Google Unveils Superfast Internet in Kansas City, Mo. - NYTimes.com

Google Unveils Superfast Internet in Kansas City, Mo. - NYTimes.com: Milo Medin, the company’s vice president of access services, said the technology and technical capacity were available to create this product on a global scale, but economics, such as the cost of constructing the fiber network in communities, presented a barrier.

Google's demonstration project does nothing to alter the cost and business model constraints that require communities to build their own fiber networks rather than investor owned providers.  While everything may be up to date in Kansas City, unfortunately for much of the United States it is not when it comes to premises Internet access.

It also starkly illustrates the dismal state of Internet capable premises telecommunications infrastructure in America -- accurately described as "incomplete" by President Barack Obama in his January State of the Union address -- where many must still rely on obsolete dialup modem technology that was state of the art when Obama's predecessor Bill Clinton was starting his first term two decades ago.  One city does not a network make.

Rural U.S. mired on Internet dirt road

The Calix U.S. Rural Broadband Report not surprisingly found rural United States remains a copper-paved dirt road of Internet access where it has remain mired for years: 

The rumored slow pace of life in rural America may be
giving way to faster broadband speeds, but rural areas
clearly started from farther behind. The most common
peak downstream broadband rate consumed by endpoints
in rural America was between 1.5 Mbps to 3 Mbps in
Q1 2012. During the quarter, 60% of rural broadband
subscribers received a maximum downstream broadband
speed of 3 Mbps or less – approximately one-eighth of the
U.S. peak downstream average published by Akamai in its
most recent published ”State of the Internet” report. In fact,
71% of rural subscribers received a downstream broadband
speed that was slower than the target for the Connect
America Fund (CAF) of 4 Mbps, and approximately 90%
fell below the CAF upstream target of 1 Mbps. Upstream
rates remained slow as well, with 95% receiving 1.5 Mbps
or less.

Why wireless premise Internet won't cut it -- and only fiber will

Why you will need a 300 Mbps broadband connection — Broadband News and Analysis: There are several reasons for this, but it boils down to the presence of more devices in the home and streaming video. Other dynamics such as whether or not folks are gamers or work from home also comes into play, but across the board it’s the rise in Netflix subscriptions, YouTube videos and family members toting smart phones, tablets, perhaps while watching content on a connected TV. If there are four people consuming media with a tablet in one hand and their eye on the TV, your home requires a fat connection.

Back in October 2010, I observed bandwidth demand emulating Moore's Law.
This item explains what's driving the demand, which slows no sign of slowing and also makes clear that only fiber to the premise infrastructure will be able to keep up.

Telemedicine market to reach $2.5B by 2018 | Healthcare IT News

Telemedicine market to reach $2.5B by 2018 | Healthcare IT News: Moreover, telemedicine has been seen to be beneficial for individuals living in isolated communities and rural regions. Telemedicine technology allows patients who live in these rural areas to be seen by a doctor or specialist, who can provide an accurate and complete examination, without the patient to traveling away from their families to far-off medical centers.

The problem is these communities typically lack the necessary telecommunications infrastructure to support telemedicine.  This infrastructure gap will be more keenly felt in the near future as the U.S. Patient Protection and Affordable Care significantly increases the number of people in these areas covered by public and private health insurance.

Internet Providers Testing Metered Plans for Broadband - NYTimes.com

There’s a clash between what users expect from broadband service and what is actually delivered to them, said Chris Balfe, the president of Glenn Beck’s media company, which created an online TV channel nearly a year ago. He has noticed sluggishness at home when trying to view YouTube videos. “As a broadband video provider it’s frustrating, but as a user it’s absolutely infuriating,” he said.

This New York Times piece makes the case for community owned fiber to avoid incumbent cableco and telco manipulation of their natural duopoly (or monopoly in some cases) to create bandwidth scarcity.  It's important to create a perception of bandwidth scarcity in order to preserve bandwidth rationing and the unit-based billing of their decades-old business models.  Communities can and should disrupt that business model and build their own fiber to the premises networks.  Enough is enough.

