News

On Wednesday, Tech News Today on the This Week in Tech (TWiT) network had Christopher Mitchell on to discuss pending legislation in Georgia that would essentially outlaw publicly owned networks in the state. I come on about 25 minutes, 45 seconds in to the show.

The Heartland Institute is one of those organizations that will say anything its massive corporate funders want it to.

Susan Crawford's op-ed in Bloomberg makes a tremendous case for publicly owned broadband networks.

The absurdity of AT&T's push to define broadband as 200kbps is so great, it boggles the imagination. We developed the graphic below to highlight just how slow 200kbps connections are. Feel free to spread it around. Higher quality pdf below.

Many complain about gridlock in Washington, DC, but I sometimes subscribe to the cynical counter-reaction that gridlock is great. It is when the Democrats and Republicans agree that Americans should beware. Though this may or may not be true about politics, it is certainly true when applied to two of the most hated industries in America: cable television companies and DSL companies like AT&T.

Lobbyists for major cable and DSL companies (Comcast, Frontier, and others) already earned their pay in Washington state this year by killing a bill that would have allowed some public utility districts to offer retail services on broadband networks in rural areas that were unserved.

The 2012 Broadband Communities Summit will be at the InterContinental Hotel in Dallas April 24-26. I will be there and am excited for the Open Access Program as well as the Economic Development discussions.

Two weeks ago, I joined a conference call hosted by the Media Action Grassroots Network discussing community ownership of broadband networks.

In the last few years local communities, governments, non-profit organizations and neighborhood residents from across the U.S.

AT&T lobbyists in Georgia and South Carolina are arguing that local governments should not be allowed to build the networks that communities need, suggesting that the private sector is prim

The Institute for Local Self-Reliance joined many other groups in signing a letter calling on Congress to cease considering the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) and instead initiate a balanced process meant to seriously consider a proper way to defend copyrights that does not threaten the open Internet.

A group of rural residents living east of Madison, Wisconsin, gathered near Portage of Columbia County to discuss their lack of affordable high speed access to the Internet. These are people for whom slow, overpriced DSL would be an improvement.

A local government in southeast North Carolina is the first entity to deploy a "Super Wi-Fi" white-spaces broadband network.