July 20, 2016 Meeting – Seattle Community Technology Advisory Board
This included a short meeting followed by a public input session on the Wave cable franchise renewal. In this transcription.CTAB Meeting topics covered included: Approval of June CTAB Minutes; approval of today’s agenda; and a short presentation by David Doyle of the E-Gov Committee on social media metrics.
This meeting was held: July 20, 2016; 6:00-7:45 p.m., Douglass Truth Public Library, 2300 Yesler Way, Seattle, WA 98122
Podcasts available at: http://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/CTTAB/podcast/cttab.xml
Attending: 28 In Attendance
Board Members: Mark DeLoura, Amy Hirotaka, Karia Wong, Nourisha Wells, Christopher Alejano, Mark DeLoura
Public: David Doyle, Dan Stiefel, Dorene Cornwell, Amethyst Thorpe, Kate Schneier, Kristin O’Donnell, Dan Moulton, Janice Tufte, Shamarr Davis, TaShon Washington, Truth, Rimon, Rezhoun Henderson, Damian Dodson, Vanessa Ingram, Gage Andrews, Eddie Jenkins, Jr,
Staff: Tony Perez, Virginia Gleason, Derrick Hall, Cass Magnuski, Brenda Tate, Alice Lawson
(Note: In this transcription, there are marked “unintelligible” segments where the speaker was too far away from the microphone to be picked up).
Meeting was called to order by Amy Hirotaka.
Introductions
Agenda and Minutes approved for the June meeting.
Amy Hirotaka: I am going to call this meeting to order at 6:03 p.m. We only have three items on the agenda today for CTAB official business. They are approval of last month’s minutes, approval of today’s agenda, and then David Doyle of the E-Gov Committee will be giving a short presentation on social media metrics.
Introductions
Amy Hirotaka: For those of you who haven’t been to a CTAB meeting before, they are generally two hours long, and they’re at the Seattle Municipal Tower on the second Tuesday of every month, from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. I highly encourage you to check those out, too. But, tonight we will be brief so we can get onto the Wave cable franchise discussion.
Minutes from the July CTAB Meeting and today’s agenda approved.
Amy Hirotaka: We will move on now to David Doyle, who is going to give his presentation.
E-GOV COMMITTEE UPDATE
David Doyle: Hi, everyone. My name is David Doyle and I’m currently on the E-Gov Committee and one of the things that I’ve been doing over the past few weeks/couple of months is actually taking data sets from the Community category from data.seattle.gov and looking at how we might use those within our committee work and help inform some of the work that we’re doing. Just to give an example, it’s a simple visualization, but I took the data set that listed all of the social media types that various community groups across the City are using, because we realized that we were only communicating by Twitter, and so we wanted to see whether that was the right approach. It’s hard to see, unfortunately, but basically in this visualization here, we have opened up each neighborhood by the type of social media that they’re using. We’ve broken it down by the various types. There are web sites, wikis, blogs, email lists, Facebook, and Twitter. Using the pie chart on the side, if we want to see who is using Facebook, you just select that piece of the pie and it will list. Over here, the communities that are using Facebook, and within those communities, which groups. This table down here, when you choose a particular type of social media it will actually list out within those communities which organizations are using Facebook to link to their group. Within this visualization itself, if you want to just look at a particular neighborhood, for instance, Ballard, when you click on a name, it will give you an overview and a pie chart of what types of social media are in use in that neighborhood. And the table underneath will update automatically with what the communities are actually using. So, a simple visualization of what we’ve been using to help inform the social media outreach strategy for CTAB and for E-Gov. Heather Lewis, I think, is going to talk about this at the next CTAB meeting, if possible. So we just wanted to highlight. I have several of these that I’ve been working on. I’ve been using [unintelligible] but I’ve moved over to Tableau because I can share it publicly more easily. As we build more of those out, we will share those with the committee. That’s it. Short and sweet. Any questions? We’ll share the URL. It will be in the meeting notes.
This is a data set that comes from the City. I’m just taking the open data set that exists.
Amy Hirotaka: Which data set are you using?
David Doyle: It’s called Community Social Media, I believe. It’s listed somewhere. I can put a link to that data set in the dashboard, and that’s probably a good suggestion. We have other ones, and as we build those out, we will share them. so this is open data in use within E-Gov Committee of CTAB.
Amy Hirotaka: Have you found anything surprising?
