AT&T’s “advanced discussions” on deploying gigabit fiber broadband to six...

AT&T’s “advanced discussions” on deploying gigabit fiber broadband to six North Carolina cities shows incumbent providers “have moved a long way in their thinking” about next-generation network deployments, said Gig.U Executive Director Blair Levin Friday during a speech at the Connecticut Gigabit Summit. AT&T said Thursday it was entering final negotiations for the deployments with the North Carolina Next Generation Network (NCNGN), an initiative among six municipal governments and four research universities -- Duke, North Carolina State, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Wake Forest (CD April 11 p14). The AT&T negotiations don’t mean “we've hit a tipping point but we know a lot more about what any provider, including incumbents, need,” Levin, former manager of the National Broadband Plan, said in a prepared version of the speech. Although NCNGN’s “multi-community collaboration entailed upfront costs and a feeling of slogging that often accompanies multi-stakeholder coordination, it brought scale to the project,” Levin said. Since scale is important to providers, regional approaches “may be the only way some communities obtain an upgrade,” he said. NCNGN used a Request for Proposal (RFP) process to obtain feedback on the AT&T proposal from all community stakeholders, which “is a model that can be utilized by other communities throughout the country,” Levin said. The RFP process works only if local governments get flexibility, so “taking options off the table takes away the creativity and leverage local governments need to obtain new investments,” he said.