Monday, July 27th, 2009
By Ryan Womack, Reporter-Researcher, BroadbandCensus.com
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va., July 27, 2009 – The top official at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration said Monday that that now is “a new era” for broadband data, including public data about carriers that provide high-speed internet service.
“Whatever the tradition is, this is a new era,” said Strickling, the assistant secretary of commerce, speaking at the Virginia Summit on Broadband Access at the Piedmont Virginia Community College here.
He said that he hoped and expected that carriers will allow information about the areas in which they serve to be made publicly available, as they do in Canada, he said. (Carriers on Ireland’s national broadband map also allow themselves and their service areas to be identified.)
Strickling also said that broadband incumbents that seek to challenge broadband applicants who argue that their areas are “underserved” will have to make such information public – and in the same format as the broadband data collection efforts underway nationwide.
“We need the data: I think it is a national imperative in which this data be collected,” said Strickling, responding to a question about whether carriers will in fact provide states with the information necessary to create state-level broadband maps.
“I think it is a...
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Monday, July 27th, 2009
By Tina Nguyen, Reporter-Researcher, BroadbandCensus.com
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va., July 27, 2009 — The Obama administration’s broadband stimulus program “has not been marketed well,” Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said at the kick-off to a Monday morning event at which top federal and state officials were speaking on it.
Striking a politically moderate note at a time when national Republicans – and Virginia gubernatorial candidate Robert McDonnell – have criticized the fiscal stimulus as wasteful, Warner said that “only Democrats” would characterize a program with “$300 billion in tax cuts as a spending program.”
He was speaking at the Virginia Summit on Broadband Access at the Piedmont Virginia Community College here.
In addition to one-third for tax cuts, another third of the stimulus funding is for state programs, and the final third is for new federal programs, such as the broadband stimulus program addressed by Monday’s summit.
In his remarks, Warner touted Virginia’s preparation for the stimulus funding, through public-private partnerships and fiber builds in rural regions of Virginia, and through its advanced work in broadband mapping.
“We’re certainly further along than other states,” Warner said in an interview with BroadbandCensus.com. Broadband mapping “gives communities a guide to know where there is or is not service available. It’s helpful,...
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