David Doyle: Yes. If you think about CTAB only using Twitter, when you look at the pie chart over here, Twitter is a very small piece of the pie. We’re also look at creating a map of which zip codes are using which type of social media. So, it’s interesting where you see different social media types being used. So it depends on the neighborhoods. So, then we can do a more targeted approach when it comes to a particular area of the City that we want to reach out to, we can tweak our approach and go with different social media types. I think one of the things we’re looking at is creating a CTAB Facebook, or getting that back up and running. We can also reach out to blogs, and maybe do guest posts on those. Things like that. So you can actually start targeting particular areas of the City, or groups, or whatever. But yes, Twitter is one of the smallest social media types within the community groups, at least. They tend to be laggard in terms of social media usage. We’re still analyzing the data, but Heather Lewis and others are using this to inform their strategy.
Nourisha Wells: Where did you find this {unintelligible}?
David Doyle: This is how people are categorizing this. This is a survey. When they gathered all the data, that’s how they were using social media. If you actually look, if you select web sites, the table will populate with all of those different web sites. You can scroll through and see some instances where they’re miscategorizing stuff, but in general, it looks pretty clean.
Amy Hirotaka: I heard that this is from the data set that we started in Community Technology in 2010 for my degree project. It’s called Seattle Communities Online.
David Doyle: Yes, that’s it.
Amy Hirotaka: So some of this is really old. I actually updated it through 2012. And then, I think, Vicky Yuki has been sort of keeping it up to date.
David Doyle: Yes, it’s definitely not the freshest data. But it gives us something to start with at least.
Amy Hirotaka: I’m glad that it’s still in use. It was a lot of work.
David Doyle: We have other examples, and over time, we’ll add the dashboards.
Chris Alejano: So this is used by community for what purpose?
David Doyle: It’s just what community groups are using for social media outreach.
Amy Hirotaka: A lot of people are on community councils. And this could look a little bit different with district councils. A lot of people on community councils attend district council meetings.
David Doyle: Yes. Could be the project in the future to refresh this. Then we could look at the trend of where social media is moving.
Amy Hirotaka: I don’t know if I should actually adjourn the CTAB meeting now?
Nourisha Wells: Yes.
Amy Hirotaka: Okay. I’m going to adjourn the CTAB meeting now at 6:15 p.m.
Wave Franchise Renewal Discussion
Tony Perez: I want to introduce myself and the Cable Office. My name is Tony Perez, and I’m the director of the Seattle Office of Cable Communications. Part of our job is to regulate cable companies in the City of Seattle, and also to the Mayor and Council in the development of broadband and communications policy. With me is Alice Lawson from the Cable Office, and Brenda Tate. And I want to thank them for being here. I also want to thank the members of the public for taking time from their busy day on a beautiful Seattle afternoon to come here and talk about cable.
What I want to do is provide kind of an overview about what we’re going to talk about today–give you a little background information that will hopefully stimulate some thinking. We are going to be negotiating a new ten-year cable franchise agreement with Wave Broadband beginning later this year likely in November. but before we begin negotiations, we undertake community involvement process to hear from the community about what things are important to them that the City should consider when it begins negotiating this franchise with Wave. Some of the things we have been able to obtain in the past, some we can’t. Some of the things we can or can’t do: there are some federal restrictions that prevent us from getting a lot of the things that we want. But at the end of the day, Wave still needs the City’s permission to occupy the streets, rights of way, string wires on poles in order to provide heir service. So, let me get started. Again, our meeting objective is to understand regulatory framework, learn a little bit about the cable system architecture and its capacity. What I really want to focus on are the last two bullets: to determine and prioritize community needs and interests, learn about satisfaction levels with Wave’s technical services, and customer services. What we’re going to do after I’m done speaking is to turn it over to CTAB, who wants to hear from you about your thoughts about the last two bullets there. After CTAB hears from you, I want to take a few minutes and have us hear from CTAB about what they think is important. And the, right before we leave, we hope to take a few minutes to see if we can prioritize some of the things that we’ve heard here today.
I want to show briefly the current areas of the City that are served by Wave. That’s the area shaded in yellow. It’s a good part of the Central Area and some parts of Queen Anne and west Capitol Hill. Together, they probably can serve about 50,000 of the 300,000 or so households in the City of Seattle. One of the things that the City did last year was to eliminate what we call cable franchise districts. And that’s what this is. It’s just a vestige of the way cable evolved in the City of Seattle, and that was one district. But we did away with those districts, so when Wave gets a new franchise there is nothing preventing them from providing its cable service throughout other parts of the City.
