Upgrading America: Achieving a Strategic Bandwidth Advantage And a Psychology of Bandwidth Abundance To Drive High-Performance Knowledge Exchange
Fujitsu Conference on Paving the Road to Unlimited Bandwidth: Technologies and Applications for a Connected Age
San Jose, California June 13, 2012
Blair Levin Speech
Each quarter, Calix shares a snapshot of the previous quarter’s Internet traffic and applications utilization based upon data aggregated from a subset of Compass Flow Analyze deployments at different sized wireline communications service providers serving rural America. For this Q1 2012 snapshot, over 50 service providers from every corner of the U.S. provided data, drawing information from over 100,000 subscriber endpoints. Networks monitored consisted of both copper and fiber access infrastructures, and access technologies deployed in these networks included ADSL2+, VDSL2, GPON, and point-to-point gigabit Ethernet.
By Christopher Mitchell
The Institute for Local Self-Reliance is pleased to release the Community Broadband Map and report, Publicly Owned Broadband Networks: Averting the Looming Broadband Monopoly. The map plots the 54 cities, big and small, that own citywide fiber networks and another 79 own citywide cable networks. Over 3 million people have access to telecommunications networks whose objective is to maximize value to the community in which they are located rather than to distant stockholders and corporate executives.
By Mark Sullivan, PCWorld
When it comes to broadband, I’m a socialist. Why? Because broadband service in the United States is currently provided by a cableco/telco duopoly, and, as such, is slower and more expensive than in most of the developed world, studies show. Because I don’t believe the FCC can fix that lack of competition within the current regulatory framework, despite the ambitious goals set forth in its National Broadband Plan. Because a reasonably-priced alternative to cable or telco broadband might be just the thing to bring competition to the industry and spur U.S. broadband cost and quality to world-class levels. Because our connectedness increasingly dictates our our economic standing in the world: Broadband is as important to us as the interstate highway system–a public works project–was to Eisenhower-era America.
The Digital Agenda for Europe (DAE) aims to reboot Europe’s economy and help Europe’s citizens and businesses to get the most out of digital technologies. It is the first of seven flagships initiatives under Europe 2020, the EU’s strategy to deliver smart sustainable and inclusive growth.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act directed the Federal Communications Commission to include, as part of the National Broadband Plan, “an analysis of the most effective and efficient mechanisms for ensuring broadband access by all people of the United States.” As the NBP indicated the level of additional funding to extend broadband to those who do not have access today is $23.5 billion; more detail about the gap and results of this analysis are presented in Chapter 2. This document details the underlying analyses, assumptions and calculations that support the $23.5 billion funding gap.
Across the country, hundreds of local governments, public power utilities, non-profits, and cooperatives have built successful and
sometimes pioneering telecommunication networks that put community needs first.These communities are following in the footsteps of the publicly owned power networks put in place a century before. We watch history repeating itself as these new networks are built for the same reasons: Incumbents refusing to provide service or charging high rates for poor service.
It is in the national interest that higher-speed networks proliferate quickly and to the greatest extent possible – and that special measures be taken to ensure that these networks can be accessed by people who live beyond the major metropolitan areas. Accordingly, it is the position of the FTTH Council that anyone who has the means and the desire to build an FTTH network should be allowed and encouraged to do so.
As broadband—or high-speed—Internet use has spread, Internet applications requiring high transmission speeds have become an integral part of the “Information Economy,” raising concerns about those who lack broadband access. This report analyzes (1) rural broadband use by consumers, the community-at-large, and businesses; (2) rural broadband availability; and (3) broadband’s social and economic effects on rural areas. It also summarizes results from an ERS-sponsored workshop on rural broadband use, and other ERS-commissioned studies.
By Fiona Morgan
Sanborn and Gentry Buchan live in a 1920s bungalow less than two miles from the center of Wilson, a city of 50,000 people a half hour east of Raleigh. The mother of a 2-year-old son, Gentry works from home as a sales rep for a cell phone company. Sanborn is home when he’s not traveling as a tobacco buyer, a rare job these days, but one that used to offer reliable work in Wilson, once a major world tobacco market.
Americans invented the Internet, but the Japanese are running away with it. Broadband service here is eight to 30 times as fast as in the United States — and considerably cheaper. Japan has the world’s fastest Internet connections, delivering more data at a lower cost than anywhere else, recent studies show.