The Motion I am pleased to report that on Tuesday night Council passed the following motion unanimously: I move that Council approve grant matching funds to the Pueblo de San Ildefonso for their grant application in the amount of $2,000,000 (two million) for a New Middle Mile Fiber Optic Line Connecting White Rock to Pojoaque contingent upon execution and approval of a written agreement with the Pueblo de San Ildefonso by May 31, 2024. I further move Council authorize the County Manager to sign and submit a letter of support (Attachment A) to be included with the grant application materials ..read more

Dear Councilors, I see that broadband is on the agenda for your meeting on Tuesday. I’ve read the agenda item and the attachments. While I would be pleased if you simply took the Recommended Action of directing “[the] County Manager to pursue a procurement for an open access network operator […]”, that Recommended Action ignores the weakness of general telecommunication infrastructure in the County that the outage in December demonstrated, and it fails to give guidance about the values the Manager should consider in pursuing the procurement. I recommend that you adopt a stronger motion with w ..read more

I plan to attend the Los Alamos County Council meeting tomorrow, 2022-12-13, and read the following as a public comment: Over the weekend Los Alamos County suffered a broad telecommunications failure for more than 24 hours. It is not clear to me how broad or dangerous that failure was. However I believe that it was both broad and dangerous. Both local news outlets were down till Monday morning. During the outage the only way I found to connect to the outside world was to drive to Ashley Pond and use the public WiFi there. Even with that connection, no information about the outage was availabl ..read more

This blog, blabnow.blog, is my first and only blog. I set it up two years ago to support a petition to the Los Alamos County Council. It took quite a lot of time to select tools and set them up. The SpeakOut! plugin for WordPress worked out. However, I don’t like editing the posts in a GUI. So today I am trying out the Import Markdown plugin for WordPress. I plan to edit posts on my desktop computer and upload them to the blog. Markup Languages One feature that I like about markup languages is definition lists. Here are some of the tools that I’ve used for writing: roff I used roff on an IBM ..read more

The County has posted the new Broadband Manager position.  It closes at the end of September.  If you know anyone qualified who might be interested, tell them about it.  I have written a separate page promoting the position. On Thursday 2021-09-16 I posted a request on Hacker News with the title “Ask HN: Advice on bringing community broadband to Los Alamos? ”  I was pleased with the discussion which you can read by clicking on the link.  There was good advice from several people with a variety of knowledge and backgrounds.  southerntofu  from France wrote in ..read more

From the agenda for the 2021-6-29 County Council meeting, here is the position description for the Broadband Manager and the proposed Salary Plan for FY22.  The two documents are inconsistent and reflect uncertainty about what’s required. The position description mixes two goals: First someone who will start up a new utility; Second someone who can do IT support for County staff.  The description specifies technical work and skills, but the County needs a big picture person who can lead an evaluation of the telecommunication infrastructure and business here and if appropriate start a ..read more

The 2022 fiscal year for Los Alamos County starts on July 1, and the FY22 budget that the County Council approved in April includes a recurring item for a Broadband Manager.  The current staff will bring Council a new position description and salary to approve on June 29. I think that the Broadband Manager will be key to improving broadband access in the County. It will require an unusual set of activities and skills. The same set of circumstances that has moved Los Alamos to begin moving again on broadband now has led a large number of other communities to make similar decisions. So the ..read more

Council Chair Ryti has alerted me to an updated version of budget options prepared by staff in which there are two more lines for broadband, namely: 12b a recurring item of $161,664 for a Broadband Manager; 12c $500,000 for Broadband design services. I like the revisions. As Emily Litella would have said, “Never mind ..read more

I was encouraged by the broadband presentation on Tuesday June 30. Both the County’s Broadband Manager, Jerry Smith, and the CTC consultant, Patrick Mulhearn, were knowledgeable and well prepared. While we should avoid running an obvious push survey, I’d like to use the survey to get the community thinking about issues like privacy, censorship and total budget. The survey is part of an effort to find how County staff can support better broadband for Los Alamos County. To do that, it should tell us: What ISP and other communication services are currently used in Los Alamos County How much mem ..read more

My name is Andrew Fraser. I live at 197 Taos Street in Los Alamos.  I’ve read Mr. Smith’s slides and the draft survey in the attachments to the agenda. It is critical to do the survey well.  I want to focus on the following three broadband issues: 1. Privacy 2. Censorship and 3. Pricing With respect privacy, let me ask if after sending email about your vacation in Europe does it bother you to see more adds about ways to spend money in Europe? Beyond reading your email, ISPs can record and monetize the sequence of WEB sites you visit. With respect to censorship, recall the fuss about ..read more