Tag: broadband

Chattanooga to Offer 1 Gigabit Internet

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View over Chattanooga, Tennessee, from Lookout...
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Mid-size southern city will likely be the first in the country to break the one gigabit speed barrier here in the US.

Ed Oswald, Technologizer

When you’re thinking of ultra-high speed Internet and its expected rollout across the country, I’m sure the last place you’d probably name is Chattanooga, Tennessee. However if all goes right, the mid-sized southern city will likely be the first in the country to break the one gigabit speed barrier here in the US.

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An Internet mecca’s transformation

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Official seal of City of Bonita Springs

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It is always nice to hear former colleagues doing good in this industry.

By Michael Pollick & Doug Sword
Staff Writers

In four years flat, a veteran of the fiber-optic wars and his Bonita Springs company have transformed Lee and Collier counties into an Internet mecca for businesses and nonprofits.

Set up with checks from some rich Collier folks who wanted to give their children and grandchildren a reason to stay in the region, Frank Mambuca and his U.S. Metro network already are proving the economic development cliché that, “If you build it they will come.”

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County faces a fiber-optic opportunity

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By Michael Pollick & Doug Sword

Map of Florida highlighting Sarasota County

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Forget Google Fiber. For the bargain-basement price of $1,000 per mile, Sarasota County could build one of the fastest broadband systems in the nation.

During the next year, local government officials will construct an ambitious new fiber-optic network — with a capacity nearing that of the Internet backbone that moves data between major cities — to coordinate most of the traffic lights in Sarasota County.

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Socket lands Callaway broadband project

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American Recovery and Reinvestment Act constru...

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“Big city broadband. Rural reality.”

That’s how Socket Telecom is touting the fiber-optic network it’s set to build in central Callaway County and a sliver of eastern Boone County.

This month the US Department of Agriculture awarded Socket a $16.6 million grant and a $7.1 million loan under the federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Within the next 90 days, Socket will use that money to start building a fiber-optic network capable of serving more than 3,000 homes and businesses.

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Consumers getting only half of advertised broadband speed

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Publish By Consensus

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Articles like the one below flooded the media this week when the FCC released its’ “Broadband Performance: OBI Technical Paper No. 4.”  All of the articles jumped on the headline that users were actually receiving half the bandwidth that the carriers were purchasing which implied that consumers were being cheated by carriers.  Even the typically conscientious ARS Technia jumped on this headline (or SEO) grabbing theme/meme.  Some of the articles took the time to extract from the report that the reasons for speed variations could be due to a multitude of factors such as user network, other Internet, and server delays, but many of them stuck with the prevailing theme.  The technical press seem bent on pressing the meme that “carriers are evil and we need the government’s regulation to save us.”  While I would be the first to chastise a carrier that was not providing what I purchased, my experience is that the transport usually lives up to the advertised speeds.  Remember too that there is always the obligatory “up to” qualifier on the speeds as well.  If I have any complaint with the incumbent ISP is that the price per bit is too expensive.

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Company wants to wire Sarasota for superfast Internet

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View of the Outside of The Cà d’Zan in Sarasot...
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SARASOTA – A British company plans to soup up a number of U.S. cities — including Sarasota — with ultra-high-speed fiber-optic Internet networks.

The discussions have been going on for several months, according to Rich Swier Jr., founder of the Sarasota think tank known as The Hub and a member of a recently created Sarasota broadband task force.

“They were following the Google fiber effort and we connected with them during that campaign,” Swier said.

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