Our own Christopher Mitchell will be speaking at two upcoming events on broadband and the future of the Internet.

First, Christopher will be at F2C: Freedom to Connect in Washington, D.C., on May 21-22nd. Christopher will be speaking on May 22nd on the "Fight for Community Broadband" Panel along with other notables from the Free Press, Harvard University, the Center for Media & Democracy, and the SouthEast Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors (SEATOA). The presentations will be at the AFI Silver Theatre and you can register here. If you can't attend in person, you can sign up for a webcast. From the F2C website:

F2C: Freedom to Connect is a conference devoted to preserving and celebrating the essential properties of the Internet. The Internet is a success today because it is stupid, abundant and simple. In other words, its neutrality, its openness to rapidly developing technologies and its layered architecture are the reasons it has succeeded where others (e.g., ISDN, Interactive TV) failed.

The Internet’s issues are under-represented in Washington DC policy circles. F2C: Freedom to Connect is designed to advocate for innovation, for creativity, for expression, for little-d democracy. The Freedom to Connect is about an Internet that supports human freedoms and personal security. These values, held by many of us whose consciousness has been shaped by the Internet, are not common on K Street or Capitol Hill or at the FCC.

Keynote speakers include Vint Cerf, Michael Copps, Susan Crawford, Cory Doctorow (via telecon), Benoît Felten, Lawrence Lessig, Rebecca MacKinnon, Eben Moglen, Mike Marcus and Aaron Swartz.

Register here!

After participating at F2C, Christopher will be heading over to Arlington, Virginia, to speak at "Creating Sustainable Broadband Solutions for Communities and Anchor Institutions" presented by the Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition (SHLB Coalition) and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). The conference will be May 23-24 at the Sheraton National Hotel in Arlington. Come the evening of the 22nd for a reception to meet the speakers and other attendees. The focus of the conference:

This national conference for anchor institutions, BTOP and BIP awardees, and anyone else (including non-awardees) will explore sustainability strategies for next-generation broadband networks and examine how community anchor institutions can benefit from and leverage these broadband investments to serve their communities.

The keynote speaker at "Creating Sustainable Broadband Solutions for Communities and Anchor Institutions" will be Lawrence E. Strickling, Administrator, National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), U.S. Department of Commerce. The conference will also include several notable pleanary speakers, including community broadband champion Joanne Hovis. The agenda also includes Break-Out sessions for more in-depth discussion. You can view the agenda, and register for the conference online.

For tourists and residents alike, much of Colorado is one amazing vista after the next. I nearly circumnavigated it on a recent trip and was re-blown away at how incrediblely beautiful it is (recommendation: stop by Great Sand Dunes National Park).

But those incredible mountains are a two-way street. The same ridges that make it great ski country make it awful wireless country. All those mountains make it hard to provide ubiquitous wireless access - leave the interstate or urban areas behind and you are lucky to see the old "1x" show up on your smartphone.

When I go on vacation, I like to remain connected to find weather reports, directions to my next destination, local cafes, etc. And like just about everyone, I really like to be connected where I live. The private telecom sector gets a failing grade for serving both residents and vacationers.

Don't forget that Colorado is one of the nineteen states that have barriers to publicly owned networks despite the refusal of cable and DSL companies to build next-generation networks. We've frequently written about Longmont's efforts to improve its broadband access despite that legislation.

Senate Bill 12-129 aims to identify areas of the state lacking sufficient acess to the Internet and seeking solutions. A local newspaper reported on testimony from local businesses suffering from the lack of investment:

Wendell Pryor, director of the Chaffee County Economic Development Corp., testified to the impacts of limited bandwidth on businesses in that area.

Princeton Hot Springs Resort, an economic driver that generates the second-highest amount of sales tax among businesses in Chaffee County, is unable to process credit cards electronically when bandwidth traffic is high.

"The broadband is simply not sufficient to allow them to do that, so it's done manually," Pryor said.

He said Monarch Ski Resort, which anchors the winter tourist season in Chaffee County, asks the staff to shut off their computers in order to have adequate broadband availability for skiers and customers.

Meanwhile, it appears that CenturyLink and other providers are trying to water down the bill. As we have seen elsewhere, the big DSL companies want to define broadband at ludicrously low speeds to hide the fact that they are crippling local businesses by refusing to provide modern services.

Government Technology offers a deeper explanation of the bill, along with my thought that this bill is better than what most states are doing because most states are either doing nothing or narrowing the options for communities by creating barriers to community networks.

An original goal of the bill was to identify both those areas lacking in broadband access as defined by the FCC and those areas lacking in competitive access to such broadband (probably the vast majority of the state). But the competition aspect was dropped in committee - probably a friendly gesture to CenturyLink and others who pretend broadband has a lot of competition but hasten to stop anyone from actually examining it.

If the bill passes in current form, it would also develop an inventory of state-owned broadband assets -- something every state should probably develop.

This bill does not address public ownership or community networks but the discussions around it are relevant. Even though big corporations like CenturyLink try to cast publicly owned networks as a public v. private affair, the article reminds us that this issue is really everyone v. a few very big cable and DSL companies:

Colorado Counties Inc. (CCI), which represents county interests in the state, supports SB 12-129. Andy Karsian, the organization’s legislative coordinator, said various rural counties have had opportunities to attract employers, but they couldn’t seal the deal -- primarily due to a lack of high-speed connectivity those potential businesses require.

