Welcome to BroadbandCensus.com

By Winter Casey, Reporter, BroadbandCensus.com

WASHINGTON, November 18, 2009 - The opening speaker of a summit focused on improving broadband penetration to minority and low-income areas of the country, and criticized advocates of Net neutrality for being out of touch with the needs of minorities as he attempted to enlist the mantle civil rights leader Martin Luther King into his cause. “[L]et us remember the worlds of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., ‘All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face-to-face with another problem,’” said Julius Hollis, the founder of the Alliance for Digital Equality, in prepared remarks. “If we fail to find common-ground on the issues before the U.S. Federal Communications Commission relative to the rulemaking governing broadband adoption, the financing of broadband infrastructure and the over-arching issue of net neutrality, the long-term socio-economic chaos that will be inflicted upon our society would be far too devastating to comprehend,” warned Hollis. Hollis delivered his remarks Wednesday during his group’s 2009 Minority Broadband Summit, which was held at the Newseum with roses on the table and a view of the Washington skyline. Hollis dove into the issue of Net neutrality or whether the FCC should step in and regulate internet access...

Read More »

Blog Entries

By Drew Clark, Editor, BroadbandCensus.com

Editor's Note: This blog entry was originally posted as a response to a post on the Open Infrastructure Alliance listserv, about the National Broadband Strategy effort that Jim Baller, of Baller Herbst Law Group, has been shepherding. WASHINGTON, December 5 - I founded BroadbandCensus.com in January 2008 after my experience of trying to use the Freedom of Information Act to obtain some very basic broadband information: the names of the carriers operating in each ZIP code. We have not yet succeeded in this task. We don't pretend that this data is in itself crucial or even important broadband information. Rather, it is a simple building block upon which citizen-users are empowered to build, through crowdsourcing, new layers of public information about speed, price, availability, reliability and competition. The fight to get data is still important, and it shouldn't be abandoned. Indeed, the possibility of getting this kind of data is the very reason that I am optimistic about the momentum that Jim Baller has been building behind this national broadband strategy. This is one key reason that BroadbandCensus.com is a proud signatory of the strategy statement. At the event on Tuesday, I stood up and asked Larry...

Read More »

News

By Drew Bennett, Special Correspondent, BroadbandCensus.com

WASHINGTON, September 16 - Senators on the Commerce Committee on Tuesday promoted the benefits of high-speed internet access and called for the passage of measures designed to provide more public information about broadband, and more broadband connectivity. At a hearing on “Why Broadband Matters,” the committee heard testimony – remotely – from an Alaska telehealth facility, among others. Chairman Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, pressed for passage of his Broadband Data Improvement Act, S. 1492, and Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, announced his Telehealth for America bill designed to expand current programs supporting broadband-enabled telehealth applications. Consumer representatives praised the benefits of broadband connectivity and advocated more be done in the U.S. to improve broadband speeds, penetration rates, and data on availability. The hearing focused on how consumers can utilize broadband for applications including telemedicine, distance education, and long-distance family and community communications. The testimony of Gene Peltola, on the impact of telemedicine in a remote Alaska village, relied upon internet-based videoconferencing. Peltola is CEO of Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corporation in Bethel, Alaska. "With gas at $8 a gallon," Peltola told the committee, "anything but the most vital of services becomes cost-prohibitive to deliver [in rural Alaska]." To overcome these costs, towns and tribes...

Read More »