Low Barriers, Costs Called Key to Google Kansas City Fiber Choice; Medin now Focused on Wireless

Google Fiber's choice of Kansas City, Kansas, for its first fiber project taught Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kansas, that his job is to take actions that help "keep barriers low and costs less" for industry innovators, he said. That recipe is what convinced Google to pick Kansas City for its fiber deployment, said Moran, a Commerce Committee member, speaking at the Incompas conference Wednesday. Google Vice President-Access Services Milo Medin said Google was looking for "a place that's easy, not just from a construction standpoint" but that would "work with us and get things done." He said Google looked at Kansas City's permitting rules, pole-attachment policies and other "boring things" that really matter, and decided it was the best choice among 1,100 communities that competed for the company's initial fiber foray, which was followed soon thereafter by Kansas City, Missouri, and by moves in Austin and some other cities. He said one of the keys was a "demand model" that invited consumers to commit to the fiber service, and thereby aggregate demand. Medin, who worked on the Kansas City project, said he's now working more on wireless issues. He said much of the industry's focus is on using low-band frequencies for broad coverage and building penetration but higher-band frequencies for making smaller cells that allow spectrum to be re-used. He lauded the FCC's 3.5 GHz band effort to find ways to share government spectrum with private users. He said most of that spectrum traditionally was used for naval radar, and specifically aircraft carrier air-traffic control. "Have you ever seen an aircraft carrier in Kansas?" he kidded Moran. Medin said sharing arrangements were an innovative way to avoid the traditional, protracted battles where industry seeks to take over government spectrum. He said the sharing arrangements can actually be a "win-win" because they allow government communications users to better "leverage" commercial innovations that had escaped them.