Ask HN: Advice on bringing community broadband to Los Alamos?

1. Not realistic, but not outside of normal for an management infrastructure/ops position. What you are writing is what you hope for, but sometimes it sends a red flag to potential applicants. The worry many high level people have is that they will be turned into the 'do everything' person. Trim a few of the less directly related requirements off of the description (e.g. Microsoft certification).

2. Yes... but also No. There are a lot of people who push through their careers collecting credentials and turning it another rung on the ladder. Chances are you will get a rosy candidate at some point, who will put in two years of aggressively spending your budget to inflate their resume and then move on. Not that a majority of people are this way, but the filters are set in such a way that this is what you are likely to end up with.

3. Other comments will say 'pay more', but it will be difficult to meet market rates for this skillset when working with local governments. If you can't get approval to raise the comp, instead try to split this role up into a team. Governments won't pay one highly skilled person 250k, but they will pay four people 80k, and one manager 120k.

4. Politically? Find someone with pull, and make sure that it's 'their idea'. Something that they can put on their win list.

Procedurally? Don't boil the ocean. Handle it iteratively. Start with commercial areas and new housing developments. White-glove your initial smaller install and it will create the broad demand from the community to expand it.

Love what you are doing. Hope this helps.

How can we change this? As a taxpayer, I'd be perfectly happy allocating some of my tax dollars to pay efficiency wages in situations like the one in this post, where hiring someone with specialized skills can save the community millions of dollars.

The thing that would pop up as #1 for me is access to poles to run fiber. If this killed Google Fiber it can definitely kill a smaller upstart.

There are gatekeepers who limit this access and they work for the county, in the permit office. The incumbents have a relationship with these people, and if they don't you better believe that their folks will start building one as soon as your project is announced. All your local contractors currently supporting Comcast are also not on your side.

It is in these people's best interest to see your project die. To make things worse, they don't have to work very hard to make it happen. All they have to do is sit on a permit application long enough to cast doubt on the project. Whereas the broadband manager has a huge hill to climb in comparison: they would have to build a relationship with all the people blocking their progress or figure out how to sidestep them.

So the person you are looking for should have high-caliber government sales skills. Good luck finding someone like that who also has a masters degree in CS and will work for 140k. This person can make millions in commissions in enterprise IT sales and they know it.

It there any perspectives of game-changing in that field? And what can be done to change it?

I'm genuinely curious about it.

You are correct about the other utilities. The Feds actually built some of the infrastrucure and simply gave it to the County when they gave up running it.

You are sort of correct about the lab's backbone connection. However that connection is owned and operated by the phone company, now called Lumen. Lumen sells capacity on that link to Comcast.

The lab is not going to be interested in buying service from the County, but as a consequence of the pandemic they have said that they are interested in supporting employees working from home. Working from home with the available Internet connections is difficult.

I’m just weary from trying to fight horrible broadband providers blocking every step of the way. Maybe the answer is to go over their heads.

This won't answer your immediate questions, but they've been heavily involved in getting startups to move to small communities. Municipal broadband is a big part of that, and I believe some of them worked on those efforts in Vermont.

Try talking with Allan and Mariela Saenz at Los Alamos Network, losalamosnetwork.com.

My blog is still there at fiberlanm.blogspot.com.

My home Internet connection is through Los Alamos Network.

I believe that the Carson Electric Co-Op in Taos uses REDInet to provide an Internet option to their customers.

I heard for years that the San Ildefonso prevented us from connecting to REDInet. Then Alan told me that he and Comcast and everyone else buys capacity on the link that Lumen operates for LANL.

We need a someone employed by Los Alamos County who knows what's going on.

I moved to Camp Verde, Arizona. Things were even worse here, but the small cable company sold out to Suddenlink out of Round Rock, Texas, and that sold out to Altice, from France, and I think Suddenlink here is similar to Comcast in Los Alamos. There's nobody like Allan, and cable's fatal flaw is that upload speeds are capped at 10 Mbits/sec. I paid over $300 a month for a couple of years for less, and now pay about $130 for 50 down, 8 up. Sigh.

Trouble is, if you offer gigabit, or even 200 megabit, symmetric, for a few hundred customers, you need 40 gig or 100 gig upstream, and that's a big-city thing. Citylink in Albuquerque does have that, and I suspect LANL does, too, though I'm not in touch with them the past 8 or 9 years.

Also, for WFH (work from home) for LANL, within the county or from Taos through Belen, there's still the fact DOE (Department of Energy) really, really wants all LANL traffic to go through ESnet (Energy Sciences) so latency that could be microseconds inside town becomes at least 70 milliseconds. That makes a huge difference in how useful it is.

Other nearby resources are Jane Hill and Cybermesa in Santa Fe, Richard Loewenberg and his first mile mailing list, also in Santa Fe and John Brown at Citylink in Albuquerque. The subscription web page for 1stmile is:

http://mailman.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/1st-mile-nm

I think the long game that local politicians miss (or are financially motivated to not see) is that broadband is becoming as important to communities as roads. It facilitates lowering the costs of so many things, benefits companies+individuals+government, improves equality of access+opportunity, on and on.

If you know people who might be interested in the Broadband Manager position, please tell them about it.