Magazine - Why Women Still Can’t Have It All - The Atlantic

Being able to work from home—in the evening after children are put to bed, or during their sick days or snow days, and at least some of the time on weekends—can be the key, for mothers, to carrying your full load versus letting a team down at crucial moments. State-of-the-art videoconferencing facilities can dramatically reduce the need for long business trips. These technologies are making inroads, and allowing easier integration of work and family life. According to the Women’s Business Center, 61 percent of women business owners use technology to “integrate the responsibilities of work and home”; 44 percent use technology to allow employees “to work off-site or to have flexible work schedules.” Yet our work culture still remains more office-centered than it needs to be, especially in light of technological advances.  (Emphasis added)

Indeed it does.  Anne-Marie Slaughter's piece in the July/August issue of The Atlantic points up how the Internet is making the office as we know it obsolete. But the Internet notwithstanding, the 1950s office culture still predominates, forcing women into the unfortunate and now unnecessary circumstance of having to choose between their professional lives and parenthood.

Don't study broadband black holes -- fill them with fiber to the premise

Counties plan study on broadband Internet access - Niagara County - The Buffalo News: LOCKPORT — Niagara and Orleans counties are planning a study to zero in on which roads and households lack broadband Internet access.

Evhen Tupis, former information technology director of the Medina Central School District, told the Niagara County Legislature on Tuesday that he has already done that sort of study in the Town of Wilson.

Tupis said he also has surveyed much of Orleans County and has determined that the official state and federal statistics, which claim 97 percent broadband penetration in the two counties, are bogus.

Of course they are.  But rather than waste time drawing maps and conducting studies to refute the dubious data  -- sourced from incumbent telcos and cablecos looking to downplay gaps in their last mile networks -- communities would be better served by building their own fiber to the premises networks.  And they shouldn't worry about overbuilding the incumbents because fiber to the premise telecommunications infrastructure is superior to most any last mile cable plant they have on the poles and in the ground.  Fiber provides sufficient capacity as bandwidth demand explodes -- both now and for the future.

Connected company muscled state agency out of Internet contract - Florida - MiamiHerald.com

Connected company muscled state agency out of Internet contract - Florida - MiamiHerald.com: TALLAHASSEE -- In 2009, with more than a quarter of all Floridians without broadband access to the Internet at home, state officials lined up to get some of the $7 billion in federal stimulus money to finance state-based programs to increase access.

Enter Connected Nation, a little known but well connected Washington-based company. It won the Florida contract to use $2.5 million to map the broadband gaps for use by policy makers and telecommunications companies.

A year later, when the state won a second grant for $6.3 million to extend the broadband efforts, Connected Nation, a non-profit company, believed it had signed up to be part of a public-private partnership with the state that entitled the firm to a no-bid shot at that money too. But the Department of Management Services, the state agency that housed the project, disagreed.

DMS said the grant requires it to use some of the money to pay for three more years of broadband mapping and the rest to expand broadband access in libraries and schools.
------------------
The real story here is the tragic policy failure of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to provide technical assistance funding to communities interested in building their own open access fiber to the premises networks instead of dubious "broadband mapping" projects.  It would have been a far more productive use of money to fill in the gaps with actual infrastructure instead of wasting it creating maps that won't connect homes in Florida and other states that remain disconnected from the Internet.

It's still 1985: California state offices stuck in pre-Internet management mode

While riding in a cab in downtown Sacramento this week — the daily commute destination of thousands of State of California employees — the usual topics of weather and traffic came up.  The driver offered his solution to traffic congestion: rather than commute to work, state employees should stay off the roads and work remotely from home offices.  After all, the cabbie pointed out, the technology allowing them to do so has been in place for many years.  They can get their work done on a computer from home just as easily as their office.  So why aren’t more state employees teleworking, he asked?

