The History of Network Technology in Wisconsin
Because of the explosive growth in telecom technology over the last decades, the State of Wisconsin, through the Department of Administration (DOA) and other agencies, commissioned several internal and external studies to determine how best to utilize the State’s network resources, and to service the telecom needs of its citizens. The early studies, conducted in the 1990s, identified the enormous positive potential a properly designed network could have in reducing government and educational costs while making the State attractive to new businesses. That this vision was never realized is the saddest of sad stories impacting the future economic vitality of Wisconsin.
To the extent these studies were truly independent, the recommendations were well crafted, but unfortunately they were ultimately ignored by policymakers. To the extent that the studies tended to favor major campaign contributors, they were used as justification to skim hundreds of millions of dollars from taxpayers and telephone ratepayers, while building a rube-Goldberg statewide network using proprietary, obsolete, and unreliable technology.
Compared to wide-area networks in other states, Wisconsin’s Badgernet is arguably more expensive, less flexible, less reliable, lower in capacity and serves fewer subscribers than any other government-sponsored state network in the country. Although it has cost more than the state investment in the Milwaukee Brewer’s stadium, it has, for the most part, slipped under the radar of critics because the subject is technical and arcane. Yet all of this would have been overcome if Wisconsin’s governors, from the Thompson through the Doyle administrations, had demonstrated real leadership, and carried through on the recommendations made by independent consultants.
I. Following is a brief summary of the major telecom studies that have been conducted in Wisconsin, along with a description concerning how they fared in the political landscape.
1. Wisconsin Technology Strategic Planning Initiative – September, 1990
In this DOA report, it was recommended that “Wisconsin must adopt a (n IT) governance model that provides an overall authority structure for statewide decision making on information technology management issues including planning, policy, standards and budgeting.” (ITSPI Final Report Page 5).
The important points here are Planning and Standards. Today, projects are awarded based upon political connections, and the vendors themselves are expected to do the design work. There is little or no network design expertise within DOA itself, and when new consultants are hired, they have inappropriate ties to the companies they are supposed to supervise (AT&T, Tektronix, etc.). There is little wonder that telecom initiatives and “improvements” favor the vendors’ preferred solutions.
2. Wisconsin Statewide Telecommunications Planning Report – December 1992
The 1992 Wisconsin Information Technology Plan was prepared by the Wisconsin Department of Administration. This report stated, “The State will establish connectivity standards to allow intra-agency and inter-agency communication, document transfer, and sharing of data and educational resources where appropriate. … State networks should be readily accessible, inter-connectable, and easily used by all agencies and citizens, subject to appropriate security and privacy safeguards (emphasis added). The State should pursue consolidation and aggregation of backbone networks …”.
To date, Badgernet has no meaningful security, priority policy, or grade of service guarantee. It therefore cannot be used for public safety applications, or for sensitive information. When the Lottery network put in its new system, an entirely parallel satellite-based service had to be used because of BadgerNet’s shortcomings.
3. Wisconsin Distance Education Technology Study – June, 1993
The Wisconsin Distance Education Study recommended that a multi-agency State-wide network be created for the purpose of carrying educational and State agency video, data and voice traffic. The final report stated that the State should seek to build, “A network to satisfy all of the needs expressed by each major user group. (If this network is not built, it) would undoubtedly result in a duplication of facilities, (as) separate networks (are) built by … disparate interests.”
This recommendation outlined the need for ensuring that the aggregated network must NEVER REFUSE the needs of each and every State agency and serviced institution, and must respect the administrative requirements of each consortium. Accordingly, peak load capacity must be purchased by the aggregating entity as needed, in real time (after all, we do not need to schedule our electric usage and telephone calls in advance based upon capacity limitations). This important goal was never achieved by Badgernet or any other Wisconsin network program overseen by the DOA. For instance, several important drug-interdiction initiatives overseen by the Department of Justice were put at risk because of the inability of DOA to anticipate future demand.
4. The Report of the Governor’s Blue Ribbon Telecommunications Infrastructure Task Force – November 1993
At the conclusion of a year-long study assessment of Wisconsin’s telecom infrastructure, the Governor’s Task Force concluded, “Access to an advanced telecommunications infrastructure is essential to ensure the continued economic growth and competitive advantage for Wisconsin, and a superior quality of life for Wisconsinites.”