I should mention, too, that Wave has a subsidiary called Wave G that uses fiber to serve mostly larger apartment buildings. And they have a pilot fiber to the home area in the Eastlake neighborhood right now. Wave G is not part of Wave’s cable system. I know that gets complicated but we can discuss that at another time. Some of the things that we can and can’t do: We can require a certain amount of capacity, customer service standards, public, education, and government channel. if any of you watch UWTV, the Seattle Public Schools channel, the Seattle Channel, the reason those channels are available and why there’s funding to program them is because of these cable franchises. Some of the things we can’t do–we can’t tell Wave, for instance, that they have to provide cable service over fiber optic cables. We’re not allowed under federal law to do that. Fortunately, we can regulate rates. We can’t require specific channels, but we can require them to provide broad categories of programming. You will provide community news and events. You will provide sports, a number of things like that. And, I want to focus a little bit on the fact that we can’t require internet. The reason we have a big ‘but’ there is that the City cannot pretend that cable networks have not evolved into broadband networks that provide internet as well as cable. So, when you’re telling us about needs and interests, if there are some that relate to internet, we want to hear that, too. We will not restrict the scope of our inquiry only to traditional cable TV services. Think broadly about this, because in the past, in a negotiation there are a number of things that you can do.
I’ll talk a little bit about conceptually how the architecture of the cable network. We have Wave’s head end, which is located over in Kirkland, and then from there, there is connection via fiber to what are called nodes in your neighborhood. Probably from each node, they serve 800 to 1,000 homes. The signal goes from the head end to that fiber node, from that node there is a signal that’s converted from light pulses to radio frequency. That travels over the coaxial cable. Since signals over copper wire don’t travel as far as optical signals, over a fiber network you need amplifiers to boost them. And, typically, there are about four or five amplifiers from the node that goes to a tap, most likely on one of the City Light poles, and from there to your home. If you want more details, we have more information on our web site: http://www.seattle.gov/tech/services/cable-service .
A little bit on services as cable has evolved: Ten years ago, we were just introducing voice and video on demand over the cable network. A cable modem was a big deal at that time. Six to eight mbps. Today, it has evolved to more cloud-based services. It’s moving to more IP delivery. Wave now can provide up to 250 mbps over its copper network, and up to a gigabit over a Wave G network. Pretty soon, it will be even higher than that. One of the things that we’ll be doing is doing a technical evaluation of the Wave network to make sure that they are capable of meeting the state of the art services provided by Comcast, Century Link, Time-Warner, other cable companies. They should be providing at least that, and they should be on a path to moving in a couple of years to 3D, the introduction of 4K video over the cable system. DOCSIS 3.1 is a cable modem standard that would allow them to provide much faster speeds, probably getting close to a gigabit over the copper system, and a lot of movement to the cloud. One of the things that Comcast is doing already is putting a lot of WiFi hotspots over their cable network to provide WiFi connectivity throughout their service area. We haven’t that from Wave, so that’s one of the things we’d like to talk to them about.
Last time we did this was about ten years ago. Its predecessor was Broadstripe. Some of you might remember them. There was Broadstripe and Millenium. We had a series of public meetings like this and we heard from the public. And based on that input–I’m not going to go for all of them, but–here are some of the public benefits to the City and to the public that we were able to negotiate as a result of that input that we got from the community: consumer protections, we were able to obtain cable modem services to at least 50 community nonprofits. Again, that’s another example where we can require cable modem services. But in the context of negotiating an agreement, everything is on the table. We can require a fiber optic link to Town Hall, so the City can do live programming from that venue. We increased the discounts for low income seniors and disabled people. These were kind of the things that we can do if we hear from the community that this is important to them. Quickly, in terms of renewal timeline, we’re at the top right now, but we’ll be conducting more meetings, more targeted focus groups, if you will, with the community to ask more about community needs. We’re also conducting a legal, technical, and financial review of Wave and starting negotiations later this fall. Their franchise expires in 2017. This will likely be before the City Council some time in spring or summer of 2017.
Once we have all of the input from the community, we work with the Mayor and City Council to try to determine what should be the priorities for this upcoming negotiations. Negotiations take anywhere from four to six months, so that’s why we need to hear from the people now. And that’s not the only way you can be involved, coming here. We’re going to be posting information about the rule process on our web site. If you haven’t yet, we do urge you to take our survey online. Please take a moment to do that.
We’re now at the part where I’m going to turn it over to CTAB, so that they can hear from the public. CTAB are representatives, appointed by the Mayor and the City Council to assist the City in some of these long-term technology and communications planning efforts. So, I think it’s important that they hear from you. And after we’re done, at about 7:00 p.m., I’ll take a few minutes and we’ll hear from CTAB on what their thinking is. They have a unique perspective on some of the community needs, given the nature of the volunteer work that they do for the City. I think we want to hear from you basically on three areas. Just broadly, what are community needs? To the extent that we can, over the next hour or so, relate those to some service that can be provided by Wave, or some grant money that can be secured through these negotiations to address that need, or if you have a specific communications need that can be provided over the cable system, that’s great too. And then, finally, we want to hear about your attitudes about the customer service, the quality of channels. Is the channel lineup a good value? Do you get enough channels for the money. It’s expensive. Are they responsive to your inquiries and complaints? With that, I’ll turn it over to Amy Hirotaka.
