On Friday, February 21, 2014, Christopher Mitchell will be speaking in Stockholm at the Stockholm Waterfront Congress Center. The event, titled Fibre: The key to creating world-class IT regions, will begin at 8:30 a.m. in Sweden (1:30 a.m. CST for viewers in the U.S.) and will be livestreamed. Chris will be providing an update on fiber … Read More
The focus on community networks tends to linger on the technology – FTTH is much faster and more reliable than cable or DSL services. But community fiber is only partially about the superior technology, as evidenced by a recent story over at Broadband Reports – “Verizon has been Quietly Increasing FiOS Fees.” We don’t see this … Read More
This is the first in a series of posts examining a premier Gigabit Community – Wilson, North Carolina. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, 85% of all jobs originate from companies with fewer than 30 employees, and 87% of businesses which started through business incubators have succeeded after five years. So Wilson, North Carolina, focused … Read More
We reported last month on a decision from the FCC to make Connect America funds available to expand broadband. At the time we did not have much detail on the measure, but on January 30th, the FCC released its official statement. The agency reached a unanimous decision to open up Connect America Fund dollars for experimental … Read More
Info World, February 6, 2014 When Time Warner and Embarq (now named CenturyLink) couldn’t provide affordable, high-speed broadband, the residents of Wilson, a small town in North Carolina, decided to do it themselves. In 2006, Wilson built a municipally owned fiber-to-the home network that offers television, telephone, and broadband services at relatively low cost. In response, … Read More
Kansas Capital-Journal, February 5, 2014 The strong signal of political blowback — not an avalanche of snow suspending Capitol activity for two days — buried a cable industry bill imposing a statewide ban on local municipalities building broadband networks. The Senate Commerce Committee scheduled a public hearing Tuesday and a vote Thursday on Senate Bill 304, … Read More
ArsTechnica, February 5, 2014 Kansas isn’t the only state considering legislation that would limit the growth of government-funded broadband networks that threaten incumbent Internet service providers. The latest such attempt we’ve learned of is a Utah House bill called the “Interlocal Entity Service Prohibition,” which would prevent a regional fiber consortium from building infrastructure outside the … Read More
Even though the Kansas cable lobby have temporarily retracted their competition-killing telecom bill, we still want to highlight the benefits of preserving full home rule, local authority by focusing on a number of communities, including Chanute, Ottawa, and Erie. Chanute We have reported on Chanute’s municipal network for years. The community leveraged its electric utility assets and … Read More
Kansas is not the only place where the cable and telecom lobbies are attacking publicly owned networks. Jesse Harris from FreeUtopia.org reports that State Rep. Curt Webb has introduced HB60, aimed at UTOPIA. From the story: As the bill is currently written, UTOPIA wouldn’t just be prevented from building to people willing to pay for it. … Read More
