Sunday, July 19th, 2009
By Drew Clark, Editor and Executive Director, BroadbandCensus.com
WASHINGTON, July 19, 2009 - Over at
O'Reilly's Radar, Carl Malamud discusses the need for a crowdsourced national communiations census, or a broadband census.
He writes:
My last tour of duty in DC was Chief Technology Officer at the Center for American Progress. One of the fun things I got to do was figure out what everybody else did, including my fellow Senior Fellows, the folks that generated most of the policy work, many of whom are now occupying senior posts in the new administration.
One of the most fascinating was Mark Lloyd. An experienced Emmy-winning television producer, communications lawyer, and community activist, Mark is the author of a well-regarded book aboutcommunications and democracy and numerous columns. He's currently at the Leadership Conference for Civil Rights.
The project Mark Lloyd was working on was a National Broadband Map to show our true communications capabilities. And, he wanted to crowd-source the map from community groups, supplementing that with census and other data from several different places to create a big mash-up. This was in 2005, around the same time Adrian Holovaty was thinking about chicagocrime.org.
Here's my reply on the O'Reilly...
Read More »
Thursday, January 8th, 2009
News
By Drew Clark, Editor, BroadbandCensus.com
WASHINGTON, January 8, 2009 – President-elect Barack Obama said Thursday that “expanding broadband lines across America” was a key component of the economic plan that he is putting together and for which he is seeking Congressional passage.
The announcement came on top of several detailed and specific proposals to include broadband-related investments to the stimulus package currently being considered by legislators and the incoming Obama administration.
On Wednesday, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation released its own eagerly-awaited proposal about the economic benefits of a broadband stimulus plan. It found that $30 billion technology investment would generate 949,000 jobs.
The 22-page report, “The Digital Road to Recovery,” linked investment in broadband networks, health information technology and a “smart power grid,” and attempted to estimate job creation based upon a “network effect multiplier.”
Some critics took aim at the proposal’s apparent emphasis on tax credits, as opposed to government grants, to undertake a massive deployment of fiber-optic technologies.
Others suggested that in attempting to be technology-neutral, and not endorse a specific technology - like fiber-optics - ITIF’s proposal would lead to lower-grade broadband like cable modems or Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) modems.
The ITIF report found that a $10 billion investment in...
Read More »
Thursday, July 10th, 2008
News
By Cassandre Durocher, Reporter, BroadbandCensus.com
WASHINGTON, July 9 – Three technology and telecommunications companies pressed their case Wednesday on Capitol Hill for better and more accessible broadband in order to promote energy conservation and a “green economy.”
Officials from
Verizon Communications, Cisco Systems, and GridPoint appeared at the briefing sponsored by the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank, on “Climate Connections: Information Technology and a Green Economy.”
Kathryn Brown, senior vice president for public policy at Verizon, said that widespread use of broadband high-speed internet service will conserve energy across the board. She cited the way Americans have already moved from buying compact discs (CDs) to downloading music over the Internet.
Not only is less gas used to travel to stores, she said, over time less plastic will be manufactured. Eventually, the production of CDs will stop.
A similar process is currently happening where employees are now using their smartphones and BlackBerry devices to access documents without the need to print them out, potentially reducing the production of paper, said Brown.
"We’re in a broadband world,” she said. “[We] can transact business in a different way."
The ability to access good-quality broadband in the home also makes the possibility of teleworking more likely, said...
Read More »