A fiber-optic backbone throughout the Plymouth, Mass., 2,877-home community of single-family homes and townhouses allows residents to receive digital satellite, phone and other broadband services.
TecHome Builder Magazine | February 2002 | by Bob McCullough
The Broadband Group consulting company designed the technology and arranged the service providers.
There are three homebuilders on the site, including one of the primary builders, The Green Company.
Pine Hills is the largest housing development in New England.
For the Native Americans who hosted the first Thanksgiving meal, instant communication consisted of sending smoke signals to and from Telegraph Hill, one of the highest points on the land that later became Plymouth, Mass. To reach Telegraph Hill, both the Native Americans and our colonial forebears used Old Sandwich Road, one of the oldest working dirt roads in the country, a path that can trace its history as a thoroughfare back to 1632.
Fast-forward a few hundred years, and things have changed a bit. Old Sandwich Road now functions as a technology highway, carrying a fiber-optic backbone that connects residents of the new Pine Hills development that now occupies the 3,000-acre property at the southern end of Plymouth.
At the moment, the initial residents of the development (which opened in October 2001) are enjoying the benefits of a fiber-optic capability that makes Pine Hills the only planned community in the country where a DirecTV signal is transmitted across the development without a single dish on any residence in the property.
That same fiber-optic cable also allows Verizon to supply a complete package of broadband services to help those residents stay in touch with the modern world. The company that selected the providers and put together the specification for that package is The Broadband Group, a Sacramento, Calif.-based technology consulting company that has similarly connected developments across the country.
As for Telegraph Hill, it is now surrounded by most of the 2,877 homes that will eventually be built at Pine Hills, which is located 45 minutes from downtown Boston and is less than 10 miles from the seasonal pleasures of Cape Cod. Many of those homes are situated on adjacent hills that dot the property to take advantage of the spectacular ocean views, and those views are augmented by a design that left 70 percent of the land in its original pristine condition.
Finding Service Providers WasnÕt Easy
The builder that implemented the development’s design, The Green Company, added nature trails throughout the property, along with a pair of world-class golf courses, one designed by Rees Jones, the other by Jack Nicklaus Design. One of the reasons they were able to build on such a small percentage of the land was their success in convincing the town fathers of Plymouth to forgo the normal three-acre zoning requirement.
To implement the technology that connects the residents, the two companies joined forces to make sure they would get the best possible package of services. Given the unique features of Pine Hills and the lack of developments in New England to use as a model, the process required plenty of creative thinking.
“What we did was create a master plan for the technology,” says Tom Reiman, president of The Broadband Group. “We defined the network requirements, the structured wiring needs, the physical network, and the demand for voice, video and data capability, along with the local content.”
But finding a provider for that content was easier said than done. Pine Hills is the largest planned community in Massachusetts, an area where the combination of scarce buildable land and high real estate prices makes developments a rarity. Even though the requirements for the infrastructure were relatively modest, there were few prospective providers in the area, forcing The Broadband Group to take an innovative approach to the process.
“We tried to look at the bandwidth to be consumed and match up the technology with the personality of the project,” Reiman explains. “In the case of Pine Hills, it was a private community that was not in a major metropolitan area, and there was no high-bandwidth infrastructure. So we had to create a template for the service.”
That template had to incorporate the plans of three different builders who were about to construct a modern, cosmopolitan update of an old New England village. Plans had been approved for a 178-acre “neighborhood center” called “Village-on-the-Green” that would include a 220-room Marriott resort hotel with conference room facilities, as well as a 220,000-square-foot retail space with a bank, stores and other facilities.
To meet the diverse needs of that community, one of the goals of the service template was to create a competitive environment in which to audition potential telecommunications providers. The Broadband Group’s strategy was to evaluate the existing services, which included Adelphia, the local cable company, as well as Bell Atlantic, which provided phone service in the area. The competition came primarily from a company called RCN, which began to make inroads into the region when the demand for broadband services picked up momentum.
“We wanted to be able to deliver every kind of service that was available in a clear and easy manner, but there was no high-speed data capability of any kind in that market,” says Reiman. “When we went into the market and analyzed the competition, we knew that we were not going to allow everybody to do anything they wanted. We wanted a fiber backbone that could continue to grow with the technology. It was that sort of thinking that allowed us to eliminate the satellite dishes on the property.
“A lot of the technology we were talking about hasnÕt matured yet, so we never say ‘give me everything today,'” Reiman adds. “Telecommunications companies are good at installing wires and providing services, but they’re not good at educating consumers on the benefits of connectivity. If you just market the services available with only door hangers and overbuild, what you’ll end up with is a package of services that maybe 10 percent of the residents in the community will end up using.
“We wanted to blend services in terms of voice, data and video while offering some price incentives, and we wanted a company that would step up and outperform the competition,” he concludes. “We wanted to reverse the normal situation where a provider dictates the offerings, and put pressure on the provider to deliver a comprehensive package of every kind of service available.”
The provider that stepped up to the plate was Bell Atlantic, which has since become Verizon. Today, it’s common for providers to be willing to offer a full package of broadband services, but back in 1999 when the Pine Hills auditions were taking place, it was unique for a single provider to be willing and able to deliver a combination of voice, high-speed data and video capability.
