Image
Fast, affordable Internet access for all.
ntia
Content tagged with "ntia"
Digital Northwest Broadband Summit: March 20 - 21, 2016 in Seattle
Next Century Cities (NCC) is hosting Digital Northwest: A Broadband Summit for Regional Broadband Leaders at the Bell Harbor International Conference Center in Seattle, Washington. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) is co-hosting the event.
The summit will bring together federal, state, and local officials, industry representatives, and community leaders to celebrate successes and share resources. The summit will examine gaps that remain and strategize on how to expand high-speed Internet access.
After a welcome reception in the evening of Sunday, March 20th, there will be a daylong summit on Monday, March 21st featuring workshops on a variety of topics ranging from rural Internet access to the digital economy.
Conference attendees are invited to stay a little longer. In the morning of Tuesday, March 22nd, government officials, industry representatives, and other experts will be on hand to answer questions in an “office hours” session.
What: Digital Northwest: A Broadband Summit for Regional Broadband Leaders
Where: Bell Harbor International Conference Center, Seattle, Washington, 98121.
When: March 20-21, 2016 (optional: the morning of March 22, 2016)
Video: Next Century Cities' Digital New England Conference
On September 28th, Christopher participated in the Digital New England regional broadband summit in Portland, Maine sponsored by Next Century Cities and the NTIA (National Telecommunications and Information Administration). In the morning, he moderated a panel focusing on regional approaches to improve Internet access, and in the afternoon he moderated a panel that included incumbent providers on their preferences for partnerships.
If you were unable to attend the event or did not see the live stream, Next Century Cities has released a video playlist of the two day long event. Christopher can be found moderating the morning panel in the main room during part three. The full agenda is available online.
Debate on Municipal Networks by Federalist Society Now Available
Our own Christopher Mitchell recently participated in a debate hosted by the Federalist Society. You can now listen to the debate at the Federalist Society website. We think it offers an intelligent airing of different points of view.
Chris, who is also Policy Director at Next Century Cities, disscussed the role of municipal networks in improving competition, reveiwed reguatory issues, and debated the anticipated legal outcome of February's FCC decision on local authority in Tennessee and North Carolina. He squared off against Charles M. Davidson, Director of the Advanced Communications Law and Policy Institute at New York Law School, and Randolph J. May, President of the Free State Foundation. Both organizations have spoken out against community broadband networks.
Rachel M. Bender, Senior Policy Director of Mobile Future, moderated.
Digital New England Community Broadband Summit Webcast Live
If you are not able to attend the Digital New England Community Broadband Summit in Portland, Maine, you are in luck. The conference is being webcast live from NTIA's Digital New England Community Broadband Summit website.
The conference will run until 4 p.m. Eastern today and is a collaboration between NTIA and Next Century Cities. NTIA describes the gathering:
The summit will present best practices and lessons learned from broadband network infrastructure buildouts and digital inclusion programs from Maine and surrounding states, including projects funded by NTIA’s Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) and State Broadband Initiative (SBI) grant programs funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The summit will also explore effective business and partnership models.
You can view the full agenda online [PDF], complete with a list of guest speakers and moderators.
"Digital New England" Conference Set for September 27th, 28th in Portland
Over the past year, New England has been a hotspot for broadband initiatives, legislation, and experimentation. The trend will continue into September when Next Century Cities and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) host Digital New England: A Summit for Regional Broadband Leaders on September 27th and 28th in Portland, Maine.
From a description of the event:
Broadband is emerging as a critical driver of economic growth and prosperity in New England. The “Digital New England” broadband summit will bring together state, local and federal officials, industry representatives, community leaders and other key stakeholders to share real-world broadband success stories and lessons learned from across the region. The summit will also examine the gaps that remain and strategize on what still needs to be done to expand access to and adoption of high-speed Internet services for the benefit of all citizens.
The event will start with a welcome reception on Sunday evening. Monday's day-long summit will include discussions on numerous topics that cover investment, access, and adoption. Come listen to some panel discussions and participate in some break-out workshops.
The welcome reception will be held at the Gulf Maine Research Institute at 350 Commercial St. in Portland. Monday's summit will be at the Holiday Inn by the Bay, 88 Spring St. in Portland.
Take a look at the schedule for this free event and register online at the Eventbrite page.
Schools, Health and Libraries Broadband Coalition Gather in DC May 1-3
DC is the place to be May 1 - 3 to see how broadband and telecommunications policy will affect education, research, and healthcare. The Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition (SHLB) annual conference will be at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel.
The conference this year is titled "Getting to a Gigabit" and speakers will address a range of issues that will impact community anchor institutions, including E-Rate, BTOP and BIP funded projects, new programs developed to address the digital divide, state and local government broadband programs, and the Universal Services Fund.
A range of talented speakers will present, including Lawrence Strickling from the NTIA. Sunne McPeak from the California Emerging Technology Fund, Blair Levin, and a long list of other distinguished professionals in telecom.
You can still register to attend and there are also sponsorship opportunities available.
