LUS Fiber has released a new ad promoting its HDTV services – probably the best ad I have seen from a community broadband network promoting its services. Video: Continue reading
Sometimes it takes a truly imaginative hoax to jolt us into realizing how much we value the public. That’s what happened in Troy, Michigan last summer. Nationwide, over 90 percent of public library money comes from local property tax dollars. Thus every time a public library needs money it has to go to the voters. … Continue reading
Washington’s Olympic Peninsula is one step closer to being laced in a new fiber-optic network. The first link in the new Peninsula-wide broadband project is between Blyn and Sequim and will serve the Jamestown S’Klallam tribe from its new Blyn library to a local medical clinic located in Jamestown. Also benefiting from the new expansion… Continue reading
Leverett, Massachusetts, is one step closer to a community owned FTTH network. The town of 2,000 will have weekly public information meetings until the Annual Town Meeting scheduled for April 28, 2012. If the required $3.6 million funding is approved at the meeting, the city will issue a Request For Proposals to build the network…. Continue reading
Back in 2005, Wisconsin state agencies were found to be spending more contracting out for services than if they were done by existing public employees. In response the legislature, with bipartisan support, passed a bill requiring agencies to conduct a cost-benefit analysis before privatizing large public contracts. By far the biggest state government outsourcer was… Continue reading
Utilities often claim that allowing customers to run their meter backward (by generating electricity on-site, e.g. from rooftop solar) can affect their bottom line because these customers don’t pay enough to cover the cost of maintaining the grid. In at least one case, however, a utility’s cost-benefit analysis of net metering was turned on its… Continue reading
Good news for folks in Jackson, Wilder, and Bingham Lake in Southwest Minnesota! Your local broadband options are about to get much better. Southwest Minnesota Broadband Services (SMBS) just announced that construction is advancing on the new network. The 125-mile fiber ring is expected to be completed by September, 2012. If you live in their… Continue reading
The next time a privateer tells you how awful government is and how wonderful private corporations are, send him a copy of In the Public Interest’s one pager, Five Myths About Privatization. Complete with footnoted sources, it is a refreshing rejoinder to the non-footnoted narrative that has regrettably come to define the American zeitgeist. For… Continue reading
For people in St Paul and the surrounding communities, I will be presenting at an event about the digital divide sponsored by the Alliance for Metropolitan Stability. The details are below, but the key detail is that you have to RSVP (no fee for admission). As the Internet and other information technologies have transformed our… Continue reading
Star Tribune, April 9, 2012 In this piece in the Star Tribune David Morris speaks out on the need to stop the tidal wave of post office closings that will occur when the Post Office’s self-imposed moratorium ends in mid May. Last year, 3,600 communities, about 90 in Minnesota, were notified that they’ll probably lose… Continue reading