Builder Implements Tech Design
Reiman is quick to add that the package couldn’t have been installed and implemented without the efforts of the builder, The Green Company. The plans of the two firms intersected in the education process, with The Green Company paying extra attention to the individual needs of the customers.
“What we like to do is go out and educate consumers about the benefits of connectivity, and The Green Company has a unique approach to meeting the needs of the consumer,” says Reiman when speaking about his partners on the project. “They assign a coordinator to every buyer at Pine Hills, and that person protects the consumer all the way through the buying process, from helping them select the services they want to getting an email address to moving in. What they do at Pine Hills LLC is to basically wrap themselves around the consumer.”
According to Tony Green, managing partner of The Green Company, that process starts well before the buyers begin to get serious about their purchase. When the company started to build the combination of attached townhouses and free-standing homes, it had a pretty good idea of the telecommunication features customers would want in the package.
“It began with market research and focus groups,” says Green. “One of our biggest goals was to preserve the feel of an old New England village, and the desire for connectedness starts with knowing other people. We wanted to make that whole process easier.”
The foundation of that connectivity was a robust structured-wiring package, along with a well designed specification that would make sure all the products would work together as planned. Plenty of structured-wiring companies got to trot out their wares for the project, but as the evaluation process evolved, the focus narrowed to one specific feature that didn’t necessarily have anything to do with their products.
“The key was to have a state-of-the-art specification so that we were able to make sure Verizon could provide the bandwidth to ensure a full array of services,” Green explains. “Our specification was designed for both commercial and residential, so we were able to create competition among vendors. We looked at four or five structured- wiring providers, and the two that we chose for Pine Hills were USTec and FutureSmart.”
The on-site expert from The Green Company at Pine Hills who worked with the Broadband Group, the structured-wiring companies and Verizon was John Judge, the project manager. According to Judge, part of the reason that FutureSmart and USTec were chosen for Pine Hills is that they offered the best combination of market presence and a reliable and robust product line. But it was their ability to provide service and support for those products that made a difference at Pine Hills.
“The good news at this point is that all of the structured wiring companies seem to be migrating toward the same basic platform,” says Judge. “What differentiated FutureSmart and USTec was that they were both working with a network of certified low-voltage installers who had the expertise to service and support the products. They were also able to work with the builders to be compliant with the Pine Hills spec, which we put together with the Broadband Group to give builders flexibility to go the standard if they wanted to.”
When the two other builders began to enter the picture, Judge also wanted them to be aligned with structured wiring companies that could provide good service and support. But all three builders came into the project with different standards for installation, and reconciling those standards required getting everyone on the same page.
“Like anything else, it began with education,” says Judge. “We met with all the builders, and we had presentations from FutureSmart and USTec. In this area, we were looking for tech support and certified installers. Then we brought in Verizon, to see how the infrastructure would be best served by the specification.
“The biggest issue we had was with the bandwidth for video,” Judge adds. “The splits in the box in the home had to be done a certain way, and each of the different vendors had different ways of doing that. So we had to go back and make sure the signal quality and the bandwidth matched up against the specification.”
Installations Tested to Spec by Consultant
The Broadband Group played a pivotal role in the verification process as well. According to Tom Reiman, the company’s testing process involves coming in after the first production units have been built and letting the builder know that one unit will be tested against the specification. But the specific unit to be tested is never identified in advance, largely to keep different companies from overbuilding to make sure the specs will be met.
“We make sure the builders install under strict guidelines, and we make sure everything that’s installed is labeled and certified,” says Reiman of the specs. “That’s something that a lot of structured wiring specs don’t do. We set up a minimum that builders have to meet, like the size of the can and the number of runs for connectivity, but we give the specification the room to grow so that the specification can be upgraded for custom homes.”
In fact, The Broadband Company set up three different levels for the specification, one for each different builder. While The Green Company continues to expand on the base of 16 homeowners who have purchased the firm’s townhouses and homes that are priced in the low $200K range, the more upscale builders like Whitman Homes and Kistler & Knapp will have to adhere to a higher standard for the pricier homes. According to Reiman, the testing process produces a wide range of intriguing results when the production units are put under the microscope.
“Most builders aren’t on solid ground in their understanding,” he says. “So we go on-site and work with the builders when we inspect the model and tell them what they did right and wrong. More often than not we find massive problemsÑwe’ve had credible builders come out of the inspection with an 80 percent failure rate.
“At Pine Hills we set up three levels for each company, and what we saw was a much lower failure rate than what we usually see,” he adds. “If you don’t jump on that failure rate right away, the problem you have is that as the level of services continues to grow, you begin to see major problems. And once you terminate the wiring, you don’t get performance back. It’s really beyond most builders, and I don’t mean that in a negative way.” THB
Bob McCullough is an author/journalist who lives in the Boston area. He’s written a half-dozen books and freelanced for a wide variety of national publications. He can be reached at rmccull147@aol.com.
QUOTE
In addition to writing the specs of the project, the consultant on the project, The Broadband Group, also tested one randomly selected unit against the specs.