Community Broadband Bits (archived)

There are recognizable and obvious benefits that occur when a fiber is deployed in a community. New access to high-quality connectivity, educational opportunities for students in schools, better reliability, jobs from new employers, and possible ISP competition. Spillover effects also occur, but they may not be as obvious. This week’s guest, entrepreneur Isfandiyar Shaheen, has made it his mission to discover and document the benefits that come to a community when fiber connectivity is available.

Interest in community broadband and broadband service from cooperatives has grown significantly within the past few years. This legislative session, lawmakers in states such as Vermont, North Carolina, and Arkansas, have decided that they’d like to start contributing to new ways to bring better Internet access to their constituents. This week, Christopher and Jess Del Fiacco, our Communications Specialist, sit down to review some of the most recent state bills that we find promising.

Over the past few years, Partner Jonathan Chambers of Conexon has become our “go-to guy” for FCC conversations. This week, he joins us to talk about a recent issue that revolves around the Connect America Fund Phase II auction and one of the grant recipients, Viasat.

We bring listeners many stories from communities across the country who are taking steps to improve connectivity and find better ways to access the Internet. This week, Christopher and his guest talk about why we value the Internet. Author David Weinberger is also a Senior Researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and a Writer in Residence at Google PAIR.

On a typical episode of the Community Broadband Bits podcast, you’ll hear from a guest whose community may be in the process of deploying a publicly owned fiber network, or an elected official who has championed a broadband-friendly policy for their city or town. Sometimes we talk to local business leaders or cooperative board members who’ve led their communities toward better connectivity. For the first time ever, we have a comedian on the show this week — Ron Placone. What does this mean? Not that the issue of publicly owned networks is joke material, but that it’s something that people from all walks of life care about.

Brent Christensen, Chief Operating Officer of Christensen Communications, came into our Minneapolis office to sit down and have a chat with Christopher this week for podcast 346. Their interview comes a short time after Christopher and several other Institute for Local Self-Reliance staff took a tour of the Christensen Communications facilities.

This week, Marshall FiberNet’s Customer Service and Marketing Manager Jessica Slusarski talks to Christopher about the town’s investment in their community broadband network. Quiet and quaint Marshall, Michigan, didn’t expect to become one of the state’s communities with the best Internet access, but here we are. Like many other small towns where big incumbent providers didn’t want to make infrastructure investments, most of Marshall was stuck with DSL and some premises were still using dial-up connections. Their solution was clear — build a Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) network.

Missouri is one of the states where electric cooperatives are taking the lead in bringing high-quality Internet access to rural areas. This week, we talk with Jack Davis, Vice President of IT and Special Projects at Pemiscot-Dunklin Electric Cooperative. The co-op is in the midst of deploying Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) to members in their service area, located in Missouri’s “Bootheel” region.

Harvard Professor, author, and broadband champion Susan Crawford has been incredibly busy ever since she released her latest book Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution — And Why America Might Miss It. Fortunately for us and our listeners, she hasn’t been too busy to take some time for Community Broadband Bits listeners. She’s here this week to talk about the book, her experiences researching it, and discussing policy recommendations aimed at bringing better connectivity to rural and urban areas.

While in North Carolina at the recent Let’s Connect! speaking tour, Christopher sat down with Greg Coltrain, Vice President of Business Development of RiverStreet Networks. Greg participated in panel discussions in all three communities where the community meetings occurred: Albemarle, Fuquay-Varina, and Jacksonville.