Fighting for fiber

Digital City Expo brings together “Minutemen” of community broadband

Branch Office Best Practices Newsletter By Toni Kistner, Network World, 04/26/05

Before I report on last week’s Digital Cities Expo, a gripe about hotel broadband. Now that Wi-Fi’s ubiquitous (heh), everybody thinks they can stick a couple of Wi-Fi access points on the lobby ceiling and charge $10 per day for “broadband” access.

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Toni Kistner is managing editor of Net.Worker. Contact her at tkistner@nww.com.

Digital City Expo

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Of all the Hyatts, Marriotts and airports I’ve tried connecting from these past six weeks, the Hyatt Regency in Reston, Va. - where Digital City was held - was the worst. My room was on the third floor: 0% connection strength. On the second floor: 0%. (Talk that the events' folks had masked the hotel connection are unconfirmed.) In the lobby, (just down the sweeping staircase), connectivity ranged from 8% to 100%. (It might be obvious, but 8% equals dial-up or worse speeds.) The folks at the front desk were apologetic, offering, “Oh, the reception on the upper floors is better.”

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Digital City Expo brought together more than 300 community leaders, vendors and big thinkers - all in various stages of building municipal broadband networks (using fiber, wireless, power line) for public safety, education, and residential and business use. Many are battling their cable and telco incumbents for the right to do so. We heard stories from Philadelphia, Corpus Christi, North Kansas City, Utah (of course, everybody’s heard of UTOPIA), Iowa and others.

A few stand out, like Iowa. Forty-ninth in the nation in job growth, Iowa loses 9,000 college graduates per year. Of its 950 communities, 900 have fewer than 500 people. A non-profit group, Opportunity Iowa, is working to pass a state referendum allowing for the formation of a “fiber utilities entity,” the first step in getting fiber lines to everybody. As you’d expect, the incumbents are fighting to pass their own counter legislation, named “The Taxpayer Protection Bill.” Nice, guys.

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