Bethany: So we’ve got our next speaker here. We’ve got Mike Knittel, who is the IT director of the city of Emmett. And he is, he’s been building some really cool stuff for the citizens. So let’s take a look at what is actually possible with local government and how they can actually support citizens in the most unlikeliest of places. So I’m going to set up your slideshow real quick and introduce yourself.

Mike: So before I get started in this, I just wanted to take a minute. I am very grateful to be here in front of you today and to have some of your time to share with you what we’ve been doing. But before I really jump into this, let’s give a big thank you and round of applause to Bethany, Joelle and all the staff that made this happen. This is awesome. Right? This is what Idaho’s about. And the sponsors. So thank you. Thank you for giving us all the opportunity to come together here. So I will honestly say that Bethany helped me. She didn’t help me. She did it. Let’s just be honest, she made the title for my presentation in the syllabus here. That is, and I love it, government tech that serves citizens.

And I had to stop for a minute and think and thought that is what we’re doing at the end of the day. And it was just kind of a weird low key realization for me. So what I’m going to talk to you about today is something that we’ve been building for the last decade. Last 10 years we’ve been building an open access fiber optic network. Some of you might be like, well, that sounds weird, but okay, so let me just share with you kind of the journey and the story of how we got to where we are today. I’ve worked in local government my entire adult life. How many of you have heard or know where Emmett is? Is in Idaho. Okay. More people than I thought. Okay. Some people are like, it’s. What is that? Is that like up by Coeur d’Alene?

Nope. Nope. So Emmett is a population of about, we’ll say 8 to 10,000 people right now. So very rural, very cookie cutter what you would expect for rural Idaho. Agriculture driven. Right. Big sawmill back in the day that closed down. So just to kind of set that tone and that picture for where we’ve come from and where we’re going to. But we didn’t have a technology department until up to just about 11 or 12 years ago. So I had worked for the city my entire adult life. I worked in emergency services, came from that sector. It was just kind of a weird thing that evolved as a lot of things do in small towns.

Small town Idaho tends to be very resilient and self sustaining, creative in their own ways to fill needs and gaps that are within the community that you might not have funding for outright, if that makes sense. So I landed myself in this position that I currently am a little bit by happenstance. When I got into technology, it was all personal and private and just kind of a hobbyist of sorts until my bosses were like, you figured out what the right click on the mouse does? And I’m like, oh yeah, kind of. And they’re like, how would you like to transition and start the technology department? Cool, sounds good. Let’s give it a go. So one of the very first things as I made that transition over, you know, you kind of start to do this assessment, right?

So we have all these different city departments. We have police and fire, library and sewer and water and parks and cemetery. And you quickly realize from a technology perspective, and this is not unlike other small towns or communities in Idaho, Everybody’s kind of doing something different for their technology needs. There’s no cohesion, Right. So you have like this department with a phone contract and this one with an Internet contract and printers and it’s. Yeah, it was pretty eye opening. So one of the first things that we realized that we needed to do was we got to streamline some of this stuff. We got to interconnect with each other, work together within the departments to make things more fluid and to share resources. Right. Everything from Internet connections to servers. So that’s what we set out to do.

We quickly realized to physically do that, to have fiber optics between those facilities, we could do it. We contacted one of the local providers to get kind of a cost quote for that. And it blew our minds how much they came back with. At the time, our public works director and myself were looking over this and he’s very much an infrastructure guy, Did a lot of our own in house sewer and water projects. And I’m kind of the geek tech guy. And he said, we can build this. Cool. I don’t know anything about fiber, but let’s do it. And that’s exactly what we did. So we set off 10 years ago and what we ended up doing is, and we’re going to go through kind of all these things, identified the need of why we started heading down this path.

