"I want to try to put this in perspective," Glenn Wikle told Santa Fe city councilors last month, holding up a FedEx box.

The software engineer works at a local technology firm that mines data from large data sets of medical industry information. Although it's technically possible to transmit the information he needs over the Internet in minutes, the company, Qforma, can't afford the going rate for ultra high-speed service in Santa Fe.

"When I need to get one of these data sets here in Santa Fe, it turns out the best way and the fastest way is this box right here," Wikle said, shaking the white cardboard container until a hard drive fell out.

If Qforma had its offices in Albuquerque, he said, the Internet service it needs would cost about $70 a month. Here, it would run nearly $1,400 a month — a price that led the company to choose weekly visits from FedEx instead.

"In a lot of ways, Santa Fe is a friendly city for technology companies. In this particular way, it is not," said Wikle, who also serves on the Santa Fe Public Schools board. "If you can help to bootstrap the market and introduce some competition ... it will make Santa Fe a better place for technology companies and a small technology company can grow without moving out of town."

That's exactly what city officials say they want to do. A proposal to improve broadband access in the city initially was included on a list of property-tax bond projects that voters will decide on during March's municipal election. However, city councilors last week decided instead to allocate $1 million for the broadband project from a $23 million bond issue that doesn't require voter approval. That bond issue will be paid off with revenues from an existing gross-receipts tax.

The basic idea, according to Sean Moody, a city Economic Development Division project planner, is for the city to install the infrastructure for high-speed Internet — empty conduit and access points from the underground pipes to privately owned interconnection facilities. Those pipes can be filled with fiber optic cables by companies that want to start providing high-speed service. The intention is that such service could be made available at a more competitive price and in areas where it's not even an option now.

When people use the term broadband, he said, it typically means any Internet delivery that is faster than dial-up speed. In today's numbers, that's anything above 1 megabits per second. Most households and businesses don't need service near that fast, but for a handful of specialized users, it's a key to longevity, he said.

"My take was that, by and large, what I call the bread-and-butter users — the residences and typical businesses — seemed to be well covered in terms of coverage per se for broadband," he said, adding later, "For the very specialized users, it's very hit or miss."

The most robust way to use city money for broadband and to see an economic development return on the public investment, he said, is to focus on the cadre of technology firms that have specialized needs for rapid data delivery. Those firms include Qforma, which was founded by a former computer scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and others birthed by complexity research at Santa Fe Institute.

Moody's proposal envisions three corridors where users are or could be, but critical decisions can't be made until the next step when the city spends up to $130,000 of the planned allocation to hire a professional business consultant to put together an analysis and engineering plan.

Empty pipelines already exist underground in the recently redeveloped Santa Fe Railyard, where officials laid the pipes with the hope that someone would run fiber optic cables through them later. In the St. Michael's Drive corridor, the city would have to trench and bury new conduit that could connect with the pre-piped campus of the Santa Fe University of Art and Design. The third potential service area is the Santa Fe Municipal Airport on the southwestern edge of the city, but that facility does not have any infrastructure in place for fiber optics.

Wikle's co-worker, Valerio Aimale, likens Santa Fe's fiber optic broadband scenario of today to what happened with railroad connections to the city in the early 20th century. Railroad planners bypassed Santa Fe in choosing the route for the main line and only built a spur connecting the city to the iron highway after locals raised money. Just as the railways helped fuel the Industrial Revolution, he said, big data will fuel the economy of the future.

"Santa Fe has a lot of brain power, but Santa Fe lives at the periphery of the empire when it comes to big data collection," Aimale said, "If we want to be part of the big data bubble, we need the fast lanes to transfer data."

Not everyone in the telecom industry in Santa Fe sees the project as a good use of money, however, said Albert Catanach, president of Computer Network Service Professionals. His business, better known by the acronym CNSP, has been providing Internet service in New Mexico for 15 years.

The limited need for ultra-high speed broadband doesn't justify the expense to the city's budget, he said. Plus, his company can provide full duplex download and upload speeds of 100 megabits per second today with its wireless technology for about $2,500 a month.

"Most businesses here in Santa Fe aren't going to run at 100 megabits," he said. "They are going to run maybe a 10-megabit connection, or maybe five. They'll go with the cheapest option possible and most of the local providers, to include ourselves and the bigger providers, already do that to all the local businesses."

Adding infrastructure isn't going to make the costs to consumers decrease, he said. He wrote the city asking for information about the project before it came up for a council vote, but didn't receive a response.

"It's really not worth it," he said. "Especially when you get city or county governments involved, it's not going to help anybody."

Jane Hill, president of Cybermesa, disagrees. She says the city's plan could benefit consumers in the long run. Her company, unlike CNSP, is a state-authorized competitive local exchange carrier, so it already has interconnection agreements with CenturyLink, the major carrier, to use its central office facilities and deliver service inside conduit owned by CenturyLink, a multi-state telecommunications company that earlier this year merged with Qwest.

Moody's proposal, she said, would allow for competition, even if it didn't get heated right away, she said.

"CenturyLink's fiber conduits don't necessarily take the most direct route. If the city had its own conduit, we could possibly do something much more inexpensively just because it was a more direct route and because we didn't have to mess around with CenturyLink," Hill said. "Even though they have to accommodate us on some level because of the interconnection agreement which gives us these rights, they don't necessarily want to make it easy."

CenturyLink did not respond to a request for comment about the proposal on Friday.

Another positive factor is the small scale of the city's idea, Hill said. At least two other fiber-optic projects for broadband Internet in the region aren't coming together, in part, because of their massive scale and dependence on federal money that never came through.

A project that several local governments and private partners had envisioned under the umbrella of the Santa Fe Regional Telecommunications Coalition, for example, aimed to build a fiber link for broadband service to Santa Fe Studios, the Santa Fe Business Incubator, the community college and other users. Its application for federal economic-stimulus money didn't make the cut.

Meanwhile, the Northern New Mexico Regional Economic Development Initiative's RediNet $13 million project to connect communities from Dixon to Los Alamos and Santa Fe with new fiber optic lines hit a major snag this year when structural problems came up with electric utility poles it planned to use.

Even if that project was providing more bandwidth to Santa Fe, Hill said, as it's funded and envisioned today, it wouldn't make high-speed service in the city any more competitive because it stops at the city's northern edge.

Moody expects the city will issue a request for proposals for the broadband business plan in February or March when the money from the latest capital infrastructure bond sales becomes available.

Contact Julie Ann Grimm at 986-3017 or jgrimm@sfnewmexican.com.