These are the right words, but actually achieving this vision has proved to be elusive. For instance, Ameritech (followed by SBC, and now AT&T) promised the State’s network consortiums in the 1990s that, in return for lifting some important restrictions, it would provide every school district in the State with broadband high-speed network access within 10 years. Following millions in campaign contributions, this has never happened. Rather, Ameritech threatened to sue local networks that had the audacity to by-pass its facilities using microwave technologies.
5. Report of the Committee on Public and Private Broadband – March 2003
The Joint Legislative Council created the Special Committee on Public and Private Broadband to “study the availability of broadband services and barriers to broadband deployment in Wisconsin, and to determine appropriate State policies relating to the ‘digital divide’ and open access issues.”
One of the significant findings of this study was that Pennsylvania should be emulated by Wisconsin. Pennsylvania anticipated that “Special attention will be given to those … proposals that that commit to enhancements in the public network infrastructure to deliver the same services to the Broader Commonwealth Community, and to the general public.” Accordingly, the State network would be used to “plow the ground” for economic development.
As discussed above, readers of this report did not have to look far to find the real “barriers to broadband deployment.” As Walt Kelly once said “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” The recommendations of this study were short on specifics, long on polemics, and did not result in any usable guidelines for either fiber deployment or wireless usage.
6. Grow Wisconsin – The Governor’s Plan to Create Jobs – September, 2003
This document set forth Governor Doyle’s intent to “promote broadband deployment” in Wisconsin. The plan states: “Access to advanced telecommunications services is a critical tool for economic development in the 21st century. Wisconsin businesses and residents must have access to high speed, interactive telecommunications services if they are to compete in today’s economy.”
As subsequent events have confirmed, it is not enough to say the right words, each and every person and agency must also do the right thing. Allowing Badgernet’s primary telecom vendor to hire the State’s contract negotiator during the contract finalization process is not doing the right thing. Signing up for a long-term contract in an environment of decreasing prices is not doing the right thing. Allowing the vendor to design the network for today’s traffic without regard to future applications is not doing the right thing.
And … putting political considerations before solid technical precepts is definitely not doing the right thing. One could wish for fewer Harvard lawyers in the present administration, and more independent technologists.
None of the above studies was integrated into the telecom planning process by the three administrations that were spanned by the time frame presented. The telecom procurement process in Wisconsin appears to be completely disconnected from the experience of successful models elsewhere in the country, and is arguably more responsive to industry pressure to pursue a “design and build” strategy. “Design and Build”, which was and is the construction philosophy behind Badgernet, cannot successfully hold a vendor accountable for the functional success of a new infrastructure. This is true because design specifications and success criteria are not defined before a vendor is given a contract.
II. History of Wisconsin’s Networks – the Good, the Bad, and the Really Ugly
In the 1990s, Wisconsin was in the forefront of designing and implementing innovative video, data and voice networks to service public safety, distance education, professional development, and other wide-area applications. Our schools, colleges, telecom carriers and local governments partnered to overcome regulatory hurdles, obtain grant funding, and implement their own state-of-the-art regional consortiums employing diverse technologies such as wireless, fiber, cable, and satellite. These groups had many motives for shared applications including high school language instruction, advanced placement courses, post-graduate MBA courses, staff development and workplace training. Proper planning made the capital costs manageable, while substantially reducing recurring costs for all consortium members. These networks were designed in advance by professional engineers, and bid to a broad spectrum of carriers. New technologies made the systems modular and scalable. Many networks were fully paid in three years on Internet and instructional cost savings alone. New students moved into the included districts in order to gain access to unique educational opportunities.
As a result of the creation of these grass-roots networks, State and educational resources became available to everyone within reach of a moderate-speed data line. Information could be shared interactively at any time, relatively independently of geography, wealth, or physical limitations. The earliest systems took root, expanded and became successful in Trempealeau County, the Clintonville area, and northwestern Wisconsin, including Shell Lake Schools and Indianhead Technical College. Soon after the land-line pioneers had blazed the way, wireless networks were installed at the behest of the Catholic Archdiocese, Chippewa Valley Technical College, Fox Valley Technical College, North-Central Technical College, Lakeshore Technical College and others.
Then, the networks began to interconnect among themselves and merging to cover even wider areas. WestWing and NDEN merged to become Northern Lights, while JEDI and SWING added other nearby schools.
This activity was capped by the creation of the KSCADE network. KSCADE inter-connected 35 schools and colleges in the Fox Valley area using modern spectrum-efficient technology that employed MPEG-II video coding and ATM transport technology. This award-winning network (delegations from Japan and Sweden were sent to KSCADE to document its success) was the first of its kind to employ nearly unlimited capacity and instantaneous any-to-any routing.
