Community Broadband Bits Podcast

This week, Josh Wallace from the City of Palo Alto Utilities joins us to talk about the City's dark fiber network for episode 26 of the Community Broadband Bits Podcast. Josh describes how the dark fiber network connects businesses, offering incredibly high capacity connections at affordable flat rate pricing. The utility charges an upfront fee to make a dark fiber connection, which means that nearly all the ongoing revenues are net income.

Dewayne Hendricks has returned for his second appearance on the Community Broadband Bits Podcast, continuing our discussion about the potential for wireless technologies to improve how we access the Internet. We recommend listening to his first appearance in episode 18 before this one. Here, we take up the old wired vs. wireless debate, but quickly determine that such a framing is useless. Wires and radios are actually complementary, not substitutes.

Dr Browder runs Bristol Tennessee Essential Services, the municipal utility on the southern side of Bristol's Virginia border. For our 24th Community Broadband Bits podcast, he tells us how they built a FTTH network and how it has helped the community. Like so many others, they started by seeking to ensure maximum reliability of the electrical grid. Now they offer telephone, television, and Internet access to the whole community.

One hundred years after Teddy Roosevelt and AT&T agreed to the Kingsbury Commitment, Harold Feld joins us on Community Broadband Bits podcast to explain what the Kingsbury Commitment was and why it matters. In short, AT&T wants to change the way telecommunications networks are regulated and Harold is one of our best allies on this subject. AT&T is leaning on the FCC and passing laws in state after state that deregulate telecommunications. Whether we want to deal with it or not, these policies are being discussed and consumer protections thus far have taken a beating.

While I was in Danville, Virginia, for the Broadband Community Magazine Economic Development Conference, I had a chance to sit down with Jason Grey, nDanville Network Manager. This interview is our 22nd episode of the Community Broadband Bits podcast. Jason and I met five years ago when I first visited Danville to learn about its municipal open access fiber-optic network. Danville is located in southern Virginia and was hit hard by the demise of tobacco and the loss of manufacturing jobs.

For this week's Community Broadband Bits, we venture outside the U.S. to interview Benoit Felten of Diffraction Analysis about the Stokab muni fiber network in Stockholm, Sweden. Stokab appears to be the most successful open access fiber network in the world. Benoit has just published a case study of Stokab and is an expert on broadband networks around the planet.

Amalia Deloney (follow on Twitter) joins us for our 20th Community Broadband Bits podcast to discuss how her work with the Media Action Grassroots Network and the Center for Media Justice overlaps with our focus on community broadband networks. We talk about the digital divide, particularly in relation to the attempted merger between AT&T and T-Mobile that would have raised prices among vulnerable populations.

Today we invited John St. Julien, of Lafayette Pro Fiber fame, on episode 19 of the Community Broadband Bits podcast. John was an essential piece of the organizing effort in Lafayette's efforts to build its own community fiber network. In many ways, he has worked to ensure the "community" piece is emphasized over the "fiber" piece. John and I discuss the organizing effort in Lafayette that led to their successful referendum in 2005, including some lessons for others who want to organize their own communities.

Dewayne Hendricks is a serial entreprenuer, innovator, and wireless expert. Wired magazine labeled him a broadband cowboy back in 2001. And he is our guest on the 18th episode of Community Broadband Bits.

Sandy has run a wireless network for over eight years and has just announced a partnership with i3 to bring FTTH to everyone using i3's technology to run trunk fiber lines through existing waste water and storm water pipes.