The explanation appears in a January 2008 white paper prepared by a group of state employees, the Statewide Work Anywhere Team (SWAT).  The paper notes use of information technology “is uniquely positioned to further the state’s ‘Green initiatives’ by contributing solutions for larger issues facing California: traffic congestion, dependence on oil, air pollution, and quality of life to name a few. It is possible to perform work from virtually anywhere. We can do business better. Work Anywhere provides one viable option that we should fully explore.”  It adds, “[w]orking from anywhere and using virtual teams are integral to the success of today’s workforce” and recommends “the State of California initiate a statewide standard for expanding the concept into its work environment.”

So why hasn’t the state more widely adopted telework four years after the paper was issued?  Despite the bulk of the work being white collar, information and knowledge work, a blue collar shop floor management by observation culture dominates.  The paper explains:

Many program area managers and executives are hesitant to implement Work Anywhere strategies/policies due to concerns regarding monitoring staff productivity and the staff’s ability to perform their duties effectively from a remote site (usually their home) without immediate access to other workers. Additionally, there is concern on monitoring staff that under-perform. The main challenges mentioned by all contacted in the study were the importance of determining the types of duties that are easily measurable and candidate selection requirements for performing tasks that could be part of a Work Anywhere plan. The most often stated concern was how to quickly manage employees that are out of sight. Some of the examples of telecommuting floundered because they lacked executive sponsorship, clear performance measurements or procedures for implementation of the policies. Additionally, some of the managers indicated an interest in receiving additional training for developing skills to better manage employees who work away from the main office.

That remains the case today.  In September 2011, the then head of the Telework Advisory Group of California’s Department of General Services, Geoff McLennan, reported only about five percent out of a state workforce of about 240,000 telework.  More recent data would put the number even lower.  As older state workers retire in large numbers and as the economy slowly recovers, younger workers accustomed to being connected to the Internet from anywhere aren’t likely going to find state employment and its pre-Internet, 1980s office culture an attractive option.   

Broken Promises: The Telecommunications Trust That Doesn’t Deliver | Stop the Cap!

Broken Promises: The Telecommunications Trust That Doesn’t Deliver | Stop the Cap!: In Kushnick’s view, phone companies like AT&T and Verizon are breaking their promises to regulators and consumers.

“Illinois Bell was supposed to rewire the state (with fiber-optic cable), starting in 1993 at an initial cost of $4 billion,” Kushnick said.

Instead, AT&T moved in and bought out the phone company and has dragged its feet on fiber deployment, along with most other big phone companies.

Kushnick told the Journal Star phone companies are going cheap avoiding fiber optic infrastructure while still ringing up huge profits

Calling wireless Internet service "fiber grade" disingenuous and misleading

Broadband network expansion set for Dayton, other Ohio cities - Dayton Business Journal: A Canton-based company announced plans Thursday to build statewide network for wireless broadband services, bringing high-speed Internet access to 3 million Ohio address points, including 100,000 that currently have no service.

“It’s an exciting thing for the industry across the board,” said Kyle Quillen, chief technology officer of Agile Network Builders. “We’re going to enable anybody to get that last-mile connectivity with a fiber-grade connection anywhere in the state of Ohio. That’s a big deal.”

Calling terrestrial wireless Internet service "fiber grade" is disingenuous and misleading.  It cannot emulate fiber or its carrying capacity, particularly for the delivery of high definition video.

AT&T struggles with burden of legacy copper wireline plant

This Bloomberg item shows how the nation's largest wireline telecom player continues to struggle under the burden of its outdated legacy infrastructure.  According to the article, AT&T is trying to decide whether to sell off wireline plant where it does not offer its DSL-based U-Verse triple play product.

