Panel to study wiring San Francisco with high-speed Internet

San Francisco Supervisor Mark Farrell has assembled a group of business, privacy and academic experts to discuss crucial, early-stage questions surrounding Farrell’s plan to wire the city with high-speed Internet service.

In the coming months, the San Francisco Municipal Fiber Blue Ribbon Panel will conduct research and provide recommendations on the most efficient and effective ways to blanket the city with broadband, an effort that could cost up to $1 billion.

If it becomes reality, San Francisco would be the largest city in the country to implement citywide high-speed Internet. City officials are currently targeting speeds of 1 gigabit per second. The average Internet speed in the U.S. is 31 megabits per second according to the most recent data published by the Federal Communications Commission, so this could be about 30 times faster.

“As we move forward, thinking about municipal fiber in San Francisco, I thought it was important to bring together a group of nationally renowned academic scholars to evaluate a wide variety of questions that we, as a city, should answer,” Farrell said.

Farrell will serve as the panel’s co-chair alongside Harvard Law School Professor Susan Crawford. Crawford, who teaches courses on municipal uses of technology, Internet law and communications law, worked as an assistant to the president for science, technology and innovation policy in Barack Obama’s administration and co-led the FCC’s transition team between the Bush and Obama administrations.

Crawford called Internet access the “the key economic and social justice issue of the 21st century. Whether it’s educating kids, providing advanced health care, moderating our use of energy and making it possible for people to work where they live — all of that is going to be helped by a better, faster and far cheaper data network,” she said.

In addition to providing recommendations for the most cost-effective ways to finance the fiber project and how to create and maintain privacy and security standards for customers, the volunteer panel will also evaluate whether to operate the network as a public or private utility, or a combination of the two. Farrell said the panel’s work would build on a report published by the San Francisco budget and legislative analyst’s office that laid out a number of possible scenarios.

Last month, Farrell and former San Francisco Supervisor Eric Mar formed a separate coalition of community groups and advocacy organizations that will provide input on the Internet and technology needs of their constituents.

The academic panel also includes Michael Bennon, the managing director of Stanford’s Global Project Center; former California Public Utilities Commissioner Catherine Sandoval; and faculty from UC Berkeley, the University of San Francisco School of Law and Santa Clara Law School, among others.

Dominic Fracassa is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: dfracassa@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @sfchronicle