And I’m gonna go through just briefly how we’re doing it and then what the realization was that we could leverage to serve citizens. So how did we do it? Well, we didn’t have a ton of money. Right. As most small communities do. So we started to just strategically do our own in house assessment of whenever they there’s roads open for new construction, sewer and water projects, new housing developments. We follow a dig once policy. Right. Because at the end of the day, the infrastructure. Thank you. Thank you. Do I go home now? Is that okay? Got the claps. So again, the infrastructure part of it is not the expensive part. The conduit and the fiber optic cable is not the expensive part. It’s getting it in the ground. Right. So this is exactly what we did.

This is some photographs of one of our water projects that was taking place that we overlay fiber optics with, thus spending very few dollars to do it. And so we rinse and repeated this throughout our community. And here was one of the other really interesting realizations. The cities strategically already own various pieces of property, Most of which are not only your core anchor institutions, but they’re water and sewer well stations, lift stations, so forth. Right. They have to have this physical infrastructure out there. The other thing that comes with that. So the city has small parcels of land that they own, and a lot of those facilities are already on generator backup. Okay, so how do we leverage that? Well, over the last 10 years, this is a screenshot of essentially the footprint of our fiber optics. This is Emmett.

And so what we started to do is as were building this, not only do we have to have that high reliability connectivity for critical infrastructure like sewer and water, and I’ll tell you what, you want a city to go into a panic, make it stop working when you flush your toilet. Right. Like nobody understands the magic behind that. There’s a lot that goes into it, I promise. I’ve learned so much. So again, to build a resilient infrastructure. So at this point, we own and operate the dark fiber that interconnects our own facilities. So what’s the benefits of that? Well, cost, obviously, if we own it and have it.

But if there was ever a sizable event that would take down sections of the Internet, in theory, our facilities are all on a closed network that we could continue to maintain and operate our systems without a hiccup. So the other thing we did is we built this out is we started to deploy public access WI fi to all of our public facilities. So again, not just the anchor institutions, but every single one of our city parks is fibered up and has public access WI fi gigabit connections, free for the Public to use safe, secure, separate network. And then we also deploy a network based camera system. So for everything from traffic monitoring and traffic counts to crime enforcement, we have that as well. So we have again, we’re only about 2 square miles is our city boundaries. Right. So pretty small.

But we have over 100 cameras right now that we deploy to become a force multiplier. And again, it’s not just for enforcement, but you think about those types of things. School zones that want to figure out, okay, what road projects do we need to do to start to make maybe widened roads or what are our areas that we need to address? Well, we can apply a data driven approach to those types of things now that we have that technology in place and can leverage it. So I have a very short time so I’m going to get away from myself. But I wanted to leave some time for questions too. So I’m going to buzz right through this. So this is just a quick picture glance at one of our facilities. This is actually out at our wastewater treatment plant.

This facility that you see is totally dedicated as a fiber optic point of presence. And so we have about eight of these right now. And what we’ve done and kind of the we don’t want to compete with private sector, we want to help fill gaps to actually let the private sector that has decreased the barrier of entry. Okay. So these types of facilities we have the fiber optics obviously connected. We actually will, you can see in that middle picture we have network rack space. So we will lease that to private sector. So think data center. If you’re a new startup company and you maybe don’t necessarily want to use like an AWS or something like that, you could go over here to ARC data center in Boise, ret rack space, get Internet connections, do all those things.

But the barrier of entry for a new startup is pretty high. It’s expensive to do that. We provide, I guess what you would call a microdata pop. Right. So it’s similarly the same type of thing. You have power redundancy, you have H vac control, you have controlled access and you can lease that space and cross connect with our various Internet providers that joined our network. And you can do that at a fraction of a cost. So again, trying to just drive that, fill that gap, so to speak, for that public private partnership for having these facilities. So what is an open access network? So think of it as a roadway. We don’t necessarily build separate roads for these three different entities. Why would we do that? Why should we do that with our data connectivity Infrastructure. Right. You have multiple Internet providers.

