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I'm here today to talk about broadband infrastructure but all I really want to talk about is my son Clayton Clayton's only 21 days old today and if I seem a little tired it's because I haven't been sleeping and in my sleepless nights as I've been thinking about this talk I've also been contemplating what this little guy is gonna need to participate in the global economy and out in the world I'm 33 years old and when I was Clayton's age which is really not that long ago I didn't have internet I didn't have cellular phone and you couldn't get cable TV and most places in Maine all that's happened since my parents generation who grew up by the flicker of the television in the heyday of broadcast TV had a very different childhood than their parents who grew up by the flicker of the kerosene lamp and I can begin when I think about that generational shift to think about how Clayton's upbringing is going to be in this new world this new world was changing and I as a young guy as a Clayton Age guy 33 years ago already could start to see the forces of change acting on main of globalization of cheap overseas labor of inexpensive coal power those things were taking main from an exporter of Industrial Age products to a consumer of Information Age content and although the Information Age is in its infancy today main very much has seen the sunset of the Industrial Age I worry and I'm fearful that the investment that my parents generation made in airports that the investment that their parents generation made in highway systems that their parents made railroads and that their parents made in canals has no modern-day analog for Clayton to participate in main when we think about the Industrial Age economy what we see along the roadsides reminds us that what defined us before the red brick mill on the side of a river producing some kind of finished product has now either stood vacant for some time or been redeveloped for commercial or residential use and in this case this is a restaurant that's no longer painted red anymore it's now yellow is no longer the most competitive place to produce things like finish paper and shirts and shoes and canned fish so as we look at what's in the future for Maine as we look at the entire country transforming from a manufacturing powerhouse to an innovation economy we start to see that places that used to be the home of manufacturing and under the same roof had product development and financing and marketing and engineering we now see that while we may have lost some of the commodity manufacturing we are succeeding in producing green power in precision manufacturing and engineering and all of the things that go into bringing innovation into a place where it can be commoditized even if those commodities aren't produced here in the US or in New England or in Maine so as we think about the innovation economy we start to think about how do we bring ideas from the creative process all the way through the place where they can be commoditized and brought to people where they can create value out into the world and increasingly we're doing that with distributed teams that communicate over distance increasingly we're consuming the content that's created by these distributed teams here in Maine and those successful products and some of the most successful products never even make it into a place where they need to be manufactured in bulk using commodity labor so here in Maine we know that we're going to buy content from other places we're going to enjoy online banking we're gonna listen to the radio and those things might have been manufactured with white collar workers like software developers and graphic designers and never have even stepped foot in a factory so the exciting opportunity for us is that we can now participate in manufacturing something new and I want to talk a little bit about today but what our content might look like and to talk about what our content might look like I want to talk about somebody else's content because it's familiar to all of us and for a long time there's a community that has been very successfully manufacturing content ideas really and distributing them to others and have become quite prosperous and obviously this is Los Angeles where we get our movies and our television and our entertainment and today Los Angeles creates these things the people in Los Angeles endeavor to create all of this content and they ship it to us over the internet and we pay handsomely for it in Maine we have the opportunity to create our own content and my eye immediately goes to my personal experience in business which is in running a technology company I have a technology company that today resides in a building that's also red brick and used to house shipping and receiving items like barrels and buckets and crates coming on and off schooners in the Portland Harbor today that same building is filled with 60 software and web developers information security experts telecom real estate specialists radio frequency engineers and fiber-optic engineers and when I was Clayton's age 33 years ago a lot of those specialties didn't even exist and today they don't exist to serve a local market they exist to serve a global market and in my business I think about the technology needs all across the world and how we happen to have 60 of these specialists sitting in a building here in Portland Maine but their market is global and while they happen to be here to reach that global market they have to live in a connected society and it's been a priority for us to seek out fast fiber-optic connectivity and that's while expensive it's at least possible for 60 people working in the same building but as i zoom out a little bit on the city and i look to a residential