At issue is whether to upgrade field distribution equipment to extend the reach of U-Verse to more premises.  But doing so still relies on AT&T's decades-old, legacy copper cable plant to bring the service to residential premises.  That plant is less than optimal for transporting the higher frequency and more interference-prone VDSL protocol utilized by U-Verse, boosting the volume of customer service calls and increasing operating expenses.  The technical limitations of the copper plant also bar AT&T from reaching about 5 million residential premises that remain disconnected from the Internet, as noted in the article by Barclay Capital analyst James Ratcliffe.

It's time to halt the "digital literacy" baloney and build fiber

With many areas of the United States lacking adequate fiber optic infrastructure to deliver premise Internet service, there continues to be an unfortunate effort to shift the focus away from that fact.

For example, this Texas Broadband Summit "designed to engage, educate, and equip technology providers and Texas communities with the resources and partnerships necessary to improve broadband access, adoption, and use," noting that "lack of digital literacy and the digital divide remain real issues in Texas."

What does "digital literacy" have to do with getting IPTV, VOIP and other Internet protocol-based services over fiber?   Nothing, because people have been watching TV and making phone calls for decades.  In that regard, they are already digitally literate.  And the web and email have been around for two decades and most people currently use these common services.

It's time to stop the PR baloney and work on alternative ways of building fiber to the premise -- such as community cooperatives and municipal fiber -- to fill in the gaps that investor owned telco and cable TV providers are unable to fill.

Demand aggregation won't attract investor-owned providers

Broadband Internet service for rural communities eyed - The Daily News Online: News:

A consultant asked Genesee County lawmakers Wednesday if they wanted to join a regional coalition to try to get broadband Internet service to rural communities and homes.
Evhen Tupis of Clarendon said he’s been working on getting high-speed broadband for unserved areas of Orleans County and Niagara County. The sparsely populated parts of the two counties don’t have a provider because it isn’t financially feasible for companies such as Time Warner and Verizon.

The coalition would issue a request for proposals to broadband service providers “with 100 percent coverage,” he said.
Tupis’ proposed Inclusive Internet Initiative would pool together the region’s counties to make it more attractive to communications companies. He estimated the cost to provide broadband to most or all of Genesee County at $150,000, the same as it would in Niagara.

Yet another misguided notion that investor-owned telecommunications infrastructure providers can be convinced to serve an area that is insufficiently profitable for them by aggregating demand.  Demand aggregation does not solve the underlying economics that make deployment impractical for these providers.  If businesses and residents want modern Internet access, they will have to provide it themselves with municipal fiber or a consumer cooperative.

Copper culprits hasten obsolescence of twisted pair

The obsolescence of twisted pair copper cable is being hastened by thieves who want to quickly resign it to the scrap heap in order to recycle the valuable metal and put money in their pockets.  By comparison, the tiny glass strands of the modern standard for telecommunications -- fiber optic cable -- offer no such market incentive to copper culprits.

Check out this Fresno Bee story that reports that the crooks have gotten so brazen they are toppling utility poles in order to get at AT&T's cables.

SB 1161 doesn't touch California's real telecom problem

There was a fair amount of mainstream media coverage this week of pending California legislation that would state public policy that the state's Public Utilities Commission does not have regulatory jurisdiction over Internet protocol (IP) services.  As this Sacramento Bee story reports, consumer groups fear SB 1161 would give monopoly incumbent telcos too much free reign as they migrate away from plain old telephone service (POTS) delivered over twisted pair copper.  The telcos and the bill's author, Sen. Alex Padilla, support the policy to remove regulatory uncertainty and allow unfettered expansion of the Internet and IP-delivered telecommunications services to homes, businesses and institutions.

SB 1161 would neither help nor hinder that goal.  California's real problem is incomplete Internet infrastructure that leaves millions of Californians disconnected from the Internet.  Since telecommunications services tend to be a natural monopoly market, the fears of consumer groups of any form of reduced regulatory oversight are understandable.  However, their concerns would make more sense if all Californians had fiber connections to the Internet via a monopolistic provider.  They don't.  California's telecommunications market suffers from market failure because the high cost business models of the incumbent telcos (and cable companies) don't allow them to achieve that level of service.  Accordingly, the CPUC should do a better job of assisting alternative, lower cost business models emerge -- such as consumer-owned telecom cooperatives -- take root and thrive.  So far, the CPUC has failed to do so.