It was also the last of the grass-roots consortium initiatives, and it earned a threat from DOA to exclude KSCADE’s schools from Wisconsin’s Internet and network subsidies. At the time, Wisconsin’s network management team consisted of ex-employees from Ameritech, GTE, and Tektronix, among others. It should come as no surprise that the recommended solution included circuits from Ameritech and GTE, and equipment from Tektronix, in spite of the fact that the proprietary switches locked the State into one manufacturer, and the inflexible topology ensured a future of cost overruns due to expensive “inter-cluster links” and “gateways”.
Soon, the State of Wisconsin sought to replace the grass-roots network initiatives with officially sanctioned “one size fits all” offerings, including the following:
a. BADGERDIAL
Badgerdial was originally envisioned by the Department of Administration and the Department of Public Instruction as a subsidized dial-up Internet access system for educational institutions and state and local agencies throughout Wisconsin. This program was an important component of Governor Thompson’s pledge to have 50% of all Wisconsin K-12 districts connected to the Internet by the fall of 1996 and all K-12 school districts connected by the fall of 1997. A federal TIIAP II grant of $224,000 was applied for and received to help fund access to rural, low-income schools, while DOA contributed $518,000 to help ”ensure success”. Users would have paid a small one-time setup fee, a monthly fixed charge of $10, and a fixed, postalized per-minute usage fee (approximately $.08).
Subsequently, however, the program was rendered moot because, by the time the program was rolled out, local commercial Internet Service Providers (ISPs) were offering higher speeds and lower costs than DOA/DPI. The program was abandoned after three years. The wasted money was never accounted for.
b. BADGERNET - I
The KSCADE network implemented MPEG ATM technology against the wishes of the DOA. As Video Badgernet was being formed, the KSCADE experience represented a chance for Ameritech and DOA to provide a broader base of lower-cost endpoints to subsidize some of the expensive rural school consortiums (such as PenNet in Door County and Washington Island). The far better reliability, scalability, capacity and quality of the standards-based MPEG solution compared to the proprietary Tektronix JPEG system would have eliminated the subsequent cost overruns on inter-cluster links, and the millions of dollars spent by the State on Gateways. Tektronix stopped supporting the JPEG platform approximately 3 years into the contract, making the equipment obsolete and unreliable. The original $90 million network estimate became nearly $200 million before the contract was concluded, considerably more than a full statewide deployment of KSCADE-type technology would have cost.
c. BADGERNET - II
With Badgernet-II, DOA repeated its network management errors. The acquisition team for Badgernet-II employed the services of an ex-SBC employee who was offered a new job with SBC while he was negotiating a contract for network services on behalf of the State. He eventually continued his negotiations on the other side of the table.
Meanwhile, this same employee also acted as a “consultant” to other State agencies wishing to fairly assess the potential efficacy of Badgernet-II, including the Technical College Board and the University of Wisconsin. In several of these cases, agencies and their representatives were told point-blank NOT to hire certain consultants, and that the preferred vendor was the presumably conflicted employee. The resulting compromised studies concluded (no surprise here) that the SBC/DOA solution was the best alternative for them. Promises were made …
For the RFP created for Badgernet-II, SBC’s design-build approach resulted in the same restricted-growth network architecture that REDUCED the subsidized bandwidth available to most users. It is clear that the $108 million estimated for this network is just as illusory as was the original $90 million for Badgernet-I. Users again will be forced to work with the “scarcity” model.
Most networks today employ a “utility” model, whereby the integrating agency has a responsibility to provide “sum sufficient” capacity, even if higher cost “peak load” capability must be purchased to cover periods of time that exceed average usage. This is the manner in which the electric grid and the phone services work today. After all, one need not call up the electric company when it is desired to turn on the porch light, only to be told to turn off the bedroom light first.
d. DOA Wisconsin Wireless Revenue Project
In 2004 Wisconsin DOA commissioned a study to determine if the State could realize revenue by leasing space on its vertical real estate, such as towers and tall buildings. This study was initiated based upon reports of a successful program in Michigan.
The study concluded that DOA had waited too long to receive the bulk of the benefit due to such a program, because the carriers had already “built around” most of the well-positioned sites.
In other words, DOA was again, “too little, and too late.”
Maybe next time Wisconsin and the DOA/DET will be able to properly manage a network project.
Everybody that believes that can contact the author at: