News

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to meet some of the folks from the Personal Telco Project in Portland, Oregon. They have been around for a long time and do excellent work.

If you aren't familiar with SOPA - the "Stop Online Piracy Act" or its companion in the Senate (called PIPA or Protect IP), you should be. This is legislation that would allow the US government to require Internet Service Providers block web sites without due process.

Susan Crawford published an excellent essay in the New York Times presenting her Looming Broadband Monopoly argument as a discussion of the coming digital divide between those with access to next-generation networks and those without.

These numbers are likely

Most of us are familiar either with Metcalfe's law or the general principle of it: networks are more valuable the more people are on it. The common example used to illustrate is a telephone. One person on a telephone network is useless. Two people is an improvement.

Communities with grassroots movements investigating or encouraging community networks should take a look at the many resources the citizens of Lafayette, Louisiana, developed in their referendum fight in establishing LUS Fiber. In order to help educate the community, fiber supporters created a short newsletter (if there was more than one issue, I have not been a

More good news from the Building Community Capacity through Broadband stimulus-funded project in Wisconsin: it has earned an award from Wisconsin Rural Partners [pdf].

A deep thank you to Public Knowledge for their throwing back the curtain on AT&T's lobbying operation in the attempted takeover of T-Mobile. Whenever the discussion of public v.

Wally Bowen, of North Carolina's Mountain Area Information Network, recently gave an excellent presentation that explained the importance of broadband and media infrastructure that puts community needs before the profit motive.

A story from Washington, DC, seems appropriate for Thanksgiving. DC's Community of Hope provides healthcare and housing to people in difficult situations. It needs Internet access for its medical work but also for computer labs where people can search for jobs and students can do homework.

Reedsburg Utilites, the owner and operator of a muni FTTH network north of Madison, Wisconsin, is finally moving forward on a project to connect rural areas of Sauk County.

Monticello, a small community of 13,000 about 40 miles northwest of Minneapolis, built one of the most advanced broadband networks in the midwest and delivers some of the fastest connections available in the state at incredibly competitive rates.

In a nod to Thanksgiving, Government Technology has collected 11 "Tech Turkeys - "Half-baked lowlights from the year gone by" (2011).

There are definitely times when you learn of a business practice where you think, "Wow, my opinion of AT&T could not go any lower." And then, BOOM. You find out that AT&T was intentionally underfunding a 9-11 call center in order to undercut its competitors in bids. Yikes. Did we mention that this is not an isolated case?

If your community considers building its own broadband network, don't be surprised to see ads like these two from the recent Longmont referendum in Colorado. When Chattanooga was starting to build its network, Comcast bought 2600 ads, similar in substance to these, to scare people into opposing the project.

If you want to predict the future, it helps to understand the incentives that guide action. Unsurprisingly, if a corporation has the option of being more profitable by investing less, it will do so.

Scott Olivier is one of several people originally from Lafayette to return to Lafayette to take advantage of the their incredible community fiber network. He has done a series of short testimonials about LUS Fifber (embedded below). We have covered similar testimonial from other community broadband networks and I think they are an easy way any community can begin marketing itself.

Dunnellon, a small town in Marion County south of Gainesville, decided to invest in a community fiber network to spur growth and diversify its income stream. Though citizens did not want to cut government services, they have not been pleased at property tax increases.