The Urbana Champaign Independent Media Center (UCIMC) will be hosting what is sure to be an interesting online discussion about local broadband models. On Wednesday, September 19th at 4:30 CST, an expert panel will be presenting "Models for Building Local Broadband: Public, Private, Coop, Nonprofit." The event will be held at Urbana City Hall in Illinois, but you can also stream the event live here.

In addition to our own Christopher Mitchell from ILSR, we will hear from Joanne Hovis, CTC Technology & Energy (public interest telecom expert and also NATOA President) and Wally Bowen, Mountain Area Information Network (non-profit internet provider in North Carolina).

From the press release:

Urbana-Champaign in Illinois is completing construction of a public system - called UC2B - that will connect 10% of the community with fast broadband they can use to access the internet, share videos, make phone calls and more.  The project was made possible by federal funds.

• How do we connect the other 90% of our community to fast broadband? 
• With what funds?  Who will control it? 
• How can these models support digital inclusion for minority and low income users?

Urbana IMC has gathered some of the top experts in the field of community broadband to join in a discussion of these questions. During this forum, which will be webcast nationally, we will explore public, public-private, non profit, and cooperative models for building out broadband.We will discuss the benefits and challenges of each model to inform our community's upcoming decision about building out the rest of the UC2B network. Champaign-Urbana recently applied to build out the network with Gigabit Squared in a public-private partnership where the network is owned by a private company and the public sets the terms of use. The community is also exploring municipal and co-op models and has a request for proposals to seek other partners and solutions.

For more information, please contact Danielle Chenowyth, UCIMC board member, at chyn@ucimc.org.