Nixa officials are trying to move ahead of the curve when it comes to business development, and the next wave on the horizon is digital. The question is whether residents and businesses want to spend the money necessary to catch the wave.
City officials are currently receiving proposals from parties that would conduct a feasibility study to determine local interest in fiber-based services such as Internet, TV and Internet-based phone services. Early estimates say it would cost up to $28 million to develop the underground infrastructure needed to reach the coveted “Gigabit City” moniker that has been the goal of such municipalities as Kansas City and Chattanooga, Tenn.
Nixa City Administrator Brian Bingle said the projection, which Lamar-based Finley Engineering unveiled at an Aug. 7 council meeting, includes $15 million for the fiber infrastructure, roughly $1 million of which would cover equipment and an operations center. Another $13 million is expected to hook up the entire city – nearly $1,900 per connection to the system.
Bingle said a request for proposals was issued on Aug. 16, and city staff expects to receive formal proposals no later than Sept. 13. The next step, with council approval, would be to contract with a consultant to prepare a marketing assessment and business plan that considers the city’s ability to serve as an Internet Service Provider and/or offer a private third party an opportunity to provide fiber to the home services, Bingle said.
The Gigabit City buzzword describes communities that offer broadband connectivity at roughly 1 gigabit per second, or 100 times faster than the average broadband service, according to Fiber.Google.com. Nixa officials in April began considering its moves toward greater broadband infrastructure with a goal of economic development.
Jeremy Bartley, co-founder of Nixa-based digital business card company QR Pro, said high-quality fiber-optics is critical for a city’s business development, especially in the technology field.
“Looking at it from my perspective as a tech professional, I want to be where there is a solid, fiber infrastructure,” Bartley said, noting current high costs for broadband make it difficult to recruit tech companies. “The cost of fiber is just not very competitive. For a tech company to come out to Springfield or Nixa, it is a deterring factor.”
Nixa Area Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Marc Truby has said costs for high-speed access can be $5 to $10 per megabit a second on the coasts, but locally range from $175 to $225 per Mbps.
Bartley serves on the board of information technology consortium Mid-America Technology Alliance, and he said one of its goals is to attract technology firms and skilled workers to the Springfield area. Bartley said if Nixa provided access to its municipal fiber infrastructure, many employers and workers would likely choose to live and work in Nixa opposed to its Queen City neighbor.
“If you were to choose between the two different places, with Nixa having the better schools in the area and fiber on top of it, where would you live?” Bartley asked. “The fiber project we’re talking about isn’t just for businesses; it is for the home.”
Nixa’s growing pains are evident on a statewide level. With broadband access in mind, Gov. Jay Nixon four years ago established an expansion program called MOBroadbandNow, with the goal of increasing broadband accessibility to 95 percent of Missourians in 2014, up from 79 percent in 2009.
That effort, funded in part by federal stimulus money, has utilized the office of administration’s regional networks to identify ways to increase broadband access.
“There were several components to this: infrastructure grants for service providers, mapping broadband speeds, and then creating a regional planning process,” said David Faucett, a community planner with the Southwest Missouri Council of Governments, one of 19 regional state planning agencies working on the broadband initiative.
While planning wrapped up in 2011 with a goal of offering health care providers a more robust, local broadband infrastructure to better serve rural patients, Faucett said a $15,000 grant was now in hand to help develop a health care specific plan. The grant, he said, would be used to help health care providers offer telemedicine to rural patients in the Southwest Missouri Council’s 10-county area.
“Telemedicine is a game changer in rural areas as far as having people be able to visit a clinic and receive a doctor’s visit over the Internet. And there are other [opportunities] for video-conferencing systems for emergency management and medical services,” Faucett said, pointing to the Federal Communications Commission’s Healthcare-Connect Fund that supports such broadband initiatives. “We are trying to leverage those (ideas) to come up with some effective strategies to move forward to improve broadband and meet needs.”
Faucett said if Nixa decides to pursue efforts to bring broadband access to homes and businesses, regional planners through the Southwest Missouri Council would help identify grant opportunities.
“We would definitely support any efforts to increase more broadband access to the home throughout the region,” Faucett said. “There are still gaps in and around Springfield and Greene County, where people aren’t always happy with the speeds they are getting now from different providers. The big picture is trying to make sure everybody in the state has access to affordable, fast broadband.”
Nixa’s Bingle, who also serves on the Southwest Missouri Council of Governments, said once feasibility study proposals are in, then it’s up to Nixa City Council to determine how best to move forward. Estimates for the city to build infrastructure strictly to communicate to its sewer and water utilities in the field is $4 million, he said. That expense would be part of the $15 million infrastructure should the city pursue the gigabit label, he said, adding funding has yet to be determined.
“There are certainly reservations associated with the cost of the city providing this without any assistance,” Bingle said. “It is expensive.”[[In-content Ad]]
