[1st-mile-nm] Broadband at the Speed of Light

[Richard Lowenberg]

1st-Mile list subscriber, Christopher Mitchell,
Director of the Telecommunications as Commons Initiative at the
Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR), in Minneapolis,
and steward of www.muninetworks.org
has just produced a free, downloadable online report:

Broadband at the Speed of Light: How Three Communities Built
Next-Generation Networks.

http://www.ilsr.org/broadband-speed-light/

The report, published by the ILSR and the Benton Foundation,
details the experiences of three municipalities that have
gained attention around the world for successfully designing
and implementing public broadband networks –
Bristol, Virginia; Lafayette, Louisiana; and Chattanooga, Tennessee.

In each of these cases, the local public power utility
took the lead in creating the new network - a characteristic
of nearly every citywide publicly owned community fiber network
in America.  Each community had to navigate difficult seas,
buffeted by lawsuits that dragged out construction schedules,
state legislation that imposed additional burdens on public networks,
and huge corporate competitors benefiting from a multitude of scale
advantages.  In each of these cases, the communities found their
network to be a major economic development asset, generating
or preserving hundreds of well paying jobs.

This report should be of interest to many on this list,
and may be of special interest, with regard to the Kit Carson
Electric Coop fiber initiative, the REDI-Net fiber project,
the developing Los Alamos FTTP project, and other such projects in NM.

RL


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Richard Lowenberg
1st-Mile Institute
Box 8001, Santa Fe, NM 87504
505-989-9110 / 505-603-5200
www.1st-mile.com   rl at 1st-mile.com
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