The Man from Glad meets Ma Bell

The plastic helps muffle the dying cries of obsolete legacy copper POTS cable plant.

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.