Tag Archives: 8 May 2012

Internet speed and access —John S. Quarterman @ LCC 2012-05-08

At a recent Lowndes County Commission meeting, I said:

I was interested to learn two weeks ago that my neighbor Timothy Nessmith was interested in getting DSL on Hambrick Road.

He said you can get it as close to him as Quarterman Road. I can attest to that because I have 3 megabit per second DSL, due to being just close enough to Bellsouth’s DSL box on Cat Creek Road, but most of Quarterman Road can’t get DSL due to distance. There are some other land-line possibilties, involving cables in the ground or wires on poles.

Then there are wireless possibilities, including EVDO, available from Verizon, with 750 kilobit per second (0.75 Mbps) wide area access from cell phone towers.

Verizon’s towers could also be used for WIFI antennas, for up to 8 Mbps Internet access, over a wide scale.

Then there’s metropolitan-area Internet. Chattanooga has the fastest such network, with 1 Gbps (1,000 Mbps). But hundreds of communities around the country have such networks, including (continued after the video)…

Internet speed and access —John S. Quarterman
Regular Session, Lowndes County Commission (LCC),
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 8 May 2012.
Video by Gretchen Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE).

…Lafayette, Louisiana, Bowling Green, Kentucky, Lagrange, Georgia, and Thomasville, Georgia. They use it for public safety, education (Wiregrass Tech, VSU), and

It attracts new industry. If you want knowledge-based industry, they’re going to be expecting Internet access not just at work, but at home, whereever they live.

Other uses include Continue reading →

Video Playlist @ LCC 2012-05-08

An appointment, a road abandonment, three rezonings, and a bunch of for considerations: they did take longer than five minutes. Here are videos of the entire Tuesday 8 May 2012 Regular Session of the Lowndes County Commission. Here’s the agenda. Here are videos of the previous morning’s work session.

They unanimously reappointed four people to the Lowndes County Development Authority. They held a public hearing about abandoning part of an unopened right of way off US 41 South. Nobody spoke either for or against, and they approved the abandonment unanimously.

They heard several items we saw discussed at much more length in the GLPC 30 April videos.

They zipped through everything else on the agenda, approving everything unanimously, including a no-bid item for $60,354.32 to Scruggs Company. There was some discussion about the need for a contract with an audit firm they hadn’t used for three years. They tabled that one, unanimously, of course.

One citizen spoke, me, about Internet speed and access in Lowndes County as necessary for knowledge-based jobs and businesses.

Here’s a video playlist:

Video Playlist
Regular Session, Lowndes County Commission (LCC),
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 8 May 2012.
Video by Gretchen Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE).

-jsq