Drop DSL and go suck our sooper dooper satellite!

Satellite Internet providers that serve a captive market of those who are off the Internet grid because of a lack of terrestrial infrastructure now hope to attract DSL subscribers by offering higher speeds. But as this USA Today article points out, converting DSL customers won't be easy since they have to buy the dish and installation. Not to mention they'd be getting much higher latency, hardly worth the trade off for higher speeds.

Satellite providers are a national embarrassment that point up how just how much of the United States remains a backward Internet backwater. The service should only be available in the Alaskan wilderness and places like Buford, Wyoming (Pop. 1).

Why America needs lower cost, coop business models to complete Internet infrastructure

The excerpt below from Timothy B. Lee's discussion in the current issue of National Affairs of what ails America's regulation of Internet infrastructure states a strong case for alternative, lower cost business models such as telecommunications cooperatives to bring fiber connections to nearly all premises and to keep cable companies from gaining near total market dominance:

FiOS is Verizon's attempt to solve this problem by replacing its slow telephone cables with fiber-optic connections capable of offering speed that can compete with Comcast's. But in 2010, Verizon announced that it was winding down its FiOS installation efforts. Verizon plans for the network to reach around 18 million households, but not in some major metropolitan areas, including a few (like Boston) at the heart of its service area. News reports cited the high costs of the project as a reason why it was not being extended to all homes in Verizon's territory. Meanwhile, AT&T's project to partially replace its copper network with fiber, "U-Verse," is also being hampered by high costs. U-Verse service is faster than a traditional DSL line, but it is significantly slower than Verizon's and Comcast's high-speed networks, and it will not reach all households in AT&T's service territory. This might explain why, in the third quarter of 2011, Comcast added more than twice as many subscribers as did the seven largest telephone incumbents combined.

Bell wireline monopoly stymies wireless Internet

The physics of radio spectrum place a natural limit on wireless Internet capacity. That limit is exacerbated by the wireline telco monopolies who restrict wireline backhaul connections to cell sites, writes Level 3 Communications CEO James Q. Crowe in this Forbes article.

Crowe details uncompetitive market practices aimed at creating artificial market scarcity of wireless backhaul and calls for action from Washington to break up the big telcos' wireline cartel.

“Broadband adoption” is an irrelevant non sequitur

More than a decade after the term “broadband adoption” was relevant, studies such as this one issued today by TechNet continue to use the phrase as if the United States was on the eve of the new millennium and Y2K was a topic of concern. In 2000, discussing “broadband adoption” was pertinent since “broadband” Internet connections were relatively new and distinct from the then commonplace dialup “narrowband” service delivered over legacy copper cable telephone networks.

In 2012, broadband adoption is a non sequitur since both the term “broadband” and the notion that people are migrating in large numbers from “narrowband” are badly outdated. Nowadays, the Internet can deliver voice telephone and TV video in addition to websites and email that was relatively novel for many in 2000.

People adopted voice telephone and TV decades ago. What has changed is the means over which these services are provided. Internet protocol technology and fiber optic connections allow voice, video, websites, email and many yet to be popularized applications to be delivered to peoples’ homes.

TechNet is talking about the wrong subject. The real issue isn’t “broadband adoption.” The real issue is lack of adequate Internet infrastructure. President Obama so in his January State of the Union speech in which he spotlighted America’s "incomplete high-speed broadband network.” While the president’s choice of terminology — “broadband network” — is technologically obsolete from this writer’s perspective, he is clearly on the right track in identifying the problem as one of infrastructure.

