Tuesday, September 8th, 2009
By Christina Kirchner, Reporter-Researcher, BroadbandCensus.com
WASHINGTON, September 1, 2009 – State and local governments said during a Federal Communications Commission workshop on Tuesday that extending broadband is important for economic development purposes.
Among the programs discussed at the workshop were those with the past goal of expanding broadband services into areas which were once inaccessible to any form of internet service, and providing education for these services.
“Areas of the country that don’t have access to broadband services of at least 10 Megabits [per second (Mbps)] in the next five years will be as economically disadvantaged as those areas in the first half of the 20th century that did not have paved roads or electricity,” said Ray Baum, commissioner of the Oregon Public Utilities Commission and head of the National Association of Regulatory Utilities Commissioners committee on telecommunications.
He said that 10 Mbps was the minimum necessary as the base of broadband for services, including health care and education.
However, before the expansion of accessible broadband reaches rural areas, digital literacy, or education in the use of computers and broadband services is a necessity, said Jane Smith Patterson, executive director of e-NC Authority in North Carolina.
“There was a development at the local level [called] public...
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Tuesday, June 9th, 2009
By Alex Tcherkassky, Reporter, BroadbandCensus.com
WASHINGTON, June 9, 2009 – Overly interventionist legislation could severely threaten the way Americans interact and conduct business on the Internet, NetChoice President Steve DelBianco said on a call to announce the group’s new initiative: Internet Advocates’ Watchlist for Ugly Laws (iAWFUL).
The project is a continuous round-up of ten most potentially harmful legislative proposals regarding internet and e-commerce.
Some of the proposed laws that iAWFUL views as particularly dangerous involve supposedly unfair and discriminatory taxation of online goods and services. DelBianco sees these proposed taxes as a “there’s a tax for that” mentality developed by cash-strapped states recognizing how much business is done online.
There are taxation proposals out of North Carolina and New York that he said unfairly tax online businesses. For instance, North Carolina’s Digital Downloads Tax Bill doesn’t make a distinction between compact discs bought in a store and those downloaded online – even though digital downloads often carry restrictions physical media does not have, he said.
Taxation of e-commerce “deserves to be debated in the light of day,” he said. The lack of taxes on online music purchases is an incentive to use “the greenest way to buy music. “
Another proposal which penalizes e-commerce is...
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Monday, March 16th, 2009
News
By Drew Clark, Editor, BroadbandCensus.com
WASHINGTON, March 16, 2009 – As the Obama administration on Monday begins poring over the nitty-gritty details about how they will be spending $7.2 billion in broadband stimulus funds, individual states are grappling to find their own best strategies to tap the funds.
At the public meeting on March 10, officials at the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration made clear that the broadband grants – unlike the past several decades’ trend toward “block grants” – will not be channeled through states.
Rather, with the exception that at least one grant be awarded within each state, the NTIA’s broadband grants will up for grabs by the most qualified applicant.
But that hasn’t discouraged representatives from states and state groups.
In fact, many are quite pleased with the way the broadband stimulus program is taking shape, and are eager to have their voice heard in the next phase of the broadband stimulus process.
Among their grounds for optimism:
- States and their political subdivisions are themselves eligible to receive grants through the various broadband programs of the NTIA and the Agriculture Department’s Rural Utilities Service.
- States have the on-the-ground knowledge about particular communications needs that positions them to play the kind of coordinative and...
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Saturday, March 14th, 2009
News
By Ken Austin, Special Correspondent, BroadbandCensus.com
DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA, March 14, 2009 – More than 120 people from across North Carolina convened last Saturday here for a “town hall”-style meeting, by
InternetforEveryone.org, seeking to raise the profile about the importance of broadband in the lives of everyday citizens.
The take-home message of the March 7 meeting came from the keynote presentation by Rev. William Barber, a practicing pastor and president of the North Carolina chapter of NAACP: “If we are not logged-in then we are locked-out.”
Barber put the town hall theme in context, offering a unique perspective that recalled 200 years of U.S. communication regulatory policy – or 100 more years than are commonly cited by policy analysts.
His message also applies to other community in America that are unserved or underserved by high-speed internet access.
The Durham meeting was the second in a series of such events across the country organized by InternetforEveryone.org, a non-profit coalition led by the advocacy organization Free Press. The first event was in Los Angeles in December.
InternetforEveryone.org, which is also supported by the Computer and Communications Industry Association, the Consumer Electronics Association, Facebook, Google, Intuit, and a series of non-profit groups, seeks to inject...
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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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Wednesday, October 15th, 2008
Broadband Census Arizona
By Drew Bennett, Special Correspondent, BroadbandCensus.com; and William G. Korver, Reporter, BroadbandCensus.com
This is the 16th of a series of articles surveying the state of broadband, and broadband data, within each of the United States and its territories.
October 15 – “Reliable, affordable access to high-capacity telecommunications infrastructure has become as essential as water, sewer, transportation and electricity service in creating healthy and successful communities in the 21st century.”
So begins a 2007 report by the Arizona Department of Commerce, the “Arizona Broadband Initiative Framework.”
The report concludes: “the opportunity for states to use ubiquitous broadband deployment as a competitive differentiator is quickly passing.” Further, “the realization of broadband connectivity in parts of rural Arizona will not be accomplished by relying on normal market forces alone.” In sum, the report urges government officials and others to expand and enhance broadband networks in the southwestern state.
Arizona is now setting off on a path that a handful of other U.S. states are already on. Officials in the Grand Canyon State sought to learn what other states have done to expand broadband services beyond those provided by market forces.
The Arizona Telecommunications and Information Council (ATIC) is tasked with coordinating state, as well as public/private projects,...
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Tuesday, October 7th, 2008
News
Editor’s Note: The following story was published in TR Daily on September 26, 2008, and is reprinted with the permission of Telecommunications Reports International, Inc. Notwithstanding the fact that content on the BroadbandCensus.com web site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License, this article is and remains Copyright 2008 Telecommunications Reports International, Inc.
By Carrie DeLeon, Telecommunications Reports
A national broadband infrastructure fund should include the involvement of state regulators and focus not only on the extension of broadband service into unserved areas, but also on the adoption rate of broadband service by consumers, according to California Public Utilities Commissioner Rachelle Chong.
During a keynote address this morning at the Broadband Census for America Conference in Washington, Commissioner Chong advocated for the implementation of a national broadband infrastructure fund, and suggested that the Universal Service Fund be reformed to shift the focus from traditional wireline to advanced services.
“More assertive national leadership on broadband policy is not only necessary, but critical,” Commissioner Chong said.
In addition, the former FCC regulator said that while some states, including California, have been successful in their efforts to map broadband data, a national mapping of broadband data could be helpful to states by enabling them to compare their...
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