Community Broadband Media Roundup - November 21, 2014

Tennessee officials are raising the “Gig City” rally cry. Last week, public and private sector leaders gathered in Chattanooga to make sure the FCC knows where they stand on removing restrictions to community broadband in the state. GovTech’s Brian Heaton covered the rally.

“What needs to [happen] is removing the restriction of the electronic footprint, so anybody who wants to provide accessible, high-speed broadband will not be encumbered by unnecessary regulations,” [Tennessee Sen. Janice] Bowling (R) said.

Public officials again stressed the need to increase connectivity beyond the city’s borders in order to develop the area’s economic future.

Longmont, Colorado is one of this week's darlings of community broadband. Trevor Hughes reported on USA Today about the city connecting residents to its fiber optic network. The public network highlights the problems communities face when private networks fail to provide service as promised.

“Longmont knows all about the failings of the private marketplace. Twice the city partnered with private companies to provide high-speed Internet to residents over the past 15 years, and twice the private companies failed. Now city workers are picking up where those private ventures failed, using low-cost government loans to help pay workers to bring the service from the network that "last mile" to peoples' homes.

"It was the private sector that failed here," Roiniotis said. "We tried. We reached out to the private sector to build this network. "If we had waited long enough, there's a chance a cable company would have eventually done this. We decided, no we don't want to wait."

In Madison, city leaders are recognizing the necessity of Internet access in helping to close the digital divide. The city is looking into expanding connections from city government centers to low income areas and the city's public schools.

“We are working in the 21st century with 21st century learners,” says Cindy Green , the district’s executive director of curriculum and instruction. That requires access to and ability to navigate technology with ease.

“The instruction drives every decision that we make and the technology is a tool that gives students and teachers access to things they could not access in the classroom,” says Beth Clarke, director of instruction technology and media services.

And, high speed broadband received a major “go ahead” in Princeton, Massachusetts this week as well. The Local News Telegram reported about the 442-to-51 vote in favor of getting the city ready for its own network.

Net Neutrality

Adi Robertson with The Verge covered Sen. Ted Cruz’s ridiculous headline-grabbing “Obamacare for the Internet” talking point. When Cruz argued that public utilities are not “bold, innovative, and fair” he missed the point, as Robertson explains: 

“The problem is that "bold, innovative, and fair" aren't words that come to mind when you think of today's unregulated ISPs. In fact, Ted Cruz's nightmare scenario doesn't seem like a radical departure from what we've got right now. If its merger with Time Warner Cable goes through, Comcast will run over half the wired broadband market, and the "innovation" that net neutrality would prevent has so far involved blocking the BitTorrent protocol and giving its Xfinity video app a boost on the Xbox. Real competition — from Google Fiber or even municipal broadband projects — is what's actually led to, well, competition.” 

However, the best response to Ted Cruz may be from the occasionally crude but generally quite hilarious, The Oatmeal. And in this case, a good reminder of how campaign finance corruption leads to these kinds of crazy statements.