News and other note worthy events
Broadband access gear vendor Calix announced a pair of municipal broadband projects this week, including one in Concord, Mass., that hints at the potential for smart grid projects to drive investment in fiber-based architectures.
SPRINGFIELD, Illinois, September 28, 2010 – Broadband high-speed internet services are stimulating the economy, creating jobs and enhancing lives in Illinois through enhanced telemedicine, training, and public safety benefits.
On Tuesday, dozens of federal broadband stimulus recipients will gather together in Springfield, Illinois, to celebrate and plan how more than $351 million in federal, state and private investment will be used to build infrastructure and frontline programs to eliminate the digital divide.
Chattanooga has become the first U.S. city to provide blazing-fast Internet — with download speeds 20 times faster than anything now offered to big business users in Nashville or anywhere else, for that matter.
The question now is whether Chattanooga’s high-tech fiber-optic system puts Music City behind in the race for new jobs.
The following video was shown at a rural broadband conference in the United Kingdom. A group of farmers took their broadband destiny into their own hands by laying their own fiber and installing their equipment. It demonstrates the relative ease at which a fiber-based broadband network can be installed in rural areas. Coming from a farming state, farmers are quite capable diggers and builders. They may even do a better job and be more conscientious since they are doing the work on their own and neighbors’ properties.
By Jasmin Melvin
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. regulators paved the way on Thursday for new, faster wireless devices by opening unused television airwaves for mobile broadband use.
Device makers such as Dell Inc, Nokia and Motorola Inc stand to profit from the Federal Communications Commission’s unanimous vote to allow unlicensed wireless devices to operate on this idle spectrum.
Google has revealed that aerial fibre links to its data centre in Oregon were “regularly” shot down by hunters, forcing the company to put its cables underground.
The search and advertising giant’s network engineering manager Vijay Gill told the AusNOG conference in Sydney last week that people were trying to hit insulators on electricity distribution poles.
LAS VEGAS — Deploying fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) is as much a culture change as a technology change for carriers, according to leading players here at the FTTH Council Conference.
Companies that have tried to sell the new service in traditional ways haven’t always found success.
For example, Telefónica Brazil put its FTTH infrastructure into place before preparing its services, customer service, IT, and back-office operations, said Andre Kriger, the carrier’s FTTH director, in a keynote speech here. And that initial attempt at a massive new service rollout fell flat, he said.