Amy Hirotaka: Great! Thank you, Tony. Just so you know, when the Comcast franchise renewal happened last year, CTAB did weigh in officially with a document asking for certain things. and for outlining problems that we saw, and the potential steps that Comcast could take towards some solutions. That is something that we need help from you on, so we can hear what you’re seeing and what you would like us to potentially ask Wave to address in this franchise renewal negotiation. As Tony said, technically it’s cable, which means it doesn’t include internet. That said, we still want to hear from you about internet service, and we can still include things about that in our statement. With that, I’m going to open it up. Tony mentioned the three things we want: background, community needs and communications needs that are not being addressed but that you would like to see addressed, and customer service issues.
Commenter 1: I have Xfinity Comcast. Maybe you could address how to make the cable box run faster [unintelligible]
Alice Lawson: Are you a Comcast customer?
Commenter 1: Yes.
Alice Lawson: I’m going to make some notes about things you’re saying about them. If we get a lot, we’ll help prioritize them later.
Amy Hirotaka: I think we can capture fast internet for low income families. I think it would be appropriate to look for that across the board.
Janice: I actually don’t have cable. I am a Wave internet user, though. I can pretty much say for sure that there isn’t enough local diversified cable opportunities. It doesn’t reflect our community. So, if we’re expanding Wave, we should be able to have some channels in Somali or Vietnamese, or whatever. It’s very important that it’s more diversified. And in local programming, there should be more opportunity to show some local channels.
Commenter 2: I just want to expand on the low income. There should be a reduced program. It was brought to my attention earlier that they don’t have one. If they’re not going to offer people with disabilities, low income people with kids that have a certain need for school….
Janice: I just want to add to that. If the low income programs often are so slow, and if you add more than two or three people using a laptop, and you have five children or whatever, everything will slow down. They don’t have the capacity to serve people with multiple laptops on it, so I don’t know how to address that, but it’s important, especially for school work. Everything is online today.
Tony Perez: You’re saying that the lower priced internet tiers are too slow.
Janice: Right. And they don’t have the capacity to add multiple people. If you have three kids and four laptops going, it shuts down.
Tony Perez: Is that what you have?
Janice: No. I know that, though. I’ve heard it.
Alice Lawson: Are you suggesting a lower priced package for families?
Commenter 2: I’m not saying ‘for families.’ I’m saying reduced for low income. And if they’re not going to do one for low income people, like single mothers with children, it’s too much of a strain for the parents. They’re poor and don’t have enough money.
Dan Moulton: So, from what he’s saying, there is a model under the Comcast package for schools that have a certain percentage of reduced lunches. His point is that those children need that and their families don’t have money for it, so that’s the model I think he’s referring to. And Janice’s, the wording on hers would be what they do offer to low income families is at glacier speed, and doesn’t support multiple devices.
Janice: Also, with the reduced lunch thing, if a certain percentage of the school has a certain amount of reduced lunches, then the whole school gets it.
Tony Perez: They just expanded that to residents of HUD housing.
Dan Moulton: That’s the model under Comcast. that way, they don’t have to violate the privacy of people. There are people who are embarrassed to take the lunch program and they still would be eligible.
Janice: If it’s a single, one individual household, even from gaming I’m hearing complaints.
Alice Lawson: Let’s try to wrap that up in a statement. The interest is in having a low cost discount program [unintelligible].
Commenter 3: And if Wave doesn’t because they are not a nationwide cable like Comcast, is there a possible alternative, even with the City or the County or something that could work as an interim, because we’ve lost solid ground. There has been different groups. I’d like to know more about what cables are available. We need somebody who can help them both with technical assistance as well as sharing the plans with them. I don’t know if Wave has the capacity to do that, but it has to be implemented through a nonprofit. Administratively, I’m not sure if we’ll ever be able to pick it up but also technical assistance. They’re very concerned. People don’t quite understand how to use something that’s a little more advanced. They speak another language.
Dan Moulton: There was model in the federal government where they set up various antenna systems for them. I think what you’re suggesting is a combination of the Affordable Care Act and [unintelligible]. Whether or not Wave has the capacity to help all these new users with the technology ask for set up.
Amy Hirotaka: And I think we’re all just throwing a lot of stuff out there and we’ll distill it later.
[unintelliglble]
Tony Perez: Are you saying that Wave should agree to provide public service announcements?
