To accommodate extended WfH requirements due to Covid and a likely segue toward more telecommuting we need to investigate and if possible improve NRAO/NM's broadband access at the home.
Federal Broadband specification is 25mbit/s down, 3mbit/s up. Typical DSL from CenturyLink is 15mbit/s down, .5mbit/s up http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest. Limited upload speed is detrimental to certain interactive services, particularly video conference.
Immediate: (1 week): Put together working team, flesh out plan
- Define problem(s) we want to solve, e.g. do we want to back Socorro efforts to obtain broadband access or simply focus on ensuring minimum requirements for our staff
- Purely internal focused on short and medium term, may overlap with broader cooperative group working with NMT, Socorro, et al
- Establish working group (smallish 5 or so at most) (James Robnett, Matthew McCleary, Rick Lively, George Moellenbrock, Rachel Rosen)
- Should have both geographic (e.g. Magdalena) and functional representatives (DMS, Electronics, VLA site etc)
Short term: (2-4 weels): Ensure staff are efficiently using NRAO resources, characterize problem, ramp up longer term projects
- Audit available connectivity in Socorro and surrounding areas (CenturyLink, cable, SDC wireless, cell, DSOC WiFi etc) (done)
- Poll users, get more detailed info as to provider, current bandwidth, stability, satisfaction etc
- Develop internal 'how to improve your home network' style document (debug, best practices type doc)
- Develop WfH clearing house web portal (useful NRAO wide) include home network doc plus pointers to SSH tunneling, VPN, VNC etc. (In progress)
- Contact NMT, City of Socorro etc regarding interest in cooperative effort (In Progress, met with NMT, scheduling with City)
Medium term: (1 to 2 months): Self contained effort to ensure NRAO and staff home networks are working efficiently
- Consider assisting staff with home network issues (e.g. purchase ADSL test meter, have staff test from external NID
- Possible electronics staff might be able to help ?
- Should not require physical contact, test point is external to house.
- Focus on fixing priority targets, i.e staff who should continue to work from home productively but who continue to have poor service
Long term (1 to 24 months): Develop plan to work with local entities to expand (establish really) Socorro broadband access.
Background history: Socorro Broadband background and complications
Coordinate with non-NRAO elements (NMT, City of Socorro, etc), determine whether to lead or follow a coordinated effort to improve broadband
- Potentially a separate group from the internal working team but may have overlap. (James Robnett, Heather Cochrane, Sanjay Bhatnagar)
- Document existing efforts and plans, decide to spin up a separate project or sign on to an existing one.
- $16B Rural Broadband effort proposed: https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-364418A1.pdf
- Flawed plan as FCC definition of unserved census block means if one person is served effectively all are, still we should hit it.
- https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-16-billion-push-to-expand-broadband-america-is-flying-through-a-fog-11590399000
- Tight schedule
- Ironically SpaceX plan is detrimental to radio astronomy: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/06/science/oneweb-launch.html