Monday, November 9th, 2009
By Rahul Gaitonde, Reporter, BroadbandCensus.com
WASHINGTON, November 9, 2009 - On Friday, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration announced seven new state recipients of the state broadband data and development grant program. These grants fund state efforts to map broadband availability and speeds. Each state was asked to pick a designated entity – either a state body or a non-profit organization – that would develop a plan for how broadband mapping would be conducted.
Of the seven states awarded grants on Friday, two choose to fully internalize their process and have state agencies control the mapping.
In Alabama, the Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs was tasked; they received $1.4 million for broadband data collection and mapping activities and $463,000 for broadband planning activities both for over a two- year period.
In Washington State, the Department of Information Services received $1.7 million for data collection and mapping and almost $500,000 for broadband planning activities both for over a two-year period.
Wyoming and Idaho, by contrast, choose to contract their mapping to the Puget Sound Center for Teaching, Learning and Technology, a Seattle based non-profit. Wyoming received $1.3 million for data collection and mapping over a two-year period and $500,000 for broadband planning activities...
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Wednesday, February 18th, 2009
Blog Entries
By Drew Clark, Editor, BroadbandCensus.com
WASHINGTON, February 18, 2009 - Art Brodsky, communications director at Public Knowledge, has just posted a
new piece about Connected Nation. In it, he writes:
The new stimulus package just signed by President Obama has $350 million in it for broadband mapping, yet even before the bill was signed, the danger warnings for this program are glaringly obvious: Who will control the information on broadband deployment? If the program is done correctly, then the program may bring some benefits to the effort to include all Americans in the digital economy. If not, much of the money will be wasted.
Increasingly, it is beginning to look as if the program will be done at the mercy of the big telecommunications companies, who will seek to submit the information they want to submit, on the terms and conditions on which they want to submit it.
State governments, working months before the stimulus package was conceived, are ramping up their own programs to map deployment of broadband, and are finding they are already increasingly running into conflicts over the type of data they will receive. Some states want comprehensive, granular data. However, they...
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Friday, July 11th, 2008
News
By William G. Korver, Reporter, BroadbandCensus.com
WASHINGTON, July 10 – The lack of a cohesive national broadband policy in the United States is hampering the nation’s ability to deploy high-speed broadband, attorney James Baller said Thursday at the Alliance for Community Media conference here.
Nations in Europe and Asia our "cleaning our clock" on broadband deployment, competition, speeds and prices, said Baller, of the Baller Herbst law firm.
Baller, who represents municipalities seeking to deploy broadband systems, recently authored a 100-page report, “
Broadband Revolution: Developing a National Broadband Strategy to Keep the U.S. Prosperous in the 21st Century,” which was released by the e-NC Authority of North Carolina.
Among the report’s key findings, which Baller highlighted again at the ACM conference:
- Hong Kong (with Singapore soon to join them) boasts a 1 Gigabit per second (Gbps) broadband system. Japan averages 93.7 Megabits per second (Mbps), the U.S. languishes at 14th place with an average of 8.9 Mbps.
- In broadband prices, the U.S. stands at 11th place with a monthly average of $12.60, more than four-times the $3.09 average cost in Japan.