[unintelliglble]
Janice: Our county just actually just developed something for low income housing called Access Points for people that are coming into housing, people that are homeless and need housing. Something along that model or working with all those different providers where they can get their information out there. In King County, we have currently three Access Points, and it’s Catholic Community Services here, in Federal Way, and one in Renton. They have been signing people up in a single point of entry. So it would just be a resource to have something similar to that. It would just have to be somebody who understands where the resources get put out into the community.
Tony Perez: Alice, the public service announcement gets its own bullet.
Alice Lawson: I know. I’m doing it.
Amy Hirotaka: I think something else touched on was culturally relevant outreach.
[unintelliglble]
Tony Perez: Is it a concern that you have that there is not enough advertising? If it is serious, and that’s something under federal cable law, we can probably do something about it. the City, by the way, under Seattle Municipal Code, we have really strong privacy protections that apply to cable operators and the safeguards apply to all services provided by cable operators over the cable system. You can look those up at Seattle Municipal Code 21.60–I forget the exact other extension, but we can get you more information about that. The FCC is working very strongly on that now. But back in 2002, we had anticipated that the type of data mining that’s available via internet was going to transition over to cable systems. And those set top boxes track everything you do–where you go, what you watched, how long you watched it. So, we are aware of that and it is something that we take very seriously.
[unintelliglble]
Tony Perez: That’s one of the things we provide, too, every year, to send you a notice of how they’re going to protect your privacy. And one of the things we’ve required from both Wave and Comcast, and now with Century Link, too, is that they give you the notice in a way that a lay person could understand. A lot of times they send you a privacy protection notice but it’s so difficult to understand. So either they get to have an option of putting it in a way that you could understand it, or we’ll require them to send our message.
Commenter 4: Are you talking about advertising coming back to you, or are you talking about more of a decision about a package?
[unintelliglble]
Tony Perez: I’d like to personally identify information.
[unintelliglble]
Tony Perez: If you ever bought anything on Amazon, or are using Netflix, you will see something like, “Well, if you like that book, you might also like this one. Or if you like that product, or if you liked that movie, here are some other suggestions for you” The basically track your activity over the web site and kind of create a digital profile on your likes, your interests, and so forth. With targeted advertising the fear is that right now they do collect over the set top box information on everything you watch, how long you watch it, and so forth. They can use that information in the aggregate. By that I mean, oh, in Capitol Hill, 80 percent of the people watch that show during that time slot. Advertisers might want to appeal to those people. What they can’t do is say, you watch Mariner games a lot. So we’re going to take that information and give it to people who want to sell beer. You know what I’m saying? Because that’s an invasion of privacy. Or that you download a pay-per-view movie and now they’re going to sell that information to marketers. It’s too invasive. It’s in your home.
Commenter 1: So the basis is they take something about what you acquire and sell it to another company. It has something to do with that?
Tony Perez: They figure out that you’re part of a demographic that will appeal to this company that sells related products. Even if you have two or three TVs in your home–you watch something, your parents watch something else–you could be watching, let’s say the same show, but that set top has a certain history and your set top is different. You would get different suggestions because they’re targeted at you. To some people, that might be a convenience, and many people would be willing to trade part of their privacy for that level of convenience. But the point is, the choice should be the user’s. And if they want to use my private information, make the value proposition to me, and then I can make an informed decision.
Commenter 5: If we’re going to ask for grant money from Wave, I’d like to see us ask for something that will invest in our young people, especially young people of color, to offer training and increase their access to the tech economy in Seattle, and tech jobs. So, things like coding, graphic design, anything that could make them more competitive in a tech economy.
Dan Moulton: That was where I was going with the digital equity. We should be asking for digital capacity for the organizations that are here. That’s the nonprofits. Besides just getting grant money, develop a mentorship program and outreach, and since they are able, somebody was mentioning cable programs for different languages, perhaps a cable program with professionals that could create that capacity. Especially inside their own specialty. My movement off of this point was connecting up with somebody who was here for the broadband conference in March. One of those is the federal program and the other one is Washington renaming the federal program. But that’s to create a backbone in case of emergencies. And the current that I saw while I was assisting people that were on the ground in New York City and New Jersey after Hurricane Sandy was that the youth and the people in the community themselves were able to take this technology and re-set up their own community to help people that were vulnerable in their own areas and communicate. This would augment the communication hubs and the OEM work. Communications is extremely important. We are, of course, in a subjection zone for a 9.0 earthquake. Beyond the Ham radio operators at communication hubs were not there. There are excellent models of this and I would like to see more of the broadband and cellular networking companies in the Seattle area share that technology and help the youth not only with jobs but to understand that they can create their own networking communications.