neighborhood I think a little bit about what is the importance to me as a business owner in having broadband and start to see some of the other businesses around me in the core of the city as I go out towards the residential neighborhoods and I think Internet to me is the same as good water and sewer is for a beer brewer or a rail line might be for a paper manufacturer in a mill up north or a distribution company might be located close to the Turnpike and as i zoom out even more and I look into individuals working from home or small businesses out in the neighborhoods my gaze settles on my wife's home business she's a consultant helping nonprofits market on the web and her clients are also out in the world and not here in Portland she's serving people in Washington DC and Boston and in New York and in Chicago and as she seeks to upload fast video and pictures and graphic design I think she struggles to do that using residential broadband products and as we look at our small business community there aren't small business products that can help us broadcast who we are out to the web and when I look up and down the street I see a doctor who can't provide telemedicine on a Saturday and I see a documentary producer who can't upload their video and I see a GIS or CAD draftsman who can't upload their prints to an out-of-state client so this frames a problem and the problem that I see is that we have an intellectual trade and balance and that is it's pretty easy for us to buy content from others from places like Los Angeles but quite challenging for us to take our content and share it with others and we have a network residential network that reinforces this negative trend and it does that by limiting the amount we can upload but allowing us to download whatever we need and I worry that we have the ability just enough bandwidth to get our credit card credit card number out but plenty of bandwidth to get something in return there's a reason for this our networks have evolved over a hundred years of broadcast entertainment radio television cable TV and web surfing we went to the factory during the day and created value it at home as we relaxed at night we consumed entertainment the network is really set up for this imagine for a moment that in our neighborhoods this broadcast is coming to a to a quiet neighborhood street there's not a lot of traffic on it maybe the roads only wide enough for one car at a time the world clayton's going to grow up in is a six-lane highway going up in each direction and today we don't have that six-lane highway in maine it really needs to go in both directions and have significant capacity to carry what we want to create so my hope is that we can create a balanced intellectual trade this is where not only do we consume content from others where we get what we need and we pay for it but we also can take what we are and what we do and share it with others in other communities and also be paid for that to bring things back into balance and for that we need a network that goes in both directions we want to be delivering who we are our innovation our creativity out to the world so what can we do about it the first thing is that the technology is easy the technology tends to be kind of a noisy subject but it's a little bit like banging two rocks together there's this thing fiber optics and the one term that I that I hope I'll leave you with is fiber to the premise fiber optic a thin strand of glass to the premise into your home and this is something we can go out and buy it's achievable and the price of admission is relatively low but it's not happening here and it's not happening here today when you look around at other communities around us we do see it it's happening in Asia in Singapore and in Korea it's happening in Europe in Spain in France in Scandinavia and it's happening in the United States in metro areas up and down both coasts it's happening in the southeast u.s. than small towns the size of Portland it's happening in Western Massachusetts it's happening in rural Vermont and it's even happening in rural New Hampshire it's not happening here yet so what can we do about it the first thing that the general political climate tells us is that let the market solve the problem but I think the fact that we don't have fast fiber optics into our home today in this far flung market is that the market has failed us if the market was going to solve this problem we'd have fast fiber optics into our homes and into our business so why has the market failed us well we have a hundred-year sunk cost in what we have today and what we have today are networks that are oriented towards giving us lots of content and not taking content from us and since big telecom has us all as customers today there's very few people that don't buy some kind of product there isn't a significant market force to push innovation so the innovation has to come from us as people who not only want to consume but people who want to create and bring our value out to the world where people can get good value from it so what have other communities done other communities have prioritized the need to get fiber into homes and businesses and they've made modest public investments and those modest public investments have come on the back of public-private partnerships but they haven't come on the back of market forces alone I'm excited about the prospect of us making a modest investment and given Clayton the tools he needs to go out and participate and to do it from here and my feeling is is we hear from people today we hear about all the creativity and the innovation and the things that are happening in all of the areas that we do to create that we'll also have the opportunity to distribute that and share it with others and at the price of admission you