News

A year ago, the FCC accepted applications from entities seeking Connect America funds for rural broadband experiments.

Bozeman elected officials voted unanimously on January 26th to approve a recently completed master plan and take the next step to deploying publicly owned open access infrastructure.

Carl Junction has been looking for a way to improve connectivity in its southwest corner of the state for several years. Plans for a fiber network did not come to pass, but the community has found a private partner to bring ubiquitous high-speed Wi-Fi to town.

For the past several months, Maine communities have been a hotbed of broadband activity. Bar Harbor, located midway along the state's Atlantic coast, is another community looking at fiber as a necessary investment. 

This article is so good, it was hard not to quote the whole thing. Do yourself a favor and check out the article for yourself-- this is exactly why we can’t trust big cable and telephone companies to serve our communities. 

If you were not able to attend Freedom to Connect in New York on March 2 - 3, you can now view archived video of presentations from Chris and others.

The Amherst Business Improvement District (BID) recently hired a firm to prepare an engineering study aimed at bringing fiber connectivity to its downtown reports MassLive. 

Hudson is moving ahead with plans to develop a publicly owned fiber network, reports the Hub Times.

We have long applauded communities that have built their own fiber networks and then elect to expand them to neighboring communities. In Louisiana for example, Lafayette could hoard its network, forcing people that want the best connectivity in the region to move within its borders. But instead, it is preparing to expand the network.

Join Chris and several other experts on municipal networks on April 25th as they address a crowd in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Yellow-Springs.Net, a group of residents who have rallied together to organize a movement to explore broadband as a utility in their community, will host the Fiber Forum.

The State of Tennessee has filed the first appeal to the recent FCC Opinion and Order [PDF] reducing state barriers to municipal broadband. Governor Bill Haslam appears determined to keep his constituents in the Internet slow lane.

The Village of Gilberts, Illinois, will ask voters in April to authorize up to $5 million in General Obligation bonds to deploy a FTTH network reports the Daily Herald.

At its March 3rd City Council meeting, elected leaders in Bristol voted 4 - 1 to adopt resolution 15 - 8 reported TriCities.com.

The Orlando Sentinel published this op-ed about local government action for broadband networks on March 11, 2015. 

Local governments should make broadband choices
By Christopher Mitchell

FCC Outlines Plan To Crush Awful State Protectionist Broadband Laws: from the it's-about-time dept by Karl Bode, Tech Dirt

We are pleased to bring you a guest post from Levi C. Maaia, president of Full Channel Labs and a graduate research fellow at the Center for Education Research on Literacies, Learning & Inquiry in Networking Communities (LINC) at the University of California, Santa Barbara.