Commenter 6: I think that Wave should comply with the City’s requirements for communication in community languages and that they have all the languages that the City has on their web site be represented on the Wave web site so that you’re sure that you’re getting that same reach into the community, the same opportunities for the community to understand what Wave is trying to get across. It would seem to make sense that the franchisee would fall under those requirements.
Tony Perez: There’s about five minutes more. Think also about channel line-ups, prices, customer service. We’re assuming that you’re all happy with that.
Commenter 7: I’m with the Yesler Terrace Community Council, and affordability is big. We also have 26 different languages in the community. For most of the people in the community, internet is something that they are totally not there yet. They’re not familiar with it, they’re not trained to do it, and they can’t afford it. They would like more TV programming in their home languages, and those of us who are online, sometimes with a WiFi hotspot would like to have affordable, fast internet with discounts for people with children, people with disabilities, and for the elderly.
Commenter 8: I’m the resident councilor at International Terrace in the International District, and we also have many languages in the building and I have heard that people want a Chinese–the most dominant group in our building is Chinese and there are several requests for Chinese programs.
Tony Perez: Is it that it’s not available or do you have to subscribe to a very expensive tier of service to get it?
Amy Hirotaka: Are there any final thoughts from folks.
Commenter 9: If somebody just wants internet, it’s $39.99 basic with Wave. Then it’s going to be kicked up $20. But they do have offers. They have $29 offers. And I was offered that many times last year, but you have to buy $29 cable with that. That really isn’t affordable. The $39 package is a good package, but the initial one is a better package, and it’s now $59.
Tony Perez: So you would like an affordable ala carte option for both internet and cable.
Commenter 9: And something that everybody can work with that’s not too slow. Not the lowest and not the highest.
Tony Perez: What do you have? What do you get?
Commenter 9: Right now, I don’t get anything because about 25 percent of the time I have a T-Mobile hotspot that goes on and off. I’d also like to say that the people in public housing’s median income is 30 percent of income. The income of public housing residents is 17 percent of the rest of the City. So $39 is a lot.
Commenter 10: Can I ask if the City can do something? One of the things that have been negotiated in cable agreements in the past or in other service arrangements in the past, has been certification for a discount. If you’re a senior, you can get a discount on your property taxes. If you have ‘x’ number of requirements, you get a break on that. Is there a capability for the City to offer a certification that you could buy? My wife has a disability. She talks to her friends through the internet all the time. Is there something that if you’re on the side of the digital divide that is really coming to have-nots, is there something the City can do to certify that? Aid certification is pretty easy. How do you certify the other things? Because you can’t ask the cable company to do it. That’s crazy. But if you switch cable companies, then you’re going in all over again. But if it was something where the City could step in and say, this household has handicap status.
Commenter 11: ORCA said it neatly. If you get food stamps, you’re on.
Commenter 10: I just had to renew my handicapped license plates. Every five years you have to go and recertify that your handicapped. My wife is very clearly handicapped, but still has to go through the process. It doesn’t even need to be something that’s permanent. It could be something that has a finite time. But if there are thresholds that you could set, that would give Wave the opportunity to say, ‘the City’s identifying people who might qualify for different rate pricing or different types of services.’ But it would really have to come to the City to take the responsibility for signing you up.
Alice Lawson: There is the City Utility Discount Program. That is the threshold that we use for Comcast and [unintelligible].
Commenter 12: Do all the operators know that, and do they take advantage of the discounts?
Commenter 13: I understand that there are discounts actually being discussed right now in the federal regions where the internet is being considered a utility. It’s something to think about. And it’s necessary for my business.
Tony Perez: I actually totally agree. Unfortunately, it doesn’t raise regulation and law to the level needed. The FCC recently classified it as a telecom service, but they’re not applying telecom-type regulations. Only for open network neutrality. That’s it. Nothing in terms of federal discount programs.
Amy Hirotaka: One more comment from Dan and then I think we’ll quit.
Dan Moulton: Mine is a privacy concern regarding the disabled. I understand that the sticker in the process, as it regards using the utility as a clearing house, the one place that you certify there doesn’t matter what company it is, therefore you turn it into a basic certification clearing house. I don’t know what it is lately, but I stopped using apps to look into the lower fare for disabled persons on Metro. Metro was asking for my personal health information in order to classify me as disabled. And I felt that that was a strong invasion of my privacy. That’s why I don’t take the bus, besides the fact that it is extraordinarily physically difficult. I’m not stable. There are a number of problems with it, but I didn’t apply because I read it and I was horrified by the invasion of my medical privacy.
Tony Perez: With that, we’re pretty much on schedule, which is great. I thought I would turn it over to the board. You’ve had an opportunity to hear from the group on needs and concerns, and so forth. I think some of you are in an unique position by virtue of reviewing a lot of Technology Matching Fund grants, which to me are fairly organic representations and articulations of the citizens’ needs as they relate to technology. You hear from folks all the time. We could all benefit from hearing from you about what is going to be important for the City to try to obtain during these negotiations. What issues do we need to address?
