DSLReports, February 13, 2013 A new bill is being proposed in Georgia that would ban towns and cities from deploying their own broadband — if there’s at least one person with a 1.5 Mbps downstream connection anywhere in a census block. House Bill 282, or the inversely-named “Municipal Broadband Investment Act,” emerges after AT&T tried and … Read More
The Georgia General Assembly is considering another bill to limit investment in telecommunications networks in the state, an odd proposition when just about everyone agrees states need as much investment in these networks as possible. House Bill 282, the “Municipal Broadband Investment Act,” purports to limit the ability of public entities to invest only in “unserved” … Read More
Glasgow was a true pioneer in community owned broadband networks, starting with its own cable plant in the 1980s. Billy Ray, CEO of Glasgow Electric Plant Board, has been an inspiration for municipal broadband networks — one can’t dig into the early history of LUS Fiber in Louisiana without running into something from Billy Ray, for … Read More
The Community Broadband Bits Podcast recently published episode #32, a talk with Harold Feld of Public Knowledge. Harold is Senior Vice President of the organization which focuses on advocating for digital rights. Harold also authors Tales of the Sausage Factory, a blog dedicated to telecom policy, software, science, technology and writing. In the February 5th podcast, … Read More
Customers of Cedar Falls Utilities (CFU), in Iowa, have recently been treated to an increase in fiber Internet service speeds with no increase in price. We have reported on CFU for several years with news on its upgrades and expansions to unserved areas. The most popular CFU home service, 12/1 Mbps, is now at 16/8 Mbps. … Read More
We received a visit in the Institute for Local Self-Reliance offices last week from Bill Lindeke from streets.mn. Bill came to interview our own Christopher Mitchell so he could learn more about our work at ILSR. The two talked about Chris’ favorite topic. In Bills’ words: I sat down with him today in his office in … Read More
We enjoy bringing you news from western rural Massachusetts and the WiredWest Cooperative. We want to share the update on 2012 activities and some of the plans for 2013. Sixteen new towns became members in 2012, which brings the grand total to 42. Business planning progressed during 2012. From the WiredWest newletter: Significant work was undertaken … Read More
The UC2B project broke ground in the fall of 2011 and is a joint effort by the cities of Urbana and Champaign and the University of Illinois. The project is funded with a $22.5 million federal stimulus grant, a $3 million grant from the state of Illinois, and a list of other grants from local agencies. From the … Read More
Harold Feld, Senior Vice President of Public Knowledge, is back on Community Broadband Bits to discuss five fundamental rules necessary to ensure we have a great telecommunications system that benefits everyone. Harold first appeared on our show in episode 23. Harold explains the Five Fundamentals here and includes a link to their full filing [pdf]. In … Read More