Generally speaking, none of them like or want to work together. Right. So if we can deploy the ground floor infrastructure of the fiber optic media that can be shared amongst Internet providers, once again lowers the barrier of entry to a market that they might not have otherwise penciled out to build to. Right. So not only for the bigger providers, but the smaller ones, again, Idaho has a lot of small businesses, Internet providers, especially in the rural communities, that would never have the capital to reach customers and constituents, their. Their neighbors, which is crazy. So again, thinking broader, okay, as we build this infrastructure out, what’s another way we can leverage it to serve citizens? So over the last year, we did a pilot program and we are now building fiber directly to homes.

So in our newer subdivisions that have come in, we build the fiber optic directly to the home. As you can see, our guys install all this equipment. We are not the Internet provider. We build an ecosystem where the customer gets to choose from one of the various Internet providers that is on our system. Does that make sense? So we have a very fluid process. New homeowner moves in. Hey, we’ve got Emmett Fiber here. They contact the provider that they choose to. Provider contacts us, and we spin them up onto the network. The beauty of this is it drives competition once again, lowering the barrier of entry for other providers. Once a provider is plugged into our system, they only have to be plugged in one place.

Any place that our fiber optics touch, they can plug in, and we can get them to other parts of the city. Does that kind of make sense? So again, because of that ecosystem that we’ve built, it’s driving innovation to all the way to fiber to the home and not only increasing competition, driving down price. Right. The other beauty of it is how many of y’ all have had Internet service and you’ve tried to contact their customer support and you’re like, I’m ready to murder somebody. The beauty of this is you are a click away. Within five minutes, we can have you switched over to a different Internet provider if you’re not happy with the one that you have. So some people might ask, how’s this funded? So for new subdivisions, what we did is we enacted a fiber optic fee.

So what happens is there’s an $1800 fee that gets attached to that building permit. So the developer essentially fronts that money, just like they have to for sewer and water infrastructure. They’re charged an $1,800 fee. Now, a lot of times those fees get passed on to the homeowner. Does Anybody want to take a guess how many calls of complaints that we’ve gotten for people that have had to pay that fee? Zero. Because who wouldn’t? I mean this is amazing technology that is being delivered to your house and you’re paying a fraction of the cost for the connectivity. So the way it’s set up right now is we provide gigabit. I say we the providers provide over our network gigabit symmetrical broadband.

We currently the equipment that is used for this has the capacity and ability to deliver 10 gigabit connectivity if a home number, if a homeowner wanted that. I mean that’s a lot of connectivity. But we have purposely done that to somewhat future proof right. As we move into higher resolution video and AI and the broadband demands that are coming, we have been forward thinking enough to future proof that so that as these connectivity requests grow, we can fulfill those. So as an example, just as a general speaking, you know, all of our providers, they don’t provide. Anybody that prides on the network does not have contracts or data caps and you’re paying an average of $70 to $90 for that residential service. That same price point is pretty consistent with even businesses.

So the providers that we have on the network right now are all Idaho based. So that’s very nice. There’s other networks similar to ours that pull in providers from Utah and so forth. We’re very thankful that we’ve been able to get Idaho based companies to do that. And like I said, switching providers takes not quite five minutes to do that was like down and dirty of everything. I apologize for breezing through that. But my contact information’s here. Please feel free. Reach out. We’re happy to, if anybody’s interested come out visit. We’re happy to show you what we’ve built. It is a fully self sustaining. We have no debt on the network. It’s taken. You can build anything as fast as you want with any amount of money you have. Right? But we’ve taken it slow. We want it to self fund self sustained.

We’re doing that right now. Again those fees that we pay. The one thing I didn’t mention is that a provider that provides to a home, we do get a fee from the provider for leasing that fiber. So again it’s a model that self sustains and rolls through. We continue to roll it back into the network to maintain it and expand it. That’s my down and dirty. Any questions? Anything. I’ll be here tomorrow too. So grab me on a break and happy to chat.