Wanna Be a Wonk? Understanding Regulatory Capture
In the world of essential infrastructure, thousands of years of history have taught us that entities, acting on their own narrow interest, cannot be trusted to build or govern the building blocks of commerce or transportation. The temptation to abuse that powerful position has always proved too much for those without accountability to the public.
For instance, if the only way to move goods is a canal, private canal owners will price at a high level or use their position to take a stake in all the industries using the canal. Such an arrangement is great for the canal owners but poor for the rest of society. Witness the history of canals and railroads.
Two options to dealing with this problem have historically been either regulation or public ownership of such infrastructure. Readers of this site are undoubtedly well aware of our preference for public ownership - a structural approach using coops, local government, or non-profits to ensure the interests of the public at large receive the highest priority.
This post explains one of the reasons a regulatory approach, whereby private companies still own the infrastructure (and often make key decisions) but must go through some form of public body that is supposed to prevent the natural interests of the private company from taking over and reducing the benefits to society at large.
Writing in the Financial Times, John Kay explains regulatory capture, the process by which the agency or commission supposed to regulate effectively begins to act more in the interests of those regulated rather than the public. An obvious example of this is the Minerals Management Agency that has long improperly overseen the extraction industry, leading to the BP Gulf Oil Hole.
As Kay rightly explains, there are multiple kinds of capture from outright corruption to something that leads some political science geeks bring up Gramsci and Hegemony...
But the most common form of capture is honest and may be characterised as intellectual capture. Every regulatory agency is dependent for information on the businesses it regulates. Many of the people who run regulated companies are agreeable, committed individuals who are properly affronted by any suggestion that their activities do not serve the public good.
Maryland's $115 Million Federal Broadband Stimulus Award
Maryland received a very large award to connect hundreds of community anchors. This is an excellent use of public money (it will lower the future need for public money to fund local agencies). The award came from NTIA's BTOP program.
The broadband funding will result in vastly improved Internet speeds for local government offices, schools, hospitals, and emergency communication networks across Maryland, officials said. More than 1,200 miles of new fiber-optic cable will be installed across Maryland — a 50 percent increase over the existing network capability, officials said. … The money will be used to link 458 schools, 44 libraries, 262 police and emergency centers, 15 community colleges, six universities and 221 other government and community centers in a statewide network designed to be available and secure in emergencies.As the networks are built with funds from the broadband stimulus, the networks will not be silo'ed, as is too often the case with public networks built primarily to connect community institutions. These networks will be available for the private sector to lease as well, creating more opportunities for broadband expansion and future competition. However, the track record of these middle mile networks creating last-mile connections is extremely poor. So let's not get too carried away, but it is a good step in the direction of local self-reliance and less of a dependency on massive absentee companies. Credit goes to Howard County's Ira Levy, who worked for more than a year to put the project together.
Much of the money — about $72 million dedicated to the 10 jurisdictions in Central Maryland — will be administered by Howard County.
DC-Net Expands with Multiple Stimulus Grants
DC-Net, the muni-owned and operated fiber network connecting hundreds of community institutions (schools, libraries, local government buildings), is expanding in scope and mission following three broadband stimulus awards.
But first, to introduce DC-Net, I am excerpting a few paragraphs from my comprehensive report on community networks - Breaking the Broadband Monopoly: How Communities Are Building the Networks They Need."
In 2007, DC-NET began with service to 135 sites, a number that has more than doubled to 280, including 140 school buildings alone. The network also provides connectivity for libraries, public hospitals, community centers, and some Wi-Fi networks. DC-NET staff designed, installed, and have maintained the overwhelming majority of the network. As is common with all these networks, some operations are contracted out (e.g. fiberoptic construction and some aspects of maintenance, such as fixing fiber cuts). DC-Net controls the locks and determines who has access to any part of its network, including key electronics on site in the buildings and elsewhere in the network, providing a high level of security. On the critical issue of reliability, DC-NET has proven impressive. The network has more layers of redundancy than one typically finds with a commercial carrier and the uptime shows it. In the first year of operation, it tallied an impressive record – with only four buildings briefly losing their network connection in three events – an average of 15 minutes of interruption per site for the year. This is far better than the industry standard – in DC-NET’s first year of operation. DC-Net is also more responsive to the needs of its subscribers. Though private companies like Verizon may require a month or even two to connect a new subscriber, DC-NET can do it in as quickly as a week to as long as twenty days. As for the services available, DC-NET will provide service from 2 Mbps -1000 Mbps, allowing subscribers far greater freedom to select the speeds they need than commercial providers offer. This publicly owned network saves DC some $5 million/year compared to the costs of duplicating functionality using leased circuits. Even then, it would not be nearly as reliable due to limits in redundancy from leased lines.
In Ohio, OneCommunity Network Expands with Stimulus Grant
Almost $45 million from the broadband stimulus is heading to OneCommunity, a nonprofit organization in Northeast Ohio (originally named OneCleveland), in order to expand their network across 27 counties.
OneCommunity expects 800 new subscribers -- colleges, hospitals, universities and governmental entities -- to tie into the network.OneCommunity generally works by expanding middle mile networks through partnerships with other nonprofits as well as the private sector. Learn more about the plans and background of OneCommunity from its press release or their web site.