It’s time to retire the term “broadband adoption” to the history books and get on with modernizing the nation’s telecommunications infrastructure to provide all American homes fiber optic connections and the many Internet-based services they can provide.

Verizon's residential LTE "HomeFusion" likely to serve only fringes of small number of metro areas

Verizon's announcement today of its HomeFusion wireless residential Internet service offering based on its nascent 4G cellular LTE service appears aimed at picking up marginal residential market share in suburban and exurban fringes of U.S metro areas where wireline connectivity from incumbent telcos and cable providers is sketchy. These are also areas where Verizon might otherwise deploy its FiOS fiber to the premise residential wireline product but will not because the company has called a halt to further FiOS expansion.

It's not likely HomeFusion will be broadly deployed in predominantly rural and quasi-rural areas. Like Verizon's mobile wireless offerings, it's bandwidth metered and can't offer the ample headroom for bandwidth demand growth -- much of it driven by video -- that fiber does. In order to improve Internet deployment and access in these areas, these communities will have to build their own fiber to the premises networks constructed by local governments or telecom cooperatives.

AT&T has effectively thrown in the towel in serving these areas. HomeFusion represents Verizon's last ditch effort to pick up some limited revenues in these underserved markets.

Protecting investor-owned Internet providers from market failure is bad public policy

This USA Today profile of Lafayette, Louisiana's municipally-operated fiber to the premise network raises significant policy questions as to the proper role of the private and public sectors in providing premise Internet connectivity. It notes Lafayette like other community fiber projects faced significant resistance from private sector telco and cable providers bent on preserving their territorial hegemony even when their business models don't permit them to upgrade their networks to provide robust Internet connections to homes and businesses. The push back comes in the form of lawsuits, public information (or disinformation campaigns, depending on one's perspective) and state legislation barring local governments from building publicly owned and operated telecommunications infrastructure.

It's understandable the incumbent telco and cable companies would want to protect their service territories from competition given that telecommunications infrastructure -- like roads and highways -- tends to be a naturally monopolistic (or at best, duopolistic) market. That kind of market creates a winner takes all situation in which the winners in turn pick winners (those who are provided good Internet service) and losers (premises deemed too costly to serve and left off the Internet grid). Their problem, however, is the losers are naturally getting restless and petitioning for relief such as recently proposed Colorado legislation designed to lay the groundwork for the state to directly serve areas lacking connectivity.

The incumbent telco and cable companies may wish to rethink their current strategy of locking down failed markets and barring the door to public providers. The courts could well cast a jaundiced eye toward such uncompetitive market conduct and state laws designed to preserve what in many areas of the nation have become telecommunications backwaters due to what President Obama described in his January State of the Union address as "incomplete" Internet infrastructure.

I'm not sure those state laws could survive judicial scrutiny in the federal courts as they effectively create a state sanctioned monopoly in telecommunications. But unlike other nations, the state doesn't actually provide the service. Instead, their function is to protect private investor owned providers from the consequences of market failure. That's poor public policy because it leaves too many effectively disconnected from the Internet and the economic, educational and other benefits it affords.

Incumbent providers may also want to considering partnering with communities instead of fighting them. As the USA Today article notes, businesses approached Lafayette about expanding the network throughout the city as a way of drawing businesses. City leaders asked BellSouth and Cox representatives to partner on the project. But they spurned a private-public partnership that could have allowed them to share in the revenues, instead opting for a short sighted win/lose strategy.

Colorado bill first step in state investment in Internet infrastructure

Government Technology has an article today on legislation introduced in the Colorado Legislature that the author, Gail Schwartz, D-Snowmass Village, describes as a first step toward the state investment in Internet telecom infrastructure shunned by private sector providers:

Schwartz said the intent of the Rural Broadband Jobs Act is to help Colorado improve access to broadband so that businesses throughout the state have opportunities to be competitive and successful.