Chris Alejano: [unintelligible] find best practices from negotiations in other cities and apply those.
Nourisha Wells: How can we apply what we did with Comcast to Wave?
Tony Perez: Right. That’s good. Comcast, at latest, has 147,000 customers in Seattle. Wave–not talking about the subsidiary, Wave G– has 8,370. That gives you a sense of the scale. We, in the past, have taken a proportional approach. For instance, one of the reasons that we ask for 50 cable modems to nonprofits from Wave’s predecessor, Broadstripe, is that they had about a tenth of the customers that Comcast has. Comcast gave us 500. there are things that we can do like that. One of the issues with their being a smaller cable company is that the cost of doing business for them is higher. They have to spread those costs among fewer subscribers. One example, unfortunately, is the cost of obtaining programming has been going up all the time. They are not like Comcast, that owns NBC Universal and a bunch of other companies. They have to compete and it costs more. I’m not making excuses for the rates that they charge, but it is true that it costs them more to provide those channels. Those are call retransmission consent negotiations, and they have to pay more to carry CBS, NBC. Do we have a lot of Wave TV customers here? You’ll see a $9.65–it’s kind of hidden sometimes–it’s called a local broadcast fee. That’s what that is. With Comcast, the fee now is $5.00. They just raised it.
Amy Hirotaka: Is that an opportunity for us, since we’re talking about things like low income internet, to look broader than the City or try to scale something like that. I don’t know how that would work in negotiations, but I do know that Wave serves the Olympic peninsula. Maybe a state-wide initiative. Is there a way to start that sort of thing through this franchise?
Tony Perez: It’s a negotiation. We can talk to them about anything. And that might actually be in their interest. If we could help them come up with a model that they can replicate, clone it, take it out to their other areas, I think the other cities would appreciate that. That’s a good idea.
Karia Wong: You agree that the channel options should be [unintelligible]. And it’s important that they have access to the channels that they can understand. And the other thing is talking about the outreach for the low income program [unintelligible]. People who can’t speak English can spend an hour. We think that’s too much. The low income application might take hours. When you call customer service, it can take an hour for them to figure out that it’s a call about low income programs. So you have to call back. I just talked to someone who called and said it took them four hours. Four hours of staff time to follow up on those applications.
Tony Perez: Yes. If I can just paraphrase, I’m hearing a couple of overarching themes. One is that Wave needs to invest more in its community, and two, that they have to appreciate the level of diversity in this community. And that their business practices should reflect an understanding of that diversity. Is that accurate? This is a conversation that we could have with them. I keep hearing that a lot. Twenty-three languages.
Karia Wong: It usually takes six to eight hours to identify technical issues. [unintelligible] You just have to wait, and there’s nothing you can do. Is there any way you can include customer support?
Tony Perez: Other things? Are any of you Wave customers?
Amy Hirotaka: Yes.
Tony Perez: You are? What do they charge for cable TV?
Amy Hirotaka: Yes. I have a cable and internet package. I’m a semi-new Beacon Hill resident, so there was a huge discount so we got cable, too. Football season was coming up. I used to live in North Seattle with Comcast, and I’m paying more now with Wave that I was with Comcast for comparable speeds. I hear complaints from people in my neighborhood all the time, about internet going in and out. But I heard the same exact complaints with Comcast, especially during 5:00 to 7:00 p.m. People are getting home from work, and everybody is streaming Netflix.
Tony Perez: Remember when I mentioned earlier, looking at the overview of the cable architecture, the shared network? Probably have about 800 homes per node.
Amy Hirotaka: Yes. So don’t know that those are any worse than the other providers. It’s certainly worth mentioning, I think, if we’re talking negotiations. I know that their cost of doing business is higher. But I also know that the areas that they serve are areas that Broadstripe served before, and Millenium before them. Having been a Seattle resident for a while, and having worked in community technology, I know that there were major issues with Broadstripe. So Wave might be picking up some of those major issues, but I don’t know if it’s the same because I don’t know if they’re using the same equipment.
Tony Perez: They did significantly improve technical quality over Millenium and Broadstripe, but we are going to be conducting a technical audit of the head end, testing signal quality, things like that. That will be some time in September, I’d think. And if some of you want to come along on that, we can talk about that.
Amy Hirotaka: Cool! And I do think that there is a very important thing that Karia touched on. Wave’s service area is a very diverse service area. I don’t know median income of Wave’s service area versus the rest of Seattle where Comcast covers, but I would assume that it’s slightly lower, just based on the population.
