Broadband & Community Broadband

... Internet2, Media Access Project, the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors, the New America Foundation and Public Knowledge. ...

... the FCC approve the use of white spaces, according to Michael Calabrese, VP and director of the Wireless Future Program at the New America Foundation. ...

Tim Wu, the Columbia Law School professor and Toronto native who first coined the term, has a simple suggestion: customer ownership of internet connections. ...

America's communications infrastructure is stuck at a copper wall. For the vast majority of homes, copper wires remain the principal means of getting broadband services. The deployment of fiber optic connections to the home would enable exponentially faster connections, and few dispute that upgrading to more robust infrastructure is essential to America's economic growth. However, the costs of such an upgrade are daunting for private sector firms and even for governments. These facts add up to a public policy challenge.

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In their paper Homes with Tails, Columbia Law School professor and New America Foundation Fellow Tim Wu and Google Policy Analyst Derek Slater lay out a proposal in which a community would establish a collectively-owned fiber trunk cable that would lead to individually-owned lines into people's homes. LINK

America’s communications infrastructure is stuck at a copper wall. For the vast majority of homes, copper wires remain the principal means of getting broadband services. The deployment of fiber optic connections to the home would enable exponentially faster connections, and few dispute that upgrading to more robust infrastructure is essential to America’s economic growth. However, the costs of such an upgrade are daunting for private sector firms and even for governments. These facts add up to a public… more

The profit-making model was the main cause of the failures, said Sascha Meinrath, technology analyst for the New America Foundation, a District-based research organization. "These communications systems should not just be solely about profit margins . . . It's more about providing a public service," he said. "Look at what cities pay for landscaping and street lights. It's a shame this hasn't been made a higher priority." LINK

NOTE: Due to a last-minute scheduling conflict, Douglas Holtz-Eakin is unable to participate in today's event, and the McCain campaign will not be sending an alternate spokesperson. The event will proceed as scheduled with Reed Hundt representing the Obama campaign.

The next president is going to face a host of pressing questions involving technology:

Why is the United States falling behind the rest of the world in broadband access, and how can we reverse that? What should our immigration policy be for… more

In a major win for the public interest, the Broadband Data Improvement Act passed the Senate (on September 26th) and the House (on September 29th). Due to amendments, it now goes back to the Senate for final approval (should be pro-forma) before it lands on George Bush's desk.

With the United States falling further and further behind a host of other countries, the question on many people's minds (including the folks over at Point-Topic who created this graphic) is, "Why is this happening?"

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It was just last year that those of us raising alarms about the massive half-decade market failure in the United States to adequately provision broadband services were facing a misinformation campaign that raw numbers mattered more than percentage rankings. According to this argument, the U.S. broadband market was sound because we had more broadband lines than anyone else.

The misinformation brigade got so much attention (mainly due to incumbents funding a propaganda campaign that "everything is fine here, nothing to see"), that public interest groups had to issue… more