In February, ILSR's Christopher Mitchell travelled to Stockholm to participate in an event titled Fibre: The key to creating world-class IT regions. On February 21st, he presented info to attendees on the status of broadband in the U.S.

While Chris was there, he also spoke one-on-one with Anders Broberg, one of the conference organizers and head of communications for Stokab, the city owned dark fiber network powering Stockholm (we discussed Stokab with Benoit Felten in 2012). Chris' presentation, Q&A, and the interview are now available online.

Other discussions and presentation videos are available at the Stockholm IT Region website, where they recently wrote about the interview with Chris:

Cities and municipalities that build their own networks has done it in order to keep and create jobs. But in order to keep up the development and expansion, the local communities must be given much more autonomy – even for experimental purposes.

Christopher pointed out that the internet is no longer just a cool thing, but a necessity – which makes fibre networks comparable to roads. And local decision making is vital in order to speed up the development and get people on these roads.

Video available below:

Though we often discuss some of the ways European nations have surpassed the U.S. in Internet network investment, they also have some counter-productive rules that limit investment. The Manchester Evening News recently published an article about a plan to bring high speed Internet to a deprived area of 30,000 homes where access is either slow or absent. From the article:

European rules ban public subsidy being used to fund infrastructure where – in theory – a company could roll it out instead.

The Manchester Council planned to use public funding to bring the homes into the 21st century, but the European Commission blocked the plan. Because Internet providers say there is not enough demand for broadband access in the areas, they are not compelled to build there.

Sound familiar?

“Part of this involves trying to address the digital divide which means that some parts of Manchester have little or no high speed broadband coverage because commercial internet service providers, such as BT, Virgin and Talk Talk and others, claim there is not enough demand. We have tried hard to address this but it has become clear that Europe-wide regulations mean our hands our tied and we cannot help provide connections where the private sector is able, but not willing, to do so," [said Manchester Coun Nigel Murphy].

This serves as a reminder that Europe also has a variety of bad policy approaches that privilege massive corporations over local authority. We hope to see people there step to defend their rights to be locally self-reliant.

Rick Karr has produced a "can't miss" 15 minute video that shows what happens when telecommunications is treated more like infrastructure and less like a for-profit morass controlled by massive companies.  

We can have universal, fast, affordable, and reliable access to the Internet but we choose instead to let companies like AT&T and Comcast dominate telecommunications to the detriment of our economy, innovation, education, and health care.  It is a choice -- and one we desperately need to revisit.

Rick Karr, a correspondent with PBS' Need to Know, travels to Europe to investigate why some countries there have surpassed the US in fast, affordable, and reliable access to the Internet -- with a real choice among service providers to boot! Video is approximately 12 minutes.

This video is no longer available.

Additional materials from the video are available at its website.

Though we in the U.S. often praise the policies in Europe that have given them faster speeds, lower prices, and actual choices in the market, the reality is that some of their companies have just as bad customer service as what we have to deal with from massive incumbent providers. This video features an incredible prank, forcing an offending company to deal with terrible customer service. Subtitles translate the audio into English.

Roland Montagne also says that competition has been driving new FTTH/FTTB projects. He mentioned that more that 56% of the FTTH/B projects were conducted by public entities such as municipalities and utilities. Incumbents originated only 10.8% of the projects.