Fiber optic connectivity is coming soon for public facilities in Kings Mountain, North Carolina. The city has its own electric, natural gas, and water utilities and is home to a little over 10,000 people. Located along the southern edge of the state, the town is considered a suburb of Charlotte. According to an Alicia Banks Gaston Gazette … Read More
Since 2008, we have followed and reported on the peaks and valleys that is UTOPIA. Recently, the Salt Lake Tribune ran a series on the regional network. The coverage includes a sampling of the bitter and sweet of the complex relationship between the pioneering network, the state, and the customers it serves. As many of our … Read More
Idaho’s capital has begun leasing dark fiber from Zayo Group that will allow it to consolidate a number of data centers it has located in municipal facilities across the city. This will allow Boise to better meet the internal needs of City Departments; the City is not providing access to private businesses or residents. We tend … Read More
Telecompetitor, January 4, 2013 A citizen’s group in Burlington, Vermont hopes to transform troubled municipal network Burlington Telecom into a customer-owned cooperative. In so doing, the group – tentatively called Green Mountain Broadband Fiber — hopes to prevent the network from being privatized and to retain local control. According to a report published by the Institute … Read More
Kudos to Richard Downey, Village Administrator for the Village of Kronenwetter in Wisconsin. Mr. Downey reminded us that we have yet to write about the fiber network in Princeton, Illinois. While we have noted Princeton in our list of economic development successes, we haven’t delved into the network that serves the city, the schools, and the … Read More
After a city in North Carolina built a Fiber-to-the-Home network competing with Time Warner Cable, the cable giant successfully lobbied to take that decision away from other cities. The city of Wilson’s decision and resulting network was recently examined in a case study by Todd O’Boyle and Christopher Mitchell titled Carolina’s Connected Community: Wilson Gives Greenlight … Read More
Boing Boing, January 3, 2013 A lot of people were frustrated in 2011 when the North Carolina General Assembly passed a bill written by Time Warner Cable to revoke local authority to build community-owned networks. A new report from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and Common Cause explains how Time Warner Cable, AT&T, and CenturyLink bought … Read More
I meant to post this over the Holiday Break but it fell through the cracks. So, at the beginning of 2013, here are some of our best moments from the 2012 Weekly Podcast, Community Broadband Bits. We want your feedback and suggestions for the show – please e-mail us or leave a comment below. Also, feel … Read More
As I recently mentioned in my endorsement of Tubes by Andrew Blum, the book explains how a municipal fiber network helped to attract Google to town. Google sited its first “built-from-scratch data center” there, a $600 million investment according to Stephen Levy. According to Blum, it all started back in 2000 when the community got fed … Read More