If CenturyLink were meeting local needs and allowing local businesses to thrive, communities would not be examining their capacity to build their own networks.

My greatest fear with the Colorado bill is that we will get another Advisory Panel or Task Force or some official body that will get nothing done because representatives of CenturyLink or Comcast or other big companies that benefit from the status quo will deadlock it. As I told GovTech,

“Unfortunately these advisory panels often end up stacked with representatives from DSL and cable companies that prefer the status quo until they can devise a scheme for the public to funnel more subsidies their way,” Mitchell said. “I hope that will not be the case in Colorado.”

Photo of Colorado's incredible mountains used under creative commons license, courtesy of Hogs555.

Two weeks ago, I joined a conference call hosted by the Media Action Grassroots Network discussing community ownership of broadband networks.

In the last few years local communities, governments, non-profit organizations and neighborhood residents from across the U.S. have successfully launched community broadband initiatives. 54 U.S. cities own citywide fiber networks and another 79 own citywide cable networks. These local initiatives, in rural and urban areas alike, have served as community scale infrastructures that are sustainable and allow participation and decisionmaking on the most local level.

Below, you'll find a commentary I just posted on the Huffington Post.

Longmont, Colorado has become ground zero for the battle over the future of access to the Internet. Because big cable and telephone companies have stopped us from having a real choice in Internet Service Providers and failed to invest in adequate networks, a number of communities have built their own networks.

Chattanooga boasts the nation's best citywide broadband network, offering the fastest speeds available in the nation -- and the community owns it. That means much more of the money spent by subscribers stays in town, supporting local jobs.

Longmont, a town near Boulder with 80,000 people, offers a glimpse at how difficult it can be for communities to make any level of broadband investment -- the big cable and phone companies hate any potential competition, no matter how limited.

Longmont's elected officials all agree they need better broadband options to spur economic development. That's why they put a referendum on the ballot that will allow the city to use its existing assets to improve local broadband access. Not only are the mayor and city council unanimous in support of the referendum (2A) necessary for this, their opponents in the city election overwhelmingly agree also! And the local paper just editorialized in favor of it as well.

Who then, is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to derail it? Comcast and its allies, of course. And this isn't the first time.

Back in the 1990s, the municipality-owned electric utility built a fiber ring to modernize its electrical grid. They took the opportunity to lay more fiber-optic cables than they would need, knowing that they could later be used by the city or partners to expand broadband access for all businesses and resident.

Over several years, the City worked with a variety of partners to spur broadband deployment locally but a new state law in 2005 gutted their ability to work with private partners to expand broadband. Qwest had just pushed what become known as the "Qwest law" through the Colorado legislature. Starting in 2004, telephone and cable companies used their clout in legislatures across the nation to prevent communities from investing in broadband infrastructure. Now Longmont would have to pass a referendum to allow local businesses and resident to use a network the town built years earlier.

In 2009, Longmont attempted to pass the referendum but Comcast and allies dumped over $245,000 into a "Vote No" campaign that spread fear and misinformation far and wide, resulting in 56% of the voters saying no. They set a record in local campaign spending, dwarfing previous amounts from all sides in any Longmont election.

But after the election, when many learned they had been fooled by anti-competition propaganda, they wanted to revisit the issue. On November 1, they have their chance. But again, Comcast and allies are pouring millions into a campaign of misinformation. Their group has already been busted for erroneously claiming the mayor is against the initiative when he has been unequivocally in favor of it. With two weeks to go before election day, they have already surpassed their previous records by spending $275,000 while the pro-2A groups have yet to expend even $5,000. The true grassroots groups are making do with a website and volunteers countering Comcast's misinformation.

The question is whether big companies like Comcast can again fool more then 50% of the voters with their glossy mailers and robo-calls. This is the real problem -- the debates have shown that the opposition to this measure comes almost entirely from outside the community. But Comcast's ability to flood the papers, airwaves, phones, and mailboxes with market-tested anti-government messages is unrivaled. The big cable and phone companies use the same tactics across the U.S., protecting their high prices and poor services from the only real threat of competition they face -- local community investment.

The most recent mailer threatens that a broadband project would raise taxes, an outright lie given that the referendum text starts, "Without increasing taxes, shall the citizens of the City of Longmont..." But the anti-2A groups care about preserving Comcast's market power, not being truthful.

Longmont could join the growing movement of communities that invest in their own broadband networks to ensure fast, affordable, and reliable connections creating local jobs and offering local benefits.

While big citywide networks like Chattanooga's Gig Network have captured plenty of attention, hundreds of communities have made smaller investments -- like the ring Longmont build 14 years ago. Often without even borrowing money, local governments are expanding fiber-optic rings and connections to encourage economic development, create jobs, and lower the cost of providing city services.

This could be the future of access to the Internet -- local initiatives benefiting local stakeholders, putting the needs of the community before the desires of distant shareholders. Longmont makes its decision on November 1. When will your community make yours?