On February 3rd, Steering Committee members from WiredWest convened in Boston to hear insights from  one of America’s broadband experts, former Indiana State Senator and Mayor of Fort Wayne, Indiana, Graham Richard. During his tenure as Mayor, Richard pushed for Fort Wayne to become the first city in the Midwest wired by Verizon FiOS, which resulted in improved economic development and quality of government and healthcare services – all while reducing municipal budgets. He is a champion of stronger cities, towns, and states, with a special interest in green initiatives, high-speed broadband, and high performance government. He met with WiredWest to discuss strategies for bringing high-speed broadband to all residents and businesses in their region, as a tool to retain and gain jobs, drive economic development and streamline costs for businesses and municipalities.

Richard provided a number of examples of how businesses today are making decisions about which communities to invest in based on access to fiber-optic networks, “In Fort Wayne’s 2007 surveys of site selection specialists and people looking to invest in Indiana, access to high-speed broadband was second, third, and always in the top five reasons a company would invest in an area,” he told WiredWest, and also provided examples of regions, cities and towns being passed over for lack of fiber-optic infrastructure.

Richard cited a study by RVA Consultants indicating home-based businesses with a fiber-to-the-home system had $20,000 to $30,000 more in annual revenues coming into the home. “If you aggregate that within a community, you begin to see a very substantial economic multiplier effect,” he said.

The meeting reinforced WiredWest’s research that attracting and retaining businesses, and enabling home-based workers and entrepreneurs to prosper in Western Massachusetts requires sufficient telecommunications infrastructure to participate and thrive in the evolving digital world. Today, the most reliable technology that has the capacity to meet the region’s telecommunications needs for decades to come is fiber-optic. Ensuring Western Massachusetts is planning for this type of infrastructure is an important economic development issue..

WiredWest is proposing a last-mile fiber-optic network that would connect to a regional fiber-optic backhaul such as the Massachusetts Broadband Institute’s middle mile network.

Currently WiredWest is working on creating a governance structure for the member towns, with a target of July 1st, 2011 of forming a public cooperative. Governance is critical to formalizing the relationship among participating WiredWest towns and creating a vehicle to capitalize and operate the network. To view the progress of towns voting on the proposed WiredWest governance structure, please click here. WiredWest is also finalizing a business plan and conducting preliminary network planning.

Watch video highlights of Richard’s presentation: Graham Richards on fiber