Fast, affordable Internet access for all.
In a situation similar to the Frontier letters to Sibley we published last week, the cable company Mediacom has sent letters to Silver Bay and Two Harbors in Lake County to scare them into abandoning the rural county-wide FTTH network that they are building with federal broadband stimulus aid.
Update: We have covered the second round of financing from ECFiber here.
In 2006, this short documentary helped to stop a push from incumbent providers to gut local authority over telecommunications and cable. Unfortunately, several states then gutted that same local authority, leading to higher prices for consumers and, surprise surprise, no real increase in competition.
Ars Technica takes an inside look at a small fiber network in a subdivision in Washington State: "Tale of the Trench: What if your Subdivision laid its own Fiber?" The author makes a valid point in noting that not all community fiber networks offer the best speeds
Another excellent video from Susan Crawford, this one from Summer 2010.
We are noted critics of federal policies that prioritize subsidies and support for private companies over the public sector (broadly defined to include local government, nonprofits, and cooperatives).
Wally Bowen, the Founder and Executive Director for the Mountain Area Information Network in Asheville, North Carolina, wrote the following piece after President Obama's State of the Union Address. He gave us permission to reprint it below.
The Netflix Techblog has released a graph of performance by Internet Service Provider - which I modified to demonstrate the Looming cable monopoly as identified by Susan Crawford (and recently discussed
For years, I have heard Graham Richards, former mayor of Fort Wayne Indiana, brag about this "beg, borrow, buy, build" [pdf] philosophy as Mayor.
The fiber-to-the-farm initiative in Sibley County, Minnesota, has completed the feasibility study and the towns involved are discussing a Joint Powers Agreement.
We are posting another perspective about Burlington Telecom, this time from Tom Streeter, a Professor of Sociology at UVM and author of Selling the Air, The Net Effect and other
It's 2011 and time for Qwest to renew a push to gut local authority in a number of states - Idaho and Colorado to start. An article for the Denver Post explains the argument:
Big cable and phone carriers want to take credit for what the Internet has become -- but they never wanted it to be open. Smart decisions behind the scenes by people like Bob Frankston have allowed the open Internet to flourish despite the big carriers.
Dave Burstein of DSL Prime is interviewed on a recent episode of America's Report on TelecomTV.
MuniNetworks.org is happy to welcome a new contributor to the site, Mitch Shapiro. Mitch will author pieces from time to time, the start of our efforts to broaden the contributions to and reach of MuniNetworks.org.
Though we in the U.S. often praise the policies in Europe that have given them faster speeds, lower prices, and actual choices in the market, the reality is that some of their companies have just as bad customer service as what we have to deal with from massive incumbent providers. This video features an incredible prank, forcing an offending company to deal with terrible customer service.
This debate is loudest in America, uncoincidentally the developed market with the least competitive market in internet access.
