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Municipal Broadband Projects Spread Across U.S.
Mediacitizen writes "Media rights group Free Press has just unveiled an online broadband map showing the vast extent to which publicly supported 'Community Internet' projects have overtaken towns across the country. Hundreds of communities now have municipal broadband systems on the drawing board, despite aggressive lobbying efforts by big telephone and cable companies to derail these projects. The national map shows Community Internet is spreading like a prairie fire."
"So... that pretty much encompases the entire province I'd say."
Sweet joke. Yeah they just put a tower up on Spy Hill, Wood Mountain, and Climax for redundancy, as a tower anywhere would serve all locations, or at least the edges of towns facing the towers.
For those that don't get the joke, there are no towers in any of those three places that sound like high elevations, and SK has an un-deserved reputation for being a completely flat wheat field because that's what it looks like from the Trans Canada Highway through the southern grain belt. Nearly half of the province is actually trees, lakes, rocks, and brush.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
"Broadband Reports explains that Texas Representative Pete Sessions is trying to pass the "Preserving Innovation in Telecom Act of 2005" (HR2726), which would ban towns and cities from wiring themselves for broadband.
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However Sessions is not only a 16 year ex-SBC employee, his wife works for Cingular, and he holds half a million dollars in SBC stock options, according to an e-mail being circulated today by media reform outfit Free Press.
"Congressman Sessions is the latest poster child for corruption on Capitol Hill," says Josh Silver, executive director of Free Press."
from http://www.dailywireless.org/modules.php?name=New
The Flash map itself if powered by my DIY Map tool. It's free (as in beer) for personal and non-profit use. You can download it at http://backspace.com/mapapp/.
Um, we have spent three hundred billion dollars to make more extremists. Invading Iraq and linking that to the so-called "War on Terror" was an outright lie. No WMDs. No link to Al Qaeda.
... what on earth gives you any confidence that these guys can find their asses with two hands? Why on earth do you think that the Iraq occupation is being run competently? Or that we should even be there in the first place?
Invading Iraq because of 9/11 was precisely equivalent to invading Mexico for Pearl Harbor.
It's worth pointing out that there were no terrorists in Iraq before we invaded. Days when there are only two or three car bombs are now good days there.
When you look at the Bush team's absolutely inept handling of the Katrina disaster, four years after 9/11 and his campaigns consisting largely of "If you vote for that Kerry guy, you'll die".... after all his rhetoric about Protecting the Homeland
Those damn liberals, always criticising. Expecting actual results and stuff. Unpatriotic. Oughta just shoot 'em.
Where I live in Wyandotte, Michigan, we've had municipal broadband for years. Its not free, but "competitively priced" as if a company provided the service. I pay ~$50 for 4Mb/512k cable service. The city contracted a Canadian provider, ParaSun Technologies, to be the ISP. The city owns the cable network, so they can provide whatever services they want. Of course, the city also owns their own power plant and water treatment facilities. The only services provided by public utility companies is natural gas and telephone.
What?
health care, and education. What electric power and telephones were to
the 20th Century, broadband access will be to the 21st. Towns that
don't have affordable broadband lose jobs. Their children suffer a
serious disadvantage in college or in the workforce, where fluency
with computers and the Internet is increasingly assumed as a matter of
course. Communities without broadband cannot take advantage of new
breakthroughs in tel-medicine or the economic opportunities created by
telecommuting. Even in crowded urban areas, the availability of
broadband can vary from one neighborhood to another, stranding one
neighborhood on the wrong side of the "digital divide" while two,
three or even four broadband providers serve their neighbors.
Municipalities have a valuable role to play in filing this gap.
Municipalities have a long history of providing necessary services for
citizens and stimulating local businesses. In the 20th century,
municipalities built power plants and telephone lines when private
services did not move fast enough. Our competitive power and telecoms
industries today demonstrate that these services by municipalities
complement private industry rather than compete with it. In addition,
municipalities have a long history of spending money to benefit their
citizens and encourage business development. They should have the same
opportunity to offer public hot spots and broadband access.
From 2001- 2004 the United States dropped from 4th to 13th place in
global rankings of broadband Internet usage. Today, most U.S. homes
can access only 'basic' broadband, among the slowest, most expensive
and least reliable in the developed world. Nearly all Japanese have
access to 'high-speed' broadband, with an average connection time 16
times faster than in the United States - for only about $22 a month.
South Korea, which has the world's greatest percentage of broadband
users, and urban China, which last year surpassed the U.S. in the
number of broadband users.
The solution is not to protect the baby bells and cable companies from
competition; it is instead to encourage more competition. Communities
across the country are experimenting with ways to supplement private
service. And these
experiments are producing unexpected economic returns. Some are
discovering that free wireless access increases the value of public
spaces just as, well, street lamps do. And just as street lamps don't
make other types of lighting obsolete, free wireless access in public
spaces won't kill demand for access in private spaces. Yet we will
never recognize these externalities unless municipalities are free to
experiment.