Change Papers: A shared effort to change North Carolina's climate for innovation.

Google’s announcement that the company is considering providing somewhere between 50,000 and 500,000 people across the United States broadband Internet access with a speed of a gigabit per second starting (maybe) later this year. It’s a reminder of the arms race going on with broadband speed.

If the “giga” prefix sends you to Wikipedia or your Latin-English dictionary, here’s how Google put it in their blog post announcing the effort: “We’ll deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today with 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections.”

Still not there? Let’s just say the speed would give you whiplash and could permit the people using it to do things with the Internet that they aren’t currently able to even imagine, and that given the permission to think at 1 gig speed, they are likely to come up with some business-changing innovations.

As I read the announcement, it was hard not to reflect on where we stood in Internet connectivity in North Carolina ten years ago, how things have changed since then – AND what hasn’t changed. Speed still kills – and saves.

Ten years ago this month it was snowing (!) in North Carolina and I was writing the final report of the North Carolina Rural Prosperity Task Force. The number one recommendation? We had to have high speed broadband across the state. In the report, we described broadband as the essential element in modern economic competitiveness: “Today’s farm-to-market road is paved with electrons…the availability and affordability of high speed information technology…will make it possible for rural North Carolina to compete with the rest of the country and the world in the next century.”

Task Force Chair Erskine Bowles put it this way: “Information technology could be the salvation of rural North Carolina; the lack of it may be the damnation of rural North Carolina.”

In Whiteville, April 26, 2000 (had to miss it – something about my twins being born that day), then-President Bill Clinton said the effort would make North Carolina the national leader in closing the digital divide, because high speed Internet “…collapses time and distance. Therefore, for the first time in my lifetime, we have a chance to move more people out of poverty, unemployment and lack of access to businesses more quickly in rural America, isolated inner cities and Native American reservations than at any time in the history of this country.”

That’s why the Task Force was bold and strident: we had to get broadband to the whole state or we would get killed by the global economy.

We recommended an authority be created to head the effort. We got $30 million from MCNC to get it started. And ten years later the authority (now called e-NC) has gone way beyond what any of us thought was possible — doubling the percentage of rural folks with high speed access, moving from 36% to about 70% in a decade.  There’s still work to do, but congratulations to them.

Enough celebrating: here’s the problem. The Rural Task Force’s bold year 2000 recommendation was that we had to have 128,000 bits per second coming down the pipe – FAST STUFF at the time. Google’s announcement tells us the new “fast” is 1,000,000,000 bits per second.

Google’s announcement reminds us of four things:

1)      There is an ever-escalating minimum ante for businesses and communities to avoid being at a competitive disadvantage in the global economy. In 2000, we decided it was 128,000 bits per second to get in the game; today the new minimum may be 100,000,000 bits per second to compete. It’s going to take some ongoing commitment on the part of our state to keep developing capacity to all corners of the state, and some ongoing commitment to make sure that folks in rural areas know how to take full advantage of the high speed.

2)      Speed can’t just be available; it has to be usable. We need to continue to work on education efforts to make sure people understand the full possibilities open to them through speed.

3)     Speed can’t just be available and usable; it has to be affordable. In 2000 it cost more than ten times as much to get “high speed” in rural communities as it did in urban communities. No business can compete with that kind of tilt on the playing field.

4)      For businesses to get a competitive advantage, Google has just declared a new standard to shoot for – the gigabit — the new fast.

The challenge to us is whether we have the will to continue to be fastest in the urban areas that need a competitive advantage and really fast in the places that must avoid being at a competitive disadvantage. Doing  the latter is the focus of a new grant MCNC has just received – it will pay for the buildout of 480 miles of new fat fiber in the state (update 4/1/10: Golden LEAF is awarding MCNC an additional $24 million to bring broadband to an additional 69 rural counties in NC, 67 of which are underserved — the award could leverage ANOTHER $78 million in federal funding and serve more than 700,000 households that currently don’t have access to broadband). Doing the former is a matter of will: is there a city that will step forward to make the case for it being the right place for Google to try out its new network? (Update 3/3/10: At least two NC cities would seem to have a good case to make: Raleigh and Charlotte are ranked #1 and #16, respectively, in the latest Forbes rankings of “Most Wired Cities“)

As with innovation itself, the key mindflip we need to make is away from ever thinking that we have come up with a final solution to any business problem or social challenge that we face. Our orientation and mindset has to be that we will keep finding the next solution, and that once we find it we need to be working on the next one beyond that, and the next, and the next. That’s relentless innovation. That’s the world we live in — and if we want to keep competing, we need a gigabit of it in North Carolina.

Tags: e-NC, Erskine Bowles, gigabit, Google, MCNC, President Bill Clinton, Rural Prosperity Task Force