“I am looking for a definitive assessment of underserved and unserved areas in our state that lack broadband access,” Schwartz said in an interview with Government Technology. After those areas are defined and as funding becomes available, she’d like the state to invest in the infrastructure needed to bring broadband to those underserved locations.

Click here to read Colorado Senate Bill 12-129, CONCERNING ACCESS TO AFFORDABLE BROADBAND INTERNET CONNECTIVITY IN NONCOMPETITIVE RURAL AREAS.

Emergence of Internet TV reinforces end of “broadband” era

The emergence of the Internet ready or “smart” TV marks the graduation of the Internet to a full featured, multiple service telecommunications service. It also marks the beginning of the end of siloed, single purpose video programming providers such as cable TV and satellite. Now that HD video content of all varieties is available via the Internet, the medium is the message in the words of mass communications theorist Marshall McLuhan and the medium is the Internet.

The Internet or “smart” TV also marks the end of the “broadband” Internet era, where the Internet was mostly used for viewing web pages and email — and later Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP). It’s notable that TV manufacturers aren’t marketing the latest sets as “broadband” TVs. That reinforces a point I made in December 2010 when I declared distinguishing “broadband” from dialup “narrowband” was growing increasingly irrelevant since dialup was becoming technologically obsolete. Consumers either have functional Internet infrastructure connected to their premises, or they don’t. And if that infrastructure can’t deliver HD video while simultaneously allowing them to browse the web, download email and make a voice call, they’re effectively disconnected from the Internet.

Better telecom infrastructure, increased telework adoption would boost suburban home values

This U.S. News and World Report article suggests a big problem with the U.S. housing market is overbuilt suburbs that are incompatible with work. Homes located in the burbs are less desirable because they are far from jobs, requiring costly commutes. Other workers aren't interested in buying suburban dwellings because they need to remain mobile to move among metro areas where job opportunities arise.

What the article doesn't mention is that these homes would be far more marketable if 1) They had fiber optic connections to the Internet and 2) More information and knowledge work (and video conferencing) was done in home offices instead of requiring lengthy commutes to a cubicle simply to use a different computer. Move bytes, not bodies.

Post Office says Internet forces closings, but affected residents remain offline

Geoff Brim sent along this Reuters piece that highlights an odd irony. The U.S. Post Office is shuttering offices in rural areas, blaming the Internet for putting them out of business. But the residents of these areas are scratching their heads since so many of them remain disconnected from the Internet due to lack of wired infrastructure. As the article explains:

Internet access has spread the way most businesses expand - to areas more densely populated with people willing to pay for service. Today, rural areas remain less connected to the Internet than urban populations across every technology type, according to Commerce Department data. Nearly 90 percent of the 24 million Americans without wired broadband access live in rural areas, latest data show.

"There's still a real digital divide between rural and urban America," said Ed Luttrell, president of the National Grange, which represents rural America. "You look at rural folks, they tend to rely much more heavily on the Postal Service for delivery of a wide variety of necessities than urban people."

Georgia cities oppose proposed legislation curbing community networks

Representatives from several Georgia cities testified last week in opposition to state Senate Bill 313, legislation sponsored by investor-owned telecommunications providers that would bar local governments from using public funds to finance municipally owned Internet infrastructure. From the Associated Press story:

Leaders from cities including Elberton, Hogansville, Thomasville, Monroe and Toccoa lined up to tell senators that broadband is necessary infrastructure for the 21st century economic development they hope to attract — and that they are doing what they must to keep their communities competitive.

"We cannot wait for the private sector to ride to our rescue," said Tim Martin, executive director of the Toccoa-Stephens County Development Authority.

Martin is correct. Investor owned providers cannot earn a sufficiently rapid and adequate return on capital expenditures on last mile Internet infrastructure to satisfy their shareholders. That's why public funding is entirely appropriate just as it finances construction of roads and highways. This isn't rocket science -- just simple economics.

