved and needed equally because they are underserved.

Mike Smeltzer (28:58):
We took a lot of grief [00:29:00] during the planning process when we were building, planning our fiber rings, that we were expanding them so far outside of the perimeters of the city. And I'd say someday, that's going to be an important place to be. And sure enough, way out in Southwest Champaign, there was nothing but farmer's fields. We ran fiber right through the middle of 80 acres of farms and right through the other, there's now a multi hundred million dollar medical complex out there on that corner. And from the very first day, the very first construction truck showed [00:29:30] up. There was Internet waiting for 'em to plug into. And that whole medical community, you still have to drive for 10 minutes to get to it, and you go buy some corn to get there, but it's there. The interstate's right there. It'll all get developed eventually, but it's an economic development engine. And even city council people that didn't understand fiber, they didn't understand digital equity there. They didn't understand how to use their phone, but they understood economic [00:30:00] development. The people in here, they're doing digital equity, and those are all important things. The people who hold the purse strings, they're going to understand economic development and workforce development, and fiber enables all that.

Christopher Mitchell (30:15):
Excellent. Well, thank you so much both of you.

Mike Smeltzer (30:17):
Thank you. Thanks

Ry Marcattilio (30:18):
We have transcripts for this and other podcasts [email protected] slash broadbandbits. Email [email protected] with your ideas for [00:30:30] the show. Follow Chris on Twitter. His handle is at Community nets. Follow community nets.org. Stories on Twitter, the handles at muni networks. Subscribe to this and other podcasts from ILSR, including Building Local Power, local Energy Rules, and the Composting for Community Podcast. You can access them anywhere you get your podcasts. You can catch the latest important research from all of our initiatives if you subscribe to our monthly [email protected]. While you're there, [00:31:00] please take a moment to donate your support in any amount. Keeps us going. Thank you to Arnie Sby for the song Warm Duck Shuffle. Licensed through Creative Common.