Community Broadband

What are people seeing with regards to Community Broadband initiatives? Vermont has some very interesting things going on, but I sometimes wonder about how the speed of technology will impact some of these community initiatves.

Comments

[Roger M. Christian]

Bonjour,

I am very interested in your CEO Blogger group, and joining your membership. My interests are to promote Inter - City Cultural Communications and Cultural Democracy via the various INTERNET media, ie. Blogs. Moreover, I have covered these following European cities of interests. Athens, Berlin, Copenhagen, Gdansk, Kiev, London, Oslo, Paris, Prague, and Rome. My network - communications base is ever growing.

Please advise.

Mr. Roger M. Christian
Ithaca Dance Master

[Clint Dixon]

Here in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania the mayor has set into motion the planning stages of offering the entire city wireless broadband Internet access free of charge, or at a greatly reduced cost.

What amazes me is that there has been little complaining from Verizon the local telephone company and Comcast Cable a local company grown to a huge corporation growing revenue through broadband Internet services as well as cable TV, as both would see a portion of their revenues suffer from a move such as this.

I also feel that this mandate was one envisioned by the pioneers of the Internet which would be globally available to all citizens.

At it's core the Internet and blogging in many ways can ease world tensions and unrest. This will take some work in order to see the light at the end of the tunnel, but there is no reason to feel it cannot be done.

As we move to a more gloabalized world common misconceptions and sterotypes will eventually fade, as these are conquored or the truth discovered, we will begin to see each other in a more common bond and not so very much different from each others wants and needs.

The dissemination of the truth we seek, as well as the global economy growing as it is, will in the future allow for an equal distribution of the world's wealth and finances.

In other ways the community broadband iniatives along with the blogosphere could allow for more than corporate business promotion, it could have a huge impact on political reformation.

We no longer have to allow our countries political pundits to sway our thinking on matters of global import by telling us whom to trust and not trust, what is the truth and what is not.

We could message a friend in another country, and ask them if those are real missle carrying trucks we see in the satellite images, or is someone trying to pull the wool over our eyes once again.

Perhaps if we make all of the world politicians blog their daily activities, and have them foster open two way communication for everyone to view, and participate, we can truely be self governed as a voice united.

[Elizabeth Albrycht]

I ran across this person today: Esme de Guzman Vos. She is the founder of Muniwireless.com , the portal for news and information about municipal wireless broadband projects worldwide. Muniwireless - a blog - has become the online resource for cities that are planning and deploying metro-wide Wi-Fi networks.

She could be a good reference for you.

Also, I had the distinct pleasure of meeting Dianah Neff, the CIO of Philadelphia, in April, and hearing her talk about Wireless Philadephia. I was very impressed at how much they thought through the implications of municipal wireless.

Jim Ware over at the Future of Work is writing a lot about municipal wifi as well. Latest post: http://www.thefutureofwork.net/blog/archives/000320.html#more