California PUC misstates public policy goal of Internet infrastructure subsidy fund

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) has adopted a decision implementing a grant and loan program to subsidize the construction of advanced telecommunications infrastructure in the Golden State through its California Advanced Services Fund (CASF). Under urgency legislation enacted in 2010, SB 1040, $100 million was allocated for grants and $15 million in revolving loans for the CASF's Broadband Grant and Revolving Loan accounts. The CASF is one of several subsidy funds administered by the CPUC to help offset the cost of providing telecommunications services in areas of the state where it is costly to provide them in order to make them more widely available.

The CASF is codified at California Public Utilities Code Section 281(a) which directs the CPUC to "develop, implement, and administer the California Advanced Services Fund to encourage deployment of high-quality advanced communications services to all Californians that will promote economic growth, job creation, and the substantial social benefits of advanced information and communications technologies..."

While not stated as a finding of law in a draft of the decision issued for public comment prior to its adoption earlier this week by the commission, the decision adopted by the CPUC nevertheless states on page 3:

"We emphasize that the ultimate goal of the CASF program is to increase the adoption of broadband."

A plain reading of that assertion does not comport with California Public Utilities Code Section 281(a), which clearly states public policy intent that the goal of the CASF is "deployment of of high-quality advanced communications services to all Californians."

The CPUC's declaration is also illogical. In order to increase the adoption of broadband, infrastructure must first be built to deliver it. That's the commission's stated purpose of the CASF Broadband Grant and Revolving Loan -- to help capitalize the construction of infrastructure capable of providing premises Internet connectivity in high cost areas where it hasn't been deployed. Moreover, the CPUC's decision distinguishes adoption from infrastructure deployment, noting at page 9 that applicants for CASF-funded infrastructure projects must submit a plan to encourage adoption of the broadband service in the proposed area(s) including the number of households the applicant estimates will sign up for the service (the take rate), the marketing or outreach plans the applicant will employ to attract households to sign up for the service.

Without deployment of the necessary infrastructure, broadband simply isn't available as hundreds of thousands of Californians trying to get by on dialup and satellite are painfully aware. And if broadband isn't available at any price, it cannot be adopted by anyone. First things first.

Obama cites America's "incomplete" telecom infrastructure in State of Union address

Since this blog was created in 2006, it has been dedicated to the exploration of strategies and methods for the build out of America's incomplete digital telecommunications network that leaves millions disconnected from the Internet because modern telecommunications infrastructure does not reach their homes and small businesses.

It was thus very encouraging to hear President Barack Obama call out the nation's "incomplete high-speed broadband network that prevents a small business owner in rural America from selling her products all over the world" in his State of the Union address to Congress this week. Millions of Americans are painfully aware of just how incomplete Internet infrastructure is as they look only a couple of miles away or even just down the road or street to neighbors who have access while they do not.

The president also used his speech to call upon Congress to fund telecom and other critical infrastructure. Congress should respond to Obama's urging by providing technical assistance and construction funding for community-based networks to finish the job where investor-owned providers such as legacy telcos and cable companies cannot make a business case for doing so. This is what was done in the 1930s when market failure led to a similar problem with telephone service and electrical power and cooperatives and local governments filled in the gaps.

It's no longer 1996: Outdated perceptions of the Internet persist

There remains a major misapprehension in the United States -- in the nation that invented it -- that the Internet is only about email and websites when in fact it delivers Internet Protocol TV and movies. It's also the updated version of Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) over copper to Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP). And that's not even mentioning videoconferencing, telehealth and distance learning. All can be delivered simultaneously over a single fiber optic connection.

Nevertheless, there remain many media accounts such as this one from Minnesota Public Radio that would have readers believe it's still circa 1996 when the Internet was a relative novelty (then mostly accessed via AOL over dialup connections). A decade and a half ago, it was understandable that as this January 17, 2012 MPR story reports there were "Many people don't believe there's anything on the Internet they need." That was a relevant perception back then. But it's badly outdated in 2012.