Tony Perez: Some parts are.
Amy Hirotaka: And I think we really need to keep that in mind and push very hard for better low income programs, and the customer assistance for the low income program.
Karia Wong: We have been providing service for housing in the ID area, ad also some on Beacon Hill. The comment that we hear is they can either choose very slow speed from Century Link over the low income plan, or they have to pay a lot more for the cable service, which might provide a faster speed. So people often choose the slower one because it’s more affordable, especially for seniors.
Mark DeLoura: I’m trying to come up with a rationalization for what I’m about to say. I’m having a hard time, so I’m just going to say it. It looks like Century Link has this 1.5 megabit low income program. I don’t know if it’s DSL or ….
Karia Wong: It’s not as fast as a cable modem.
Tony Perez: That’s over the DSL portion of their network. I don’t know how many people get it, but if you’re eligible for the Century Link fiber connection, the low income tier speed is 40 megabits per second, which is much better. You can do things with that.
Karia Wong: If it’s available. I have some clients who were able to sign up for that. But a lot of people who are in the ID, because of the networking system, the wiring is really old, so the maximum speed that we can get is 7 mbps.
Tony Perez: In a multi-family building? No, that’s an issue with older buildings. In those situations, it’s either a tenant association or the property owner that rewires the building, the CAT 6 wiring of today, but sometimes the cable operator will be happy to rewire it for you in exchange for a 15 year agreement.
Amy Hirotaka: I wonder if Mark could just have a chance to finish this thought, because we all jumped in.
Mark DeLoura: I thought it was funny that we were talking to Comcast about the 10 mbps program. In January of 2015, it’s really easy to say to Comcast, come up to 10 mbps because we already had an established contract and the system is probably in place. But I don’t think that that’s enough. I really think that going with the broadband definition is the right way to go.
Tony Perez: I think that’s a really good point. Twenty-five down, three up.
Amy Hirotaka: We did put that in CTAB’s Comcast franchise statement.
Tony Perez: Anything in the net is outside the franchise. It’s a separate agreement.
Amy Hirotaka: We can go on record saying it and calling them out on it.
Tony Perez: Yes. That’s the beauty of being citizen volunteers. You can say all of that. So we have about five minutes left. If you have nothing else, what we want to do now is we’re going to give everyone three dots that you can spread out among any of these, or if you feel really strongly about one statement or issue, you can put them all there on that one spot. I recognize that some of these may be very similar to others, so we will work on that and go back to CTAB and say we think these four are all low income internet discounts. So, we’re going to tally up all of these votes for that. We don’t have the time here to do the editing. Anything else about cable system technology? WiFi in the community?
David Doyle: On the web site here, it says Comcast has 150,000 Seattle subscribers right now. Century Link has 160,000. Wave has about 8,000.
Tony Perez: Century Link has how many? 160,000? They passed 160,000 households.
David Doyle: I just noticed a quote here: “Wave can choose the ability to offer services city-wide. What we haven’t talked about, or what I haven’t heard is what if Wave decided not to renew? Because we’re assuming that they will. What would be the outcome of that?
Tony Perez: They have money invested in the cable plant. They have a revenue stream, so they are making money. And they’re not just making money from subscribers. They also make money from advertisers. That’s revenue that you wouldn’t see. Even if they did that and say, ‘we don’t want to do it,’ Comcast would likely buy them out.
David Doyle: …the consequence of something that they might do.
Tony Perez: I don’t see that happening, but what we are a little bit concerned about is that it appears, and we haven’t confirmed this yet. This is one of the reasons why we’re doing a technical audit. It seems to us that they could have determined that their future is in the broadband business. Not so much the cable business. And that they’re going to funnel their available capital to their Wave G subsidiary to do internet in large, new apartment buildings and condominiums, and possibly not maintain the cable network to technological currency. They figure, that’s enough. We’re not going to put our money there. So, we’re going to make sure that that’s not the case. One of the things that we’ll be asking our consultants to do is to tell us does this network have the capability to meet state of the art standards of other cable companies. If not, that’s something we need to talk about. But the chances of them leaving the cable plant? Zero.
Alice Lawson: Since Wave built the system, they’ve already declined in subscriber levels. So they’ve gone from about 11,000 subscribers to just a little above 8,000. We don’t have any information on their internet subscriber base because they don’t have to report on that.
Tony Perez: You can see that. If you drive in this neighborhood, you see a lot more satellite dishes than you see anyplace else. Because it’s expensive. Okay, so it’s time for the dots.
Amy Hirotaka: We want to reconvene here afterwards.
Tony Perez: We have to leave here by 8:00 p.m.
Meeting adjourned.