When Pete Pruitt asked Comcast Cable how much it would cost to get high-speed internet service at his Caswell County home, officials told him they’d need to run fiber lines to his street, a mile-long artery that 12 families call home.
Cost: a one-time fee of $48,000.
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.
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.
Image via Wikipedia
LAS VEGAS — The American arm of a British firm known for deploying local loop fiber through sewers has high expectations for its chances in the US market, based on the Google (Nasdaq: GOOG)-inspired boom in municipal fiber projects. (See Google Jumps Into Gigabit FTTH.)
The company is i3 America , and it has stepped up as a platinum sponsor of the FTTH Council Conference here only weeks after announcing the first US pilot — in Quincy, Ill. — of its Fibrecity open access network.
By Craig Settles
Image via CrunchBase
Municipal broadband networks may the fastest way for smaller communities — and those in areas without much competition — to bring better broadband to their businesses and residents. These networks aren’t generally popular with incumbent communications providers, which have a history of suing to stop them. However, their tactics have changed.
In 2005, the main goal of large incumbent telcos and cable companies was to try for an outright ban on municipal networks. As the public vigorously fought back, incumbents switched to creative assaults on communities’ ability to find or use money to pay for networks. Eighteen states have restrictive muni network legislation (see map) that makes building a community-owned network impossible or difficult, especially when it comes to funding them.
Image via Wikipedia
According to my friend who blogs for www.freshloan.co.uk – the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced Wednesday that an $81 million broadband stimulus grant and a $35 million government backed loan to Springfield-based Vermont Telephone Company (VTel).
The $35,166,081 loan and $81,664,754 grant to VTel Wireless, Inc for their Wireless Open World (WOW) project is one of 49 broadband infrastructure projects announced nationally. The broadband investments will give rural residents in 29 states access to improved service that will expand economic, health care, educational, and many other opportunities to underserved rural communities. Today’s announcement is part of the second round of USDA broadband funding through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (Recovery Act).
